Dear wonderful friends and supporters,

One month ago 50in50 exceeded its goal on Kickstarter. When the dust settled, and I began to be able to speak in complete sentences again, I asked, "Now what do I do?" So, I thought I'd share with you what has been happening with the project and where it's heading.

The first thing I did was hours upon hours of research on equipment, specifically cameras. I ended up deciding on the Panasonic HMC-150. This is one slick number that shoots gorgeous footage, and stores it directly on a high-capacity SD card. I got a good deal on it, too. All very cool.

Next step: I had to learn how to use the thing. It's a serious piece of hardware, and it came with one serious manual (written by Tolstoy, judging by the length). What ensued was, essentially, a self imposed, crash-course film school. I basically crammed everything I could about depth-of-field, F-stop, shutter speed, and NLE workflows into my head as fast as I could. I shot some really great looking footage... then learned that my laptop is now handily out-gunned by the high quality HD footage.

Is this boring yet? This might be boring.

The super-fast capsule review of the tech stuff is I bought another mic, some lights, a battery, and have come up with some post-production work-flows that I'm HOPING will make it so that I don't have to buy a computer with more muscle.

Now, the artistic stuff.

Getting this funding was a bit overwhelming in some ways. It's engendered a greater sense of responsibility with regard to quality. I mean that I now feel responsible to my investors to make a good product, whereas before, I only felt responsible to myself. It felt like a lot more pressure than I'd anticipated. I shot an episode that was going to be "my first episode back". It was this big, ridiculous Christmas-themed music video. It took a tremendous amount of planning, effort, and time than any other single episode. I built a freakin' green screen in my living room for it. I edited the whole thing, got it really polished, watched it again and said... no. This isn't it. This isn't what the project is about, and this isn't good enough. Deciding not to release that episode was really tough. It was an expensive way to learn some really important lessons, but I'm glad it happened.

I needed a visceral reminder of what this project is about. It's not about glitz and fanfare, and it's not about trying to "go viral". It's about acting and it's about story-telling. Bringing my focus back to those fundamentals was what I needed to reignite the creative spark, and I feel like I'm back on track, which is really what I needed after the long fundraising hiatus. So, November was about the acquisition of new/improved equipment and learning how to use it. December is about getting the creative side together. This month will be spent plotting, planning, and writing. Early January is when episodes will begin marching out again, and they won't stop until there are fifty of them.

So, that's what's happening. I'll be updating the blog soon and more often. That's where I really get into detail about Process (since this is a Process-oriented project, after all). I go into a lot of detail about how the characters are created, and how the episodes are created, too. If you haven't been yet, I'd encourage you to poke around and read a few entries. New episodes will be released there as soon as they're out. The project blog is at: http://50in50.wordpress.com

That's the skinny. I'll send out another update when the first episodes hit. 'till then, thank you again, so much, for your support.

Best,

Brent