Make Film Work — I make videos. Sometimes I write about it.

Around 2am, Thursday morning I put my MacBook Pro to sleep. I was going out into the living room to watch a movie with my roommates (the Mel Gibson tour-de-force, Ransom) when I figured I could use my computer to convert some video I was in the process of archiving. I went back into my room and lifted the lid. The screen didn’t turn on.

Now, I know that sometimes that happens. You just have to give it a minute before the screen kicks in and you’re right as rain. Well, I gave it half an hour and still nothing. I tried connecting my external display and nothing. I wasn’t even getting a backlight. NOTHING. At this point I went and made an appointment at the Millenia Apple store for that afternoon.

After taking a look at it, and hearing about my various restart/reset attempts, the Genius (named Jason, btw) told me that my logic board was probably fried.

Well, that sucks. He told me they’d send it out and have it back to me in about 10 days. The problem then is that I’m not going to be around in 10 days. I’ll be settling into my new home in Salem, MA at that point. So he kindly told me that they’d be happy to ship it there instead.

I went home and spent a few days trying to work exclusively from my iPhone. And as great as it is, it’s not a desktop replacement. At least not yet. So I dug out the first Mac I ever bought, a 12″ PowerBook G4. It was in need of a pretty serious cleaning as it had recently been put through the special kind of abuse only a 14 year-old can inflict.

After the cleaning, however, the trackpad wasn’t as responsive as I would have liked. I also lost the ability to use two-finger scrolling. I solved the latter by downloading iScroll2. But to fix the first issue, I’d have to do a little bit of Mac surgery. I went into the closet and pulled out a twin PowerBook G4 that only lived for about a week before being stepped on by an unapologetic professor with a weight and coordination problem.

I took stock of what parts I was going to harvest (I seemed to be missing a few screws from the working machine too) and got down to business. The process took about an hour, and in the end I had what felt like a much newer PowerBook G4 to play with. Which is what I’m writing this on now.

I look forward to getting my working MacBook Pro back in a week or so, but it’s always a humbling experience going back a few years in the Mac legacy. In fact, I’m amazed that this machine runs as well as it does. With a lone 1.33GHz PPC processor, and just 768MB of RAM, I don’t have a problem running Leopard, or doing all of the web-browsing things I’d want to do. Obviously I’m not doing any video work on this machine, but it’s fine for photos, and music, and most multi-media operations.

It’s just one more reason why I love these machines so much, and why I’m not ripping my hair out over a toasted logic board.

Last week a small group of us headed out to Kennedy Space Center. Meagan and I wanted to see it one last time before we left for Salem at the end of the month, and Brian just hadn’t been in a while.

We were lucky enough to arrive on the same day as the launch of a new telescope called GLAST, which is going to be studying gamma rays. Pretty cool. We took some pictures which can be found on Flickr but I thought I’d post a couple here too.

You might even be interested in grabbing that picture of the engine as an iPhone or iPod touch background.

I realize it’s already been covered by more than just a couple of sources, but I thought it was worth mentioning (and celebrating) the release of Celtx, version 1.0

Celtx, of course, is your friendly (and free) script writing software available for just about every computer platform in existence. In short, it’s awesome. And it just got better. The Celtx website outlines all of the new features, and even includes a couple of helpful videos to send you off in the right (and hopefully creatively inspired) direction.

I’m a huge fan of the Consumerist, a website advocating consumer rights and sharing the terrifying ordeals that some companies put their customers through. It’s got a certain car-wreck shock value to it, I suppose.

It’s the kind of site where you hope you’re never the one writing in with your own tale of woe. Unfortunately, a recent shipping experience I had prompted me to write in with one such story.

You can head over to my post at the Consumerist’s website for all the bloody details, but the short of it is this:

I ordered a new Sennheiser G2 100 Wireless Mic set from B&H for an important last-minute shoot. I choose overnight shipping via UPS. Instead of the package arriving at my door as I had hoped (and expected), I was told I would have to drive out to a construction site where I could meet up with the driver as he helped another, already overloaded, UPS driver with some of his delivers. Ultimately my driver never showed up and I had to drive 30 minutes to the UPS distribution center later that night.

It wasn’t a good time. I was pretty miffed about the whole thing and asked for a refund on the $40+ I spent on shipping. I was told that somebody would be in touch. About a week went by and I hadn’t heard anything from UPS. I did get an email from somebody at B&H who expressed concern over my story, and said that they’d get in touch with their UPS people to straighten things out.

A few days went by and I got a phone call from “B&H’s UPS guy” who offered a really sincere apology as well as a $50 B&H gift card. Not too bad. He also assured me that nothing like this would ever happen again; not to me or anybody else.

I really appreciated the apology, and especially the personal phone call. Somebody (actually, his name was Lou) went out of their way that day to make sure I was being taken care of. You can’t over-appreciate something like that.

In the end, I don’t imagine this is something that happens very often. Nevertheless, it probably shouldn’t have happened in the first place. That being said, I’m really happy with how B&H (and ultimately) UPS handled everything. And I especially like that I should soon be getting a $50 gift card to B&H. A card that I intend to use on my first visit to the B&H store in New York later this summer. Can’t wait. No shipping required.

Rails Envy: 1 Controller Obesity from Jason Hawkins on Vimeo.

I shot another set of ads for the wonderful guys of Rails Envy recently, and the first four are now available as your nerdy entertainment for the week.

We shot the ads against a white wall in tiny apartment with surprisingly solid results. I was able to blow out the rear wall enough to cover up the textured paint, and later I dropped a green screen behind our Burt Reynolds look-a-like. Trying to do any kind of chroma keying with MiniDV footage is always going to be problematic, but since this was produced to be viewed (mostly) on the web, the lower quality of the key wasn’t a huge issue.

The software I used to pull the key is a handy little plugin called dvMatte Pro 3, which specializes in keying DV footage. I wrote more about this little gem here. I know I’ve said this before, but it’s become an indispensable tool for a lot of the work I’ve done recently. Really great stuff.

These ads are always a lot of fun to work on, and I thank the Envy guys for the opportunity to work on a project like this.