Durin Gleaves

Films and Television

I've been fortunate enough to support, participate, or get actively involved in several film and video projects over the years.

Cheech & Chong's Last Movie (2025) - an amazing documentary ten years in the making. I helped develop templates and audio production workflows that unlocked a treasure trove of C&C's original 24-track master recordings, with musicians like George Harrison, Billy Preston, Carole King, and Aretha Franklin, into the soundtrack for the film. I spent quite a bit of time at the production house, editing and producing temp and screening mixes, and even worked alongside that beautiful Rolls Royce in the garage when I needed a quiet room.

Dirtbag: The Legend of Fred Beckey (2017) - Edited the theatrical and surround sound mixes for this amazing documentary on a fascinating curmudgeon on the main for whom the term, "Dirtbag", was coined.

Beaver Fever (2006) - Hired for my stunning good looks, goomba acting chops, and prestidigitation with a deck of cards for this comedy short finalist in the Howard Stern Film Festival.

The Price is Right (2006, unaired) - Tricked into crossing the stage during a session of The Price is Right at CBS Studios, I saw more bingo wing shaken at me that day than... I don't know what. Note to self: Bingo and Wings night at a nearby restaurant.

Mistaken (2004) - Fire stunt crew for independent short. I successfully extinguished a man fully engulfed in flames multiple times on a cold weeknight at a rural gas station near Winlock, WA. Can't complain about that.

Where We All Start (2001) - Edited an independent time capsule of a film produced and shot in Seattle. Imagine, if you will, juggling 14GB video captured from a DV tape using hacked Windows firewire drivers and a SCSI drive with only 12GB of space, and you'll have a good idea of how efficient and fun the edit process was.

Kids Are People Too (TV ~1981) - A blink-and-you-missed-it appearance as an attendee at a Washington State computer summer camp. Our most clever hack was a program that LOOKED like the Commodore 64 OS prompt, but which failed every request and command in devious ways. Muhahaha.

Art Installations

Sometimes I and some rather capable friends have built large scale art pieces, some more intriguing than others... COMING SOON

Firepod - Six steel claws spring forth from the earth, belching fireballs and mayhem. Did extensive work on the MIDI control system, including writing a program to convert musical events to MIDI fire events. Pyros unite!

The Secret Life of Trees - aka Never Trust a Tree. Confess your darkest secrets into a lonely, stoic tree and let it disperse your shame deep into the ground. Or does it? Trees talk amongst themselves, and another's roots may just pick up those secrets and share them with the world.

Musee d'Fart - An interactive gaming experience at Electric Sky in Skykomish, WA, 2024. Find the Fartemon hiding in the woods, match their farts to your cards, then play the arcade game to unlock 2 minutes in outhouse nuclear fart heaven. I am underselling it, but to describe it further would be madness.

More to come...

We all have firsts. These are a few of mine.

Mr. Pine's Mixed-Up Signs - The first book I read all on my own. The classic tale of a small town painter who is wholly responsible for the design and installation of the entire towns signage at one time. A primer in poor civic planning, an already ignorant plan goes seriously amok when he is unable to locate his glasses. Abdicating any sense of professional responsibility, he installs the signs anyway to terrible effect. Only after locating his glasses as a shattered Mayor tracks him down - the dog was wearing them - is he able to restore order. A testament to optical technology.

Ultrix Passwords - My first "real" hack. In the late 80s/early 90s, University mainframe computers would often have a "guest" account that didn't do much but let me poke around and learn about, in this case, Ultrix - a version of UNIX for DEC mainframes. Unix systems represent hardware and network devices as files on disk. I discoverd that /dev/tty ports (that represent the visual back and forth between the computer and a user) were locked to each user for security after they had signed in with their username and password, but were world-readable otherwise. This meant "cat /dev/tty* >> passwords4me.txt" could capture every sign on that occurred as long as I wanted - the tty port only kicked me out after their password was accepted, but unfortunately, it was already in my hands by then.

Yes, I did have the Radio Shack Pocket Tone Dialer modified for l33t phone phreaking, but by then, red boxes were a thing of the past. Prior to the late 80s, payphones were almost all owned and operated by the telephone company, but deregulation opened the market for private payphones, where the money went to the owner of the phone. Official payphones had computers at HQ that verified the money was put in, but private phones had to handle that themselves. They also had to allow toll-free calls to be free. Sloppy programming in most models meant you could call a 1-800 number, get them to hang up on you by whatever means necessary, then wait until the dial tone returned. The billing flag was never reset since the phone didn't hang up, so voila - free calls.

More to report...