Brewing Weekend

Due to being oncall for work this past weekend, I spent a lot of time confined to the house waiting for my work cell to blow up. I found a local homebrew shop close to my house so I decided to drop in and see what they had to offer. I was pleased to find a few avid friendly helpful homebrewers working the place, much better then some other stores that staff a bunch of beer snobs. After talking with the staff for a bit I picked up a few sets of ingredients, and went home to brew. I ended up brewing a Full Snail Ale and an Oktoberfest.

Brewing takes most of the day and provides a lot of waiting for boils. As such, I decided to double up on projects and film the process. Watch the rough edit of the film:



YouTube Version

Beer Brewing

I finally had some free time in my schedule so I went to brew some beer with my friends this weekend. We brewed a partial mash IPA, and my all grain America Hefeweizen. I decided to bring my video camera equipment along and do some video work as well. We had a great time and I'm very excited to start brewing more regularly. We'll see how much time I can devote to it between all my other projects.

I was astonished by the active fermentation occurring in my beer tonight. So much in fact that I shot, edited, and published a quick video showing it off. Check it out! For those of you unfamiliar with the brewing process, the particulate is a very natural part of the brewing process. It all settles to the bottom of the carboy at the end of primary fermentation and is filtered out upon transport to secondary. In this batch we used whirfloc (a coagulant/clearing agent), so the particulate is a bit more pronounced at this stage then normal (esp due to the light color of Hefeweizen).



YouTube Version

DIY Video Camera LCD Monitor

I'm back in full project mode again and have been planning to work on my filmmaking. There is still a lot of gear that I need to collect, purchase, and/or build before I dive into the deep end. I've been wanting to add an external field monitor to my equipment, due to the lack of (or maybe to the benefit of?) a flip out LCD viewfinder on my camera. This helps show exactly what the camera sees, fine tune focusing, and removes your eye from the internal view finder when tracking, dollying, or other large movement scenes.

I started off pricing out various high quality, light weight, portable LCD monitors, and found some great options. However at the last minute I remembered I had an old Insignia IS-PD040922 portable DVD player laying around. I got it a few years ago as an Xmas gift, and the DVD player broke after just a few hours of usage. Best Buy refused to fix it, so it's just been sitting around. I pulled it apart, fixed it up, and modified it to mount on my camera's MA-100 microphone adapter plate.

It works very well for this application, even if the resolution sucks by comparison to newer screens. It's an excellent option until I get serious about my filmmaking. By then I'll have the experience of using this screen, and know more about the specs I want in my next screen. I'm excited to put this new setup to work.

Bismarck's Trick Video

Put together a small video for my friend Sarah the other day. She wanted to film her schnauzer doing all it's crazy tricks to submit to some "smartest dog" competition airing on Oprah. I'm pretty happy with the video, esp. considering I only spent 1 hr filming & 4 hrs editing the video with no clear plan.

You can watch the video below, let me know what you think.