Daughter of Godcast Episode 070, The End. The last episode of the Gentle Release.

Hello and goodbye! We’re here to wrap 2016, in the very last episode of the Daughter of Godcast Gentle Release. This has been approximately 70 episodes about the 12 going on 13 year history of the Daughter of God, a post apocalyptic romantic comedy featurette. We’ve got a smidge of 2016 yet to tell and then we’ll briefly talk about next week’s invitation to the upcoming Crowd Completion. Episode 070, The End.

In Episode 006 and 016, we introduced Toe Socks, the short Lauren Discipio had written and directed back in 2002, inspired by an aesthetic conflict with our pal Shoal Southworth. I was the cinematographer and support for Lauren, her first time directing. We edited together and wrote and performed the theme song, Beans and Rice. Since Lauren and I didn’t really know anything about film festivals back then, Toe Socks never found an audience, we just sent the link to a few friends and moved on.

Telling the story of the Daughter of God implied I might eventually revisit my entire origin myth, every project and experience that informed my perspective as an artist, shaped me as a maker of movies and as a human. On August 31 I wrote to Lauren and asked her permission to post Toe Socks on YouTube. She replied that Toe Socks deserved to be seen. I tossed out the idea of sending it to a few short festivals and she was game. She created an IMDB page and we uploaded a screener. We tried top tier festivals and a few regionals, but our genius went unrecognized. We were and clearly still are, decades ahead of the curve.

Some geekiness. A megabyte is a thousand kilobytes, a gigabyte is a thousand megabytes and a terabyte is 1000 gigabytes. 1 terabyte can store about 2.5 hours of 720p HD video, at 30 frames a second. Since each second of video has 30 frames or pictures, here’s another way to think about 1 TB. 2.5 hours x 60 minutes x 60 seconds x 30 frames = 270,000 pictures. That’s how many pictures you can save on 1 TB.

Over the course of the project I had grown my life’s archive from ~20 TB to over 100 TB, most of which was stored on 1TB bare 5.25″ SATA drives. The SATA drives had been swapped into 2 bays, the trusty Venus T5’s I’d purchased in 2008. By 2016,  the drivers for the Venus T5 were antiquated and my SATAs would no longer mount reliably. In June of 2016 I hungered for way more storage, a vasty virtuality that would give ready access to all DOG’s media.  After some research I went with OWC’s Thunderbay RAID and the super convenient Startech 4 bay SATA toasters. In english, this meant that I could have 18 TBs of super fast RAID storage and an additional 4 TBs of removable SATAs or 22 TB available total at any given time. That’s room enough for almost 6 million pictures.

As the years have rolled by, significant chunks of Daughter of God’s technological infrastructure have obsoleted, Final Cut Pro 7.0 being the most significant. I so appreciate that most of my archival files are still accessible after all this time.

At a random party in late summer of 2016, I met a real life Uncle Joe, a deep state operator, long retired. In his day, a player. Now living in a shack somewhere in Manistee, a random acquaintance of the party’s host. He displayed a casual disregard for his top secret clearance , happy to tell me whatever I wanted to know. I asked him how he could get away with that, and he said no one would ever believe me, and if I outed him as my source he’d just deny everything.

Later, I made inquiries in my network and his story pans out, he could be the