First to 1000!

Sometime early this morning my senior thesis project hit 1000 views on Vimeo! I wanted to say a big thank you to everyone who has checked it out!

The video hit 1000 in large part to an article posted on Syracuse.com
Which has exploded the viewership of the video.

I have also added some special features from the DVD that did not make it into the documentary for your enjoyment. Hopefully the video will go viral with your support and make its way to 2000 views.

Thank you again to everyone for your support!

My Senior Thesis

I am sure a lot of you have may have already seen this.  However for those who did not I thought I would post it here to save the trouble of finding it.

I encourage you to watch and enjoy!

Archbold Stadium, The Story of ’78 from Gordon Brookes on Vimeo.

The incredible story of last game played at Syracuse University’s historic Archbold Stadium as told by the players, coaches, and fans.

Created by Gordon Brookes and Erick Ferris for their thesis project in Television, Radio, and Film. “Archbold Stadium, The Story of ’78″ re-creates the final game against the United States Naval Academy through pictures, interviews, and never before seen game film.

The documentary features interviews with Syracuse Football Alums Tom Coughlin, Floyd Little, Art Monk, Joe Morris, Bill Hurley, Craig Wolfley, and Dave Jacobs as they describe their memories of playing for Syracuse.

This documentary was made possible by the generous support from the Syracuse University Archives, The S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, and alumnus Bruce Bertrand who provided fantastic color pictures and film.

Enjoy!

New Years, A Reflection

2010, it came so very fast. Just to think I was but in Middle School when the new millennium started, now I have graduated as a member of the class of 2009.

With a new decade comes new challenges. For the first time in my life there is no “preset” goal. When I was a little kid the next year always had some finite goal. Make it from one grade to the next, and after high school, graduate college. Now I have done all that and the work world is open to me. It is an uncertain future, I have always had school to look forward to, but now that too is behind me.

Employment has been interesting. I have bounced around from internship to internship, done odd jobs here and there, interned on a feature film, flew out to Arizona for a short film, and now I am working for Apple part time as a Specialist at the Bridgewater Apple Store. Each one of these experiences has been rewarding in its own way, and I am making new friends wherever I go. Each thing has been a learning experience, with new challenges wherever I go.

I am looking forward to a new decade, and I am curious what new life goal I will uncover along the way. I do strangely miss the structure that school brought during the past decade, and I wonder what new structure, or lack thereof will replace it.

So cheers to the new year and the uncertainty it brings!

Syracuse Basketball

I am sure a few of you have seen the recent Syracuse v. UNC game, and as a Syracuse fan I was thrilled.  However, the game opens up a lot of questions, and I will share my thoughts on this years team.

First of all both Cal and UNC are clearly overrated, not in the ability sense, but the poll sense.  Cal maybe a fraud, but UNC is young and is missing four starters from last years National Championship team, and it is going to take them time to build up.  So for now they do not deserve a #4 rating, but at years end I would not be surprised at all to see them in the top 10.

So where does this put Syracuse? Its clear the Big East coaches got one thing wrong, Syracuse is not the number 6 team in the Big East.  If they are the 6th best team in the Big East then the rest of the nation should be terrified of the Big East this year.

So why be excited about Syracuse this year? A lot of reasons, despite losing Jonny Flynn, Eric Devendorf, and Paul Harris this team has a lot of weapons.  No one player is going to replace Flynn.  Scoop Jardine and Brandon Triche are going to have big shoes to fill, and we won’t really know how well until this team is really challenged.  Jonny Flynn was the kind of player who could take a game over, and Jardine and Triche may not be that kind of player, well not yet at least.

Enter Wesley Johnson, the junior transfer from Iowa State.  Rapidly the country is learning his name, and for good reason.  He is a force on the court, and the last two games showed he is the kind of player who can take over a game.  Jim Boeheim was saying all last year he was the best player in practice, and that he would be something special.  Few people would listen to him last season, but know he has the media’s attention.

I like to think of Wes Johnson as a faster, better shooting, better rebounding version of Paul Harris.  If he can keep up what he is doing now, then frankly this team is going to be something special.

Syracuse has two excellent senior leaders returning.  Andy Rautins and Arinze Onuaku.  Andy Rautins has proved he is a shooter, but not only that he has emerged as an on the court leader.  He steals the ball, gets assists, and shows a hustle that few on this team match.  Despite his ankle injury Andy has show little hesitation to throwing himself on the floor for a ball.  If Syracuse is going to do well this year, Andy Rautins has to stay healthy.  No one can replace him on this team.

Arinze Onuaku has shown he can be a dominating big man, but one thing Syracuse must do is give him the ball.  He is the all time leading percentage shooter in Syracuse history.  If Syracuse is going to win close games they must give him the ball inside.  The duo of Rick Jackson and Arinze Onuaku will be a force to be reckoned with if Syracuse feeds them the ball inside.  Syracuse cannot live by the long ball alone, they must establish the inside game if they are going to live up to their potential.  At the same time Syracuse must hit their free throws, they cannot become the next Memphis.  If Syracuse is going to win close games they must hit free throws.

So those are my thoughts for now, Syracuse has incredible potential this year, they may end up surprising a lot of people.

 

Sorry for lack of posts!

Hey all.  First of all I wanted to apologize for the lack of updates for the past month.  My life has been consumed by my internship on the feature film Almost Perfect.  It was a great experience for my first impromptu PA experience.  I had LONG hours, most days were 16 hours or more because of my commute to and from the city and New Jersey.  We didn’t have a huge crew which was nice, so I got to meet a lot of people and make a couple of friends along the way.

The actors were very nice to work with and the director knew my name by the end of the shoot so that was a nice bonus.  We shot all over New York from midtown to Nyack, each day brought a new location and adventure.  All in all it was 20 days of craziness including my first adventures driving a Cube Truck and 15 passenger van in Manhattan.  Lets just say working mirrors help a lot.

I also just finished up my first paid PA gig day playing on the hit Canadian TV show Degrassi.  It was quite amusing telling my friends I was working on Degrassi and having them freak out.  Apparently this show is a big deal, but I have never watched an episode in my life.  We had to do crowd control in Times Square which was diffcult to say the least.  We had so many tweens bombarding us with cameras it was a nightmare trying to keep the street clear.  Apparently this show is a big deal.

Lastly I have returned to Triboro Pictures who have just gone out to AFM to pitch their latest slate.  You can see some of the projects here.

Good to be back and expect more regular updates again!

Adventure in Arizona

Apologies for the lack of updates for the last week, but I have been very busy.  For the last week I have been in Arizona on my first film shoot.  To clarify, I have done plenty of film shoots in college, but those were for school, this was for real.  Real actors, big crew, and real locations.  It was intense, it was fast, and I lost a lot of sleep.  But, boy was it fun!  You can’t teach this stuff in school, you have to be there.

It was hot, very hot, I have never drank so much water in my life.  I got a fantastic farmers tan, and met some great people.  We had great actors, great crew, and a great experience.  There was plenty of tense moments, but also a lot of fun ones too.  Nothing compares to being on a film set.  Every day was a new experience, new people to meet, and new challenges to face.  We had a night shoot which was challenging, but it was nice that the sun was not beating down on us.  We all got to bond as a group, with the end of the shoot we all had a beer at 6:30 AM in the morning before hauling home in the same day.

I’ll let the pictures do the talking, I still can’t believe I had the opportunity to do this, and I can’t wait for the next opportunity to do something like this again.

A hard days night

 

The location

Getting setup for a shot

The RED camera we used. True 4K Resolution

 

The night shoot and crew

Train Sleep

For those of you who read my Some Math post you will understand I spend a lot of time on trains and subways.  But what do I do with all of that time?

Well if its in the morning I sleep, or at least I try to sleep.

The amount of sleep I get is greatly variable on which train I get, and what day it is.  On Monday’s and Tuesdays I take the 8:16 Express train into New York City.  Despite it being busy train because of the large volume of commuters coming from Hamilton and Princeton it is generally a quiet train ride.  Most of these people commute all the time so there is very little conversation.  These people know that being quiet is the best thing to do.  So generally these days I get about 40 minutes of OK sleep.

Wed-Friday I take the 8:57 Express train in.  This train is a world apart from the 8:16 especially on Fridays.  On Wednesday’s and Thursday’s the train is generally quiet, but on average it is much louder then the earlier train because you start to get the family crowd taking day trips.  Kids can be real sleep killers, esepcially if I am unlucky in my seat selection.  On all NJ Transit trains there are seats that face one anothers.  These seats are kid havens, so if I am unlucky and get stuck behind one of these seats there is often a lot of noise.

Fridays are the worst because everyone and his brother decides they want to go into New York City.  Fridays I generally get very little sleep because of families, loud tourists, or lots of crying babies.  Some times I try and move when I see families sit nearby.  Often I can’t because the train is packed.  Its quite common for me to see other freuqent commuters roll their eyes whenever they see large groups of kids get on because they know they won’t get much rest.

So train sleep is really hit or miss.  Some days I get a perfectly quiet train and some person will sit next to me with headphones blazing.  The worst was on a Tuesday after I had 5 hours of sleep.  This person sat down next to me and for 40 minutes all I heard was a constant thump of hum of his headphones.  I did not realize you could make your iPod so loud.  Saddest of all he some how fell asleep!!!  He must have gone deaf since I could pretty much make out the Eminem songs he was blasting.

Common courtesty 101.  If its before 9AM on the train, please be quiet.

Some Math

So I have been commuting for a few months now and I thought I would share some stats.

For an average 5 day week in New York City with no baseball games I spend 3 hours per day commuting(Car-Train-Subway-Subway-Train-Car), then 8 hours at work.  So for the average week 15 hours commuting and 40 hours working.  However most weeks involve at least one baseball game.  

A baseball game with the Cyclones means traveling out to Coney Island which adds 2 hours back and forth to Manhattan.  A baseball day will often consist of 4 and half hours to 5 hours of commuting if I catch my train.  Weekends for a baseball game will take  6 hours of commuting for a 3 hour game!!!  Sounds crazy, but with all local trains it takes forever. 

The past three weeks I have not had a day off because of baseball games so an average 7 day week (with three games) I spend 52 hours working and 30 hours commuting.  Not a bad 80 hour week.

Epic Boston Weekend

Finally got some time off this weekend and I had an opportunity to travel up to Boston for the first time ever!  My buddies band Cozmosis was having one last reunion show before all the band members flew across the country and the show was epic.

I left NYC around 4PM, but we didn’t make it to Beantown until midnight because of bad traffic, horrendous weather, and some bad direction finding on my part.  I made a huge mistake on the directions and we ended up getting lost for an hour.  Fortunantly by the time we got there my buddies band was about to start so we got there in the nick of time.  While it was a hassle getting there boy was it worth it.

My buddies band was amazing, the whole place was rocking, and they play an amazing rendition of Airplane with everyone singing along.  I am really sad that his band is not going to be able to play together again because they put on an incredible set.

The next day we hoped to explore Boston but the rain proved to be daunting.  We wanted to go to the aquarium but by the time we got there it just wasn’t worth it,  so we walked around and got soaked.  We checked out the Boston marketplace and got a really good chocolate chip cookie,(although not the best) then went to Faneuil Hall to dry out and take in some history.

For dinner we went to a restaurant with the largest selection of beer I have seen on the East Coast.  I tried Ayinger Brau-Weisse which was a fantastic wheat beer.  My buddy tried a Mead which is a beer made from honey.  I am going to have to bookmark that place and go back because they had 112 beers on tap, so one night was not nearly enough.

Afterward we explored a bit of Fenway then marched around for awhile before retyurning to my buddies place for the evening.  The house was so packed we slept in the car which was suprisingly comfortable (06 Jetta hotel).  In all we spent less then 30 hours in Boston (maybe as many hours in the car) but it was worth it just to see my buddies band alone.

I am going to go back: A, because I need to see more of my Boston friends who I sadly missed, B, it rained so much I didn’t get to see much, so mark my words I will be back!

Time Off (Finally)

Some of you may have already read my Epic Week(s) post about not having any days off.  Well I finally got my days off this past weekend with a fun trip down to Washington DC.  Despite a lot of rain we managed to make due with the short time we had in the city.  We all(7 of us) stayed in my friends apartment which was conveniently located next to a super market with food and beer.

We arrived as a trickle on Friday night with our respective car loads showing up at odd hours.  The drive down was fairly smooth traffic wise, but we got destroyed by rain on the Jersey Turnpike.  After we arrived at my friends apartment we stocked up on food and beer and played some board games while we waited for the rest of the crew to arrive.  After a very heated game of Settlers of Catan, the rest of the group showed up and we commenced with some games, tv shows, and Xbox.

We awoke the next morning to the hopeful prospect of walking around DC, but since it took all 8 of us 2 hours to shower that narrowed our window somewhat.  After grabbing a bite to eat at Pot Belly and 5 Guys(which does great hotdogs and burgers) we hopped on the Metro to go to the Zoo.  However our dilly-dallying had cost us the nice weather and as we emerged up the Metro escalator it was coming down cats and dogs.  We then had a quick vote and decided to go to the National Archives to seek shelter, but even with a GPS enabled phone we walked 15 blocks in the wrong direction….

After almost getting to X street (which my one friend now says we have to go back and do), we gave up and turned around.  At this point we were all completely soaked having brought NO umbrellas.   So we walked back towards the center of DC wet and defeated.  Seeking shelter we ducked inside the first thing resembling a restaurant which turned out to be a huge sports bar with the largest selection of beer I have seen in the United States.

Seeing this selection and being generally cold and miserable we decided to warm up with a few pints and lively discussion.  I tried a couple of German wheat beers, while my friends had the gamut from Guiness to some French named stuff.  It was just what we needed before walking back out into the downpour.

After taking a moment back at the apartment to dry we headed out again in search of dinner, which turned into an hour long affair in which we walked in a giant circle.  After giving up on multiple places we settled on a Mediterranean place and we gorged ourselves on sea food, pizza, and pasta.  With our bellies full we walked back to the apartment briefly to regroup and plan our next move…..

Stay tuned!