Question: I’ve been trying to figure out what I should after posting this week’s 7x7; I promised myself that I would try it for a year and, as of this week, it has been exactly 52 weeks!

But now what? I know myself well enough to know that I won’t stop hitting record during all hours of the day - I still on average record around 4 hours of iPhone footage each month - so, how do I take all that and release in a manageable way? Or do I at all? Do I just archive it away for the unforeseeable future?

What ever my options are, it needs to be simple, intentionally restricted in structure, and consistent. I would love to hear your ideas!

About a month ago, during a phone conversation with my Mom, she told me she wasn’t sure what I was in the world I was talking about “recording over used cassettes”, so, I explained what my side-audio-project was and she laughed and said something along the lines of my being weird.  But, it got me thinking that maybe I don’t make a clear enough distinction between things that I post here on my blog because I think they are cool - and things that I post here because I work on them personally. To help resolve that, and in order of no particular importance, my projects:  7x7s → This project is an exercise in limitation, which I strongly believe in; if you are fortunate enough to have the option of setting up rules ahead of time, do so. The rules for 7x7 videos are as follows: 1 video per week, for 52 weeks. Each video has 7 shots in it, each shot can only be 7 seconds long. No music. No titles. At the end of the 52 weeks I’ll have a chronological string of videos totaling just over 42 minutes.  Feature film → Been working on this feature-length documentary for the last few years, currently near the end of post-production / editing. In 2001 I rode my bicycle across the country with my best friend Tim, I suppose this film is my trying to put into words what a trip like that does to your head.  The Loneliest Mix → There’s a hybrid Blue Whale that the NOAA has been tracking since the early 90s who sings at 52 hertz, far higher than any other known whale; as a result this unique whale’s song goes unnoticed. In short, it has been alone for the last 20 years - the largest living create on Earth - and it is alone. I visit local yard sales and thrift shops buying up used cassettes tapes and I re-record this beautiful create’s song overtop the tapes and mail those tapes to people. Note: You will need decent headphones / speakers to hear this song.  HD8mm → Erica and I really enjoy digitizing people’s old 8mm film reels, so we started a service that does just. It’s only been public for about a week, so there’s not much to mention as of yet, but we’re excited to see where it goes.  Typewriters Anonymous → Several years ago my younger brother, Nick, bought me a beautiful 1930s Smith-Corona typewriter, ever since then I’ve had a love for vintage typewriters. The apartment was becoming overrun with them though, and I thought it was time I found some of these typewriters new and welcoming homes; so, I launched a Tumblr and an Etsy shop. I hand clean and repair each typewriter and I personally write the thank you letters for each one I send off - it’s been very rewarding so far.  That’s everything for the being - at least as far as public projects go, I have a few private projects, but nothing that occupies more than a total of 48 hours per year for me. One thing I’ve learned while working on post-production of FToM is that I need smaller easily-manageable but intentionally-limited projects to keep my motivation and confidence high; without these things, every-so-often reminding me of what progress feels like, it would be easy to get lost and overwhelmed in two years of editing. 
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About a month ago, during a phone conversation with my Mom, she told me she wasn’t sure what I was in the world I was talking about “recording over used cassettes”, so, I explained what my side-audio-project was and she laughed and said something along the lines of my being weird. 

But, it got me thinking that maybe I don’t make a clear enough distinction between things that I post here on my blog because I think they are cool - and things that I post here because I work on them personally. To help resolve that, and in order of no particular importance, my projects: 

7x7s → This project is an exercise in limitation, which I strongly believe in; if you are fortunate enough to have the option of setting up rules ahead of time, do so. The rules for 7x7 videos are as follows: 1 video per week, for 52 weeks. Each video has 7 shots in it, each shot can only be 7 seconds long. No music. No titles. At the end of the 52 weeks I’ll have a chronological string of videos totaling just over 42 minutes. 

Feature film → Been working on this feature-length documentary for the last few years, currently near the end of post-production / editing. In 2001 I rode my bicycle across the country with my best friend Tim, I suppose this film is my trying to put into words what a trip like that does to your head. 

The Loneliest Mix → There’s a hybrid Blue Whale that the NOAA has been tracking since the early 90s who sings at 52 hertz, far higher than any other known whale; as a result this unique whale’s song goes unnoticed. In short, it has been alone for the last 20 years - the largest living create on Earth - and it is alone. I visit local yard sales and thrift shops buying up used cassettes tapes and I re-record this beautiful create’s song overtop the tapes and mail those tapes to people. Note: You will need decent headphones / speakers to hear this song. 

HD8mm → Erica and I really enjoy digitizing people’s old 8mm film reels, so we started a service that does just. It’s only been public for about a week, so there’s not much to mention as of yet, but we’re excited to see where it goes. 

Typewriters Anonymous → Several years ago my younger brother, Nick, bought me a beautiful 1930s Smith-Corona typewriter, ever since then I’ve had a love for vintage typewriters. The apartment was becoming overrun with them though, and I thought it was time I found some of these typewriters new and welcoming homes; so, I launched a Tumblr and an Etsy shop. I hand clean and repair each typewriter and I personally write the thank you letters for each one I send off - it’s been very rewarding so far. 

That’s everything for the being - at least as far as public projects go, I have a few private projects, but nothing that occupies more than a total of 48 hours per year for me. One thing I’ve learned while working on post-production of FToM is that I need smaller easily-manageable but intentionally-limited projects to keep my motivation and confidence high; without these things, every-so-often reminding me of what progress feels like, it would be easy to get lost and overwhelmed in two years of editing. 

In any given day I record between 2 to sometimes 40 individual HD video clips with my iPhone 4 - managing all these individual clips, keeping the videos separate from the photos, and importing them into iMovie would get overwhelming after a few weeks. It’s a lot of media to move around and when I decided to commit to 52 weeks worth of 7x7s, I wanted to be sure it didn’t become a side-project that distracted me from my main-project, FToM. Here’s a few things I use to keep everything as automated as possible:  Using Auto Importer to auto-import your camera roll → If you aren’t already using Auto Importer for your iPhone then you’ll need to open up Image Capture, which comes preinstalled on every Mac, and while your iPhone is plugged in, choose under the “connecting this iPhone opens” device setting the Auto Importer option, then check “delete after import” so you don’t end up with a ton of duplicate files.  After this, you can close Image Capture, disconnect and reconnect your iPhone, you’ll see Auto Importer open up, it’s going to be a small transfer window, with a smiliar style you see when you drag a file from one folder to another. You’ll see this small window pop-up anytime you connect your iPhone if it has a photo or video in it’s camera roll - but otherwise, you can just worry about plugging your iPhone in for syncing or charging, everything else is going to run in the background with no effort on your part.  Using Hazel to separate videos and photos → At this point, Auto Importer has taken everything on your camera roll, and moved into one place, most likely your Photos folder, but you can choose any folder you prefer to have your media import into. For example, I have mine auto-import into my Photos folder under Dropbox - this way my media is backed up to the cloud within minutes of it being pulled off my iPhone. Now, if you want your iPhone movies to just automatically be in iMovie when you open the app to edit, then your video files being under Photos doesn’t do you a lot of good. This is where Hazel becomes very, very helpful.  You can see in the image above that creating a Hazel rule is as simple as creating a smart playlist in iTunes. I keep all of my iPhone movies in an iMovie Event called Randomness - so to have Hazel keep all of my iPhone movies in the right place, I just dragged my Dropbox/Photos folder into Hazel and told it if kind is movie, then to move file to the folder iMovie Events/Randomness. Next time I open iMovie, it notices new movie files in it’s Events folder and generates thumbnails for them.  And that’s it. After setting up Auto Importer and Hazel, I never need to do anything manual with my iPhone movies - I plug in my iPhone at night to charge and while I’m falling asleep, everything is being moved around my computer where it needs to be for when I’m ready to edit a 7x7 each week.  Now, I even have a Hazel rule to watch for movies under Randomness that are older than 2 weeks and move those files to an external Rugged drive to keep my computer from filling up. But, perhaps that’s another post for another time.  This is the second how-to post I’ve written for my 7x7 workflow, I hope at least one friend out there on the internets finds this helpful. If you have any questions, be sure to ask them here. 
Pop-upView Separately

In any given day I record between 2 to sometimes 40 individual HD video clips with my iPhone 4 - managing all these individual clips, keeping the videos separate from the photos, and importing them into iMovie would get overwhelming after a few weeks. It’s a lot of media to move around and when I decided to commit to 52 weeks worth of 7x7s, I wanted to be sure it didn’t become a side-project that distracted me from my main-project, FToM. Here’s a few things I use to keep everything as automated as possible: 

  • Using Auto Importer to auto-import your camera roll →

If you aren’t already using Auto Importer for your iPhone then you’ll need to open up Image Capture, which comes preinstalled on every Mac, and while your iPhone is plugged in, choose under the “connecting this iPhone opens” device setting the Auto Importer option, then check “delete after import” so you don’t end up with a ton of duplicate files. 

After this, you can close Image Capture, disconnect and reconnect your iPhone, you’ll see Auto Importer open up, it’s going to be a small transfer window, with a smiliar style you see when you drag a file from one folder to another. You’ll see this small window pop-up anytime you connect your iPhone if it has a photo or video in it’s camera roll - but otherwise, you can just worry about plugging your iPhone in for syncing or charging, everything else is going to run in the background with no effort on your part. 

  • Using Hazel to separate videos and photos →

At this point, Auto Importer has taken everything on your camera roll, and moved into one place, most likely your Photos folder, but you can choose any folder you prefer to have your media import into. For example, I have mine auto-import into my Photos folder under Dropbox - this way my media is backed up to the cloud within minutes of it being pulled off my iPhone. Now, if you want your iPhone movies to just automatically be in iMovie when you open the app to edit, then your video files being under Photos doesn’t do you a lot of good. This is where Hazel becomes very, very helpful. 

You can see in the image above that creating a Hazel rule is as simple as creating a smart playlist in iTunes. I keep all of my iPhone movies in an iMovie Event called Randomness - so to have Hazel keep all of my iPhone movies in the right place, I just dragged my Dropbox/Photos folder into Hazel and told it if kind is movie, then to move file to the folder iMovie Events/Randomness. Next time I open iMovie, it notices new movie files in it’s Events folder and generates thumbnails for them. 

And that’s it. After setting up Auto Importer and Hazel, I never need to do anything manual with my iPhone movies - I plug in my iPhone at night to charge and while I’m falling asleep, everything is being moved around my computer where it needs to be for when I’m ready to edit a 7x7 each week. 

Now, I even have a Hazel rule to watch for movies under Randomness that are older than 2 weeks and move those files to an external Rugged drive to keep my computer from filling up. But, perhaps that’s another post for another time. 

This is the second how-to post I’ve written for my 7x7 workflow, I hope at least one friend out there on the internets finds this helpful. If you have any questions, be sure to ask them here. 

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