hello. my name is mike ambs.

via ftom film:

I should apologize - this site has been far too quite the last few weeks! It’s not that there’s been nothing new to report - we actually have been a bit overwhelmed, to explain: Erica and I are heading back to NYC in September for a week’s-worth of industry meetings at IFP Labs; pitching… or really just talking in general is not my strong-suite, so, I’m a little terrified of what’s coming up fast. The point being, there’s been a lot of writing lately to meet the film profile deadlines.

The film’s logline, synopsis (60 words) *and* even the summary (500 words) all had to be re-written, mostly from scratch. Here’s the updated synopsis, which I’ll need to update soon on the main site:

For Thousands of Miles is a story of coming home after months of travel and constant-motion; a story of who you are before a 42-hundred mile bicycle ride, and who you are when that road finally ends; it is a story of a person now split between two lives.

Also, I needed to write another 500 words for the artistic statement, which took me a while to get right. The last remaining things needed are bios - Erica wrote mine today, which means, for the first time ever, I have an actual, adult-like bio… I was excited!

Outside of writing, I’ve been trouble-shooting some smoothcam issues in FCP7, we were recently assigned a mentor for the film, through IFP, and I was supposed to get that person an updated cut of For Thousands of Miles weeks ago - but considering 80% of the shots in the film were affected by this sudden tech bug (resulting in a strange jack-hammer-like vibrating effect on footage); I spent two weeks pulling my hair out over test trying to fix it, but!, I’ve finally found a work-around.

Aside from that, I’ve been keeping myself up late at night trying to find a way to finance the last $60k needed for the film, which doesn’t include marketing of any kind, yet. I’m trying to stay open about the IFP film week I mentioned above, but, I know FToM is a difficult film to get money for… IFP even mentioned that I might have a harder time than normal getting industry-anyone interested. But, regardless!, I’m still trying to move forward… but, these days, I feel like I’m dragging a small house behind me… uphill… in the snow… both ways.