Nick Coleman | Actor / Writer / Producer / Filmmaker / Photographer | Nicholas J. Coleman

This weekend, I had the pleasure of acting in a short film written by Keith Hamilton, and directed by his brother Blake Hamilton of Traplight Productions.

The short film, Combat Rock, is actually an introduction to characters that inhabit the feature film Keith is developing, The Skylark.

I had read the feature in a group setting with members of Element 8, and the Hamilton brothers are so much fun to be around that I just had to say yes to being in the short film.

I play Mr. Cole, the father of Micah and Finn Cole–two precocious young boys in love with music (which sounds a lot like the Hamiltons if you ask me). The story is very simple, but resonates with the joy of youth and the loss of innocence. A key element in the plot is a new record the Finn wants to buy–the classic Clash album Combat Rock.

Alan, the film’s director of photography, was excited about using a new method of shooting using Nikon prime lenses mounted on a Canon D-SLR and recording on HD video to CF-cards. Sound confusing? Basically, the “video” camera is gone entirely–they were shooting on a still camera that records video! The upside to this way of shooting is access to the incredibly high quality lenses that go along with traditional still camera setups. For some examples of this method of shooting (and how gorgeous the results can be) check out http://www.dslrflix.com

I’ll be sure to post video once an edit is available.

In Other News…

You may notice that the website got a redesign… It’s a pretty significant difference. I don’t want to bore anyone with the gory details… unless you’re a nerd like me, in which case, keep reading.

My old site was an SHTML base, with a blog in a subdirectory (root/blog) and a news section in another subdirectory (root/news) and was a cobbled together mess of old site info (my site started out as a free Tripod account, then had a Blogger skin period, then became a mish-mash Wordpress install).

My challenge? Combine the news and blog databases (one running Wordpress 2.5 and the other running Wordpress 2.1), remove the SHTML files, and create a single Wordpress installation acting as a CMS.

Whee!

Believe it or not, I got the whole thing done in about 24 hours. I’ve been working on a similar website redux for the photographer I work with (Dave Cross) and for an actor named Paul Pryce (whose site I began some time ago, and for various reasons am just now finishing). In both cases, I have to migrate data and I figured rather than test stuff on those sites, I would do it on mine.

Combining two different Wordpress blogs is surprisingly easy: all you have to do is export the post info for each blog? from within Wordpress, saving the data to an XML file. On the brand spanking new database, you simply import the XML files you just created. There’s even a function to import and store the attachments (this didn’t work for me because I had used non-Wordpress blogging systems for old posts).

In my case, I just moved the attachments from various folders into a single repository and ran a series of “find and replace” strings on the raw database to fix the url inconsistencies.

I’m particularly excited about the Floatbox elements powering the demo reel (which I will soon upload in higher quality, and with new content) and the photos page (which is also still in lo-fi mode in light of the old site).

What Do You Do With Old Blog Posts?

As I was tinkering with the new site layout, etc, I started looking through some of the old blog posts on here… wow. Some of this stuff is… old. And makes me wonder what I was thinking. Which is part of growing, I suppose. I toyed with the idea of throwing away all of the old posts, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized I don’t mind that content being there… I’m just going to figure out a way to categorize it so that anyone coming here for “business” purposes won’t have to wade through that junk.

I’ve come a long way since I started posting in 2004. Before Twitter. Before Facebook. Before anyone was really blogging for that matter.

Have you ever read on old journal, and not quite recognized the author as yourself?