Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Chug

At the beginning of this month, I mentioned that Zane Lamprey is trying to fund his new TV show through Kickstarter. He did get an impressive amount of money, but with only a few days left, he only had about $350K of his $500K target. The way Kickstarter works is that if you don’t hit your goal, nobody pays a penny. Amazingly enough, he blew through his target with about a day to spare! He’s said that for $500K he can do five shows and for every $100K over his goal, he’ll add another show. He posted a pretty thorough breakdown of where the money goes. Here’s part of his post from http://chug.tv 

Someone posted on my Facebook yesterday questioning how it could possibly costs $100,000 per episode to “follow you around with a camera”.  I explained to him that $500,000 six ways is actually $83,000.  But, there is also a 5% cut that Kickstarter takes and another 5% that Amazon takes to handle the thousands of transactions.  And, we have to fulfill all of our obligations to you, the Kickstarter backers. We’ll still have to buy, print, and ship thousands of t-shirts, hoodies, medallions, posters, DVDs, Blu Rays, as well as the travel, food, and venue rentals for the dinners and parties that we’ll be doing in LA, NYC, and Chicago.

And while that may still be a lot of money to have a camera follow a guy around to bars, it’s a very small budget to make an actual network quality TV show.  With Chug, as we did with Three Sheets, we’ll have over a month of planning and pre-production where the producers will need to lock down locations, hire fixers (international translators and location scouts), get shooting permits, carnets (certificates that allow us to ship our gear in and out of the country), coordinate travel, and get insurance (which alone is about $25,000).  Then, while shooting, there are: two camera guys, (with expensively rented cameras, gear, and lights), a sound guy, (with expensive rented gear), two producers, and the executive producer. This is aside from hidden daily costs like the flights, rental cars, train tickets, hotels, per diem, and food.  Then, as we’ll end up with dozen of hours of raw footage, we’ll need to hire editors, assistant editors, a post production supervisor, motion graphics animator, writer, and producers to put the show together.  And, during the several months that the production will be on-going, all of those people will obviously need to be paid… except me.

The money raised by Kickstarter, in fact, won’t be enough to fund Chug.  No money that comes in from the Kickstarter campaign will go into my pocket. I’ll actually be putting in my own money to get the show made to the quality that you should expect from a TV show.  The fact is that I am gambling on the idea that I can sell Chug to a network after the show is made and after the Kickstarter backers have all been given their rewards.  Even though they’ve all said “no” already, I have faith that some network will see what an amazing show we’ve made, be surprised by the dedicated fan base, and hire us to make more episodes.  That’s my contribution and dedication to the show.

It’s interesting to note that he’s not making a penny off this and is using it as a way to produce some episodes and attempt to sell them to a network. It’s a lot less risky for a network to buy episodes that are already done than to fund production and hope to make their money back. Then if the episodes do well on TV, they might buy more!

Congrats to Zane and his team for surpassing their goal and thanks to them for making more episodes! I’m excited to see them!

benmartens May 30, 2013 Commentary

Bathroom Paint

To save some money during our bathroom remodel, we decided to do the painting ourselves. The contractors left three months ago, but it took us a while to get to the painting. But now it’s finally done! We were shooting for a straight gray color but it definitely has a blue tint to it now that it’s on the wall. It looks good though.

I also had to paint the ceiling (white) because of some drywall repair they did when installing the new vent fan. That turned out to be a bit tougher than anticipated because of the sky light. It’s really hot up there when the sun is shining!

The last piece of the puzzle is some kind of drape or valance for the window. Tyla had one picked out but when we put it up, we decided it was a little too short so we’ll look for something else.

benmartens May 29, 2013 Home Improvement

Why People Fear Guns

As I’ve started to get more involved in shooting sports over the last couple years, I’ve been thinking about why people view it any differently than golf. Whether you go to a gun range or a country club, you’ll be surrounded by retirees joking around and having fun. It’s a very similar environment. Somebody could use either a golf club or a gun to kill you, but most people don’t have an irrational fear of golf clubs. Why?

One theory is that people generally only see guns in the news or a movie. That image is usually showing something that is illegal. Unfortunately, that represents the vast minority of gun use in the world. Just about every round fired through a gun has a happy sport shooter behind it. While it’s always good to have a healthy respect for any device that can injure you if used improperly, there’s no reason why a gun should be immediately correlated with violence.

I don’t know if that will ever change, but if you’re interested in seeing the most common use of guns, I’d be more than happy to take you along to a range where you will see normal humans enjoying a fun sport. Even if you decide it’s not a sport you enjoy, at least you’ll have one other picture that might pop into your head when you hear about a gun.

benmartens May 28, 2013 Sports

Browning Buck Mark Camper UFX

While I’ve sent quite a few rounds through both a rifle and a shotgun, I haven’t spent much time with handguns. I decided to add one to my collection but which one to buy? I ended up with a Browning Buck Mark Camper UFX. It shoots .22 LR bullets which some view as kind of wimpy, but the big upside is that each bullet costs less than a nickel. If you’re shooting a 9mm, .45, or one of the more popular big sizes, you’ll be paying ~$0.40-0.60 per bullet. I read more than a few websites that said everyone should own a .22 handgun because it’s so cheap to shoot. Why spend lots of money learning with more expensive ammo? If you figure you’ll shoot 1000 rounds to learn how to shoot a handgun, you can buy a .22 handgun, 1000 .22 rounds AND a 9mm handgun for the price of a 9mm gun and 1000 9mm rounds.

I bought the gun at Cabela’s. Washington state imposes a 5 day waiting period on handguns but waives that if you have a Concealed Pistol License since you’ve already been through a huge background check. For some unknown reason, the quick background check that they always do when you buy a gun raised a little flag (maybe somebody fat-fingered data along the way?) so I had to wait two days to get the gun, but that wasn’t a huge deal.

Ammunition of any kind is difficult to find right now, but they sold me a box of 525 bullets that they keep in the back room for new gun owners. Score! It just so happened that 800 12-gauge shotgun shells that I had ordered two months before had finally arrived too so I walked out with quite a haul!

I look forward to getting to the range to try this gun out!

benmartens May 27, 2013 Sports

Sudden Infant Death Syndrome

In one of our recent classes, the teacher talked for a while about Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS.) I had heard it in passing before, but I didn’t know much about it. The SIDS website defines it this way:

SIDS is the sudden death of an infant under one year of age which remains unexplained after a thorough case investigation, including performance of a complete autopsy, examination of the death scene, and review of the clinical history.

I was surprised to find out that this is basically a catch-all answer for “we have no idea why your baby died.” Wow! In the year 2013, babies are still dying and science can’t figure out why. That’s incredible! All they can do is offer tips for things that seem to correlate with lower numbers of these deaths. A lot of these tips were discovered by studying cultures with higher than normal SIDS rates and understanding what’s different about their culture. Here are some things that lower the risk:

  • SIDS occurs less when parents have babies after their teenage years and when they wait at least 1 year between the birth of a child and the next pregnancy.
  • Infants should always sleep on their backs.
  • They should sleep on a firm mattress in a crib with nothing but the baby (no pillows, no covers, no bumpers, no toys, etc.)
  • Avoid exposure to tobacco smoke.
  • Breast-fed babies have a lower risk of SIDS than formula-fed babies.
  • Offer a pacifier to the baby.

It’s nice to know that there are things we can do to help lower the risk, and hopefully some day they’ll understand what causes this. It turns out that there is an adult version of this too, though it appears to be much less likely.

benmartens May 24, 2013 Family

Baby Purchases

There is a deluge of product information available for a pregnant couple, and as a first time pregnant couple, we didn’t even know what types of things we should be buying, much less which specific brands and models we should look at. Rather than researching everything individually, we decided to pick one overall book and stick with it, for better or worse.

The book we picked was called Baby Bargains. The book is organized as a big list of all the things you should consider buying and then for each item, the book discusses what to look for, how many you need, and which brands might be the best fit for you. While I’m sure you could take any one item and have a long argument about it with someone who likes a different brand better, we knew that following the book should lead us to a pretty good option.

Even with all that background, we still had a big task ahead of us. Our gift registries were carefully crafted as a list of items we thought we needed, so after the baby showers (THANK YOU!) we headed to Babies R Us and walked out with three carts full of stuff. The UPS man arrived later in the week with endless boxes that completed our Amazon registry. I’m sure there will be plenty of surprise trips to buy something we didn’t think of, but I feel like we have a pretty good start.

We did waffle a bit on our car seat decision. We started with the new Graco 40 which is supposed to hold a child up to 2 years/40 pounds. When we got it home, we discovered that it was too wide to fit in the middle seat and it was a couple pounds heavier than most carriers which seemed unnecessary. We ended up getting a slightly smaller Graco model which saved us quite a bit of money and also fit the car better. Only time will tell if it was a good decision. I’m sure we’ll have a lot stronger opinions about these purchases in a year!

benmartens May 23, 2013 Family

King County Library Rocks

We live in a high tech county. Facebook, Amazon, Google and Microsoft all have offices here and those are just a few of the names you’d recognize. It apparently trickles down into our library system. The more I look at the library, the more amazed I am!

A couple years ago, they enabled Kindle ebook checkouts. I’ve been a heavy user of that and it has worked fantastically well. We were also able to drop our Consumer Reports website subscription because the library gives us that for free. Tonight I was contemplating subscribing to a magazine when I decided to browse through the library. It turns out that they offer free access to a bunch of magazines through Zinio! (Zinio is an online digital magazine distributor.) Tyla is sitting on the couch laughing at me because I’m so excited about this.

The moral of the story is that if you haven’t been to your library in a while, be sure to check out what services they offer. You might be surprised!

P.S. The magazine I was looking for is called Family Handyman. I was given a couple free issues of the magazine and was very impressed. They’re full of great quick tips and project plans. Every issue I read gave me some good ideas. I’m pretty excited to get it for free through the library. I also signed up to receive Skiing, Popular Science, and Mental Floss. Who knows if I’ll have time to read them all, but who cares, it’s free!

P.P.S. “Free” in the context of this post of course means “you’re already paying for it with your taxes so you might as well make use of it.”

benmartens May 22, 2013 Books

Password Strength

Hopefully by now you know that a 20 character password made up of just letters is stronger than a 6 character password that is uses symbols and numbers too. Length plays a key role in the strength of a password. Passphrases are a great way to make long passwords that are easy to remember. There’s a good article on the 1Password blog that made the excellent point that though a simple sentence is very long, it might not be as solid as you think. For example, if your pass phrase is “twinkle twinkle little star”, that’s a pretty obvious string of words to put together. The linked post has some good ideas for mixing up your passphrase so that it’s still easy to remember but much harder to guess. If you want to get truly random, they also mention a method of rolling dice to generate completely phrases with completely random words. Mix that in with a few random characters to avoid a straight dictionary attack and you’ve to a pretty solid password!

However you make your password, please make sure that it’s strong, you change it often, and you don’t use the same password on multiple sites. Or if you only want to remember one really good password, check out a tool like LastPass.

PS. If you haven’t read the comic referenced in the image above, here’s a link to the full strip.

benmartens May 21, 2013 Geek

Pregnancy Photos

Tyla and I have attempted a few home photo sessions to capture her big beautiful belly. You might have seen some of them on Facebook, but I thought I’d post them here too. The due date is less than 3 weeks away!

benmartens May 20, 2013 Photography

Kingkiller Chronicles

Looking for a book to read? I just finished the first book of the Kingkiller Chronicles and immediately started on the second one. It’s something like a cross between Harry Potter for adults, but that isn’t really fair to either series. Patrick Rothfuss is the author and he has spent a decade polishing these books and it really shows. The world is extremely intricate, but it’s not overwhelming. The story is engaging, but it’s easy to follow along. If you’re at all interested in the fantasy genre, check this out. And if fantasy isn’t your thing, don’t be put off by the sterotypes around the genre. While there is magic in the book, it’s used as a tool in the story, not as a main focus that keeps getting beat to death.

Leo Laporte interviewed the author on a recent episode of Triangulation. It gives a nice background into Patrick’s thought process behind the books. At the end they apparently start talking about the book, but they warn of major spoilers so I’m going to listen to that after I finish the second book. Hopefully it won’t be too much longer until book three launches because I know I’ll be itching to continue the story after I finish book two!

benmartens May 17, 2013 Books