Spring Sprungin’
- Matthew Burgos
- Mar 22
- 2 min read
Ultimately, I don’t usually like Spring.
A few reasons:
1) it’s wet and muddy.
2) a totally disproportionate number of friends and family have either died or gotten very ill during Spring.
3) and, like a bear just out of hibernation, I just don’t understand why everything is suddenly moving so fast. Everyone just chill out!
Having said that, this Spring I am newly occupied by a singular goal: to build our little production company up so that that myself, my creative partner (and life partner), and a few friends can work together exclusively moving forward: creative collaborators working on projects we want to work on - with enough overall work to sustain ourselves. Can we do it? I believe we can (with the ever-present caveat: will the world end first?)
So, despite the utter s**t-show that is our contemporary culture, I’ve been feeling optimistic. It’s been a long winter of getting a bit plump (maybe I hate that word) and doing a ton of back-end work on our editing workflow, gear list, and some great interview shoots. One particular project that has been a bit of a microcosm for the whole thing is our production van. Because we don’t (yet) have a brick and mortar studio and film primarily on location, having all of our gear in a single, mobile place is truly a luxury. But, because we’re trying to build up slowly, we’ve had to start small - a little Ford Transit Connect that needs a LOT of work and kitting-out to be truly useful. But it’s getting incredibly close!
What we had to do:
1) Install a ramp for our production cart (thanks to David from Herc-U-lift for the expertise)
2) Get some branding up on that s**t. (And studio member Mitchell’s lovely logo)
3) Drive to Cedar Rapids Iowa for a wire bulkhead to protect the gear from break-ins, and our heads from flying gear. We installed that just yesterday.
What’s left to do:
1) Replace the alternator (not dead yet, but not healthy)
2) Front left blinker is funky. (Replaced the bulb, but still weird)
Is this not exciting to hear about? Well, that’s the kinda stuff that you’ve gotta think about when building a small business.
I think.
Honestly, we’re just winging it. Winging it with big ol’ brains, a ratchet, and some ingenuity. Want to hear about how to organize a workflow of terabytes of footage between cameras, a private server NAS, and redundancy for all raw footage? Maybe next time, if you’re lucky.
To conclude, we’ve been trying to have fun. It was a tough last few years for a variety of reasons, but we’re doing our best to feel gratitude for things. We’re doing our best to rediscover some of the simpler joys of existence. We’re doing our best.
Oh, and we got a motorized cart for hauling gear on location, which is also basically a go-kart. So that always helps:
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