Sunday, March 13, 2011

the oneyear plan

hey guys.

so, this is big news. I'm about to start working on my first full length feature, "the oneyear plan," and I need your help. All the help I can get.

the oneyear plan is the story of jeremy, a man on a journey to find love within the span of one year. It's a comedy/drama, but its not a romantic comedy, more a self discovery/personal journey story.

Here's where you come in. I will need help funding the project. You can help fund in two ways, one is through kickstarter, and the other is through my newly made zazzle store. At kickstarter, you can give more money and and can get varying degrees of thanks, be it an executive producer credit and lots of cool free stuff, depending on how much you give. At zazzle, you buy various items, t shirts, mugs, etc. anyone who gives in anyway, be it zazzle or kickstarter will receive a special thanks credit, as well as anything promised by the amount of money given.

All of this will be done through the central hub, oneyearplanmovie.com, which is where all further updates will be given.

thanks for reading.

peace. love.
matt

Sunday, March 6, 2011

timespace.

so, the first part of the lifemotion project is online now. the link is at the bottom, so you're forced to read the whole post. aha.

anyway, its called timespace, instead of spacetime, because spacetime kept making me think of space jam, which isn't a problem, but I like timespace better for this. we shot it over two days around atlanta and the georgia state campus, and along the way met some very interesting people while filming. That's pretty much all I can really say about that. We shot in full 1080p, hd, with a panasonic hmc40. got some pretty fantastic shots.

Editing was really fun. It took a long time and lots of patience. Especially for one 20 second shot, which took nine hours. you'll see. It was done in premiere pro, and after effects and all that. Took about 4 days straight working to get it done. Then the uploading.

So, we originally uploaded last night, and waited hours for it to upload to youtube. while doing this, I joined vimeo, because then cool people could watch our videos. Then I realized that vimeo has limits on everything, unless you pay for vimeo, so I decided vimeo is stupid, and didn't upload. Mainly because it wouldn't let me upload. Finally after about an hour, our video was on youtube. Without sound. So, I went back in, and reencoded it, think it would have better sound. Uploaded, this time taking about 3 hours (I watched Iron Man 2 waiting, which didn't suck anywhere near the amount it did in theatres. In fact, I very much enjoed it this time, bolstering the tiny amoutn of hope I had for thor to a fair sized chunk of thor hope. thrope. seriously though, iron man 2. orignally a d, now a solid b) I was too tired to stay up for the rest of the upload, so I fell alseep. Woke up, checked video, no sound. Turns out, I wasencoding my audio in dolby digital 5.1 surround. and youtube can't process that. So, I encoded everything to a good solid hd youtube format. And now here you see the finished product.

enjoy timespace. best if viewed at 720p.

peace. love.
matt.

Monday, February 28, 2011

the lifemotion project: part one: spacetime.

so today was a long fantastic day of shooting on my new project, which is currently titled the lifemotion project. It will be a series of shorts, showing life in motion. ahaa. cleverly titled. ahaa.

Anyway, I have to say that the energy was awesome as we went about shooting around places. I'm definitely finding a great shooting partner in Tyler McClain, and I can't wait to see what endeavors we achieve in the coming months. I'm really excited about this project. We didn't finish filming it, but we did get a lot of work done today on things, dodging rain. I have to say, G-d was so good to let us film around the time it was supposed to be worst, but the sun was out and awesome. Got some pretty sweet shots in, and some eh shots, but that's what you deal with. We're going to finish shooting wednesday, hopefully. I hope the energy is at even half of what it was today, because man we were flowing. I feel like such a geek when I talk like that. Write like that. Whatever.

Anyway. So. Background on the lifemotion project. This will be an ongoing project through the summer. The plan is to create short films that show life being lived through motion. The first part is a very (very, very, very, very, very, very) loose narrative which was called mirrors, but now has evolved into the currently titled spacetime. I've always wanted to do sci-fi, and we're touching on it, I'm a sci-fi junkie, and time travel and space-time are things I probably throw around in my mind a few times a day. I can't exactly elaborate on what it is beyond that, hopefully this will give you a clue. I dunno. Probably not. That's alright. That's also how loose the narrative is. Ha.

We continue shooting wednesday. Hopefully we throw into post wednesday night. hopefully it'll be uploaded by the end of the weekend.

peace. love.
matt.

Thursday, February 24, 2011

big things.

are coming soon.

very, very big things.

peace. love.
matt.

Monday, September 13, 2010

its been over a year...

since I last updated.

wowzers.

Anyway, keep your eyes peeled, because there's going to be a lot going on here. I've started doing a bit of graphic design work, and I've been working with Michael Sechrist on some video work, so I'll be posting all that fun stuff up soon. I hope you like the current design, but it'll be changing a bit over the next few days/weeks/months/years/whatevers.

Keep on keepin' on, brothers and sisters.

peace. love. homework.
matt

Thursday, August 6, 2009

green tea, hd, contests, scholarships and other fantastic endeavors.

A few weeks ago, my friend Cathy asked me to help her with a video. She said it was for a contest for her fiance, to get a scholarship. The video was to be a short video about the benefits of drinking whatever sort of tea you wanted to make it about, in a kind of funny, quirky, downbeat, creative style. That night I wrote up a little script, which was then heavily shortened, both for time and content.

Anyway, the final product has been up on youtube for almost a week, and has gotten quite a bit of attention.

I want to tell you how excited I am for this video. Definitely one of my favorite videos to work on, even on par with fatman cometh. However, what makes this video so special to me is that it is my first ever work done in HD, which of course, is going to be how I edit all my videos from here on out, unless I somehow end up working with real film.

I'm kind of taking a little break, but I still have a few more videos that need editing, so I'll do that soon. Please watch the green tea video, because it is for a contest and the number of views is factored into judging.

And if you like what you see, and want a copy for yourself, ask me to make you a dvd of some videos and I'll make you one.

Enjoy.




peace. love.
matt

Thursday, July 30, 2009

16 OS - Get That Cash feat. Young Presidents.

At long last, here is the video for "get that cash." I filmed it in april, with some help from matt golden, of matt golden photography. It was a very interesting shoot, considering I've only done a few music videos, none of them being rap. So, I began editing around the same time as the no relief tour trailer. What I managed to not realize was that I had never even seen a rap video before, so I had no idea where to even start. I put together a very rough cut, watched it, and hated it.

I then decided to actually watch a few rap videos. I hated them too. So I would try and get through various stages of finished-ness before I would decide that it wasn't right, and start over. Some inspiration came a few weeks ago from some indie rock videos. I then knew what I wanted to do. A rap video that didn't look like a rap video, but a matt dickstein indie rock video. I had my direction. Obviously, it's got some rap influences, the quick cuts at the beginning, a few of the effects, the fact that it's still a rap video, no matter which way you look at it.

But, it was boring. I needed something else, then I saw this video. And I had some more inspiration. So then I went through and added some embellishments to the video.

The final product was done on adobe premier elements 3.0. I used the "three-d" transition for the color effects used throughout the video, and honestly I wouldn't mind making an entire video using that effect, because I love it that much.

So, here it is, the music video for "get that cash" by 16 OS featuring Young Presidents. Let me know what you think.







peace. love.
matt.