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Wednesday, March 10, 2010

A new endeavor

Can it be a year and a half since I last posted? Amazing. Time slides past on rocketsled. There've been two harvests. Not a few bottles of vino. A few personal accomplishments, including selling my first screenplay option and making my first film with friends. An award-winning marketing campaign at work. A fifth and a sixth birthday for my assistant vigneron.

I still haven't engaged in my Oregon wine endeavor. After packing up in Missouri short of planting my commercial vineyard, I still haven't sold the property and had the resources to get involved in the wine biz.

But I've figured out a new angle. You have to narrow your focus. Hobbies like making movies and making wine tend to compete for what little free time you have as a working stiff. And I don't exactly have a 40 hour job. Not by a long shot.

So I need to economize. Collapse. My next film project is going to be a documentary about wine. We're going to launch a Kickstarter campaign this summer. We have a few ideas about the focus of the film, though it'll take a few years to truly coalesce. We know the style of filming we're going to do.

My new Canon 7D arrived today. It's an amazing little device that shoots footage that is indistinguishable from a Red Camera (unless your a technophile), and over the next three years I'm going to put it to good use. I hope to interview some famous and some not-so-famous winemakers who have followed their passions, leaving both successful careers and dead-end jobs to pursue their obsession with fermented fruit.

I'll be using this blog to document the process of making the film. It's been a long time since I uprooted my family from our country idyll in Missouri where we grew hybrid grapes and made some damn good wine in a harsh continental climate. I'm about to climb back into the vine rows, and I hope I'll have some good info to share along the way.

3 comments:

Kegan said...

Excellent post! I can't wait to see how the next project unfolds. I think your point about condensing passions is a pretty great idea. After your wine project, do you want to do a bacon documentary?

rzr said...

We need a followup on the soybean oil. Success, fail, inconclusive? Viticulture could really use a few more tools to combat frost, especially simple approaches that don't involve massive wind machines or millions of gallons of water. (hellozac@gmail.com)

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