2011 on Prolost

I began the year by posting The Shot You Can Make and creating free galleries that you can browse from your mobile device to compare how various camera/lens combinations would capture a standard movie scene.

I encouraged you to eschew experts and follow the curious.

I went to New Zealand with the fxguide/fxphd guys and shot with the Epic under epic conditions.

We color corrected some food.

I accused your new TV of ruining movies, and then weighed in on filmmakers choosing high frame rates.

The DV Rebel’s Guide became available as an eBook, and still sells well despite being written back when our cameras were still being used for what they were intended.

Red Giant released two new iOS apps, Movie Looks and Noir, and then released two free color correction tools for the desktop: Colorista Free and LUT Buddy. All the Red Giant iOS apps became universal, and we even released Plastic Bullet for Mac.

I saw the very last Space Shuttle launch ever (after failing to see the second-to-last), and I cried.

I rapped about storyboarding on my iPad, which led to a cool friendship with the creator of Penultimate and some thoughts on “feature requests.”

I appeared on a couple of podcasts.

Red Giant released Magic Bullet Suite 11, which includes Looks 2.0, a completely redesigned Magic Bullet Looks.

My wife and her sister started a company, and I got to contribute some photography to their site.

I told the story of directing my first music video.

I complained about Netflix, at first by myself, and then in chorus with the rest of the internet.

Apple released Final Cut Pro X, and Red Giant began porting plug-ins to it. Mojo works, Looks doesn’t—yet.

Steve Jobs died. I never met him, but he knew who I was.

I met a real, live Ninja.

I helped fxphd with a color correction class and explained how I reverse-engineered an optical bluescreen extraction for fxguide.

Amazon announced new Kindles and I took the opportunity to share some thoughts on indie publishing and how it relates to filmmakers.

Canon announced the C300, and I wrote about the state of low-end Super 35mm digital cinema cameras.

I proposed a plain-text screenplay format called SPMD and some wonderful folks got on board and made it real.

What you didn’t see is that I was also busily developing numerous film projects, including one original screenplay, Psyops with Bold films (who made the amazing Drive), and a few other collaborations.

I also worked on some new filmmaking tools that I can’t talk about yet—but you’re gonna love them.

I didn’t shoot any personal projects this year, which is something I plan on correcting in 2012.

Prolost served over two million page views to over 650,000 unique visitors. I don’t know what that means—but what I do know is that I continue to get a lot out of this blog and Twitter. When I look around the interwebs I feel particularly fortunate about my little slice of it. People say lovely thing about what they read here, even though I am always careful that this site reflect my work rather than become it. The comments I get here on Prolost are often better-written than most blog posts. So thanks for a great year. Here’s to all the crazy stuff we’re going to see and do and think in 2012.