Within Michelangelo Flores

Will I get a copy of the movie I 'volunteered' for?

2009-07-01T23:23:00.000-05:00

So, the award-winning August Evening has now had a limited theatrical release and is also available in stores, both of the brick-and-mortar sort and online. The 'all-volunteer' crew can have a copy for their effort, but we must first travel to the producer's house in Austin to receive our copies. It's not like gas is more expensive than postage. Thanks, Chris Eska and Jason Wehling. You're every bit the royal jerks I'd expected you to be.

Outdoor lighting test with AC power inverter

2009-05-30T08:52:00.001-05:00

I've been wanting to use a live model for testing my 'portable' studio lighting rig. So many live models can't arrive punctually for the time of day that I want to start shooting, so I have once again resorted to placing my little girl in front of the lens. They're a little soft on the focus, being somewhat rushed with my old 28mm 2.8 MF lens. I should probably have used the 17mm AF zoomer. Next time.

That camera stand is cursed, I tell you

2009-04-24T12:54:00.000-05:00

Earlier in the year, I promised myself a basic studio camera stand if I made it through another Ted Nugent reality shoot. To my surprise, I survived. So, I ordered the item from B&H. It was a drop ship item from Regal/Arkay in Wisconsin. Some of the tooling to make the items was stolen, so there was a delay. A long one. Finally, they shipped on Tue of this week. I thought we were home-free and I would have my long-awaited and much-anticipated studio stand. Today, the UPS truck arrived with just one of the two packages that comprise the shipment. Most of the stand was lost once it arrived at the UPS facility in Mesquite, TX. So, it doesn't look like I'll be getting my stand.

Buying a mannequin to shoot. Need help naming. Not 'Colbert'.

2009-04-14T22:04:00.000-05:00

After months, if not years of frustration in dealing with amateur and aspiring 'models' and their tendencies to be divas, no-shows, and no-talents, I've decided to take my model photography to a new level by using a life-size mannequin. So, 'she' won't be able to pull of more than a couple of poses, will only have one expression. She also will not have a husband or boyfriend with whom to clear shoots, will not have schedule conflicts, attitude problems or skin problems. She'll have more talent than most, and will not waste my time. And I will still get to use 'her' in various locations, and under varied lighting scenerios. I can't wait for her to arrive. Now, I'd like to ask my readers for suggestions on her naming.

ShotCode test

2008-10-30T12:19:00.003-05:00

This is my first shotcode. I'm not sure how I will use it, or of if practical application, but here it is. The online demos show that, if I had this circular barcode on my shirt, or on a label of some sort that one could photograph it with a cell phone camera and use a mobile phone app to scan it and go to the URL to which the shotcode is linked. Amazing, right? Maybe. So long as you have your compatible phone, you won't have to remember hyperlinks. Handy when you've had one-too-many at the watering hole, and you've just made the contact that will make all the difference in the world.

August Evening releasing soon!

2008-08-21T22:33:00.004-05:00

About 3 years ago, I worked on a small indie film for five hot summer weeks in Gonzales, TX. That indie, entitled "August Evening" is now being released in theaters nationwide. Please support Texas independent films - go see this movie (and brush up on your Spanish). If you slow down to read the subtitles, you'll miss out on the excellent, award-winning cinematography, some of which is mine.

So far the release dates are as follows:

8/20/08 - New York, NY - Magno Screening Room
9/5/08 - New York, NY - Village East Cinemas
9/19/08 - San Antonio, TX - Santikos Bijou Theater
9/26/08 - West Hollywood, CA - Sunset 5
10/10/08 - Austin, TX - Arbor Cinemas at Great Hills
10/31/08 - Portland, OR - Hollywood Theatre

Finally, something about a shoot

2008-08-21T20:13:00.003-05:00

I swear that I'm going to use this space for sharing news about what I am doing with creative projects. The rants will be removed tonight.

I had the pleasure of working with Dallas-area model Robyn Talley a few weeks ago. One of her in one of the un-poses struck an art director friend of mine as needing some marionette strings, like this:

Time to think and write

2008-08-03T09:36:00.002-05:00

Over the last few weeks I've done a lot of complaining, with not much room or energy left over to be reflective or creative. Many times I have written that I didn't want for my blog to be overladen with negative. Even so, I have had a difficult time fulfilling this goal. Today my wife and kids are traveling, and so I hope to spend time at this keyboard working on a remedy.
Earlier this summer I sold my Toyota and purchased a Honda scooter in an effort to save on gas. The scooter does a good job getting me to the office and around the small suburb where I live. I am pleased with the performance, and just performed my first oil change last night -- 0.6 litre of 10W30.
Even though we're in the midst of a heat wave here, riding the scooter is a lot of fun in the morning and around sunset. In fact, on days that I am unable to ride due to cargo-carrying requirements and travel needs, I find myself suffering from a touch of withdrawal. Going for an errand on the scooter right away dismisses the withdrawal symptoms. Funny.
A couple of weeks ago I scooted to dinner with friends while my wife was traveling. When I left the restaurant and headed for home there was practically no traffic. For most of the four-mile ride I was alone on the road. For those few minutes I felt as if the world had been given over to me. The sun was low. The upper atmosphere was alive and full of energy, as evidenced by the clouds that were transformed into massive brush strokes that turned from white to orange to purple and grey in front of the sun. The air temperature was just below body temperature, but patches of it were considerably hotter and cooler. Cool, damp patches of air lingered in lower-lying spots of topography. In addition to variations in air temperature, the air was flavored with its contents. I could smell the train tracks before crossing them. I could tell when large commercial production facilities were near, because there would be a break in the natural scents of earth and vegetation. I was amazed at how many of these sensations are unavailable to the operator of car or truck, or at least when I am driving the car or minivan how I am unable to perceive more of the tastes and sensations of the environment.

I'm a Zazzler...

2008-03-18T13:20:00.003-05:00

create & buy custom products at Zazzle

I was reading in Wired Magazine last night about "instapreneurs", and it seemed like a noble cause. Help in my noble cause by buying some of my designs!

Paused to scribble today

2008-03-05T21:14:00.003-06:00

I'm taking a break from complaining about how rotten FirstCare Insurance is being to ponder other matters. I've had a few shoots cancel on me for various legitimate reasons. The time off has given me time to review photos that deserved attention, and so I'm grateful for that pause. Today's doodle involved a toy that my daughter has. I call it Baby SIDS, because it looks morbid. My mother-in-law gave me a tiny bottle of whiskey a while back, and in an idle moment I learned that the bottle fit into Baby SIDSs' hand quite well. I photographed it, and today I did some vector art of it.

August Evening at the Spirit Awards

2008-02-25T08:18:00.006-06:00

The feature that I worked on back in 2005 won the John Cassavetes award this past weekend. It's yet another flourish in the August Evening experience. Pete Castaneda was nominated for best male lead, alongside Don Cheadle, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Frank Langella.

It sounds as if August Evening will be distributed before long, but no one knows when. Since it's in Spanish with English subtitles, now might be a good time to brush up on your Spanish.

Back in the land of the living

2008-02-15T10:08:00.002-06:00

The operation to re-attach my retina was successful. Dr Chen installed another gas bubble to hold the retina in-place. Post op required that I lay on my face for a week to maximize the effect of the bubble. This meant renting a chair and bed attachment that looked like pieces of massage equipment to facilitate the face-down stance. During that week, it was difficult to type more than a brief sentence or two, so I am trying to get back up to speed now. I have to say that it's nice to walk upright again, and to be freed from what house arrest must feel like. Having to face down was another good reason to go ahead and get a Sony Playstation Portable. I watched a couple of movies on it, played some games, and tinkered with it for at least thirty hours of my incarceration. When I thought I'd go stir-crazy, I listened to a couple of movies on the MacBook. Catch-22 and Sneakers are two that can be enjoyed when you can't look directly at the screen. I had a mirror contraption for seeing outward, but it was more relaxing to keep the eyes shut and simply listen with earphones. Catch-22 has dialog that keeps the interest up, and Sneakers' has a wonderful musical score by James Horner, along with a performance by Winton Marsalis that is always a joy to hear.

Doc says not to physically exert myself for a while, so I'm spending time in the office and not in the garage where I maimed myself in the first place.

Friggin' Firstcare Insurance!

2008-01-29T18:55:00.001-06:00

They're not paying $1,600.00 of my doctor bills, even though we had absolutely no choice but to use the surgeon who was on-call at the time of my accident. Can you believe it? Not only do the Firstcare reps not know the difference between a pediatric ophthalmologist and a retinal specialist, they don't know the difference between a corneal specialist and an optometrist! Firstcare is, of course in the business of making money, but they should switch fields of operation if they are not going to avail themselves of knowledge of the terms for the field in which they concern themselves. Firstcare Insurance is a bunch of moronic bozos. I swear that the only times my wife has shed tears is because of having to deal with them!

UPDATE: 22 MAR 08
I was quite surprised to open today's mail and learn that FirstCare has decided to pay the nearly $3,000.00 of emergency care bills that they had been refusing to pay. I must thank my sis-in-law for the advice to go through the appeals process. I had plenty of time to write out the gory details of the morning on which I ruined my eye, and why I could not wait 36-hours for an approval from the insurance company. Evidently, the appeals process is the first opportunity that a medical professional who is employed by FirstCare has to look over the situation. Up until that point, it's all accountants and bureaucrats that answer the phones. So, I am thankful that they have come around. I dearly hope that they will continue to approve the much-needed procedures that the surgeons are planning that will restore some of my vision. I've stopped wearing my pirate patch full-time, now that the redness, swelling, and sagging of my eyelid are passed. I've grown accustomed to the giant pupil that I am now sporting. I would like it even more if it worked, but I've written that enough times, already.

Firstcare Insurance

2008-01-23T07:55:00.000-06:00

We've been very fortunate in all of this. The very biggest problem is with insurance. Firstcare allowed me to be admitted into Providence Hospital, but are refusing to pay for the doc's visits while I was in, to the amount of $1,200.00. Also, Fistcare tried to get me to go to a pediatric opthamologist for my second procedure. It's as if the bean-counters at Firstcare don't know any medical terms, and only have a stamp that says 'approved' or 'denied'. While we were driving up to the emergency room, my wife called Firstcare, and they wanted to know if we had called in advance of the emergency to get approval to go to Providence. There I am, bleeding out of my eye, going into shock, and Firstcare wants to know if we'd gotten approval for the emergency visit. I swear. I wish someone would give everyone at Firstcare a bad case of explosive diarrhea, lock them in the building and turn off the water! Please! Someone do this!

Another visit with Doc.

2008-01-21T18:38:00.002-06:00

We just returned from visit #6 with my retinal surgeon. Got a good report. Pain is so low that I have actually forgotten to take pain pills for a couple of days. I have a green light to return to normal activities, such as exercise. In six weeks, I have another visit with him and a new guy on the scene -- a corneal specialist. The thought is that I'll be going back under the knife sometime in April for what we think will be a corneal transplant.

Today's visit with the doc

2007-12-31T15:16:00.000-06:00

We've just returned from Austin where we met for another check-up with the surgeon who performed the second surgery on my damaged eye. He was all smiles, and was quite pleased with the progress. Additionally, I have been able to perceive color when holding a lens up to the eye. The gas bubble that is holding my retina in place is obscuring my view, but as it dissipates, I can perceive shapes surprisingly well. While we haven't been scheduled for any more surgeries, they are still expected to take place within the next year. I think that the next procedure will be a corneal transplant, followed by a lens implant. Today we learned that the cornea does two-thirds of the job of focusing, and the lens does about a third of the job. The doc went ahead and removed two of the sutures (of which there are still more than a dozen) that may have been causing some undue irritation. I think that the pain is indeed dropping as a result. Thank you all for checking in and for the wishes of support and recovery. Evidence of the injury will almost certainly remain, but that is not even a concern of mine. I only mention it here because someone brought it up. I honestly don't care how my face looks, if I can see.

Went for a drive today...

2007-12-19T15:56:00.001-06:00

It's my first drive since losing sight in my right eye. I drove about ten miles (I'm guessing) to my favorite Chinese restaurant, Cathay House. I drove it alone, since I can't bring myself to beg anyone to drive me over there for a late lunch. The place is just too busy at regular lunchtime, so I like to show up between 1:30p and 2:30p. That still qualifies for the lunch special.
It was a lilttle scary. I drove alone. My "troubled eye", as I like to call it did a lot of watering during the drive. It can still detect light, and since most of that iris is gone, it is quite sensitive to light levels. So, there was much watering, but not a lot of pain. No close calls. In fact, I spotted some pretty bad driving along the way on the part of others. I was so nervous that I was worried that I would be too jumpy to eat, or that I would get sick to my stomach once I did eat. But no. The food was comfy enough to stay down and calm my spirit. This all bodes well, as my office space is just a couple of miles down the road.

Moments that result in big chancges

2007-12-08T06:13:00.000-06:00

As if life were becoming a bit too hum-drum, I managed to blind myself in the right eye on 30 Nov while tinkering in the garage. The resulting trauma to my eye was sufficient to cause near total blindness in that eye, and send waves of horror through my circle of friends and family. I do apologize for putting everyone through this, especially my mom and daughter.
Many friends and family members came to visit me in the hospital, for which I am quite grateful. They brought gifts of their company, support, prayer, and in one case wildly-colored footwear.
Yesterday, I had a fairly thorough set of ultrasound images made in Austin. They revealed an eye full of blood. But, hope is not lost, so long as I can detect light. More surgery is planned for next week, which may restore some sight, but I would be happy just to be able to keep the eye. Actually, I don't even know if that is true, because during the course of this ordeal, we learned of a more significant ant potentially life-threatening condition that had gone undetected for my entire life. Without this key discovery, my life could have been significantly shorter, and since blindness is not fatal, sight is something that I would readily trade for life on earth with my loving wife and family.

I'm such a terrible student of Latin

2007-10-08T23:13:00.000-05:00

I've recently been revisited by the torment of attempting to translate an English phrase into Latin. I felt inspired to render the phrase from the Pirates of the Caribbean series, "Take what you can, give nothing back" into Latin for a graphic. I thought that I had a handle on it, but ended up with gibberish which I then had emblazoned on a t-shirt. At least it wasn't a tattoo. A kind user on Yahoo Answers was kind enough to correct my error, and so now I've repaired the art, and taken a piece of sandpaper to the t-shirt in order to render it illegible by all but the most intrepid reader.

Career Adjustment

2007-09-23T10:14:00.000-05:00

For the last two weeks, I've been enrolled in the subsea robotics program at TSTC here in Waco. The class covers an array of disciplines, including hydraulics, electronics, and fiber optics. These are all fields that interest me, due to the real-world applications of them. Without training in these areas, all of my projects that I dream-up at my workbench are little more than fantasy.

As is typical for this time of year, I am running a fever ranging from 100-103-degrees. It finally broke at about 2am, but it's still low-grade. I have a theory that it's tied to my allergies to Juniper trees, but who gets a fever as part of an allergic reaction to tree pollen?

I missed a half-day of class yesterday, and so must get back to reading.

Other fun stuff that's happened since the last entry include extra-gigs as a Garrity Motors mechanic in two eps of Friday Night Lights (#204 and #207, I think), and Wire in the Blood...

August Evening gets distribution deal

2007-06-25T18:24:00.000-05:00

August Evening, the feature that I worked on (as AC and 2nd unit DP) back in 2005 premiered this weekend at the LA Film Festival, and was sold an hour after it showed.The buyer is Moctezuma Esparza, an Oscar-nominated producer of such films as Selena, The Milagro Beanfield War, and Gods & Generals. We should be able to see in the D/FW area by this Fall. I'm excited that the project has been sold.

The first day of the shoot saw us at a chicken barn near Gonzales, Texas. Working amidst 20,000 chickens was easy when compared to the daunting task of eating lunch nearby. I've never seen more flies in my life. Eating a plastic-wrapped sandwich involved unwrapping a bite-sized portion for just long enough to bite into it. Failing to immediately re-wrap the sandwich meant taking the risk of having a small cloud of flies land on it. Of course, then there was the horrible stench of the chicken feces. There was simply no escaping that. Someone left the door to my car open, allowing a few hundred flies to tag along with me for the next day. Driving with the windows open didn't make much of a dent in the population of stowaways. I'll admit that had to be the very worst day for everyone, especially for Elysia, who suffered an electrical burn, and then the nickname "Sparky".

I had a good enough feeling when I met director Chris Eska that he would carry this project through to completion. That's really my biggest concern.

29 June update:
This from August Evening director Chris Eska:

"I just won the Target Award at the Los Angeles Film Festival! I received an unrestricted $50k cash prize for best filmmaker. The jury told me it was such a unanimous decision that there was nothing to debate!!
And they had the option to create one additional award to give to any film in the festival, and they chose to give us another award for Best Acting Ensemble!!!! Crazy. They had me pose for photos with Clint Eastwood, Dustin Hoffman, Tony Bennet, etc. Aidan Quinn gave me the award. Terrence Howard, Ryan Phillipe, Kevin Bacon were in the very small awards room."

9 July:
A Reuters news article on the film mentions a shot of a suburban housing development at dawn and credits the DP for the shot. In fact, it was mine. I'm sure that the producers don't want me to go into the gory details of how much controversy there was over the getting of the San Antonio suburban dawn shot, but it's my blog, so here's the straight dope: Yasu (DP) didn't want for me to shoot it, because doing so would violate protocol for crew turnaround time. I was willing to get just a couple of hours' sleep in the name of getting the shot that director Chris Eska wanted, so long as I could grab a nap in the truck on the way to the next location. This was the only such conflict of which I am aware on the shoot, but it was early enough on that it may have set a tone and galvanized morale. After all, I live to shoot and shoot to live.

My MacBook Logic Board is Dead

2007-05-28T12:51:00.000-05:00

The MacBook that we bought back in December of 2006 went dark the other night. Only the sleep light would illuminate at full brightness, making it one of Apple Computer's first high-tech flashlights. I already have enough Petzls and SureFires, so I took the computer in for warranty repair. That's all I know about the nature of the defect and repair at the moment, as I haven't gone to retrieve the MacBook from the repair facility in Austin. I may do that on Wednesday.

So, it was the logic board.

A crappy billboard says it all...

2007-04-16T13:26:00.000-05:00

As you know, I live in the backwater town of Waco, Texas. The city's motto: "mediocrity rules here." It's never more apparent than when looking at a locally-produced billboard for the town's many realty companies that spring up like so many bluebonnets. Poorly photographed, poorly typset, and poorly laid out are they all. It makes me ill and depresses me that so many people have decided that, "well, I have a computer -- why hire an agency or any sort of professional to do the work?" A good enough argument. I mean, why should anyone hire a realtor to sell a house?

One More Green Step

2007-04-09T22:45:00.000-05:00

I neglected to note last month's purchase of a Scotts Classic Reel Mower. Last year, I gave away our old gas-powered, exhaust-fume-gushing, noisy lawn mower and we hired a lawn crew that made even more noise and smelled worse than the mower. So, this year we're saving money and a little bit of the environment by using our "pancake-powered" lawn machine. My wife managed to incense a Republican co-worker when she told him that we're burning less gas every weekend. Even the miser I work with couldn't see the reason for switching over. He scoffed that saving $2.50 in fuel costs each month wouldn't make a difference. This is a guy who hates to pay for ANYTHING. And before you think that it's hard to push: my 10-yr old son pushes this 35-lb tool around our quarter-acre lot without complaint! So there!

Spring shooting becomes tricky

2007-04-08T21:58:00.000-05:00

Imagine going from this.
To this in the course of just a couple of days.

That's just what happened over Easter weekend here in Waco.