Things have been pretty busy out here at the treehouse, in between getting into the movie distribution game
directly (just in the US and Canada, though) and getting thirty-three films ready to take to the
American Film Market
this year. It all takes a fair bit of doing, making sure all the screeners, trailers, posters, and other
promotional elements are ready for prime-time.
Adding to the complexity is that I've gotten new video displays for the market and decided to convert pretty
much everything to anamorphic widescreen for demonstration purposes. Might as well get a little
closer to state-of-the-art, as the number of source formats just keeps multiplying: film, several new flavors
of high-definition video, 24p standard-definition, assorted variants of PAL, and all the older video formats
as well--I've got masters and source materials in them all.
I love talking about "convergence"--and it all does sound so good in theory--but when I'm back out here
in the trenches instead of in a discussion panel or giving a talk, "divergence" is probably a more accurate
descriptor for this cinematic landscape.
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Adding to the real-life excitement and drama level out here, last week the well died. Suddenly and
quite unexpectedly, after twenty-two years of faithful fluid delivery, its flow ended with a whimper.
In the shower.
I had a crew out to diagnose and hopefully fix the problem--and fix it, they didn't. Their diagnosis was
that the well had collapsed. That was it and that was that. Water would never again be forthcoming from
that particular hole in the ground.
And *that* is a particularly expensive that.
And now I'm sharing my yard with a sixty-five thousand pound drilling rig and an assortment of other
assorted heavy equipment, drilling their way down to the subterranean waters below.
How far (and how much it'll cost) remains to be seen. They've told me to expect four days of drilling, and
after that, I'll need to have a well pump installed and some form of water transportation and delivery system
constructed to carry this aqueous gift from the ground into the house.
I'm thinking "a pipe" or something along those lines would do it.
Here's hoping, anyway. Someday soon, however, there will be showers in the forecast again here at the
treehouse. And we'll all be happier for them, no doubt about it.
Until then, I'll be trying to keep the mighty sound of the mighty drilling rig *out* of these movie soundtracks
I'm working on....