Today I got my brand-new 1-terabyte (1,000 gigabyte) external hard drive in the mail—bought in order to store and edit the Political Justice footage. I paid about $110 for it, including shipping. I remember a few years ago when I was interning at Channel 10 and they got their first terabyte drive, my boss looked up how much a terabyte would have cost in years gone by. I couldn’t remember those numbers, so out of curiosity, I did a little research and calculated the cost of a terabyte in years past (via Cost of Hard Drive Space):

2004: $1,000
1999: $27,400
1989: $12 million
1984: $80 million
1956: $10 billion

Granted, the very idea of a terabyte would have been ludicrous in 1956, when only one magnetic hard disk existed, with a storage capacity of 5 megabytes and a production cost of $10,000 (in 1956 dollars). Still, hypothetically, a terabyte would have cost $10 billion 53 years ago. Inflation-adjusted, that’s $78.4 trillion—enough to pay for the federal bailout more than six times over.

And now I’ve got two of ’em in my living room.

If you want to try out for Political Justice, you’ll want to stop in for the last day of general auditions today (Wednesday, June 10). You can come to Bas Bleu Theatre, 401 Pine Street, from 1:30-5:00 PM, or the Poudre River Arts Center, 406 North College Ave. (Northeast corner of Willow & N. College) from 7:00-10:00 PM.  Use the east side exterior stairs and come up to the second level. Our casting director will be out of the country, so don’t pester her. You can drop me a line saying you’re coming, or you can just walk in.

Casting has gone swimmingly so far and we’ve had a lot of smart, talented people come in and read silly things off of pieces of paper. Someday I will tell you more but now, I sleep.

Sincerely,

Andrew Gingerich

I’ve got two shorts here for you, both trying out YouTube’s HD feature (click the ‘HD’ button to watch in 720p!)

The first is a short piece of direct cinema called Desperation Sonata. A couple months ago I was doing a low-light camera test in the MCAD student center late at night, when the halting strains of Moonlight Sonata began echoing around the room and the whole thing turned into a documentary in the style of Frederick Wiseman or Béla Tarr:

The second is a silent experimental short I made a couple years ago called Mind/Body, playing with the relationship between positive and negative—and on a more theoretical level, the separation between the physical and mental world. This was my excuse for learning how to smash open Super8 cartridges with a rock and process the film by hand:

Also, I’d like to point you once again to Exploding Goldfish’s YouTube channel, which is finally going to get some use now that they do HD and don’t have a weekly upload cap like Vimeo (now if only they’d let me replace existing videos with newer versions I could go back and re-upload all my old videos in HD).