Shawn Philip Nelson
Veteran
Never owned a DVX100. (or any Panasonic camera for that matter…)
When I first discovered DVXUser about 3-4 years ago I lurked a bit and then left, figuring this site didn’t apply to me. Later on I heard word-of-mouth from a fellow Oregonian that DVXUser was still a great resource even if you don’t own the camera, so I came back and registered just over two years ago. Little did I know how much this site would do for me.
Wow! What a difference one site can make in your life. My wife affectionately refers to this place as ‘DVXSlut’, or ‘the other wife’. The diversity of things ‘she’ has taught me is overwhelming. The audio forum with massive amounts of help from those guys unveiled a whole new level of quality for me. The festivals too have taught me. I first helped Norm Sanders and Ryan Walters with some of their entries, even acting in Norm’s ‘Without Provocation’ and now in TimeFest I’m entering my own film for the first time with my buddy Ken. The Café has wasted hours of my life, I’ve bought and sold things on the Marketplace. I entered one of the Photography contest, debated films in the film section, ridiculed the Vegas forum for their non-Mac ways, enjoyed the Lighting forum and the genius of Drewski and his Coollights spring up from late night forum brainstorming. So many things have happened.
Usually I try to make posts that are helpful to the situation (I even have one sticky, yay, nerd prize J), but I guess this entire post, my 1000th post, is purely self indulgent and can fall like a rock here in the busy Café
.
Who am I? For anyone that gives a sh1t, read on! The rest of you, I strongly recommend mixing 2 shots of Jim Beam Black, ½ shot of Amaretto, and ½ shot of Grenadine over ice with two maraschino cherries. It’s an awesome drink I made called the ‘Southern Cherry’.
I’ve known I wanted to be a writer/director since I was 7 years old living in Newhall, California and visiting the Universal Backlot. I even developed a concept for my first feature (It was to be called ‘Timechangers’ and would be about a group of guys that looked like the Ghostbusters except their guns would blast you through time. When you are 7 years old, this is the coolest idea in the world).
Well my dad wasn’t rich and so instead I ‘became responsible’/’faced reality’ and got a degree in Computer Science from Oregon State University back in 2003, I was the youngest in my class of 4000+ because I began college at 13 (I graduated 2 weeks after my 19th birthday). But most eventful was that during college, the disease came back.
This ‘disease’ is that of filmmaking. Stories would pop into my head at random times, unrequested! Movie after movie my brain was creating whilst I was trying to be realistic in life. Finally I couldn’t take it any more and during my senior year, I recruited about 30 of my friends to cast and crew a 30 minute comedy called ‘The Logical Pursuit of a Woman’. It was about 4 engineer friends using their superior logic to acquire women. It was a campus hit! Viewings were arranged in the campus center and hundreds of students saw it. The movie played repeatedly on the local campus channel and my friends started getting recognized around campus, I was a hero to engineering (25% of the school).
That’s it, I was hooked! After graduation I spent 5 months unemployed (crappy job market of 2003) and my dad sold all of his stock in order to buy two VX2000s and a Canon XL1 for me to shoot weddings with my siblings and for me to make movies with. Later that year I got hired on at a software company and promptly moved back in with my parents (J) in order to spend as much money as possible on cameras, lights, gear etc. I made another short then decided I was ready for a long movie! Lol, I made a 55 min movie called ‘Shotgun for Mary’ that was a romantic comedy. Learned a ton and then decided to try genre.
So, I put out a casting call for girls aged 15-25 to play medieval maids in a children’s movie I was making called ‘Knight Time’. One of them was a hot 18 year old blonde that caught my eye. My productivity was shot for the next year until I proposed to her movie style J. I had her acting manager send her on an audition to play the role of a medieval princess. I had him request her to dress up (she owned a dress like that) and sent her out. Because it was from her manager, she didn’t even question that this audition was out in the middle of a field of an enormous farm. I had a photographer there with a table set up to ‘take resumes’ and he had her stand out in the open while I road up to her on a Fresian Stallion, wearing 50lbs of real armor and proposed to her, a knight to his lady (tip: proposals this intense get you brownie points for YEARS). Though during this time of dating, I did manage to make one movie that won me an award, it was called ‘Diservice’ and was about SWAT teams being hired by parents to break up dates for their horny teenagers http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qt0ZoS4pMus
I managed one more short before we were married in 2006. 10 months later my son William was born J. It’s funny how much more productive I became after she became pregnant. It really lights a fire under your ass to make you realize you better get going towards your dreams. I want my son to grow up knowing his old man made it.
In the spring of 2006, shortly after I got back from my honeymoon in England, I gave my dad a call. He was at NAB 2006 in Las Vegas and I told him he had to visit this booth by this new camera company called Red. I told him it might be a scam, but the specs were too cool, he had to check it out. Thankfully he made it his priority and was there at 9am on that fateful Monday morning. He calls me at like 9:15 to tell me that Red is $17,500 for the body. Holy crap! I freaked out and told him we couldn’t afford that (my best camera at the time was a Sony Fx1). He hangs up and calls me back ten minutes later to tell me he’s reserved #27, so I instantly reply that I’ll split it with him (totally unsure of how I’d come up with $10k but knowing there’s no way he could come up with the full amount).
After a while, the full weight of what Red was going to be started to sink in view all the activity in the Red subforum here on DVXUser. It became like the ‘magic sneakers’ for me. Knowing that I was going to be the owner of the best camera in the world was an enormously good burden to bear. It was this that caused me to dig in and really learn audio (damn that sub forum! It caused me to spend about $15k on audio, mostly on credit cards!!). Plus I had to learn lighting much better, exposure, camera concepts, etc. The year from summer of 2006 to summer of 2007 was mostly spent busting my ass learning to a whole new level, so I could feel ‘worthy’ of owning a Red. In that time I did manage to shoot 5 more shorts (a webisode series, office comedy, still in post).
At NAB 2007 I went and met Jim Jannard, and he knew who I was! I gave him a bottle of Oregon whisky and met Jarred and the team, it was incredible. We were told Red would come about 4 weeks later and so I eagerly cast my first Red short. Fast forward to August and still no Red. I was in a holding pattern, but still learning. August of 2007 my dad got a call to come down to the first ever Red day. He told them he’d bring ‘his son’ and they told him no, only one person per reservation holder, there was no room at Red HQ for guests. My dad said ‘you don’t understand, my son is my business partner, he owns half the camera, it’s Shawn’. The guy on the other end goes ‘OH! Shawn! I’ll ask Jim’, two days later we get the call ‘Jim says Shawn can definitely come’
Red Day was incredible! Drinking champagne and chatting up Jim, Jarred, Gibby, Kelly, Mike, Mark, Graeme, the crew, it was a true memory. There was one distinct moment where everyone in attendance went around the room telling who they were. Holy sh1t, I’ve never felt so small in all my life. Everyone in attendance deserved to be there but me! They were Emmy winners, writers of major Hollywood movies, owners of mega companies, etc. Then there was me, I felt like saying ‘Hi, I’m Shawn, I’ve snuck under the rug and I’m really hoping no one realizes I shouldn’t be here, oh yeah, I’m Red #27”.
#27 has since become my lucky number and now I see it randomly popping up all over my life (trying very hard to not be like the movie ‘23’. I’ve shot countless hours with my Red. That camera has introduced me to so many people, brought about so many new relationships, and done so much for me that I could write a post twice as long as this just going into it.
Now I’m shooting my TimeFest entry ‘Aetas’ on it and then after that I have to settle into post and finish off the other movies I’ve shot (2 red and the webisode series).
I’m still a software engineer, working 40 hours a week programming. But I know it won’t be forever, I will be a filmmaker, it is inevitable, because I can’t be stopped unless I’m dead. I’m going to keep going until I’m there. As my writing mentor, Cynthia Whitcomb, tells me ‘There is only the road to success, never a road to failure. Getting off the road is when the dream dies, letting the pot holes derail you is floundering. Just keeping walking and you will make it, it is inevitable’.
When I first discovered DVXUser about 3-4 years ago I lurked a bit and then left, figuring this site didn’t apply to me. Later on I heard word-of-mouth from a fellow Oregonian that DVXUser was still a great resource even if you don’t own the camera, so I came back and registered just over two years ago. Little did I know how much this site would do for me.
Wow! What a difference one site can make in your life. My wife affectionately refers to this place as ‘DVXSlut’, or ‘the other wife’. The diversity of things ‘she’ has taught me is overwhelming. The audio forum with massive amounts of help from those guys unveiled a whole new level of quality for me. The festivals too have taught me. I first helped Norm Sanders and Ryan Walters with some of their entries, even acting in Norm’s ‘Without Provocation’ and now in TimeFest I’m entering my own film for the first time with my buddy Ken. The Café has wasted hours of my life, I’ve bought and sold things on the Marketplace. I entered one of the Photography contest, debated films in the film section, ridiculed the Vegas forum for their non-Mac ways, enjoyed the Lighting forum and the genius of Drewski and his Coollights spring up from late night forum brainstorming. So many things have happened.
Usually I try to make posts that are helpful to the situation (I even have one sticky, yay, nerd prize J), but I guess this entire post, my 1000th post, is purely self indulgent and can fall like a rock here in the busy Café
.Who am I? For anyone that gives a sh1t, read on! The rest of you, I strongly recommend mixing 2 shots of Jim Beam Black, ½ shot of Amaretto, and ½ shot of Grenadine over ice with two maraschino cherries. It’s an awesome drink I made called the ‘Southern Cherry’.
I’ve known I wanted to be a writer/director since I was 7 years old living in Newhall, California and visiting the Universal Backlot. I even developed a concept for my first feature (It was to be called ‘Timechangers’ and would be about a group of guys that looked like the Ghostbusters except their guns would blast you through time. When you are 7 years old, this is the coolest idea in the world).
Well my dad wasn’t rich and so instead I ‘became responsible’/’faced reality’ and got a degree in Computer Science from Oregon State University back in 2003, I was the youngest in my class of 4000+ because I began college at 13 (I graduated 2 weeks after my 19th birthday). But most eventful was that during college, the disease came back.
This ‘disease’ is that of filmmaking. Stories would pop into my head at random times, unrequested! Movie after movie my brain was creating whilst I was trying to be realistic in life. Finally I couldn’t take it any more and during my senior year, I recruited about 30 of my friends to cast and crew a 30 minute comedy called ‘The Logical Pursuit of a Woman’. It was about 4 engineer friends using their superior logic to acquire women. It was a campus hit! Viewings were arranged in the campus center and hundreds of students saw it. The movie played repeatedly on the local campus channel and my friends started getting recognized around campus, I was a hero to engineering (25% of the school).
That’s it, I was hooked! After graduation I spent 5 months unemployed (crappy job market of 2003) and my dad sold all of his stock in order to buy two VX2000s and a Canon XL1 for me to shoot weddings with my siblings and for me to make movies with. Later that year I got hired on at a software company and promptly moved back in with my parents (J) in order to spend as much money as possible on cameras, lights, gear etc. I made another short then decided I was ready for a long movie! Lol, I made a 55 min movie called ‘Shotgun for Mary’ that was a romantic comedy. Learned a ton and then decided to try genre.
So, I put out a casting call for girls aged 15-25 to play medieval maids in a children’s movie I was making called ‘Knight Time’. One of them was a hot 18 year old blonde that caught my eye. My productivity was shot for the next year until I proposed to her movie style J. I had her acting manager send her on an audition to play the role of a medieval princess. I had him request her to dress up (she owned a dress like that) and sent her out. Because it was from her manager, she didn’t even question that this audition was out in the middle of a field of an enormous farm. I had a photographer there with a table set up to ‘take resumes’ and he had her stand out in the open while I road up to her on a Fresian Stallion, wearing 50lbs of real armor and proposed to her, a knight to his lady (tip: proposals this intense get you brownie points for YEARS). Though during this time of dating, I did manage to make one movie that won me an award, it was called ‘Diservice’ and was about SWAT teams being hired by parents to break up dates for their horny teenagers http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qt0ZoS4pMus
I managed one more short before we were married in 2006. 10 months later my son William was born J. It’s funny how much more productive I became after she became pregnant. It really lights a fire under your ass to make you realize you better get going towards your dreams. I want my son to grow up knowing his old man made it.
In the spring of 2006, shortly after I got back from my honeymoon in England, I gave my dad a call. He was at NAB 2006 in Las Vegas and I told him he had to visit this booth by this new camera company called Red. I told him it might be a scam, but the specs were too cool, he had to check it out. Thankfully he made it his priority and was there at 9am on that fateful Monday morning. He calls me at like 9:15 to tell me that Red is $17,500 for the body. Holy crap! I freaked out and told him we couldn’t afford that (my best camera at the time was a Sony Fx1). He hangs up and calls me back ten minutes later to tell me he’s reserved #27, so I instantly reply that I’ll split it with him (totally unsure of how I’d come up with $10k but knowing there’s no way he could come up with the full amount).
After a while, the full weight of what Red was going to be started to sink in view all the activity in the Red subforum here on DVXUser. It became like the ‘magic sneakers’ for me. Knowing that I was going to be the owner of the best camera in the world was an enormously good burden to bear. It was this that caused me to dig in and really learn audio (damn that sub forum! It caused me to spend about $15k on audio, mostly on credit cards!!). Plus I had to learn lighting much better, exposure, camera concepts, etc. The year from summer of 2006 to summer of 2007 was mostly spent busting my ass learning to a whole new level, so I could feel ‘worthy’ of owning a Red. In that time I did manage to shoot 5 more shorts (a webisode series, office comedy, still in post).
At NAB 2007 I went and met Jim Jannard, and he knew who I was! I gave him a bottle of Oregon whisky and met Jarred and the team, it was incredible. We were told Red would come about 4 weeks later and so I eagerly cast my first Red short. Fast forward to August and still no Red
. I was in a holding pattern, but still learning. August of 2007 my dad got a call to come down to the first ever Red day. He told them he’d bring ‘his son’ and they told him no, only one person per reservation holder, there was no room at Red HQ for guests. My dad said ‘you don’t understand, my son is my business partner, he owns half the camera, it’s Shawn’. The guy on the other end goes ‘OH! Shawn! I’ll ask Jim’, two days later we get the call ‘Jim says Shawn can definitely come’ Red Day was incredible! Drinking champagne and chatting up Jim, Jarred, Gibby, Kelly, Mike, Mark, Graeme, the crew, it was a true memory. There was one distinct moment where everyone in attendance went around the room telling who they were. Holy sh1t, I’ve never felt so small in all my life. Everyone in attendance deserved to be there but me! They were Emmy winners, writers of major Hollywood movies, owners of mega companies, etc. Then there was me, I felt like saying ‘Hi, I’m Shawn, I’ve snuck under the rug and I’m really hoping no one realizes I shouldn’t be here, oh yeah, I’m Red #27”.
#27 has since become my lucky number and now I see it randomly popping up all over my life (trying very hard to not be like the movie ‘23’
. I’ve shot countless hours with my Red. That camera has introduced me to so many people, brought about so many new relationships, and done so much for me that I could write a post twice as long as this just going into it.Now I’m shooting my TimeFest entry ‘Aetas’ on it and then after that I have to settle into post and finish off the other movies I’ve shot (2 red and the webisode series).
I’m still a software engineer, working 40 hours a week programming. But I know it won’t be forever, I will be a filmmaker, it is inevitable, because I can’t be stopped unless I’m dead. I’m going to keep going until I’m there. As my writing mentor, Cynthia Whitcomb, tells me ‘There is only the road to success, never a road to failure. Getting off the road is when the dream dies, letting the pot holes derail you is floundering. Just keeping walking and you will make it, it is inevitable’.
