Hello and goodbye! We’re here to wrap 2016, in the very last episode of the Daughter of Godcast Gentle Release. This has been approximately 70 episodes about the 12 going on 13 year history of the Daughter of God, a post apocalyptic romantic comedy featurette. We’ve got a smidge of 2016 yet to tell and then we’ll briefly talk about next week’s invitation to the upcoming Crowd Completion. Episode 070, The End.

Toe Socks

In Episode 006 and 016, we introduced Toe Socks, the short Lauren Discipio had written and directed back in 2002, inspired by an aesthetic conflict with our pal Shoal Southworth. I was the cinematographer and support for Lauren, her first time directing. We edited together and wrote and performed the theme song, Beans and Rice. Since Lauren and I didn’t really know anything about film festivals back then, Toe Socks never found an audience, we just sent the link to a few friends and moved on.

Telling the story of the Daughter of God implied I might eventually revisit my entire origin myth, every project and experience that informed my perspective as an artist, shaped me as a maker of movies and as a human. On August 31 I wrote to Lauren and asked her permission to post Toe Socks on YouTube. She replied that Toe Socks deserved to be seen. I tossed out the idea of sending it to a few short festivals and she was game. She created an IMDB page and we uploaded a screener. We tried top tier festivals and a few regionals, but our genius went unrecognized. We were and clearly still are, decades ahead of the curve.

Toe Socks Vimeo or YouTube

Vasty Virtuality

Some geekiness. A megabyte is a thousand kilobytes, a gigabyte is a thousand megabytes and a terabyte is 1000 gigabytes. 1 terabyte can store about 2.5 hours of 720p HD video, at 30 frames a second. Since each second of video has 30 frames or pictures, here’s another way to think about 1 TB. 2.5 hours x 60 minutes x 60 seconds x 30 frames = 270,000 pictures. That’s how many pictures you can save on 1 TB.

Over the course of the project I had grown my life’s archive from ~20 TB to over 100 TB, most of which was stored on 1TB bare 5.25″ SATA drives. The SATA drives had been swapped into 2 bays, the trusty Venus T5’s I’d purchased in 2008. By 2016,  the drivers for the Venus T5 were antiquated and my SATAs would no longer mount reliably. In June of 2016 I hungered for way more storage, a vasty virtuality that would give ready access to all DOG’s media.  After some research I went with OWC’s Thunderbay RAID and the super convenient Startech 4 bay SATA toasters. In english, this meant that I could have 18 TBs of super fast RAID storage and an additional 4 TBs of removable SATAs or 22 TB available total at any given time. That’s room enough for almost 6 million pictures.

As the years have rolled by, significant chunks of Daughter of God’s technological infrastructure have obsoleted, Final Cut Pro 7.0 being the most significant. I so appreciate that most of my archival files are still accessible after all this time.

UFOs

At a random party in late summer of 2016, I met a real life Uncle Joe, a deep state operator, long retired. In his day, a player. Now living in a shack somewhere in Manistee, a random acquaintance of the party’s host. He displayed a casual disregard for his top secret clearance , happy to tell me whatever I wanted to know. I asked him how he could get away with that, and he said no one would ever believe me, and if I outed him as my source he’d just deny everything.

Later, I made inquiries in my network and his story pans out, he could be the real deal. I’ve since meant to visit him again and ask him a series of tinfoil hat questions. Especially now with the advent of the hokey To the Stars Academy of Arts and Sciences and the official release of the Super Hornet UFO video last week, what can he tell me about the fedgov trysting with ETs? My Uncle Joe is the “Wizard of the Deep Canyons, King of the Flying Saucers”, so any information this dark operator provided could easily be woven in to the movie’s backstory. Making the movie even more eerily accurate would be a win. Or I might be making this up.

Michigan Movie Makers

After the podcast was well underway, I briefly revived M3. Who was out there still, making movies? Recall that In 2010 I’d returned from NYC and after sailing around Lake Michigan I discovered Traverse City’s movie making boom, driven by the Michigan Film Incentives, see episode 028 and 034. I re-cofounded the Michgan Movie Makers and attempted to herd that community of cats. By 2015, the incentives were gone and my motivation to herd cats faded away. Now in 2016, channeling all that energy into my own projects, I wondered many other local movie makers might be left standing.

I emailed the list and requested updates. From our peak of 200 or so members, pnly Matt Dayton, Bill Latka, Arron Dennis, J Mark Eiden, Tom Emmot, Vince Hancock, Robin Pearson, Cody Stowe and myself were still active. I knew there were a few others out there, like Ben Busch, Cat Muncey and the godfather, Rich Brauer. The last of the Jedi.

Michigan Movie Makers massive update

Where’s the Cast?

In episode 008, Ann Loeding DOG’s line producer visited the podcast and gave her recollections about our 10 days of production aboard the big boat, Alexander Henry. Two weeks earlier I had emailed 4 other members of the Daughter of God’s cast and crew asking for their remembrances. Nobody responded. I was slightly disappointed at first, but then I realized that I had plenty of story to tell all by myself. Perhaps when DOG has legs, these prodigals would come home. After 10 years, Steve Zilliax now legally re-enter the USA, see episode 005. Maybe we can live stream his episode from the doom raft in the summer of 2018.

Wordcamp Ann Arbor

I attended my first WordPress Wordcamp in Ann Arbor with my new uber ally, Milagros Parades.  Every conference has a unique culture, and I did my best to adapt rusty geek tribalism from past SIGGCHIs, SIGGRAPHs, and even Worldcons, the World Science Fiction Convention. I returned staring up at learning curves, but at least now I knew what I didn’t know, and that’s a start. I attended my second Wordcamp with Joe Cissel in October of 2017, see episode 060, more present and itching to poke and prod the wordcamp culture.

Reasons to Podcast

After a couple months of podcasting, I was revising and upgrading my motivation almost every episode. This was both exhilarating and disconcerting. I thought I knew what I was doing, but history is just a list of surprises. Here’s a peek at my transformation in just two weeks.

10/24
process log

 What's the mission of dog.movie?

To magnetize 100k people to Daughter of God.
To give Daughter of God's audience easily access,
Offering audience access to the longest little movie ever
Preparing Earth for the coming of Daughter of God

A laboratory for Dan to build the new movie making paradigm
Dan's homebrew venue for global art and awareness
Dan's channel of connection to decisive collaborators

11/12
process log
[snip]

Doesn't matter how many people are watching or listening. What matter is 1) Am I having fun and 2) Am I making something super cool? The rest will follow.

11/18
process log

[snip]
Is the podcast a success? My god, last night I was organizing the master podcast file and seeing all the sound effects, and that reminded me of the crazy stuff I've done so far over the last 12 weeks. and I am like, wow, this feels good.

To sweep up the last crumbs of 2016, here are a few links from the extended family with commentary.

From James

In October James Schaberg sent, Johanna under the ice , a sweet short about an icy freediver. I was a certified FII Level 2 Freediver that August with Mark Lozano in Alpena and of course Wim Hof would come later. That James is a little prescient. He also sent me Favorite Podcasts of NPR 2016, in December and predicted Daughter of God would be included for 2017. Ya never know.

From Shoal

Shoalie Southworth sent some dweebs overdub of Geordie Rose and Dwave Quantum Computing. I was annoyed by the Mandela Effect commentary and sought out the original talk, where Geordie makes predictions about super intelligent AI not unlike Ray Kurzweil’s Singularity except without any mention of humans integrating this technology and upgrading. Milagros had already turned me onto Micheal Brown’s practical time travel with his Presence Process, so when Shoal dropped this video on10/08, I was prepped to riff about alternate universes around episodes 008 (10/25) and 010 (11/03).

I can’t help thinking that godlike super intelligence running on quantum computers is pretty much a description of us. According to Prof. dr. Dirk K.F. Meijer PhD and other researchers, human brains do much of their processing outside of the skull, in other dimensions, we are fleshy, bone-y quantum computers. WE are already godlike super intelligences, instantiating in duality for fun and profit. We’re sneaking up on ourselves.

From Matt

Back in April, when Matt Kern and I were tinkering with tracking and 3D scans, he sent a link for Lytos, a camera system that records not only values of light and shadow, but spatial data. This means elements of a scene scene can be changed after the shoot, they are not baked into the image. Actors, props, sets and even depth of field and exposure can be changed. Rotoscoping was used extensively with DOG to unbake elements for VFX, but a Lytos capture would make rotoscoping as obsolete as handcranked film cameras.

Quantum computing and the Lytos together imply that DOG is already an antique right out of the box. Technical details are moot, all that matters is the joy in the making – our delight in deploying a Toy Universe, tweaking the backstory, emphasizing the quirky performances on the big boat. Noticing how the making of this movie is still making me and maybe you too. The key to completion is relishing this making, loving this great big canvas, primed and ready for paint. We clearly have the spark, the madness, the vision. Letting the joy flow steady and strong, that’s all now. The movie is a connection to what we are living now, now and now. A capturing of full spectrum experience, just another deployment of the highest technology. Who’s making who?

That’s our history, thanks to those of you who went all the way from Episode 001 to 070. Over a year and a third of weekly podcasts. Next week, without any gaps or pauses, we’re going to begin the Crowd Completion, test screening chunks of the movie, from graphic elements to scene snippets until eventually we’ve assembled the entire shebang, the whole shooting match. I am so looking forward to feedback about what’s working for you and what isn’t, talking about how this movie feels, what thoughts are inspired, what sweet realities come within reach.

We want feedback on image fragments like logos and graffiti in the DOG world, miniatures, story boards for additional scenes, snippets of live action scenes, VFX… pretty much everything.

Daughter of Godcast has been available on iTunes and several other podcast venues, and streaming directly from DOG.movie. If you’ve been listening only, we’ll try to keep the Daughter of Godcast viable as an audio experience. The podcast has also been out there as a video version since episode 011, and if you’re ready to get interactive, there’s going to be even more visual venues.

We’re launching the Crowd Completion on at least 8 social media platforms simultaneously, so there’s plenty of places to comment and have discussions. Find links on www.dog.movie and subscribe to DOG’s presence on your favorite platforms.

So what’s the new Daughter of Godcast Crowd Completion gonna be like? Next week is the official invitation episode. We’ll talk about how feedback works in more detail and lay out some of the perks of participation. We’ll also present the first chunk of media for your review and post it on all the social media platforms. We’ll probably pose a question to focus the comments and discussion.

From then on, the episodes will provide highlights from the previous week’s feedback and then introduce a new chunk. We’ll keep reviewing and choosing the best chunks together until we’ve got a finished featurette.

If you’re not living in the US, Canada or Europe, I really want to encourage you to join in with comments and feedback, even if you’re not perfectly fluent with english. Daughter of God belongs to the whole wide world.

Here’s what you can do TODAY to get ready. Follow the links from dog.movie to your favorite social media hangout and like or follow the Daughter of God presence there. If you’re listening on iTunes, please rate this podcast and write a review.

Thanks for a fabulous year, looking forward more of you in 2018.

You’ve been listening to the Daughter of Godcast, episode 070, The End. The Gentle Release is now done, finished, over with. We’re moving all the video episodes to Vimeo for safe keeping, and perhaps enhancing them slightly too. Lots of changes coming. Maybe in 2018 well even get into the model shop. We’re mostly going to be in the now, the this and here, the ever present. Perhaps a tiny bit of guruing still, life coaching, rambling philosophical discourse, just for SEO sake, definitely hints on how to optimize your human experience, that’s one of the perks of membership in the DOG family. Gotta keep you perky. Actually, the whole Crowd Completion will automatically upgrade your game, that’s inherent in the design. We’re all upgrading.