Getting It Seen

2009-09-02T19:06:00.001-07:00

New updates coming soon. Promise.

2009-06-28T00:43:00.001-07:00

Don't forget to pick up your copy of college times and turn to page 8!

2009-06-23T12:23:00.001-07:00

Madison Hall now on IMDb! http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1458930/

2009-06-22T11:03:00.001-07:00

Meeting with web designer now.

2009-06-21T20:12:00.001-07:00

Meeting with the web designer tomorrow. New site should be up in a few days!!!

2009-06-17T16:30:00.001-07:00

2009-06-17T05:59:00.001-07:00

Finished Chris Gore's Ultimate Film Fest Survuval Guide. Any suggestions 4 other books in the same genre 4 the MH team to look @?

2009-06-15T16:01:00.001-07:00

We just got an email from with out a box. We're now eligable for IMDB. Our page should be up in a few weeks!

2009-06-15T14:19:00.001-07:00

Slamdance received our screener. Everythings cool so now we're officially under consideration. Now we wait till november......

No Worries

2009-05-19T01:32:00.000-07:00

The theater is paid for and secured. Nothing to worry about now but logistics. I had the President of the AFA send out an email the other day for volunteers to help with the screening. I haven't gotten a single response yet. I may just have to pull favors. I hope not though. Hopefully someone will volunteer.

Molly and I spent the day driving around to businesses looking for donations to help with our silent auction to help raise more money for the film. A lot of rejections, but some promising leads mixed in.

I've started inviting everyone I've ever met to the screening. We better pack the house.

The updating every week day at noon thing has been going well. Facebook is giving me details on visits, interactions, video plays, picture views, etc. Some interesting numbers. Things are really erratic, but that's OK.

Johnny did a new poster and we released it on Friday. Next one should be out this Thursday. Look for it.

I used my newfound web coding skills to format most of the social networking site pages for Madison Hall to match the official site. I think i did a pretty good job myself, thank you very much.

That's about it.

Javalicious

2009-05-15T14:17:00.001-07:00

I've been trying this new method of posting. I'm not sure I like it. I've been emailing blogger from my gmail. But the format is all funny. Maybe if I turn off rich formatting? I don't know. Well, we'll see.

I started watching those training videos. Neat stuff. I've already applied what I've learned to the parking page. Check it out. Every time you refresh the picture that's uploaded is random. :) Neat. www.madisonhallmovie.com

I've been trying to get in touch with the theater to confirm and pay for the reservation, but the lady I was working with no longer works there. I hope this doesn't become a problem. I watched her put us in the theater's calendar, so I'm not really worried about it. But we'll see. When I tried to call to talk to her the manager on duty just told me to call the owner. I did. No response. I'll try again tomorrow.

I've been spending the last few days calling everyone who ever worked on the film to invite them to the screening. It's nice to get in contact with old friends.

Less is More

2009-05-15T00:02:00.001-07:00

This was supposesd to be posted tuesday night. there was some sort of
error. sorry to the readers.
________________________________________________

Not much has happend in 24 hours since I last posted. But, you
know, more posts is better than not more right?

For the website I'm still leaning heavily towards doing it myself,
with the help of Ryan for hosting. So yeah.

I've started calling the cast and crew about the screening. It got to
be 8 p.m. and I figured it was too late so i'll stop. Pick it back up

tomorrow where I left off.

Been doing some more research on prices. Found some good stuff and found

some not so good stuff. We may have hats made. Neat huh? :)

I watched the first 3 tapes from shooting. It was rough. Especially
because so much from day two was so bad and unusable. It felt like

looking at old nude pictures of myself. Awkward.

That's it. I'm trying to post every two days now so the posts should
be way shorter.

Self Help

2009-05-11T17:12:00.001-07:00

So I'm leaning towards saying screw it to trying to find a web
developer. I've spoken with a few people and the more i think about it
the more i think that no one can offer me something for what i'm
willing to pay that I couldn't do myself. A friend is getting me some
training videos on different programing languages and web theory
stuff. It'll be good either way because that means I can change things
or fix things if there's a problem later, and whoever designed the
site is gone. But, it's also making me think, why don't i just design
it myself? i don't know. I haven't made a decision, but i'm seriously
leaning towards doing it myself. Maybe I'm thinking to big for what i
want. maybe simpler is better. i don't know. The only thing i do know
for sure is that I don't wan to waste any money on something that I
could just do myself.

We released the second teaser poster today. It looks great. Keep it
coming Johnny!

We announced the test screening on facebook on Saturday. It's going to
be at Chandler Cinema's at 7pm on Saturday June 6th. After party to
follow at Iguana Max. I'm going to start calling cast and crew
tomorrow.

Swine Flu?

2009-05-07T13:05:00.001-07:00

I had a great meeting with our primary investor on Tuesday, but then
got really sick all Tuesday night and all of Wednesday. no fun.

I'm in the process of interviewing all these people that have
responded to the craigslist add. blah. some good stuff though. i'm
going to give a screener of the movie to my prof that over saw the
project. I'm dropping it off at 2:30pm today. we'll see what he says.
i think he'll be impressed.

Not much else has happened.

Liar

2009-05-05T14:31:00.001-07:00

I lied. I said I'd post tomorrow in my last post and it's been way
longer than that. Sorry.

I've spent the entire day today at home doing "business-y" things. it's
been fairly boring. Most are movie related but some are personal, like
dentist appointments.

I've been doing more research on web developers. It's been pretty
tough. I met with one last friday. I mentioned that in my last post.
Well the meeting went great. We ended up talking for like 2 hours. And
he totally gets what I want to do and knows how to execute it.
However, I just can't afford him. He usually does websites for like
$2500-$7000 and I told him I'd be lucky if I could raise $1000. He said
he'd spend the weekend going over some stuff and see what he could do
for me for $1000. I'd really like to raise the money though, because
I'd love to work with this guy. I also want to work with this guy because doing all this research is stressful. Everyone "business" in the Valley that does this sort of thing is
charging about the same. A few a little less, but it's obvious that
most of those companies that charge less are just charging you for a
template that you could just buy yourself for much cheaper. I made a
Craigslist ad today. About thirty minutes ago actually and I've had like 15
emails already, however, most of them seem like scams. A few aren't but most
feel like it. This is frustrating. The website is just so
important. I feel stressed everyday that there isn't a site up.
Hopefully this will work its' self out soon.

Speaking of money, we may have another investor. I don't know all the
details yet, though, so that's all I'm going to say.

John Murphy signed on to cut a few trailers for the movie. I'm excited
about this because I don't want to do it. Well, I do, but I also don't
want to spend the time doing it.

Jarvis and I spent the other day making little "making of" video's for
MH web content. It was fun. I'll post them periodicly.

I took one of Johnny's finished cartoons and made the first character
portrait teaser poster. It looks great. I'll change the picture on the
blog to it once I release it. I think I'm going to tomorrow.

Tapia and I went to Chandler Cinema's the other day and tested the
movie out on their equipment in one of their auditoriums. It actually
looked and sounded a lot better than I thought it would. Not that I
thought their equipment would be bad, but just the DVD being
projected. We're like 95% sure we're going to be doing the
screening there. It's cheap and worth it. We also went driving around
looking for a place to do an after party/fundraiser as well. I think
we're going to do it at Iguana Max. We're also thinking about doing a
silent auction. Which could be really cool or really lame.

I'm waiting to hear back from Kenny's company on some more quotes for
less DVD's. I just don't think we can afford to spend $500 on DVDs, unless someone reading wants to send us a check.

Speaking of sending checks, I'm probably going to be meeting with our
initial investor sometime this week to figure the details of this
arrangement out.

As Usual

2009-04-29T22:17:00.000-07:00

I say this all the time but I really need to post more often. I actually had intended to post last thursday but Mike wants me to have him "edit" my posts. So i sent it to him and he "edited" it two days later. We'll i'll keep having him do it cause (as you know) my spelling and grammer is just aweful. But i'm not going to have him do this one. it's been too long since we I posted last. Here's what i would have posted last thursday:

-------------

I was approached by a potential investor the other day. Money. Money. Money. MONEY!!!. Haha, just kidding. Well, not kidding about being approached. Nothing signed yet so I wont reveal who because I want to protect this person's privacy, but yeah. They were interested in investing a small amount of money (a couple hundred to a possibly a few K or two) to help with festival fees and marketing stuff. Every little bit helps. I'm also excited about this because if it goes through, it's more leverage to find other investors. People are more likely to get on board with something that other people are involved in as well, rather than floating the boat all by them selves. I'll keep everyone posted on what happens with this. For right now I'm working on getting this person a DVD screener so they can be better equipped to make a decision.

One of the things that Mike and I have been talking about (and we discussed this with our potential business partner as well) is that there are three major steps we need to take, even before we decide which way to go in terms of finding a distributor. The three steps are these: setting up a professional website, having a test screening for invites/cast/crew/vip's in a professional venue, and having professional DVD's made (for festival submission and cast and crew copies). these will be important no matter which way we decide to take the film. It's important that our core team (cast/crew/friends/family) be as excited and passionate about the film as we are. We need to prove to them that this is legit. Not some crappy student film that we're just going to throw away. So I'm in the process of getting quotes for all these things.

The search for student web developers didn't work out so well. The student organization that got back to me said no one would do it for free.

Maybe I should try a different school other than ASU.

-----------

So yeah, that would have been it. I've been doing research on a venue for the screening. It's looking like the cheepest place is going to be $200 for the evening but i hesitate to do that because i want to promote as much professionalism as possible. I'm afraid that doing the test screening in a "$1 theatre" will make the film less credible. But maybe not. it's 750 for the next best thing and then 5000 for an AMC theatre. Retarted. I've got to make a decition on this pretty quick

I've also been doing research on DVD duplication. It looks like it's going to be the cheepest to go through Kenny's company. But i need to decide how many to make and in which manar. it's $2.50 a disc for full packaging (amerey, insert, disc art, shrink wrap, etc.). it's $1.50 for a spindle of DVD's that have art on the disc but that's it. Not sure how i'll do it yet.

I got a copy of the movie to my potential investor. He saw the flaws of the movie right away (which is good because it means he's got a hint of what he's doing) but over all he said he was impressed with the film. He used the word "Polished" specificly. I think that's good. Right? so i'm going to set up a meeting with him sometime in the next few days hopefully to work out the details and see if this is really something he wants to do.

The ASU film fest was this weekend. That was fun.

I found a web designer that did a website for another local feature. I found this guy through the IFP vendor list. Hopefully this will work out. I'm going to meet with him on Friday to talk about options for the website.

Johnny's been calling me asking me questions about details on the poster so i think he's making progress. I asked him to try and be done in 2 weeks so that we can start making the DVD's soon.

I've got more to write about but i'm tired. I'll post again tomorrow. -GN.

Will It Work?

2009-04-20T20:43:00.000-07:00

I seem to be on this trend of titling my posts with questions. but they're appropriate enough.

So I had this idea. Well... more like i borrowed this idea. :) A few years ago a website for the sequal to one of my favorite video games was set up. Every week day the game developer would update the site with information regarding the game. maybe he'd announce a character. Or an Item, or a game mode. Sometime it would be something as lame as how to set widescreen or full screen. But every once in awhile he'd upload a trailer, or a video clip. those were great days. I checked the site almost every day for a year and a half. Just to see what was knew. And it was always something small. something that would only take me 5-10min to look at, then go on with my day. Well, i'm going to try that with MH. I've already started. I established a facebook "page" which is sort of like a facebook profile. It's actually way neater than i thought it would be. Gives me status on page views, photo views, interactions, etc. Other users on facebook become "fans" of my page and that allows me to send them updates. So, for the past 3 business days i've been updating the site. I actually have 2 months of updates planed out so far percisly to exactly what i'm going to upload on what day. and i've still got more content after that's up. If you read this and want to become a fan of the facebook page, or just check it out, here's the link:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Madison-Hall/85227223141

I hope to use this strategy with the main website as well. once i have it up.

speaking of the website, i spent a few hours today combing the ASU website network looking for student orgs or departments that deal in web development. I sent a few emails out and have already gotten a response from a student org. They just requested more info, but it would be so awesome if i could get someone to work on the movie's website that knew what they were doing. even a little bit. Of course it will be the same situation as with the cast and crew. Some sort of deferred or pro-bono work. I'm hoping to find someone that is interested in just building a resume. Someone who has skills in web development but doesn't have content to apply them too. cross your fingers. :)

I spoke with my brother in law the other day about a game for the website. He's going to start working on it. I'm really excited about this. I hope we can make it happen. I'm not going to say too much about this yet. I want it to be a surprise.

I met with Johnny the other day about the posters. It was a good meeting. Very productive. I think we're on the same page. He should be getting me some drafts sometime this week.

I got about half way through touching up the movie it'self. I'll finish tomorrow and start burning DVD screeners for Harkins and such.

What to do? What to do? What to do?

2009-04-17T00:00:00.000-07:00

So.....

Now the movies done.....

What to do? what to do? what to do?

Well, i guess first things first. I've been watching the movie as much as possible on as many different platforms as possible. I need to make sure there arent' any universal problems that i missed, and that my exports and compressions are good. At least for the DVD anyway. So far i've screened it twice at home, once at Tapia's, once at my brother-in-law's (with him and my wife's parents - man was that awkward) and once at a friends house on his tube television. It's interesting how different the movie looks and sound on all these different platforms. I've found a bunch of problems so far. Nothing to bad though. A few situations where i forgot to bring the music down, or my mixing just didn't work like i thought it did. I should be able to fix everything in a day or so, then re-export another couple DVD's. Then be done for good on the film it's self.

But once I finish it it's back to the same question. What to do? Well, a while back, John had asked me what my distribution plan was. that's something I need to work out. Steph saw the movie and thinks we should try and world premiere at the 2010 Slamdance Film Festival. Seems like a long shot to me. i never thought the film was much of a festival movie. more of a b-movie comedy. but who knows. I have a lot of thinking to do over the next week or two. I bought a book. Chris Gore's ultimate Festival Survial Guide It's pretty good so far.

I also talked to Harkin's about both a completion screening and a limited release. It's gonna cost about $450 to do a screening. I got some money to try and raise. In terms of the release, it was an awkward conversation with one of their film aquaistion executives. he said that these things rarely work out and kind of talked to me like I didn't understand the industry at all. He started to explain to me that i should find a distributor and that the distributor would put the movie out in theater's. :) ha. so i told him that i'm more interested in a limited release to gain numbers to show to a distributor, and to raise money for the festival circuit. He started to warm up and said he would take a look at a screener. Sometime next week after i fix the stuff i'll bring him a DVD. I'm hesitant to do this at all though, because if we do a limited release, we shoot our selves in the foot for the festival cuircut.

Basicly i've got 3 options:

1. Festivals, 2. Four Walling/Limited release through Harkins, 3. Approaching Distributors Directly.

I got some thinking to do.

Completion. Now What?

2009-04-16T21:59:00.001-07:00

I'm 2 weeks late on this post and 1 week late finishing the movie. But, IT'S DONE! yay!!!! I finished last thursday, April 9th, 2009.

All I did was mix and mix and mix the week after i posted last. It was very tedious to say the very least.

The Phoenix Film Festival was last week. it started the 3rd, the day i wanted to finish by. well, by the 3rd i was not done. I was close, but not done. i spent all that day at tapia's working on the movie, and then took fri-sat-sun off. just getting a break from the movie, hanging with Molly, etc. Plus I couldn't really move forward because i was waiting for that song from nashville. they didn't want to email me a copy or anything. Instead they snail mailed me a copy. it came in the mail Tuesday. I was exstatic. I stayed up all night trying to finish to get it done for the 8th so that i could pull a scene and walk into my old capstone class and "turn in" my capstone. Well, come about 6:30am on wednesday i couldn't do it. So i had to leave to pick molly up from work. I could have gone back to tapia's that morning and finished but i was exhausted. So i went to bed and went back to tapia's that afternoon. I worked all day and at about 8:00pm on wednesday i thought i was maybe 2 hours from finishing. just going over stuff again. you know. anyway, i got a strange call. a number from new york. It was Chad Ohnstad. If you go back and look at my old posts, he was someone i had wanted to help me produce the movie. well he was in town and wanted to meet up. I told him i was about to finish the movie and he was like "no shit!". he came over and we caught up for like an hour and then he left to let me finish and i'd call him when it was done. well, as it has gone with the project since the beginnning. it took me roughly 3 times as long to finish as i thought it would. I finished about 3am on thursday morning. I started the export and burning process and it took roughly 3 hours. the first disc was done at 6am and I had to leave to get molly at 7am at the hospital. when i got back at tapia's at about 9am some how i feel asleep on the couch. i don't remember how. i just woke up. kinda strange. the first thing i did was go get a hair cut. Jarvis was with me. In fact, Jarvis was hanging with me the whole time i was working on the movie for the past few days. it was nice company. well, we went and i got my hair cut. then we met Chad and some other friends at Four Peaks and had a celebration lunch. Then we went back and watched the film. Everyone had great reactions. I was actually surprised.

so that was about it. Since then i've taken a week off. just watching the movie as much as i can on different tv's and sound systems. there a few problems that i missed in the final mix that i'll have to go back and fix. but no need to rush. I watched the movie with Jason, he said i did a good job in the mix. The movie also looked really well on my TV i thought. i'm excited to move forward now.

moving forward now. right? now what?.....

Since the movie is done. I'm going to discountinue this blog and start a new one. www.madisonhallmovie.blogspot.com. As a fresh chapter in the life of the movie, i figure i'll create a new blog. plus, i'm sick of having to log into my old gmail account to update this one. yay for less log ins! :) see you on the new page!

Phew...wipes brow

2009-03-25T15:40:00.000-07:00

Wow.

It has been a crazy week and a half. I just got out of the shower and am sitting in my underwear on Tapia's couch. It amazes me to say this....but.... Madison Hall will be 100% completed on Thursday April 2nd, 2009. The only thing that could mess it up is an act of God... or Tom. Tom should be completely done with the original music by the 2nd. here's what happened this week. It's a little blurry, but i'll try.

Tuesday, March 17th. (St. Patty's Day)

So I spent all day working at Tapia's. Molly had the day off so I took the car. I don't remembe what i worked on. Probably laying in foley that we had recorded. I was starting to feel stressed about recording the rest. just trying to find time to do it. I went home really late and ended up hanging with Molly, her friend Lexi, and my brother in law till like 3am. i was pretty upset about it because i had wanted to go to bed at like 11pm so i could get up early and go to tapias. I keep saying, i can see the finish line of the movie, so i just want to sprint to it. you know?

Wednesday, March 18th.

I woke up at like noon. Molly had to work at 7 so there was no way i was going to drive to tapia's, get there at 1 by the earliest and then have to leave by 5 to drive through rush hour and get home by 6:30 so she could go to work. So i just stayed home. I brought my computer into the lawn and hung outside with our tortious, bowser, and spent like 6 hours scouring myspace for music. I found 2 artists that i was interested in using for the philanthropy scene and 3 for the car scene. I messaged each of them, or their agent. I decided to message several people at once and keep my options open. waiting for two week for that indie label just to tell me i couldn't use the song i wanted but i could use any of there other songs for $20,000 was very frustrating. over all the whole myspace process has been frustrating as well. there's a lot of baaaaad music on myspace. So I rode with Molly to work and took the Light Rail to tempe and walked to tapias and stayed the night there. We did some more foley work and John Murphy came and helped us out. it was very nice of both of them to help me. Tom emailed me and told me that he wasn't going to be able to work on the movie again until the 28th of march because of school stuff. He said spring break started that day and he would commit to finishing the film by the 2nd of april. yay. :)

Thursday, March 19th.

So I laid more effects in. capturing the tapes is a little anoying. takes like 2.5 hours for each one. cause i have to log it, then capture it. lame. we did some more foley recording to i think. making progress. Jason had to cancel and switch to friday. That was fine. I heard from a couple of the people i contacted about music on wednesday. in fact, i heard back from 4 of the 5 artists I contacted. some emailed me. some called, some referred me to thier agents. etc. I emailed who needed to be emailed and held off on calls until friday. I spent the night at tapia's again.

Friday, March 20th.

I spent most of the day on the phone with musicians and with Jason. One of the artists i talked to was actually at SXSW with his band, which i thought was pretty cool. I hope to be there next year with MH. We'll see. :) he said he'd have his business parter and legal guy get back to me at some time. I still have yet to hear from them. I think they had hesitations because of the content of the car scene. it was a country song about love. we'll see if they contact me. I also talked to a local artist here in phoenix. She didn't really have time to talk to me i'll have to get back in touch with her on monday. I also was in email contact with someone from Nashville about a country song for the car scene. Unfortunatly the guy's agent was in Germany so i'll have to wait to hear back from her. Jason and I spent roughly 2 hours trying to trouble shoot the problem i'm having with exporting the credits from photoshop to final cut. we made some progres, but not enough. i'm going to be getting together with Antonio on monday or tuesday the 30th or the 1st to figure it out. Jason also spent 3 hours teaching me some mixing tricks and the whole kind of basic concept. turns out it'll be a lot easier than I thought. I'm totally excited to start mixing. but i need to wait until i have all my effects in place. Molly helped me do some more foley work on friday night, and I went back to phoenix and stayed at home.

Saturday, March 21st.

Molly and I went back to Tempe and did a lot more foley work. it was productive. that's about it.

Sunday, March 22nd

I hung out with Family, and then Molly brought me back to tempe that night. I imported the latest tape that night and watched "Princess and the Warrior". It was pretty good.

Monday, March 23rd.

I spoke to that local musician that went out of town for the weekend. She sounded interested in MH and was willing to help. We planned to meet up on tuesday so she could give me one of her CD's. She's going to talk to one of her entertainment lawyer friends about a contract/release for the music. I spent most of the day syncing more sound effects. god, footsteps are the bain of my existance. i'm never doing another film that has footsteps again. I helped Randy do some pick ups for DOL and also met a homeless man name Jack on the Light Rail. First Jack i've ever met.

Tuesday, March 24th.

I met with the local artist and she seems excited to help. She gave me her CD and when i got home i played around with it. It'll work great. Molly REALLY likes it. I also got a call from nashville from that agents office. The agent was still in germany but her assistant or whoever said that the agent had emailed me and i had not responded. I told her i'd look in my spam and sure enough there it was. she had emailed me asking for more info on the project. Budget/cast/distributer, etc. I emailed her this long email laying everything out on the table. The nature of the production, how low budget we are, the content of the scene for the song. she said she'd talk to the artist and get back to me. I also spoke with someone in British Columbia today from a indie record label about a different artist for the car scene. she didn't seem thrilled with the idea but said she'd get back to me. I spent the rest of the day synching more footsteps. i tried to completly finish synching all of the foley we have. I wasn't able to. Oh well. I'll finish on wednesday. over the past week i've recorded almost 150 effects. i've only got something like 10 effects left to do. We're going to try to do them friday night.

Wednesday, March 25th.

When i woke up this morning on tapia's couch, the first thing i did was chceck me email. In it, I had a message from that agent in germany. "I spoke to John and he said you could use the song in your film" woopeee!!!!! so that means i've got all my music. Contracts still need to be signed, but oral contracts are done. omg. i'm so excited. I updated the blog today and baught some headphones(advise from jason for mixing.) as soon as i post this i'm going to go finish synching the rest of the foley and start mixing tonight. i'm so excited. good week. good week.

Holy Foley!

2009-03-16T21:16:00.000-07:00

After i posted last week i sat down and started to watch the movie and take more notes on what needs to be done for sound. I got about 15 minutes into the movie when i realized...what the hell am i doing this for? i mean, i know i put all the sound effects from Soundtrack in and whatnot, but why do i need to watch it again? I was just looking at my notes constantly and confirming what i already had down. sure i'd add something or realize something every 5 min or so. But why waste time doing that now? i'm going to have to screen the film when i have everything done that i've already got notes for now so why not wait till then. yeah. so I did just let the rest of the movie play. but i didn't take notes. i watched it for color. everything looked good. i'm sure i'll see something i want to change at some point but for right now, good.

I haven't found music yet for the 2 scene i need music for. I haven't really been looking either. i'll get on it this week when i have down time.

I had a very very busy week with foley. I ended up staying over at Tapia's for 2 nights working on foley stuff. I was able to find about 200 effects on sound track and so i had about 240ish effects to record. I think that's right. i could check but i don't want too. it's something liek that. anyway, we started doingn recording on wednesday night and did maybe 15 recordings. we decided to quit early because we werent' doing thing effeciantly. I had my notes that i had taken with grady a few months ago, but they were in chronological order so i kept having to go get props again and stuff. So we ended early and first thing in the morning on thursday i set about to rearranging my notes into a more efficiant schedule. doing all the effects in one location, with all the props i need, and doing one prop at a time and getting all the effects i need with that prop all at once. That sort of thing. It took me about 3 hours to rearrange everything. i was able to condense that 240 down to about 150. you know, because a foot step is a foot step, even though it occurs at 10 different places in the movie. See, in my notes, i had 10 different footstep effects writtine down. that would be a waste of time. So then we started recording again. Johny Murphy came and helped us out too. we got about 45 effects recorded that night so it was very productive. Molly helped me do effects Saturday night and we got about 20 effects done. Friday i imported the effects and played around with them. Today i did some syncing and the recorded effects are going to work great. which is so funny cause our recording method is so ghetto. highend microphone xlr to mini converter into a soccermom mini dv cam. we can record at 16bit audio though which is good enough for this. So right now i have about 70 our to 150 done. not bad. i'm going to be doing some myself tongiht. i've got a mic stand so it should be fine. a little awkward but fine.

I finished the credits friday. Finished. All done. I've decided not to do the Where are they nows. i just don't think it will fit with the film. no opening credits either. Just the company logos and the main title. all the credits will be at the end.

I'm meeting with Jason this Thursday. I'm hoping i can do the importing of the old footage at Randy's this Friday.

Tom did a few of the other Spy ques and they're great. He went on vacation this weekend so nothing new from him for a couple days now. but almost done!

So, i think, if i kick it in the ass, and i mean REALLY kick it in the ass... I could have the movie done by Sunday...

...I know right? it's unlikely, but possible. Wish me luck.

Not Like A Woman

2009-03-10T13:23:00.000-07:00

Sorry for skipping a week. I've actually been very productive. I just procrastinated too long last week on the blog. I've been working at Tapia's almost 35-40 hours a week. So when i get home i don't want to work on the movie anymore. and this feels like working on the movie...

Anyway, I readjusted the color on those scenes i had mentioned. I think i found a good balance in the scene where i was concerned about the red vs. blue. I have yet to screen it yet though. Will do that in the next couple of days or so.

Tom is very consistant. He keeps sending things. and 90% of the time they're perfect. He finally got the spy que to a place that i like. so he can move on to the other ques with the same theme. We're actaully pretty close to being completely done with all the orignal music. :)

I dove head first into MySpace. I've saved a lot of links to a lot of pages. I did find a PERFECT country song for the blow job scene. Like a Woman. www.jamieoneal.com. I spoke directly with the record label and they were really helpful. After a week of talks they utlimatly said no to us using Like A Woman, but they are sending me some hip hop stuff that they think would match thematicly with the film. I'll give it a listen, all though i have my doubts. I'm looking for something that Delialah would play. we'll see. back into MySpace.

I spoke with Chase Stain recently. Because we're so close to working on the final mix of MH I wanted to get all my i's dotted and t's crossed. He's totally down and is drafting up a release as we speak. I talked with him about a music video or two, using the MH footage with stuff from concerts or what not. i want to do this for them because i'm so greatful for them letting me use thier music for fee. and it would be good promotional materials for MH :)

So i finally finished laying in all those sound effects. God it was so tedious. Footsteps. so many fricken foot steps. anyway, i spent a day exporting the tracks and burning a disc and such. i'm going to watch it today and take notes on what I really need to record now. Hopefully i can do some recording this week, or even finsih :). that would be awesome.

I'm meeting with this guy Jason that did on set sound for Randy's film. He's going to help with the final mix. I'm excited to learn some things. it can be a real frustrating process.

So after lots of research I found that what i was doing with photoshop for the credits was the best way to go after all, and that the problems i was having were not because of the method, but more because of some technical settings in FCP...i think. So i'm almost done with the credits in Photoshop. As done as i can be until we lock the film. You never know when someone will get on board and i'll have to add them. so yeah.

I finished going through all my old paperwork for the movie. took my like 2 hours. but it was fun. I threw a lot of old stuff away. i'd say like at least 5 reams worth of paperwork.... It was old stuff that i didn't need though. like copies of the script, Day out of Days, etc. lots of copies of things. i made alot of copies.

johnny has been working on the posters. he sends me an email every once and a while. i'm glad that's moving forward again.

I decided the other day to start importing old footage from the movie to help smooth over some area's that need room tone that i can't generate. like tunnels scenes and stuff. and wouldn't you know it? but the camera i borrowed from my bro in law wont read my tapes from teh DVX. it's a panasonic soccer mom cam. even though it's panasonic it wont read the tapes. sorry. correct that. it will read the tapes. it wont read the time code on the tapes. So i can watch and listen to the footage on the computer and on the monitor on the camera, but i can't import it. Son of a bitch. so i emailed randy to see if i could use his camera and his final cut to import. he said yes. I'm going to try to do that friday.

At one point i do intend to go back through the old call sheets and blog about each day of production. i have a feeling all i'll have to do is look at the call sheet, and maybe some of the shot lists and footage and it'll all come rushing back.

Big Giant Fucking Footsteps. (exuse my language.)

2009-02-25T17:43:00.000-08:00

Haven't finished up the Color Correcting yet.

I did meet with Antonio and he took LOTD out of the film and put the news in like i wanted. YAY! it was really easy. there was also this tiny problem that i had noticed with one of the rendered effects he gave me. The exposure meter on teh camera graphics appeared to be missing a bar. We figured it out though. it was some wierd thing that had to do with Interlacing. He didn't make a mistake.

Tom has been sending stuff right along. It's great to finally be having this stuff completed. After working on the film for so long with out knowing what it would sound like, it's neat to finally be hearing it. We are having a bit of trouble with the Spy theme for the Urban Explorer guys. We're just not communicating very well or something. I don't know. I think it's mostly my fault, for not being able to percicly articulate what i want form teh music. We encountered this a bit on LOTD. He was a little bummed about the whole thing, not getting it perfect the first time and all. But i told him the other day that i never expected things to go 100% perfect. he sent me a new draft of the Spy theme last night. It's a step in the right direction but somethings missing. I spent like 3 hours going back and forth between it and credits today. I just couldnt' figure out what didn't work for me about it. I think i eventually hit it but we'll see. I emailed him my notes. he should get back to me by friday. he always sends me stuff on Friday. yay tom!

I have made a big decision recently. I have decided to abondon the quest for the two mainstream songs i wanted for the film. here are the reasons:

1. MH will have a mixture of Original Composed Score music and Local Indie music. So that being established, i think the songs might seem a bit out of place. Kind of like having a Big Star in the Blair Witch Project. It wouldn't have worked for that movie. This isn't that much of an extreme case but you get my point. I think having stuff that most people haven't heard before will add some consistancy.

2. I will not be able to get the songs for free. No matter how cheep they offer, i don't have any money.

3. I was watching this interview with Mickey Rourke about the Wrestler. He was talking about how he wrote a letter to Bruce Springstien asking him to write some music for the movie. He talked about how Bruce was an old friend and that it was a blessing he wrote them a song because they couldn't afford a Springstien song with a 5 million dollar budget...

So yeah. The only way i could get something for free would be to be personal friends with Faithe hill. Still working on that one. If it happens, then i might use the song.

4. Let's say i found some money? like, 10,000. That money would buy me rights to thiese songs for a limited amount of time. like say 2 years of Festival rights or whatever. Or let's say i get the songs for free, but can't sell the film or make any money off of it until all the rights are secured financially. In other words i could shop around teh film and do private screenigns with the music but couldn't sell it unless the full cost of the songs were in the contract. This kind of sutionation would greatly hurt the chances of teh film getting distributed. I don't want to MAKE any money on this. It would be nice to get my investers (me included) they're money back and pay everyone for thier work. But i don't want back end points, or whatever. I just want people to see it. I want it to be in distribution so i can get legitamete credit for the project. I think having those pre existing terms, like the unpaid for songs, would hurt our chances of the ultimate goal.

I could keep making up reasons but those are the best. so it's onto myspace to hunt down more music. :)

Yeah, ok. So that pile of Sound Effects i found. Worst story of my life. Not really. It's just, it's taken me roughly 5 full days so far putting them in the movie and i'm only 2/3's through. it's one of the most tedious things i've ever done. Not as tedious as photocoping for 7 hours strait in Telford on the 14 days in GB trip but still, tedious none the less. Lots of Footsteps. Footsteps footsteps footsteps footsteps footsteps footsteps footsteps footsteps footsteps footsteps. And it's way worse than that. The effects are workign great though. it's definatly cutting what i'll need to record in half at least. and it's lots of hard stuff. Like police sirens, alarms, ambiance, etc. hopefully i'll be done by the this weekend.

I spent 6 hours today trying to figure out how i was going to do the credits. I was having trouble with the stuff i was doing in photoshop when i imported it. Here's a conversation i had with Emilio, a good friend, that i had today about the issue:

me: you know anything about outputting or exporting?

Emilio: you talking final cut?

me: i'm talking anything

Emilio: sort of. what do you want to know?

3:28 PM me: eh

it's complicated

3:29 PM i spent all this time making this high quality image file in Photoshop for the credits of MH

and when i drop it into the timeline, FCP wants to render the image in terms of pixel reduction to match the quality of my footage :(

3:30 PM Emilio: make the image the same resolution as your video source

that way it won't resample it as much

there might also be settings to prevent that from happening

3:31 PM me: but that sucks. why would i do that? if i can help it i want to make my credits look as good as possible

Emilio: it doesn't suck. it's the size of your source so it's going to look as good as your video

3:32 PM maybe if you make the credits a different file that you export in HD

3:33 PM me: yeah. i got to figure this out at some point. i've got some really deep techies that i can ask. frustrating...

Emilio: good luck with that

3:35 PM read this... might help.

http://www.larryjordan.biz/articles/lj_prepping_still_images_FCP.html

8 minutes

3:43 PM me: that'll help a bit. but not like i want it too

here

imagine this

3:44 PM you go to a movie theatre and watch "The blair witch project"

it's on the big screen. the image is a crappy handy cam image. all pixelated out.

3:45 PM if you were to write the credits and titles in a font that uses the same pixel ratio as the crappy soccer mom camera, the text would be virtually unreadable on screen

i want to avoid that with MH

3:46 PM i want to make all my credits Movie theatre appropriate. If i do that right now, on a big screen they are virtually unreadable because an A becomes some sort of 3 pixel concoction

make sense?

there has to be a way to make the titles look amazing.

there has to be

the image as already been captured

i can't make that look any better.

3:47 PM but. The titles can be created from scratch

just like the sound.

you can have a 5.1 really well mixed soundtrack for a crappy looking film

the same concept has to be able to apply to credits.

make sense?

Emilio: yeah, i get it

i thought fcp had those kind of tools

me: if it does, i don't know where they are.

3:48 PM Emilio: have you tried with livetype?

me: yuppers

i need to talk to someone who knows what they're doing with it.

who's done this sort of thing before.

I know that's a lot but it was easier for me to paste it rather than write it out :)

Anything else, anything else? hmm. Big post this week. Sorry. Lots happening. Which is a good thing i guess.

OH! I noticed recently that i ahd a coment on a post a while back. John, to answer your question, here's the deal. our ultimate goal for this film is Sundance. Just kidding. DVD distribution. To have the film on the bottom shelf of blockbuster next to Minesweeper (directed by Uhl Bol) would be a dream come ture. We'll do research on indie and comedy film fests but this isn't your typical art house festival movie. so the film markets might be a better choice. Also, we'll talk to Harkins about doing a limited release here in the Valley kinda like Jakes Corner or Never Been Thawed. but that's a whole can a worms i don't know anything about. I'll let you know more when i get there and when i know more.

Dabbeling

2009-02-16T11:17:00.000-08:00

So, as expected, after watching MH with all the color correction done there's a bit of tweeking i need to do. One scene i feel i should have never color corrected at all. There's a few shots that need to be adjusted in a few scenes but the scenes as a whole work fine. One of the scenes that i left alone, as explained in the previous post, really needs to be adjusted. I'll just have to find a mid point between the blue hall and the red room. Try to find someway to make both spaces work. Right now, with the way it is it just looks aweful. I'm sure i'll be able to fix it.

Everytime i watch the movie i have these editing urges. it's like, i want to start re-editing a scene or cut something out. grr. there will be some last minute edits at the very end once the movie is done. it's much easier to do that then to do it now and screw up the time code for the other people working on the film.

After watchign the film for color i've decided to take LOTD out of the film. There was a scene were two characters are watching it on a TV. I have it in the movie because in the script the characters were supposed to be watching a baseball game but it would be impossible for me to get rights to a real game and I never shot footage of a fake game for the TV. So what i'm going to do instead is have them watch the same news that melanie watches in the begining. I'm going to need Antonio to do the effect of transposing the image on the TV for me but that shouldnt' be a problem.

Tom sent me new stuff. Haven't synched it yet.

Nothing from the record companies yet.

I'm still debating about title cards. I'm leaning more towards time stamps now. I think it might be able to move the film along more smoothly. We'll see.

I still need to do the Foley work but I did recently find a whole pile of royalty free sound effects that i think will work really well for the movie. Sometime in the next few days i'm going to through my list of what i need to record and see if i can find it in this pile. I'm hoping it will cut what i need to record in half. :)

I started dabbeling with the whole mixing thing. I found this really neat equalizer tool that will allow me to fix some of the ADR problems i have. The thing were part of the dialog is ADR and the other part is in camera. So far it's worked really well with one part of the double teaming is gay argument. The other it didn't work as good but i've got to play around with it. I also played around with some effects that create a "coming from behind a door" sound on dialog. I'm excited to start doing this kind of stuff.

True Color

2009-02-11T20:25:00.000-08:00

As of this evening I have finished all of the Color correction for the film. At least I went through the entire film and color corrected.It took me roughly 4x the length of the film. As i was working i was figuring out ways to move faster through the film. It was interesting how some parts i didn't expect to be correcting i ended up making adjustments, and others i wanted to correct but ended up leaving the way they were. I decided to leave all the tunnels stuff natural, the same way we left the sound. I think it's an interesting choice and adds something to the film. There was 2 scenes that i desperatly wanted the change the color tempature but couldn't because i door was open to another room in the scene that was lite with different temperature then the foreground. Both scenes are redish orange and the hall ways are blue so when i bring down the red the hallway turns into a windex blue that just looks aweful :( oh well. live and learn. it doesn't hurt the film to leave it red, it's just now what i wanted. Now i'm going to burn a DVD and take it home and watch it on my TV some time this weekend. I'm excited. This is another large milestone. I may have a few tweeks to do but over all it's done so that means that All that's left for picture is just finalizing credits, then only sound work left! :) wahoo!

Still need to do the Foley work.

Tom keeps sending stuff and it's great.

I spent roughly 4 hours over the past couple days on the phone and on the internet trying to track down who to talk to about purchasing the rights to the two major songs i want. Christina Auguilera's All i want is you and Faith Hill's Breathe. Each is owned by a different company so i have to deal with two seperate entities. No one seems to want to help me either. They keep telling me i called the wrong place or to email some else. I don't really knwo what i'm doing and am not 100% sure which kind of rights i want. i just want to talk to someone who will have some patients and go through all the details with me. I'll keep trying.

I've been watching hero's lately and all the text has made me wonder about what MH would be like if i did a bunch of title cards through out the film. i might through some in for the time being to see what they look like.

I've been spending some time on myspace looking for music that could work in case i don't get the big music i wanted. i'm actually thinking it might be better not to use it because it would be so rare. i mean, most of the music in the film will be written for the film and local indie bands, so the popular music might stick out too much. i mean, imagine if in Lord of the Rings Coolio's Gangsta's paradise started playing in mordor? it woudl be really out of place right? obviously nothing would be that bad in MH but you get my drift. we'll see.

10 Months Later

2009-02-03T22:57:00.000-08:00

Randy's movie was an awesome experiance. We wraped on the 18th. I would have posted but my Dan flew back for a week from korea so i hung out with him most of the time. And we did a 24 hour film challenge through IFP. It was really fun. Now, back onto full time with MH.

10 months ago i sent out the first emails requesting the cast to send me their availability for a few weeks so we could record ADR. On January 7th, I finally finished all the ADR. That's right. Kristin finally got together with me. It was a little awkward, but productive none the less. And she did a great job. I knew about it a week in advance, even when i posted last, but i didn't want to sayanything cause i didn't want to jinx it. not that i believe in any of that crap, just thought why the hell not. But all the ADR is recorded. Woopie!!!

Over the last week i was able to go to Tapia's for a few days and synch all the Ali and Kristin ADR. I also was able to put in Kristin's Hyperventilating and the Double Teaming is gay argument. It's going to be challenge however, mixing those two bits because the original sound is so different from the newly recorded stuff. I'm going to email this new sound guy i recently met about some effects stuff.

Grady quit the movie. Well, more like Grady quit me. He was working on Randy' movie with me and one night my wife started yelling at him and he walked out. He wouldn't talk with her at all. He feels that he never does anythign wrong and so he doesn't have to listen to anybody. Which is too bad. I think he's very self destructive. Well, he didn't come to the set of Randy's movie anymore and he hasn't emailed or called me about anything so i guess he's done. Too bad. i'm thankful for everything he did do on the project however, and i will miss his help from here on out.

I still have some foley recording to do. I'm going to be using my bro -in law's camera with a microphone hooked up to it. Kinda ghetto but should do the trick. I'm going to try to start that by the end of this week.

Tom as been sending me stuff every weekend since he left. It's awesome. Only one theme hasn't worked so far (the spy theme for the urban explorers) but the rest has been great. I think it's safe to say that almost half the music is done. I'm going to have to start seriusly looking into getting the rights to the christina aguliara and faith hill songs though. Not sure when i'll dive into that but it needs to be soon.

I got all the stuff to Antonio that he needed. He finished everything and I got it from him last week. THE SPECIAL EFFECTS ARE DONE!!!! haha! things are really starting to wrap up. About time huh?

I emailed Johnny, the old cartoonist guy. I was looking through some old files and found his old toons and they were just great for the movie. And i haven't been able to find anyone that cared as much as he did or did as good a job as he did so i emailed him asking him forgivness for me basicly firing him. He said no forgivness needed and that he was very happy to be involved again. we're going to be getting together this week but i told him that i'm just going to let him do what ever it is he wants in terms of a time line for right now. My bigest priority is finishing the movie. I'm not going to try and jugle everything like i did last spring and summer.

That's about it. Things are looking up!

Styx

2009-01-05T16:41:00.000-08:00

I saw Styx in Concert on New Years Eve. Just thought i'd let you know.

As you can imagine i didn't get anything done when i went to texas. That's just how these things go. I'm going into production on Randy Forte's Capstone starting on Saturday the 10th. So working on MH during that i have a feeling will prove to be difficult.

Things are pretty much the same. I still need to get that shot to Antonio. I didn't do any sound recording like i had planned on. Really i just decided not to. I chose to watch the Office instead.

I did meet with Tom and we did go through every que in the entire movie and we seem to be on the same page with things. He's going to start working once he gets back to the UK later this week. I've got to burn him a better DVD than the one he has. When i'm doing that i'm going to try to get some color work done. We'll see how this week pans out.

Merry Holidays

2008-12-23T21:15:00.000-08:00

My major edit idea turned out to be a great idea. what i did was switched the first two scenes. I swaped the news scene and the double teaming so now we open with the double teaming sequence. It also worked really well with the Credits. Mike Tapia helped me with fonts and doing some photoshop and the credits are looking really good. Almost done with the opening sequesnce.

So i picked up Randy's stuff on Saturday. There was a bit of a snafu and the microphone we intially borrowed didn't work. We had to go back to Randy's and switch it out. we did some recording but it got late (like 2am) and i lost motivation so we called it a night. Haven't picked it up yet. I emailed him about doing it tomorrow night. Molly's got to work and i got no one to hang with for xmas eve. Might as well get some work done right?

I spoke with Tom. He's in town for the holidays. We're going to get together on Friday the 3rd and go through the movie for a few hours going over the spotting i had emailed him. He wont get anything done till he's back in the UK but that's ok.

I almsot got the ADR with Kristin done but the plug got pulled at the last minute. I'm going to use a recording studio in a post house that Antonio works at. I spoke to the manager there and they're going to let me use it for only $50 for an hour. Kristin promised early January she'd get it done. cross your fingers yet again...

I met with Antonio about the Effects. He's almost done. I have to re-import him some footage for one effect, and he's working on a different one while he's waiting for that footage. I'll import it tomorrow and bring it to him after the holidays. But the effects are nearly done. Just 2 shots left.

I didn't get too much done because there was the ASU graduation, My friend Tristan came back over the weekend for the holidays and wanted to hang out, and also my good friends Daniel and Kellie Swier had there baby girl on Saturday. Molly and I spent a lot of time over there on sunday. Also i've been doing things and chores and stuff to get ready for Texas. I'm going with molly's family for 5 days to visit more family in San Antonio. We leave xmas day. So i prolly wont post again till after the new year.

Merry Holiday's everyone (john ;) ) ! Peace!

not as progressive, but progress none the less

2008-12-17T21:20:00.000-08:00

I finished all the frame adjustments. It feels really good to have a milestone done and finished. i ended up staying up till like 4 in the morning the last tuesday i posted finishing it.

So i was going to borrow some stuff to do some sound recording but randy didn't have a recording devise, just the mikes and cords. So I looked into renting a portable sound recorder, the same one we had on the first foley stuff we did, and it was going to cost me like $150 with a $500 deposit. Yeah... so i was like no thanks. So after that i did a little more research and decided to borrow randy's stuff and hook them up to Grady's handy cam and record to mini DV that way. That's the way all the original audio was caputred anyway so it will match the movie. We were going to start recording this weekend but there was a hick up with finding a place to play some sirens. I drove all over the valley and even out of the valley looking for a parking lot or venue to play some sirens and record them but nobody wanted to let me do it :( i also had the ASU capstone screening to go to so that took a day out of my week. it took a whole day cause i went to both showings. they showed the film that i had gone up to the reservation to work on. turned out pretty well considering the circumstances. Saturday i spent the day with molly ( we bought an African Spurred Tortoise. ) Sunday i spent roughly 9 hours scheduling Randy's capstone with Stephanie. She signed on as the 1st AD. So ANYWAY.... i didn't get a lot done over the weekend. Then to top it all off, it has rained all week, which means i can't do my sound recording. I could do some interior stuff, but if it rains hard enough it'll pick up on the mic. So we'll just wait till it calms down. hopefully this weekend it'll clear up.

ASU Graduation is tomorrow so i'll be going to that.

I blitzed Kristin on Tuesday after noon and I got contacted by Kristin on Tuesday night. We texted back and forth for a bit. now it's been 8 days and nothing. i called her again today. i'll guess i'll just keep trying.

Antonio and I are getting together Friday about noon to go over some of the effects.

Haven't heard from Tom. I think he's in town. I'm going to email him tonight and try to call him tomorrow.

I spent last night working on the credits and fonts and stuff. I spent a few hours today trying to place some things into the movie. It's not working out too well. Not sure what i'm going to do. I had a drastic idea for a major edit. I'll do it and see what it looks like. It shouldn't interfere with tom's work. We'll see.

Productivity

2008-12-09T15:31:00.000-08:00

I had a very productive week last week.

I'm over halfway through adjusting the framing for the film.

Grady and I finished going through the film for a list of foley work to be done. we're going to start recording this friday. i may get equipment from a friend, Randy, to do the recordings that way i wont have to rent anything. yay.

I've decided to put all the marketing stuff aside until i finish teh film. so no poster or website or trailer work until the movie is done. that's what i'm doing.

i also decided a while back not to cut my hair till i finish the movie. it's getting pretty long. i figure more incentive to keep working hard.

I had a hard time getting a hold of antiono about some effects stuff but he finally got back to me late last week. we need to get together because aperently some of his files got curropted.

Grady and I spent 3.5 hours spotting MH for tom. I emailed him the list and he's going to take a look at it. He's actually coming home for the holidays. He'll be here on the 16th. wow. i just realized that's next week. i'm going to try to get together with him to discuss the scoreing further.

Kristin is proving hard to contact again. i blitzed her today. Facebook, email, myspace. hopefully she'll contact me....

Giving Thanks

2008-12-01T11:22:00.000-08:00

I am thankful for the all my friends and family that have supported me through this project. I am also thankful for the oportunity to do such a thing. That said, i didn't do a thing over Thanksgiving.

Tristan

2008-11-26T12:46:00.000-08:00

In the last two weeks i was half as productive as i wanted to be. Tristan, one of the exec producers, and one of my best friends, is left town for good. There were a few events that i just had to go to so yeah. I also was asked to PA on a shoot that Stephanie was ADing. Steph was one of our gaffer's on MH. So all in all I probably worked only part time for the last two weeks. Hopefully back to full time after thanks giving.

I finished adding all the roomtones and effects that we have and i have to say i'm fairly pleased. Right now Grady and I are screening the movie for additional recording. It's taking about 1/4th to 1/5th time to do it. What i mean by that is for every minute of the film we're spending 4 or 5 going over it and over it looking for what needs to be added. it took us 3 hours to do 30min so yeah.... we're about a third the way through right now.

I'm also about 30min through now with frame correction. I knew it would make a difference but it's making a much bigger difference than i anticipated. Which i think is great!

Kristin has informed me that her internship is over after thanksgiving. So she'll have a lot more time. I'm calling her on Friday.

Music is at a stand still as i haven't found time to spot. I'm going to try to have something for tom to work on by tonight.

Normalized

2008-11-12T10:45:00.000-08:00

I seem to have started this habbit of posting on wednesdays. not sure why. So my first week went of full time work on the movie went fairly well. It was a little difficult to get up early in the morning and get down to tapias but it seems to be getting easier.

I have finished normalizing all of the dialog and I feel great about it. There are only maybe 2 or 3 real concerns i have in terms of quality and continuity. there's a point at which we where ADRing a light coversation between vic and steve (ashton and price) and then they have scripted lines. well we didn't adr the scripted lines, only the conversation, and the jump from the ADR to the in camera sound is really jaring there and doesn't match. I was afraid things like this would happen but i was also prepared for it and i'm sooooo happy that there are so few places where that accured.

i've started putting in the roomtones and sound effects and it's going pretty well. the foley we did worked out well but i'm finding that there's a lot more that i have to do. I did a lot of foley and even though i know i didn't get it all i didn't reallize that i barely did half. owe well. i plan on renting equipment sometime in the next two week so or so. The roomtones are 50/50. Half the time they work and half the time they don't. the only reason they don't work though is because they were recorded to low. we need to record room tones at a higher volume level and turn it down, rather than the oposit. kind of like taking a high quality picture and scaling it down to a thmb as apposed to taking a thmb and scaling it up. get my drift?

i did hear from kristin and she said she's trying to find time.

i got a bunch of responses from the craigs list add. i'll respond to some of them tonight.

i also posted an add for a VO artist for a new trailer. i got a bunch of responses which is good. i'm not going to approach anyone until i have something to work with though.

Tom liked some of the music i sent him but some of it he didn't think worked for the movie. which made me sad but that's alright. he did have a good suggestion about moving some placements of songs and that got me really excited. he also sent me some original work for the film that Molly really liked. i'm still undecided but i have yet to hear it and see the picture at the same time. That's the next step. He also said he's anxious to get working on some other stuff and wanted me to spot the film out for him. I'm going to try to do that either tomorrow or friday.

That's about it. I know nobody reads these things but if anyone has any questions feel free to post them and i'll do my best to answer them. Except you Dan. Don't post a thing. i'll just delete your comments.

Late Start

2008-11-05T20:53:00.000-08:00

So my last day at work was last thursday. i ended up staying at the theatre from 10pm-6am. it was a long night. mostly i was just hanging with the employee's and talking seeing as it was my last day. there was a cleaning crew that we had to stay and supervise. whatever, then halloween was friday night. I had to hang with family sunday night and today i spent 5 hours driving around phoenix trying to get finger printed so i can apply for a job as a substitue teacher. so in short, i'm not as far along as i'd like to be after my first few days of only working on the movie.

so far i've normalized about half of the movie. well, i've normalized half the dialog. it's going pretty well. haven't found any problems since i changed all those file names. which is good.

I sent a few of the songs i'm thinking of using in MH to Tom in england to start editing them to the movie. i'm anxiuos to see what he does with them.

i've started going through footage picking shots for the new trailer. i'm excited about some of my new ideas.

i had to let frankie go as the cartoonist. he just hasn't shown me anything in 4 months and i need something really soon. i posted an add to craigs list. we'll see what comes of it.

i've been working on framing the picture. it's coming along nicely. i'm about 10 min into the film. i've gone shot by shot and i'm surprised how much i'm moving the frame around. i'm also doing some motion and zoom effects to get rid of canted angles and lessen the effect of shakieness some hand held shots have. it's working very nicely.

i finally was able to talk to janaki about the kind of equipment they have. he was fairly rude to me. lied to me and said he never got my phone calls. what a load of crap.

I have yet to hear from kristin again. but i'm calling her every day.

Mover and a Shaker

2008-10-29T01:59:00.000-07:00

I did four posts today cause i thought each topic deserved it's own little section.

since i'm starting working 6 days a week i'm going to be kicking everythign in the ass and getting things moving. as grady calls me, a mover and a shaker, that's what i'm going to do. move and shake that shit up.

in fact, i spoke with Kristin today. TWICE! She's totally down and still wants to be involved, which is such a relief to me. she's going to try and look into a time to meet. If i don't hear from her by thursday i'm going to giver her a call.

One Day Left

2008-10-29T01:44:00.000-07:00

So a few days after my last post i had a horrible day at work. It was so bad i don't even really remember it. so i quit. I quit. I'm soooo happy i quit. i didn't walk out or anything. i texted molly from work and asked if i could quit for my birthday. I've paid off the credit card debt i owe her dad but we still owe the 1600 for the car. we've been trying to save money to pay that off and to save to move to LA. But i just hate my job so much and also Mike Tapia moves out of his house on Dec 1st. I don't know where he's going but i need to finish the movie and he may not be around. Then what the hell will i do? So i did a lot of talking with molly and we decided it was best that i quit. I put in my two weeks and my last day is tomorrow. well, it's my last schedule day where i really have to work. i'm going to go in thursday night and screen a movie one last time and turn in my keys. but the last day i have to spend 9 hours there is tomorrow and it's the last day i'll have to wear my suit. i'm so excited. So today is tuesday (wednesday morning). I have to work 12-9 wednesday and then on thursday i'm going to tapias. i'm going to screen my movie thursday night, then on firday it's halloween. Saturday is Nov 1st which will be the first day that i start my 6 days a week of working full time on the movie at tapias!!!!!!! i'm very very very very very very very excited. Almost there. I think i see the finish line.

i'm going to substitue teach on in about a month or so. that's how long it takes to set up.

Bad Stain

2008-10-29T01:39:00.000-07:00

I was absolutly exstatic when i got contacted by Chase Stain, owner of Bad Stain Records, who is a member of the Band Numbers on Napkins, the one i was trying to contact for so long. YAY! he's givin me free rain with any of his music to use for the movie. he also gave me some CD's from other bands to use as well. Right now i have 5 or 6 songs the i'm most likely going to use. i'm so happy. the songs work well too. he's giving it all to me for free. i know he wants the publicity and exposure and i don't blame him but i don't really feel that right about it. So what i'm going to do, although i haven't told him yet, is give him rights to the footage of MH for any kind of Music Video for any of the songs i use in the movie. I'm debating on weather or not i want to take that project on myself once the movie's over. Maybe i could use it as well for marketing materials for MH? i'll make the offer to him, but we'll see on me doing the video. i'll post again about it later.

in other related music news, i recieved some ques from tom but haven't placed them in the timeline yet. i really need to email him. i think i'll try to do that tonight.

Slashie

2008-10-29T01:29:00.000-07:00

So i don't know if i've spoken of this before or not but i'll go ahead and explian it just in case i didn't. When i captured all the footage 2 years ago in final cut, i followed the file path that the window suggested. so all my files where named according to Scene, Shot, Take. The file path suggested is this SceneNumber_Shot/Take. So in example, this is the file for scene 283 shot 4 take 2: 283_4/2. well most technical people know that back splashes are file path and programing formating or something like that but i guess i'm not most people. after all it was suggested by final cut! anyway, so these files worked absolutly fine for 2 years....until...Sound track. when i worked in sound track, after spending days and days making the project files, whenever i alted a file, the / in the file caused an error and it wouldn't save. IT WOULDN'T SAVE!!!! Grady and I figured out that if we went into the operating system and altered the name of the file to something like 283_4--2 and then reconnected the file then saved, closed the project then reopened it, we could then save our progress for that particular file. Well, with 1180 somewhat files that got really really really annoying, so i decided to fix them all. It took me 9 hours. I had to go and manually change the file name for all 1180 somewhat files so that none had a / in them. then i had to manualy reconect each file in final cut to it's original source file with a new name. after that i had to sent the sequenses to sound track and cut and paste each of the new sequences with the correctly linked files back into the original project files with the ADR synced and such. it was a giant pain in the ass. i'm only half way done right now with cutting and pasting but it's not that bad. so FUCK YOU SLASHIE!!!

Home on The Res

2008-10-11T01:15:00.000-07:00

"Home" is a student film being made by a very good friend of mine. He's a native American, Navajo to be specific, and he's making a movie based on the reservation. I've been meaning to help him on the project a lot for the last few weeks but never really got a chance to because of work and short notice. But i was able to head up to the reservation over the last weekend with him and help him shoot the rest of his film. It was a great experience. But, it meant i didn't work on MH as much as i had meant to.

Over the last few days it's been a pain in the ass trying to get everything organized. i had some hick ups with file paths and crashes so i had to end up recreating all the project files for sound mixing. It took me pretty much all day but that's ok. I ended up cutting the film into 3min-4min sections. there's about 25 project files. But with the projects being so much shorter than before there will be no more crashes.

I still have not heard from Frankie, Tom, or the band i was trying to contact. not sure what i'm going to do about it.

I bought a PC to TV converter box today so that i can hook up a CRT (tube TV) to Mike's computer so i can monitor image quality while color correcting. i had fun setting it up. it looks nice.

I'm feeling a bit of a time crunch because Mike's going to be moving out of his house on Dec 1st, which is only 7 weeks away. so i'm scrambling now to get this done. Grady and I set a bunch of deadlines for ourselves to help keep us on track.

I started going through all the old call sheets to start working on what the movie cost in deferrals. it was fun to go through all the old call sheets.

Final Final Cut

2008-09-30T23:29:00.000-07:00

Whoops, I didn't realize it's been two weeks since i last posted. Sorry. Things are moving along. Here's a recap.

We got final cut up and running on tapia's computer, all though it took a little bit of trying. Hopefully it'll be the "Final" Final Cut system we work on. it's working well. I've made the sound project files and we've been working on them as much as we can. it took a few days to get the project files put together correctly and to add all the ADR to the new time lines. We had some confusion at first with time codes and beats but it got resolved. The equalizing is working much better than i thought it would, which is a relief because i'm glad something is going better than i thought it would :). we've even started dabbling a little with mixing some room tones and sound effects in. but not much.

Sound can get a little boring so we switched for a day and did color correction. It looks like we're going to do all of the color correction through final cut instead of trying to do it through another program like Color. My reasoning for this, and Grady agreed, was that working in soundtrack has been such a pain that adding another software application with another learning curve would be just too much. Final Cut's features should work just fine for what we're doing. I've emailed Antonio about it to see what his opinion about the whole thing is, plus i realized i might be messing with his effects shots if i go color correcting so i want to make sure we're working in sync with each other.

I did some research on gun shots in movies (just watched movies with gun shots in them) and was amazed to find that the effects looked very very similar to what Antonio had done for MH. I emailed him with a few changes and he sent me the files i asked for so i can pick the best effect shot for the scene. Haven't had time to really analyze them yet but i will next week.

Tom responded to me and said that he was going to start working on the movie early last week. I have yet to hear from him so i emailed him tonight about it.

I emailed a band i'm interested in working with last week. no one responded so i emailed all the members on the website tonight. hopefully they'll get back to me.

I heard from Frankie about the posters. He said he'd get something to me by the end of the weekend, but then emailed me Sunday saying that he had some unanticipated things come up and couldn't get me anything. he said hopefully by the end of this week. i'm glad he emailed me to let me know. I'm anxious to see something though.

i've decided to install Adobe Premiere on My laptop so that when the movie is done, or when i can't be at tapia's i can work on the trailer(s) from home. i'm excited to start doing those sorts of things.

I spent a few hours a couple nights ago going through old emails collecting names for the credits of the film. that was fun. looking at all the old emails flooding back from i was in prep and deep in production. memories. i'm sure it will be fun to read this blog when it's done too.

My cousin's ex said that it's fine to keep using his services for the movie for free. YAY!

I bought new glasses. They should be done next week. Hopefully i'll see better :)

That's about it for today. Thanks for reading!

ADR DVD

2008-09-16T20:31:00.000-07:00

I still have yet to hear from Kristin Kelley about doing her ADR. So I've been calling her every day now for two days. today i looked at her myspace and saw that she updated her blog this morning about how she's due on the 25th of this month or something and that their probably going to induce. I knew she was pregnant again, i just didn't know how far along or anything. So i'm called her back and told her i would call her in a few weeks once she recovers from the birth. so until then i wont mention this again.

I was able to burn a DVD of the ADR files at low audio sample rates. it seems that i could export all the audio at lower bit and sample rates and the speed wasn't effected. Grady and I watched the DVD last night and took notes. There are a few lines that we need to go back and adjust for better syncness. there were also a few mistakes where i had left a file on the timeline but those are easy fixes.

Are next course of action will be to start going through all the dialogue and getting it to the right levels for the movie. Grady and I agreed that we can't really move on now until we get final cut up and running. We're going to have to import all of the original audio as the separate files that final cut uses, but to get it wee need to access the timeline on final cut. Also, we're going to have to break the project up into chapters because having the entire movie as one project file is too much for tapia's little computer.

I have a friend that i talked to that's going to help me upgrade Tapia's computer to Final Cut 6.2.

I emailed Tom about when we could start working on the score. doing the long distance thing from London should be interesting.

I emailed Antonio about the effects and he responded immediately. i had emailed him last week and he said he had just plain forgot about it. which is fine. he said he'll have stuff for me tonight. I like working with Antonio

Frankie has seemed to disappear again. This poster cartoonist thing is turning out to be a lot harder than I thought it would be. I emailed him. hopefully he responds.

I emailed My cousin's (now ex-)finance about what to do with the websites, as he's no longer going to marry my cousin. If i have to pay him he wont charge me much but free is great. We'll see what he says.

Htz and Bit Rates

2008-09-12T15:46:00.000-07:00

I had an awful day last Tuesday. For one i thought i was done synching and when i was exporting all of the tracks to burn to a dvd i realized i missed an entire character. sigh. We need to burn a DVD with all the ADR and watch the movie with the ADR and takes notes. Well when i started to burn the DVD i got a failer notice that said something about improper formats. this was at like midnight because it took almost 2 hours to export every track from every project file. so Grady and I tried to add the tracks to final cut and listen and not only where some audio tracks out of sync, there were sound bites that where not there in the ADR timeline. Like off take stuff, me giving the actors direction, etc. We where very very confused and it was late and we where tired. After fiddling around with exporting at different setting and stuff we were able to figure out that what was happening was that some tracks where at different bit rates than others and also different htz rates than others. we dicided to give up and go home. i had an aweful rest of the night. i just couldn't sleep and i had to work the next day, plust i had to get up early and pick molly up.

so i'm at tapia's now. it's friday, a few days later, and i finished synching the last actor that i had missed. now i'm updating this becaue i can't work anymore here. I need to talk to antonio about how to export correctly out of sound track to make a the ADR DVD and i need to figure out a way to update mike's final cut before i could work on color or framing.

i met with miguel. we talked about some legal stuff and caught up a bit. it was good to see him. he said he might be able to get me a few paying gigs over the next few months which would be awesome. He also said that once the film is completed if i wanted to do anything comercially with it i need to clear through the "ASU" Film committee. that makes me nervous but he said there's nothing to worry about. he's seen the movie and i'm not a student anymore so i can't see why he would lead me astray. he also mentioned off handeldly about how if the film did make money the School might want a very small portion of the income for the use of equipment and mentorship, which i don't think he's %100 wrong but it will be a very touchy subject when we get closer to that point. a friend of mine said i should find my own laywer to figure it out. i'm not sure what i'll do yet. right now i just want to finish the movie.

nothing from Kristin Kelley or anyone else i emailed. we'll see.

Cameo

2008-09-09T01:06:00.000-07:00

I ended up working five days this week even though i was supposed to work only four. oh well. I was going to spend all day today working on the movie but Molly had a doctor's appointment and Nate Klaer wanted me to do a Cameo in his movie. My Cameo consisted of me and another ASU graduate greeting a student like the ghosts at the end of return of the jedi. apparently you become like a ghost when you graduate.

So i only got to work on the movie for like 4 hours today. I didn't finish syncing the ADR like i thought i would. I'm planning on finishing it up tomorrow.

I email Kristin Kelley, now Kristin Clinton, about finishing up the ADR. I know she's busy with all her baby stuff. I prey to god she can help me and finish her ADR. I think it will be very unfortunate for the movie if i have to use a new actress for all her audio.

I spent a few hours over the last few nights downloading all the old call sheets from the movie, to start working on what the film actually cost as well as a lot of paperwork and data. one of the things i'm going to do is go back like i did last summer and try to remember things from each day to create a post about how the shoot went. the call sheets should be able to spark my memory.

I finally heard back from Miguel. i'm going to meet with him tomorrow and catch up as well as talk to him about movie stuff. I'm also meeting with Switzer.

23 Days

2008-09-04T22:43:00.000-07:00

Today is September 4^th. In 23 days it will be exactly two years since we started rolling camera for this movie. Back then it was called Freshman: (with various subtitles). So my last post was titled Summer is slipping away. Well, slipped it did. It’s been over two months since my last post. What I’ll do now is wrap up some of my topics from my last post and then I’ll get into the new stuff. So….

I think I worked a total of maybe, MAYBE, 10 days on the movie this summer. Unfortunatly all I did was work. Work and go to weddings. I did get promoted at the theatre. I’m now a manager and am learning some valuable skills. Right now my primary responsibility is in projection. My typical shift consists of me running all the projectors and the projection booth in the 16 auditorium multiplex for 9-10 hours a day. Some days I love it and some days I hate it. I was going to go down to part time (3 days a week) sometime around this month to work on MH. I’ve almost paid off the debt I owe Molly’s dad, however, I broke the door of their mini van in the middle of august and added another $1600 to my debt. I’m making a bit more money but not enough to pay off the debt any quicker. So I’m staying at my job full time for now. No idea of when or if I’ll go to part time before we move to LA. Thankfully though, my shifts are so long that I ended up working like 50-55 hours a week and I told them I can’t do that and molly agreed so now I’m only working 4 days a week instead of 5. This gives me more time to work on the film.

I found a new guy to do my posters. Frankie. He’s only sent me one draft so far but he’s got a better education than Johnny and more experience with these sort of things so hopefully he’ll come through. I’m going to email him tonight to see when I’ll get the next thing from him.

I sent some notes to Antonio today in regards to the gun shot stuff he’s working on. He also sent me a few drafts of a mock interface for the camera POV shots. He’s done some good work so far and is always quick to get back to me. I’m so glad I’ve got him working with me. I don’t know how I would have done the effects stuff with out him.

Grady still texts me a lot about working on the movie. Molly and I had our last wedding 2 weeks ago and since we’ve been back I’ve been working on MH again. Because I’m only working 4 days a week it makes it a lot easier. I can’t use the lab at school anymore so I’m working at my friend Mike Tapia’s place. He’s got all the stuff I need to work on the sound for the film. His final cut is two old for the project files I have (same problem from the lab) so I’m trying to figure out a way to update his application. Hopefully I can make it work, if I can’t I’m sure I’ll figure something out.

In terms of working on the film, I have no idea of a time table for when it will be completed. I know that I don’t have a whole lot of work to do for the film specifically, and I have a huge amount of post post work to do. What I mean by post post work is marketing and business materials. I try to work on post post stuff when I can’t be working on the actual film, like right now. Below are two lists of what are still left to do for both post and my coined term post post:

Post:

ADR Synching
ADR Recording for Final Actress
Sound Effect Organization
Sound Effect Placement
Room Tone Placement
Music Scoring
Music Selection
Music Clearence
Music Placement
Mixing
Credit Finalization
Credit Creation
Effects Finalization
Effect Placement
Framing
Color Correction
Mastering

Post Post:
Website
Website Content
Trailer(s) (which include everything in the post list but all over again L)
Posters
Post Cards
Business Cards
Press releases (for varius things)
Deliverables (for which I’ll explain more later)
and everything else I can’t think of

It may seem like there’s a lot more to do on the movie then after but believe me, everything on the post post list seems much more daunting to me than the stuff for the movie.

So that’s all I’m up for posting tonight. I know I’ve said this before but I’ll say it again. I’m going to be posting more often now that I’m working on the film a lot more again. Sorry to keep everyone in the dark for 2 months.

Summer is Slipping Away.

2008-06-26T08:21:00.000-07:00

So after reading my last post i have come to a conclusion. I am an idiot. I can't spell or write to save my life. Whatever.

So now I've been at this job for a month. My dissatisfaction with it comes and goes. I was correct on the grooming part. I've had my first of 3 interviews for management. a pay raise will be nice.

I fired johnny (posters dude). he never emailed me or texted me or anything. i even gave him an extra week on top of what i posted 2 weeks ago and nothing. i feel bad cause we're friends but i need to get my stuff done. Well, i guess alls fair in love and war...and...business? sure. Anyway, i've got a new guy. I sent him johnny's drafts today and i'm trying to set up a meeting with him.

Antonio sent me a clip of the muzzle flash of a gun shot and it looks pretty good. at least that's moving forward.

Grady texts me once every 3 days or so saying he's worried about the movie. I just can't seem to be able to find any time to work on it. I don't think i've been in the lab in the last two weeks. Especially with all these weddings and my job. I've been to 3 weddings in the last 6 weeks.

I'm anxious to go to part time to get back to working hardcore on MH. I'm going to try to talk to molly tomorrow about some sort of time table. I'm also a little nervous cause i can only use the lab through the summer, and summer only has 7 weeks left :(. I have a few other resources (friends with similar setups) that I'm going to look into about working on the movie if it goes past summer.

The Bow Tie

2008-06-09T12:15:00.000-07:00

The worst part of my job is this awful bright blue bow tie i have to wear. i think however, that the company is grooming me for a promotion so i wont have to wear the bow tie for too much longer.

It's been about 2 1/2 weeks since my last post. When i got home I was officially served papers and the process had begun. my old credit cards were sueing me. I say were because i was able to settle with them outside of court but i had to borrow money from may father in law. So now i'm working at my job full time trying to pay off my father in law off. Not much has been done on the movie. I finished syncing a few actors and have moved onto others, i'm still trying to get Kristin Kelley to come in and do her 45 min of ADR, I met with Antonio Chang about doing the special effects (gun shots, camera interfaces, etc. That's about all that has gone on in the last 2 weeks. I've spent all my days off at the lab working on synching but it's slow.

I have two goals i'm working towards right now at my job in order for me to go to part time and start working on the movie a lot more. My first goal is to pay my father in law off. It's only $2000 so working full time i should be able to pay that off pretty quick. Molly and I are trying to live cheeply too. My other goal is to get promoted. I'll get promoted, pay off my father in law, then go part time at work to really kick it in gear for the movie.

Oh, and Johnny has until Wednesday to finish the posters. We'll see what happens. I sent him an email saying that 3 months is ridiculous for this kind of thing and that if he doesn't kick it in gear i might have to find someone else. so we agreed on this Wednesday for his final drafts and then i know i'll have notes and he'll then have 3 days to get the notes taken care of. So if this happens then we should have are art for the website by Sunday. no promises though. you know how this goes.

Another decision I've made is to stop giving a time table for the completion of the movie. I'm just going to work on it. I'll tell people when i hope to finish it but i'm going to stop saying things like we "should" or "will" have it done by "specific date", right now cause of the job stuff i hope by the end of july. i HOPE.

Still nothing on the IMDB status. no rejection, but no approval either.

J.O.B.

2008-05-21T08:05:00.000-07:00

Yeah, so i got a job. I start next week and starting friday i'm out of town for 4 days for a cali wedding. I'll be working on the movie all day today and all day tomorrow but that's it for this week and who knows about next week. the job i got is full time so.... we'll see. Oh yeah, i work at Harkin's theatres. need you're popcorn cleaned up? i'll be right there.

probably not full time

2008-05-17T10:24:00.000-07:00

So for some reason i didn't post the last post correctly. So i posted it today. Sorry.

So on thursday, The day i found out we didn't get into the lab, i recieved a phone call from some creditors and found out i'm being sued for credit card debt. I knew i had the debt and i have every intention of paying the cards off, i just couldn't when i was in school. I was going to wait a few more months before i got a job to finish the movie but because of this it looks like i can't wait. the debt isn't much, just a couple grand, but you know. got to do what you got to do. So i'm looking for a job. i made some progress on the film on thursday. I'll go back to my posting template when i post on monday but this post is just to let everyone know that pretty soon i might have a job and my time devoted to the movie will suffer. i'm going to stop giving an estimate for completion as stuff keeps coming up. i'm just going to say it'll get done when it get's done. so.... that's it.

good and bad news

2008-05-15T09:59:00.000-07:00

Good news is that i'm back. I took a hiatus from all aspects of responsibility and celebrated my graduation by doing nothing but watch movies and play Grand Theft Auto IV. I also bought a new bird cage. But as of today i'm back on the movie. In fact, i'm back on the movie full time. I'm not a student and i'm not employed. Molly and I discussed it and because we are so busy with weddings and commitments and such, i'm just going to work full time on finishing the movie. Because i took about 2.5-3 weeks off, the completion goal is going to be backed that much as well. so now we're looking at a completion in mid june. At least everything on my end should be done by then. we'll see about tom.

Bad news is we found out today that we didn't get into the IFP Rough Cut Lab. I was prepared for the disappointment but was still disappointed non the less. I thought we had a much better shot at it this year than we did last year. Oh well. The movie isn't really for the hardcore "independent" audience anyway. It's only independent cause i don't have any money. Not cause I stand for or against something. :)

WOP Screening Response

2008-04-22T15:47:00.000-07:00

I'm not posting in the usual format cause nothing new has happened except the screening. The "work in progress" screening went really really well actually. I was very very nervous. I thought the movie was going to look awful, sound awful and a whole bunch of people were going to see it before it's done. Thankfully only 8-10 people showed, it looked pretty good, and sounded pretty good. I was pleasantly surprised. People laughed steadily and were actively engaged the whole time. The screening turned out to be a breath of fresh air for me regarding the project. I hate getting burnt out on the footage but there's not much i can do. The screening has re-motivated me. I'll try and keep it in mind while i start to get burnt out again in the next few weeks as we're finishing up the film.

Why Dan Why?

2008-04-19T21:20:00.000-07:00

Picture:
Effects
Nothing New

Color
So apparently Dan hasn’t done a thing and asked me the other day if I want someone else to do it. I’m starting to doubt whether he’ll do it at all. I really don’t want to add another thing to my plate. Maybe I’ll just have Grady do it to give him a break from sound. I’ll have to talk to Dan about it.

Credits
Nothing New

Picture Misc
I’ve been playing around with exporting from final cut. I want to make sure that when the movie is all said and done and I do the final export, that I export at the highest possible quality, etc, etc. I played around with doing a little exporting for the old trailer for the new website. I also was trying to cut off the bottom and top black bars so that the picture is just the widescreen picture as apposed to a full screen image with black bars on it. i figured out a way to do it but it seemed to hurt the image quality. There’s a few people I need to talk to about it.

Sound
Effects
nothing new

Room Tones
nothing new

ADR
I haven’t called Kristin yet. I keep hoping to get an email from her. Maybe I’ll call her tomorrow. I’m starting to worry she’ll file a restraining order on me or something. I’ve got a contract with her signature that says she’d come in for ADR, but who knows. I just wish she’d communicate with me more.

Mixing
syncing is still taking longer than I thought. This group project in particular is taking a long time. Grady’s been taking a few days off, come to think of it, so have I. It’s hard for me to work in the lab because I get distracted by friends and people who need help. I’m anxious for the semester to get closer to ending so that the lab dies down.

Music
Nothing New

Misc Sound
For ADR syncing I started a “group” project in sound track in which I am putting together all of the off screen dialogue that’s more of a “director” thing. I’m trying to be effeciant so I can get all this syncing done and this is stuff that Grady wouldn’t know what to do with. It’s going ok so far.

Marketing
Website
Nothing New

Trailer
Nothing New

Posters
Johnny sent me the finished poster for the four guys (adam, ben, kent, and josh). It looks great. I spent about 2 hours doing detail work, just cleaning up individual pixels that didn’t get filled in with the paint bucket tool he was using. But I didn’t want to bug him with that stuff that’s not really creative work but more bitch work. I can do that. It’s good to try to do the bitch work for the people that work for you for free. It’s the least I can do. I talked to Kenny today about doing the Photoshop work with titles and credits and stuff. He’s real good at stuff like that.

Misc Marketing
Nothing New

Misc in General
screening is tomorrow. Should be interesting….

WOP Screening

2008-04-17T13:29:00.000-07:00

So here’s an email I sent out to the cast and crew and some other people yesterday:

Hey Everyone,

I found out last night that we will be doing a MH Work in Progress Screening, hosted by the ASU SOTF this coming Sunday 4/20 at 4pm in Neeb Hall at the ASU Tempe Campus. We will be screening the version of the film that was submitted to the 2008 IFP Rough Cut Lab 3 Weeks ago. Even though the picture is locked the film is NOT finished. If you choose to come to the screening, the version you will see will have no original music (only temp copy righten material), No color correction or frame adjustments, no ADR, Foley, or Room tone work done, absolutely no mixing and No credits. The film will be completed by the end of May and there will be a cast and crew completion screening where you will receive our copy of the film.

Please email me if you have any questions.

So with that said, here’s my update for today

Picture:
Effects
I’ve been conversing with Antonio over chat and email and he’s on board. We need to get together at some point but I don’t think it’s going to be until the beginning of May

Color
Dan still has the footage and still should be working on it as we speak.

Credits
I’ve begun email people about names of people that should be in the credits, like special thanks to people who approved things that I never met. That kind of stuff.

Picture Misc
As I work meticulously on the sound syncning I’ve noticed a few shots where the actors look into the cameras. Most of them are on simple shots with no dialog so sometime in the next 2 weeks or so I need to go back and review all of the takes and see if I can find a better one. I wont change the timing of the edits at all, so the picture lock will remain the same, just going to try to swap some stuff out for other stuff.

Sound
Effects
nothing new

Room Tones
nothing new

ADR
I have the space reserved for the 26^th and as of right now Ali and Jamie are coming from California. I need to email Kristin today. I emailed her a week ago about coming in on the 26^th and I never got a response. I’ll try again today. If I don’t hear back from her by tomorrow I’ll start calling her. As I’ve been synching I’ve found a line we missed for Ben. So he’s going to come in on the 26^th as well. And we also have one last line with nate that we didn’t finish back in march.

Mixing
syncing is STILL taking FOREVER. We will finish doing the sync on the aDR by the end of the semester, in fact we should finish by the end of this weekend, but it is incredibly tedious and an awful process. Oh well, I guess it’s my burden to carry. And grady’s :P

Music
I met with Tom for a mini spotting session yesterday. It went well. He’s stressed cause he thinks the movie needs pop culture music in some places. Hopefully he’ll be able to let go of that as we don’t have any money. Haven’t heard back from Danielle in a while. I wonder what she’s up too? Also, some of the temp music I found online may actually be free to use. I need to make some phone calls to find out. I’ll let you know.

Misc Sound
For ADR syncing I started a “group” project in sound track in which I am putting together all of the off screen dialogue that’s more of a “director” thing. I’m trying to be effeciant so I can get all this syncing done and this is stuff that Grady wouldn’t know what to do with. It’s going ok so far.

Marketing
Website
So I went to start really putting all the pages of the website together, at least in terms of code, and I hit a really big snag. It’s complicated so I wont bore you with code jargon like I bore you with film jargon, but suffice it to say, I can’t do what I wanted to do. I’m going to have to work with separate pages instead of just one. Oh well. Someday when I’m a big powerful executive ;) I’ll pay someone who knows how to do this stuff to do it the way I want it.

Trailer
Drew hasn’t responded to any of my emails. I hope I don’t have to recut a new trailer myself. Schools almost done. I’ll let you know.

Posters
I had a real productive day with Johnny yesterday. We got a whole bunch done. He sent me a bunchof drafts and was popping stuff out left and right. Hopefully we’ll be done soon but I don’t want to put a timeline on it cause who knows.

Misc Marketing
Nothing from IMDB

Misc in General
We submitted to the IFP Rough Cut lab again. We should find out if we are accepted around the 15^th of May.

So nothing has been happening with this so called “screening” on the 20^th for like weeks. I have been asking Miguel and other people what room the screening will be in so I can do some tests for over a month now. Well I hadn’t heard from anyone for so long I decided about a week ago to stop panicking about having the movie in a watchable state. Well, Tuesday I had an AFA thing to do with Tapia in which Miguel attended and he ever so slightly leaned towards me and said, “the screening room for Sunday is Neeb Hall if you want to do your tests.” Well that’s just great. There’s absolutely no time for me to do any tests and the movie is certainly not in a watchable state. He noticed I wasn’t too happy about it and asked me about the movie and I told him what I just stated above. Anyway, so I was mad for a couple of days but then got over it. I’m just going to screen the copy I sent to IFP. I figure, if it’s good enough to submit to IFP it’s good enough to screen for my peers. And I truly believe that only a few cast and crew and my peers will show up to this thing. The school is doing Zero advertising for it. Plus they just sent out an email about Switzers capstone screening at the end of April and most students are confused and think that there is only one screening. Even some of the students screening keep telling me as of yesterday that the Sunday was canceled and moved to the 28^th (which is Switzers thing). I know this isn’t true cause I talked to Miguel about it yesterday as well. So like I said, I’m not panicking and I’ve just sort of given in. I’m going to finish the movie and sell it and it will be wonderful. Yay.

How i feel right now

2008-04-12T14:05:00.000-07:00

Snycing sucks :(

Synching Sucks

2008-04-08T21:07:00.000-07:00

So my apologies for not posting for a week. here's what's been going on.

Picture:
Effects
I never posted to Craig's list cause i got a response from the notice i sent out to the AFA. I'm probably going to be working with an old friend on the effects stuff. Antonio Chang. I'll have to email him later tonight to give him more details of what I'll need.

Color
Dan has the footage and should have be working on it as we speak.

Credits
i've started working on the credits. At least designing the lay out and stuff in photo shop. i'll have to go through all my old paperwork to lock it in when i'm done. it's good though cause it gives me something to do when i can't be in the lab or do anything else.

Picture Misc
nothing new.

Sound
Effects
nothing new

Room Tones
nothing new

ADR
Kristin couldn't come in this weekend :( . Adam came but Ben was like 3 hours late and we only had 10 minutes to get the Double Teaming is gay dialog. We got it, but it was a close one. All the stuff i wanted them to do together had to be split up. the facility let Jamie McKeel and us come in on Sunday so i shortened her time to an hour and brought Ben in for the other hour. Adam had to keep re arranging his schedule cause of Ben being late. Thanks Adam. Also, Jamie McKeel was late on sunday so i switched the hours around and called Ben to see if he could come in early. he did. thanks Ben. We almost had the cops called on us...again. we did the ADR with jamie where she had to scream like she was being kidnapped. i can't wait to be done with this. i only have 3 actors left. Jamie Isreal and Ali Steltzer, who say they're coming on April 26th. after i confirm with them i'll reserve the space. then it's just Kristin. She emailed me saying she was super busy. not sure what to do next in regards to her. we'll see.

Mixing
syncing is taking FOREVER we only have 4 actors done right now and we've been working in there, both me and Grady, for almost 35 hours this week. i have a sneaking suspicion we wont finish syncing until the end of the semester. god i hope not.

Music
Danielle emailed me back. IFP will be no help for music. Also, the distribution company said out right distribution rights are not at set rates and highly depend on the situation. so it looks like we're going to need to get to the artists to get the music we wont.

Misc Sound
Nothing New

Marketing
Website
Still no website cause still no art.

Trailer
Haven't heard anything.

Posters
i talked to johnny on Wednesday of last week. he sent me some stuff and i had more notes for him but i was exhausted so i emailed him the notes on Thursday. he said he would have a lot done for me by the end of the day and also that he could have everything done by this Tuesday. he had a double shift this weekend so i didn't bug him. i just thought i'd let him be. i feel sometimes like he thinks my notes are saying that he's not doing a good job when really my notes are to make the good job he's doing better. even if i say that to him i'm not sure if he believes it. i'm kinda at a lose about what to do. Also, i think he has a hard time grasping the idea of a work timeline. i mean that when he tells me he'll have stuff done, i don't think he's lying, i think he really thinks he'll have it done, and doesn't realize exactly how long it will take him to do stuff. he said he'll have stuff for me tonight. i know, we'll see.

Misc Marketing
I submitted to IMDb. we'll probably get rejected. but what the hell. I also forgot to submit the info with amanda melby and john schile attached. oh well, if we get on i'll add them, if we don't i'll include them in the next one.

Misc in General
the phoenix film festival was this weekend. I had to work there on friday night as one of my responsibilities as a member of the ifp advisory council. Also, i had to go to my brother in laws on saturday for his birthday party, and then sunday i decided to take the day off after ADR and go back to the festival instead of working on syncing. so that's what's going on.

Still no website :(

2008-04-02T17:46:00.000-07:00

Picture:
Effects
I'm going of putting a post out on craigs list and also the AFA's list serv to look for an after effects Artist to do the muzzle flashes of Jason's gun when he fires it. I'll try the AFA first and then i'll try craigs list.

Color
I had thought that cause Dan hated the movie so much he wouldn't want to do the color correction. I was wrong. He was supposed to bring me his hard drive today so that i could transfer the all the footage to him. He forgot it.

Credits
Nothing New

Picture Misc
I spent an hour and a half yesterday at the lab working on my "logo" or whatever it's called. you know, the little 3 second movie before the movie that represents the production company. like the pixar lamp jumping thing, and the bruchiemer tree getting electricuted. if you still don't know what i'm talking about i'm sure you've seen the guy fishing from the moon that's the D in Dreamworks? yeah, that little video. the one i made for Captive Run is cute. i like it. it was easy to do, and fun.

Sound
Effects
Grady and I (and Molly) went to the down town dorms yesterday. it was OK. mostly the people were still rude and unhelpful.

Room Tones
We weren't able to get a room tone for the hall way. The people in the lobby were too laud and the staff wouldn't let us go where it was quiet. oh well. Screw em.

ADR
I'm burning my second to last ADR DVD right now. I'm finishing up ADR this weekend with most of my people. There have been some scheduling issues with the last 6. i'm so burnt out on the subject i don't want to talk about it. I'll let everyone know how it went early next week.

Mixing
YAY the sound track thing actually kinda got fixed and worked well. i don't know what happened but it just worked. Grady's here now and we're working on the syncing.

Music
I ran into Tom yesterday and he lost his voice screeming in vegas. we didn't talk about the movie or anything, i just thought it was kinda funny. oh those composer types. tsk tsk.

Misc Sound
Nothing New

Marketing
Website
Still no website cause still no art.

Trailer
I sent the scripts to drew. He said they'd help.

Posters
Still nothing.

Misc Marketing
Nothing New

Misc in General
Nothing new

No Website Yet...Maybe Tonight?

2008-03-31T12:49:00.000-07:00

Picture:
Effects
Nothing New

Color
nothing new.

Credits
I started working on the credits last night. I'm going to do them in photoshop and then import them as an image file and then apply motion to the image making it crawl from bottom up. the title cards will all be done in photoshop as well. I'm going to just use Word to write them out and then copy and past into a photoshop file. I'll deal with fonts and color and stuff later. for now i'll just make the base file, then manipulate later.

Picture Misc
I finally let Dan watch the movie. He hated it. He said it was an embarrassment to him in terms of cinematography. I think that's a little extreme but i do think he had his hopes up way too high. He'll come round i think. Somethings he'll never get over i know, like the fact that some shots are not 100% in focus and stuff like that. Oh well. Not everyone will like the movie.

Sound
Effects
I scheduled to do the rest of the effects Tuesday.

Room Tones
Same as above

ADR
Saturday I went to the lab to get some work done and then was going to go and do ADR with Jacob. He was the only one i had scheduled as Ali and Jamie didn't come this past weekend. On Saturday at about 12:45 i realized i never sent instructions to Jacob an where to go. He was scheduled for 1pm. So i emailed him and went to my phone to call him and realized i didn't have his number. So Grady and I waited for two hours outside the facility on the off chance he might check his email and come running over. he didn't. later that night i got an email from him saying he was waiting at the film studio across campus for about the same amount of time. Oh well. We'll just have to reschedule. My bad.

I got an email from John Schile today asking about ADR and saying that he would make himself available. It's nice to get emails like that every once in a while. Fortunately i don't need him, which is one less thing i have to do, but it's no secret that i would like that attitude from everyone else.

Mixing
Saturday i meant to start mixing at 11:30 but didn't get started till 6pm cause that's when jon was supposed to leave. See Misc in General. Well, he was supposed to leave so i could do mixing but then he and his producer decided they had to burn a couple of dvd's which took a few hours so Grady and I decided to try some mixing in another program. actually the original program i wanted to use, sound track. So we imported the movie as one big file, which was on the hard drive, and then just synced the ADR to it. Grady hadn't had any sleep and got frustrated and burnt out and went home early. I stayed and worked for 5 hours and then Sunday went to the lab and did the same thing and finished Alicia and Ben in terms of syncing their ADR. Molly had to pick me up at 6pm so at 4:30 when i finished syncing Ben i figured I'd play around with exporting the sync. The idea was that we sync all of one Actor's adr lines into one time line, then mute the original sound of the film and export. The desired effect would be an audio track that's the length of the movie with the only sound being the ADR of that Actor. If we start the audio track at the start of the movie all the lines will be in sync. Well, that's the desired effect. It's not what's happening. I don't know the software that well but I have no idea what's going wrong when I export. I spent an hour and half yesterday trying to figure it out. When i export some of the tracks are missing in the final ADR file and there are some lines that i deleted from the time line. So I'm frustrated because if i can't get this to work I'm going to loose the 8 hours of work i did figuring out this program and syncing these two actors. I'm going to the lab tonight and working till 11pm so i'll try and figure it out then.

Music
Danielle Emailed me. She talked to a leasing company for Music rights and It's going to cost a little under $2000 per song for their services. I told her to call them back and ask how much for all out rights :) just curious. She needs to talk to the record labels or artists directly. She should get back to me with more info later this week.

Misc Sound
Nothing New

Marketing
Website
So those of you who read this production diary will note that there is no website up and it is Monday the 31st of March. The website is set up and ready to go, save for a few details like font color and stuff but i'm waiting on Johnny's artwork before i lock in those details. Grady and I spent the 2 hours waiting for Jacob on Saturday going over how some website code works. He was getting a little frustrated cause he couldn't' remember how he had done it a long time ago. It turns out that Grady built a web based game that uses the same effects i wanted the website to do. Well, he sent me the final code yesterday and I was able to build the website fine. There are still some pages that aren't done but, like i said before, i'm going to publish the site in small pieces to try and build excitement for the movie. The first day it goes up it'll just be the home page. Then the synopsis, then the cast, etc. each day i'll put something new on. But i need Johnny's artwork as it's the foundation of the site.

Trailer
So drew came into the lab Sunday when i was working on doing sync stuff. He showed me what he had, which wasn't much, and he said he was having a really hard time figuring out exactly what to do. While talking to him i had a bit of an epiphany. I should have done this way back when i first had him agree to do it. I told him i would send him various versions of the trailer guy scripts for him to edit to. The trailer guy is that ominous voice that's like "in a world....torn by change....blahblahblah." So i had the epiphany that if he had a few varieties of scripts like that it would give him a back bone to edit to. a through line if you will. I meant to send him that stuff last night but i just got to busy with other stuff so i'll do it after i finish this post.

Posters
There was typo in the previous post under this subtitle stating it was Tuesday. it was actually Thursday. So today is Monday and as of yesterday at 5 i had not received any more drafts from Johnny. He worked a double shift on Saturday so it makes sense that he didn't get anything done that day. he also worked yesterday and didn't get home till 5. I texted him and asked if he was still going to get everything done and he said yes. I think he didn't realize how much there still was to do. Because the website isn't up you can guess he didn't' finish. He sent me some a few drafts and i only had one note for one of them, other than that they were perfect. So i'm waiting now on the rest. he's at work and said he gets off at 4 and would send the rest tonight. so hopefully we can get the site up tonight. we'll see.

Misc Marketing
In his email, John Schile suggested in terms of marketing that we should submit the film to IMDB. I don't think they'll except it yet, but what the hell right? i'll submit this week.

Misc in General
Saturday I went to the lab at about 11:30 and Jon Baranick (an actor in the film, and a fellow film student, and the best man at my wedding) was working that day and needed the computer i edit on. In earlier posts i talked about the problems with the software in the lab in terms of different versions of final cut and how i'm limited to only 1 computer in the entire lab cause it's the only computer with the capability to run my project files. Well, Jon is working on his capstone called "Fat Guy P.I." which will also be showing at the capstone screening in 3 weeks and his producer set up the project files on the new version of final cut so Jon is under the same constriction. So now not only do i have to only use 1 computer to work on the movie with, i also have to compete with Jon for it. Stupid. refer to my earlier posts to see how i feel about this software Upgrade/Downgrade issue.

2008-03-27T17:40:00.000-07:00

Picture:
Effects
Nothing New

Color
nothing new.

Credits
Nothing New

Picture Misc
Nothing New

Sound
Effects
Grady and I spent all of Monday night, and Tuesday day getting the rest of the room tones and started doing sound effects. We have probably 60% of our sound effects recorded. pretty much we just need to get into the dorms to do the rest. I'm going to schedule that for next Tuesday.

Room Tones
We got almost everything done. I'd say we have about 90% of our room tones. done. they're pretty easy to get. The pain in the ass is driving to every single location. it takes us 4 hours to record 30 minutes of room tones.

ADR
So i got an email on wednesday morning from the ADR facility guy saying that there was a major coplaint on saturday because we were too loud. Stupid. Stupid Stupid Stupid. it frustrates me that this is giving us such a hard time. I just keep telling myself it's the cost of free. I talked to jamie and he said he and ally are going to try to make it out here. We'll see. Also, I talked to kristin and she said she's just swamped and goes to ASU west so it's hard for her to come to tempe. I emailed her asking if she'd like me to wait a couple of weeks and let things calm down for her. we'll see what she says.

Mixing
Grady and tried to start synching the stuff we've been getting yesterday. I say try because there where some issues on what program and how exactly we are going to do it. I got an other hard drive for 2 reasons. One was because i ran out of space, and two was to split up the work, so that i can work on one file on one hard drive while he works on the other. Well it turns out the soundtrack pro sucks at transfering files. So we thought, well ok, we'll sync everything in final cut to make it easier, and then export to Sound track so that we can do the mixing in sound track. Well because of all these technical problems it sort of negates the whole working on two computers at once. Especially because final cut only works on the one computer (see earlier posts). So whatever. I'll see if i can work it out tomorrow while i'm at work.

I met with swtizer yesterday just to give him an update on where i am. I told him i was nervous because i'm so close to the end of this project and i'm stressed by the ADR situation and i jsut want to get the 6 actors done. Switzer didn't seem to care about the ADR and was more concerned with mixing. I told him we were mixing in the lab and he asked what kind of speakers we had and i was like, um. Headphones? he said that's awful because we have no idea of what the movie will actually sound like in a theatre. So switzer said to contact a mixing company and ask them to mix the movie for free. Ha! Janaki came by and suggested the same thing. They said i probably wont get it but why not ask and hopefully they'll let me at least listen to the movie in there facility. So i'm going to start making calls to those places later when i have my original music. I don't want to waste an opertunity like that on temp popular music i can't use

Music
Nothing new.

Misc Sound
I need to do room tones and sound effects in the dorms where i shot and the lady that i used to be in contact doesn't work there anymore. i talked to the new lady and she was incredibly rude and treated me like some sort of deviant who wants to rape the residents. i had several email exchanges with her over the course of an hour where i kept trying to come up with solutions to her concerns in terms of what time, and where we would do the recording and she was very short with me. Finally i sent a long nasty email explaing how i was a student at the university that she worked at and that she was not only not helping with the educational process but impeeding it and bla bla bla and just ranted and raved and then she emailed me and asked me to call her. I talked with her and pulled out my Poly Sci side and apologized for sounding rude but i was frustrated at being treated like someone who's trying to make porn at the library. I didn't say that but you know. I was all polite and sweet and she gave me what i wanted. were going there on tuesday. Actually, i found out later in my meeting with switzer that he had sent her a few emails as well. I had cc'd him on the emails. So i guess that helped. It's just stupid. It's me and grady with a microphone. why such a headache? but whatever. I could actaully proabably double another dorm but that fact that she told me no in such a rude and irational mannor pissed me off so i fought it.

Marketing
Website
I've decided today to do the launch with a section of the website at a time every day. Small sections to to lengthen it out. So when i launch the home page on sunday it should take about 3 weeks to put everything up which is just in time for the screening. I'll have most of the site done and could put up the whole thing by sunday but i think this will be better to get people excited about it and keep them excited rather then let it die down after a week.

Trailer
I met with drew and he said that he didn't have anythign ready for me to see yet but that he would do everything he could to get it done by sunday. i gave him the same spiel i gave Johnny (see next entry)

Posters
I met with Johnny Monday and he had some good stuff to show me. I was a little nervous because it seemed like he hadn't gotten a lot done since the last time i saw him. What he had done was great. He had forgotten some stuff at home and said that it was better so we decided to get together Tuesday night as well. On tuesday night, my fears about him not getting things done were put to rest. He had more great stuff to show me, and on top of that, he drew a drawing right in front of me and it was great. he said it only takes him about 10 minutes to pop out a draft. I asked him if he thought he could be ready by Sunday and he said yes. This is what i told him (and drew about the trailer). I said my biggest priority is quality not deadlines. He's not getting paid and i wish i could pay him but I'm not so i don't have that leverage. So i said if something comes up or it's not enough time. tell me. i want it to be the best that it can be and I'm not as concerned with deadlines (although it would be nice to meet at least one deadline. He sadi that he understood but that he could do it. So far, today is tuesdday and he's sent me several drafts and they just keep getting better and better. I've included one on this post as a little treat and preview of what the posters will look like when they are done.

Misc Marketing
Nothing New

Misc in General
Nothing new.

Almost Done with ADR

2008-03-24T11:44:00.000-07:00

Picture:
Effects
While editing the opening credits scene I did notice that there is an effect i might need to do. In the wide shots i had to open up the lens to get a good exposure and unfortunately that blew out the back light on the TV. So in the wide shots the TV with the news on it is very bright. not uninterpretable, but bright all the same. when I shot the insert, it was way to bright because it was the only light source for the shot. So i shot it both ways, open and a little blown out, and stopped down so that it was clearer. but this made the plastic frame of the TV get a lot darker than it is in the wide shot. in the wide shot the TV is silver and in the insert it almost looks black. i may do some matting and compositing effects mixing both shots so that the image on the tv is nice and visible with the stopped down image and the image of the TV frame is still silver with the open lens shot. We'll see if people notice this little continuity error before i decide to go ahead and do it. it might not be a big deal. we'll see.

Color
nothing new.

Credits
While i was re-editing the opening scene today i decided to move the movie title credit to a better spot. i think it's going to work well. originally it was over a wide shot of the dorm, and the words "Madison Hall' came up. Instead, i moved it to a shot where Mike and Jeff are ripping down Melanie's posters. it looks good.

Picture Misc
As I hinted at above. i did some editing today on the credits scene. I think I've locked the picture. i worked on it for about an hour and half this morning. it's a simple scene so it was pretty easy. i need to run it by a few people before i lock it down though.

Sound
Effects
Nothing New

Room Tones
Grady and I are going to try to finish recording the rest tonight.

ADR
So Saturday we got most of what we needed done. We finished with Vic, Mike Z., Lauren, Josh, and started with Ben. We were supposed to do Kristin but her son had had a bad night so she couldn't come in. She was going to bring her son with her but i think it's for the best that it didn't happen. I've been thinking that it's probably not a good idea to bring her son to one of the sessions. She's got to get upset, swear, and hyperventilate and stuff and i don't want to upset him. Plus it would probably be hard for him to be quiet. there was a little bit of a fiasco in terms of Lauren just cause she had a crazy day with lock smith's and easter plans etc. I'm still not sure what happened. Unfortunately I had slipped up and didn't add her email address to an email i sent out last week with instructions on where to go and what time. So she tried to call me and email me but i was doing ADR and had my phone off. but she finally made it and we were able to finish her up. It went well. Now all we have left to do is Ben, Adam, Kristin, Ali, Jamie I., Jamie M., Myself, and Jake. The only firm person i have for this Saturday is Jake. Ali has yet to get back to me on what day she can do it. She's coming into town this weekend and she said she'd do ADR but i haven't heard back from her since i had my saturdays restriction imposed. Also, I talked to Jamie I. via AOL instant messaging the other day and he said that he's worried he wont be able to come to phx from cali cause of financial issues, which i told him i completely understand cause i don't have the money to bring him here either. Adam is coming in two weeks so that should be fine. Jamie M. can't do Saturdays EVER. so i have to gravel and beg for the ADR place to let me in at some other time for a few hours to get her done. wish me luck on that. I'm going to call Kristin today to try and schedule something far in advance.

Mixing
Today while editing the opening scene I spent some time syncing the all the different shots of the news. i took on shot and took the entire scene and laid down the sound and synced the other shots of the tv to that one audio file so that anytime you see the tv in any shot it's sync to where the news broadcast is currently at.

Music
I think i'm going to look into using a Sum 41 song. I just asked Danielle about it and she said she's making phone calls today.

Misc Sound
So i forgot to mention in the last post about this master list of sound info that Grady and I made. It took us roughly 10 hours or so to go through the entire movie and write down every que for every sound effect, room tone, and ADR line. it's roughly 7 pages or something like that, single spaced.

Marketing
Website
I spent a good few hours yesterday tweeking some of the javascript. I have no idea what i'm doing. but whatever, it seems to be working fine. Yay free ware online! i'm a little nervous about not getting the art work in time. Everything else should be set to go.

Trailer
Drew, the editor for the new trailer, got back to me and said he was going to have it done by this week. i have my doubts as i haven't seen anything yet, and not that i don't think he'll have something done that he thinks is "done". but i'm sure i'll have some sort of notes. If i'm wrong great! if not, oh well. we'll just keep working at it and have it out asap.

Posters
I had a hard time getting together with Johnny over the weekend. In fact, we didnt' get together at all. I'm meeting up with him today at the brewery where he works.

Misc Marketing
Nothing New

Misc in General
I bought the Hard drive. It's goign to make life soooo much easier. it was a little more than i thought though. ended up being $308 after tax. Oh well. still worth it by far.

Major Update

2008-03-22T09:06:00.000-07:00

Ok, so I feel bad. I know that I said I would start posting on this blog on a regular basis and I want to. I really do. And I did…well, for a few weeks anyway. I talked to my brother in law who lives in texas at one point and we talked about it. He said something that kind of made me feel better about not posting very often. He said my blog reads like someone who's to busy to post on their blog. Well, that's how I feel. But, I think it's important for myself and for the people involved that I do make time and do keep up with it so I think I've come up with a plan. From now on I will try and post every other day. What I think is happening is that I'm doing so much through out the week that at the end of the week it seems like a daunting task to sit down for 20-40 minutes and type out all that's happened. Maybe if I post every other day they will be smaller posts and there for less daunting.

As you can see, I've also decided to create separate sections (which I was doing informally most of the time anyway) to help organize my blog better.

So let's go ahead and start shall we?

Picture:
Effects
I still have some Visual effects that i need to get done. I'm probably not sure when i'm going to do them but just so you know what they are here's a bit of a break down.

1. I need to create a camera interface for the shots that are the POV of Jeremy's camera. Like time code and cross hairs and the little recording led etc.
2. I need to zoom in 10%-20% in on the image to get a closer shot that i didn't get on set. So essentially i need to take a medium shot and make it a close up. this gets tricky because i have to find the right balance where i don't loose noticeable picture quality when i zoom in.
3. We need to add realistic gun muzzle flashes to the scene where Jason fires a gun. Not sure how I'm going to do that yet. I only need one or two so hopefully we can sell it well. Maybe i'll put a post on craigs list or something for someone familiar with After Effects.

I believe that is all the effects that i need to do for this movie.

Color
Dan and I have yet to go over the picture. We need to sit down and watch the entire movie and go over frame adjustments and color pallets and then start color correcting. I'll probably start to worry about this in 2 or so weeks when i've got the majority of my sound recording done and am working only on mixing.

Credits
Occasionally this goes through my mind but i quickly dismiss it as one of the last steps i'll do. I just don't have time right now.

As for the opening credits, I have to finish editing the opening scene before i can even think about how, what, who, etc.

Picture Misc
The only thing that falls under this category in terms of picture is the last scene i have to edit. It's actually the first. I've put together a rough cut of the scene. I'll talk about it more in the Misc in General Section further down.

Sound
Effects
I have taken the master list of ADR/RoomTones/Effects that Grady and I did and have put them into separate files. Yesterday when I went out to do Room Tone recording I brought the list with me to see if I could get any of those effect via Foley work while i'm out with Grady and the recording equipment. I got a few sound effects that i needed, like when i was doing room tone during the Jeremy arrest scene i was able to record the sounds of the elevator that Tyler was hiding in. the dings, and button mashing, etc. There are 4 pages, single spaced, of sound effects we need to find and or create so this will take a few days to compile.

Room Tones
As i stated above, last night, Grady and I went out on the town getting room tones. I was supper late in the lab creating an ADR DVD and didn't get out of there till about 10. We had planned on starting at more like 6pm and going to every location that we shot the movie at through out the valley with our sound equipment and just sit and shut up. we need to record about 1 minute of audio from each location. Well, since I got out of the lab so late we ended up just walking all over campus getting various outside campus room tones (as a lot of the movie takes place out side on campus) and various sound effects too. once we have all the room tones done we'll then take that minute at each location and lay it down over the scene that takes place at that location. if the scene is longer than a minute than we just loop it. This is done to create a consistent background/ambient noise for the location that the scene is taking place in. Normally (and ideally) this is done on set by the sound crew when the scene is being shot but we just didn't have time and frankly, i just didn't want to. When you're on set it's always easy to say, "eh, we'll just fix it in post" but then you've created an entire day's work for yourself. reap what you sew i guess.

ADR
I almost don't want to write about this section. Not that it's been going bad or anything, just more that so much has happened in the past month that it seems daunting to sit and write about it. Anyway, I had stated in the previous post that i found out the ADR facility was open not from 8-5 but 8-6 and then proceeded to rant about how i wish i knew that before. That doesn't make much sense that an hour would be so significant. It actually is not supposed too. It's a typo, the ADR facility is actually open from 8am-9pm, so actually that's 4 hours outside of business hours. Needless to say we took advantage of it today. as of right now we have 13 of our 25 actors done. So far the sound quality seems to be just fine. One of my initial concerns was that the movie is rated R and i didn't want to offend anyone with the actors yelling obscenities all the time at the facility. we only had one incident with Alicia. It was the scene where Alaska wont let Jason into her room. She's yelling at him through a door and while we were doing a take someone knocked on the door and asked if everyone was OK. Apparently there was a line of people outside the booth all concerned that something was going down inside. no harm no fowl. A nice little chuckle it gave us. oh well. I made a large mistake in terms of ADR scheduling though. For the first few days i didn't give enough time at all for the process. I figured we would have about 8 hours of audio when all was said and done of ADR takes for the movie. I seem to be about right as we have about 4 hours of audio right now and half the actors done. The mistake i made was telling the facility that we had about 8 hours of work. It has worked out to where we need about an hour to get fifteen minutes of audio recorded. So we spend about 16 hours in the facility, 8 of which on one day, getting ADR so far. Well, the facility closed for a week during spring break, (which was about a week ago) and i had sent a few emails requesting time to do ADR for actors that were coming in for the Easter weekend and such. Well, i didn't get a response for a few days until finally, my contact emailed me and said that he was sorry but that the management had decided that "The only firm option I can give you at this point is possibly some Saturday time, the lab is open from 10am-4pm". I was a little stressed by this. Actually, that was a horrible day when i got that email, a whole bunch of other stuff went wrong and i had to scramble and send emails like crazy to all the cast to see if they could change to Saturdays. I sent my contact an email with 2 major concerns. However i started the email on a positive note, letting him know that i was fine with this and that we film students call this "the cost of free" (which is true, if they're giving it to me for free i have no leverage but to grovel). My concerns were this: 1 being that I still have 16 hours of time i need in the facility for the other 12 actors and that takes up almost 3 of the 6 Saturdays left in the semester and other students need to use the facilities, other student that have more precedence then me because it's not my department. I also was concerned because he gave me a Firm option to Possibly work on Saturdays. How is that firm? so i asked for complete confirmation on that so that if it's loose, i can find alternatives. I also started looking for alternatives either way. I had heard a rumor that the film school bought (or made) a portable ADR booth so i went to the studio to check it out. It seems they made it cause it was a joke. and if they did buy it, man what a waste of money. Grady and I checked it out and basically it's some PVC pipe glued together in a rectangular form with bed lining egg crates glued in between the pipes. It was a sorry sight. well, i heard back from my contact at the facility we had been using and he gave me a concrete confirmation on using Saturdays and also laid to rest all of my concerns. so that's what we're doing. I have 6 actors today and we're filling up the entire 10-4 time slot in the booth we've been using. so that's where we are so far. now, here's a bit on the process.

Basically what I did was take the ADR break down sheet that i got from the original sound break down sheet and created an excel file. Then I separated all the actors dialogue ques in sequential order. Basically recording according to actor, then time code. Then Grady and I entered each time code into the timeline of the picture lock and manually typed out the line(s) that needed recording. so from there i also copied a portion of the scene with the line(s) it and significant head room and tail room and opened a new timeline and created a loop. Then i exported the loop as a separate movie file and then have been organizing and authoring ADR DVD's by date and actor. So for today I made a DVD yesterday with a main menu and links to 6 other menus for the 6 actors we have. In each menu are links to each Que loop that the actor needs to replace the dialog. as of right now i have about 6 ADR DVD's today's being one of the biggest. I try to recycle my loops as it takes a long time to create them. what i mean by recycle is if say Kent has a shot where he's in the background with Josh and we just need them mumbling, i'll use Kent's loop on Josh's DVD instead of creating the same loop again for josh. I think it saves time but who knows. So when the actors come in i set up my lap top and put the DVD in. Grady starts the equipment and I start the DVD and they just try to recreate the que while watching the loop and trying to match their performance and sync to the picture. The facility is small but it's free. Grady, me, and the actor are all in the same booth but that doesn't seem to affect sound quality. Grady listens to the soudn't being recorded and I have a head phone splitter on my laptop that i split the sound with so that the actor can listen to the original audio and i listen tot the original audio as well but keep one ear out of the headphones to listen to the new audio the actor is creating. It's always awkward at first but then the actors get used to it and move along smoothly. Thus far we have done the following

Steve Murphy
Amanda Melby
Kate Haas
Kent Walter
Alicia De La Vega
Kasim Aslam
Nate Klaer
Ryan Murphy
Brad Golden
Jen Ball
*Colin Redemer
Danial Kunz
Jon Baranick

Still Left:

Vic Martinez (Today)
*Josh McDermitt (Today)
*Lauren Monroe (Today)
Ben Folsom (Today)
Kristin Kelley (Today)
Mike Zduniak (Today)
*Ali Stelzer
*Jamie Isreal
Jamie McKeel
Jacob Detharidge
*Adam Roa
Jared Mercier (don't laugh)

6 of our 25 actors that need to do ADR don't live in AZ anymore so they're coming form out of town. I *'d them above so you can see who. Colin already came out and i was nervous about his ADR because i had scheduled only 2 hours before i had realized how long it was actually taking us. But it worked out and we breezed through it. Colin saw the movie as it is now while he was here and said he was impressed and that he can see it will be better than he thought it would be. that was motivating. :)

See i told you there was a lot in regards to ADR. Sheesh.

Mixing
Haven't really started this at all. We plan to start syncing the ADR we already have sometime this week.

Music
Tom is back on board. When Tom and I met last and he said he probably wasn't going to be able to do it (before he sent the email saying he wasn't) he asked what i would do if he couldn't. I told him 2 things. Send out emails and craigs list posts etc looking for a composer and also plead with administration to use the editing lab over summer to finish up the mixing of the project. Turns out that i'm considered a student by the university until the start of the Fall semester of 2008 even though i graduate in may. So i'm going to try as hard as i can to finish the mixing before the semester is over (depends on if tom can get it done in time) but if he can't it's fine. So that's why he's back on board. plus, like i told him, i couldn't imagine anyone else doing my first feature. Tom's music saved and/or tripled the effectiveness of the other 3 films that i did with him. I did send out emails and stuff looking for other composers, but everyone that emailed me was very very flaky and/or didn't know what they were doing. It was stressful until i found out about the student status thing.

There will be a campus screening of the movie on April 20th for a capstone presentation, not a premiere or anything, but the school is requesting that I show the film. Actually, i had approached them about it back when i thought it would be done in time, but now i know it wont and they still want to screen it, just with temp music. So i'm looking for temp music and i'll have to start mixing that soon if tom doesnt' have stuff by a week or so before the 20th. Also, Danielle is looking into copyrighted music that we need for the movie. Nothing on that yet.

Misc Sound
I think i've covered everything in terms of sound.

Marketing
Website
The website is moving along fine. I wanted to have my "marketing blitz" out by now, but that just wasn't realistic. I should have, depending on the art work, the new website launched by next sunday. it looks good so far. I'm toying with launching different parts of the website one day at a time to try and raise hits and get people excited about the site and the movie.

Trailer
From what i understand via emails and meetings in passing with the editor, the trailer is in a fine cut stage. I emailed him at the beginning of the week to see where it is but have yet to hear back from. I'll email him today about it. the new trailer wont be out by the time the website launches but that's ok if i do like i said in not launching the entire site at once.

Posters
My poster guy is AWESOME. He did a few drafts so far and they look great. I'm going to try to meet up with him sometime today to go over everything. The posters are going to be the main art for the site so I want to make sure they are done in time. he says it shouldn't be a problem. he's also doing 5 character portraits. I can't wait to get them out.

Misc Marketing
There's a girl i sit next to in one of my classes that is a writer for the state press magazine. I feel temped every tiem i have that class to be like, "hey, i got a story for you" and pitch my movie. I was in the state press once before for LOTD and it was great. I'm going to approach her at some point, but i think i'll wait till the website is up. (i know it's dick but it's an opportunity i don't think i can waste)

Misc in General
Ok, so, as of 3 weeks ago we finally had on official PICTURE WRAP on Madison Hall! YAY! we shot the last scene with the RA making posters with the news on the TV in the background. It took me a long time to get the news graphics set up but i think they look great. So I shot it all by myself, well, my wife Molly helped :) and the actor too. ok ok. Anyway, the way it will work is the scene sets up the idea of the college environment with the school news on in the background and the quiet hours posters being made. the opening credits will go over the quiet hours posters. i still have yet to finish fine editing the scene because i've been so busy with other stuff but i'll get to it.

Over spring break i did nothing. Well, nothing on the movie. I figure it's my last spring break of my college career. Super smash bros Brawl came out and i and some friends played it for 4.5 days strait. i lost 4 pounds cause i barely ate. it was awesome. incredibly awesome.

I'm buying a new hard drive today because I've completely run out of space on my laptop, 500gig hard drive, and 4 gig jump drive. WD Terabyte at costco for $250. can't beat it.

Music?!

2008-02-17T16:07:00.000-08:00

This week has been busy…and rough. On Sunday my composer that I’ve worked with on a few other projects resigned from the position. His schedule is just too crazy. It’s partly my fault for not keeping up with him on where we were with the movie, and also just unfortunate timing. He’s not only trying to finish school but also he’s working on planning his wedding which is in two months. So I’ve got to find a new composer to have the movie done by the time I’m done with school. Tom is going to help me find a new one cause he works with music student orgs and such. It’s on my list of things to do this week. Tom said that he thinks the movie would benefit from copywritten music like blink 183 or SR-71 so I’ll look into that avenue as well. The idea of copywritten material scares me because I have no money to pay for rights.

Grady and I did some testing last week in the ADR booths. There are two at the facility and we wanted to see which one was the best so we can schedule the right one. We had some technical difficulties but we figured out which one we’ll use. Now, tomorrow I have to go and book the space. I thought that we could only use it between 8-5 but I guess that’s changed to between 8-6 which is for the best anyway. It just frustrates me that I didn’t know that before I emailed my actors about scheduling. I got a hold of just about everybody so I’ll be locking everything in tomorrow and making lots of phone calls.

Me and Grady have still yet to finish our note taking on the movie. We’re about 26 minutes into the 85. We just couldn’t find the time to sit down for a substantial amount of time. And when I say substantial, I mean like 8 hours. We pretty much have to have it done by the beginning of this week so I can get all the lines in order for the actors. Also, we can’t do any sound effect and room tone gathering until we know exactly what we need.

Seeing as we’re not ready to do recording, and I had thought we were going to be by tomorrow, we’re still going to take the equipment I have reserved and do some tests tomorrow or Tuesday. I’ll re check out the equipment when we are ready.

I met with Johnny, my cartoonist, and he’s really excited, which makes me feel great. We had a little trouble with transferring some reference pictures from me to him but hopefully I resolved that today. We should have a poster by the end of two weeks.

I’m still working on the news sequence. We’re shooting Kate’s scene this Thursday and I get the equipment on Thursday and return it Friday. It took me longer than I thought to do this news sequence but so far I think it looks awesome. I tested what I’ve done so far with my HD TV at home and it looks great. I think I’ve got another 3 or 4 hours left of work to do on it. Tuesday I’m going to be prepping for the shoot, buying everything I need, like the posters, markers, and stuff.

Steady but Slower than I Wanted.

2008-02-10T13:06:00.000-08:00

Things seem to be moving along nicely, but at a slower pace than I wanted.

Dan is in Korea for some Friend’s wedding so nothing is being done on the color correcting side of things.

I emailed the cast about specific dates for ADR and over half emailed me back. There are still a few I haven’t’ hear from and that makes me nervous. I’ll be making phone calls this afternoon to try and get a hold of those people. The cast that I did hear from seems enthusiastic to finish the project, which is great. I have a lot of control over the scheduling and can pretty much do the ADR anytime I want over the next few weeks but I gave the cast specific dates and times to choose from just so things can be more streamlined and strait forward. It would be a scheduling night mare to approach each individual member of the cast with “so when’s good for you?”.

Tom canceled on my twice this week for the spotting session. We’ve scheduled to do it today at 8pm cause our schedules don’t match up at all next week.

I met with the editor of the trailer and we went over the file I created for him. We also set goals for the next four weeks in terms of when we want to have a rough cut, fine cut, picture lock, etc. According to our timeline we should have a trailer by the end of spring break (mid march).

I can’t start work on the website till I have the poster.

I made a flyer for a Cartoonist Needed add and put it up in the art building on every bulletin board I could find. I also posted an add on Craig’s List and Facebook. I got almost 20 responses. So now I have a cartoonist. He’s a kid that I’ve worked with before but on Disks, and he was an actor. But in the last three years he’s been studying graphic design and he sent me some of his portfolio stuff. I’m excited to see some drafts. I’m in the process of setting up a meeting with him this week to show him what I have in mind and give him some reference files.

I scheduled the shooting date for the opening credits scene with Kate for the 21st of February. I’m excited to get this in the can as it’s been a long time coming. I’m going to try and finish the new sequence today so that I wont have to worry about it next week.

I scheduled some recording equipment with the school of the 18th and 19th and plan to do room tone and Sound Effects gathering with Grady. Should be fun.

I spent a good few hours creating the project files in soundtrack pro. One for each chapter. We have the tracks broken down into In Camera, ADR, Effects, Music, and Room Tones. Each section has a few tracks as well, for example there are 2 effects tracts and 4 ADR tracks. We’re using this setup as just a base. If we need to add more tracks we will. Once I had the project files all set up, Grady (my sound designer/technician/artist/whatever) and I had a hard time figuring out just where to start working on this project. He started to go through the chapters, just playing with different files and settings, trying to learn the program. A few months ago, sometime before Christmas, we sat down and watched what we thought was a close picture lock and wrote down all the sound that needed to be replaced, and what sound was good enough to keep. Well Grady was playing around with some of the files that we know we want to replace and he made it sound beautiful! So that threw a wrench in our approach. Where do we start? We don’t want to waste time recording things that we’re not going to need, and we don’t’ want to waste time fixing or trying to fix something that we’re just going to rerecord. So we decided to do a more thorough walk through if you will of the entire film. A sort of stop and play session of what’s good, what’s, not, what’s saveable, what’s not, what needs to be rerecorded, etc. sort of the same thing we did before xmas but much more involved. We started last Thursday and did it for an hour and only got 6 minutes into the movie. We’ll see how it goes. I emailed him today to try and lock down a specific schedule through out the week of when we work on the movie to make things more efficient.

So as you can see, moving along, just a little slower than I wanted.

A Week of Scheduling to Come

2008-02-04T12:14:00.000-08:00

I watched our picture lock with the professor that has been overseeing the production, Switzer. Miguel has sort of stepped down on the project for a few reasons but mainly now I report to someone else. Miguel will help still if I ask something specific of him but I no longer report to him directly. Anyway, we watched the picture and he had a lot of praise for me and the other people involved in the project. We’ve got a good little movie here and I’m getting more and more anxious to finish it up. We actually made a few changes to the movie because we hadn’t specifically started working on sound. So now we really have a picture lock. 85 minutes, 2 seconds, and 17 frames , :) (with out the credits of course.)

Dan, the movie’s cinematographer, is going to be doing all the color correction as well as adjusting the framing. We shot in 3x4 and are putting 16x9 mattes on it so that we had the option of adjusting the framing. Dan’s going through the tutorial right now for color correction.

We met with the guy that’s in charge of the ADR facilities. This is going to work out beautifully. I’m a little concerned because I have to schedule all my ADR between 8-5 Monday through Friday. Like I said, I’m only a little concerned. I’m spending this week picking dates and emailing and calling cast members to start setting things up. One thing I also have to do for ADR is write some new dialog for some scenes that needed to change a bit. I’ll do that this week sometime.

I met with Tom, my composer on Friday. He’s a little concerned about getting things done in time in relation to what kind of music we use. He had talked about how if I want Anything of Orchestral genre it would take longer than the semester to write and record and mix. So we’re going to try to get the best out of the time and money that we have. One area we talked about was the Halloween mask scenes and he knew exactly what I was looking for. In short we both excited to get started. He’s got a copy of the picture lock and is watching it and we’re meeting Wednesday to start a full out spotting session (establishing and identifying musical ques.). We think it will take about three and a half hours so we’re going to try to do it all Wednesday but we might need to break it up into another session.

As for my afore mentioned marketing blitz in the previous post, I met with a web designer and the editor of the new trailer. Right now I’m setting up a project file for the editor and getting everything organized so that he can work efficiently with the 450 gigs of files that are associated with the movie. We’re meeting Tuesday night to go over the project file and also to establish dates for goals. The web designer and I went over a few options for the website. She’s not designing but more as acting for an adviser to me. We decided on a simple sleek design but I can’t move forward on it till I get the new one sheet for the movie. In that area I’m having a lot of trouble. I can’t seem to get a hold of a cartoonist to do the project for me. The school of art was very unhelpful. I had talked to a few people about it that were interested but they decided they didn’t have enough time to do a good job. Better in the long run I guess. So this week I’m also trying to figure out how to reach the art students better.

This week I’m also working on scheduling the last shooting we need to do with Kate with the news stuff in the background. I gave up on finding a graphic designer to help me with the news graphics so I’m doing it myself. I went to the journalism school to see if I could get some help but they said just to find an artist to do it. So I guess I’m doing it myself. So far it’s working pretty good and I’m pleased. Besides it supposed to be news produced by students and since I don’t know what I’m doing I figure I’ll get the look I’m going for right? :)

I also need to schedule times to go out and record room tones and some sound effects. I’ll do that this week.

Picture Lock and Problems.

2008-01-26T10:54:00.000-08:00

As some of you probably know, we have locked the picture on Madison Hall, which means we now dive into sound head first. We actually locked the picture back towards the end of December but there were some problems with the editing lab. A new version of Final Cut (editing software) that came out in October was updated to our lab. The staff member that is in charge of the film studio and equipment made a fuss to the person who is in charge of the lab about the apparent problems with the new final cut. One of those problems was that the software went through a major update so projects on the new software wouldn’t work on older versions. Because of this issue and some others regarding HD compatibility, this particular staff member manged to convince the lab staff to DOWNGRADE all of the software back to the previous version of final cut. What this means is that all the work done in the lab (ALL THE WORK DONE IN THE LAB!) was inaccessible! The idea of newer files not working on the older software wasn’t a problem till they got rid of the new software and installed the old! And it wasn’t just Madison hall that was affected. ALL film students that worked in the lab from October till now were affected. So I put up a stink and set some angry and frustrated emails and the administration decided to update ONE of the 15 computers back up to the new software. So now I can get back to work but I’m going to have to fight with the rest of the film school for the one computer. So far in the last week there was only one time that I couldn’t get on because someone else was but whatever. So now we dive into sound work.

I spent about 4 hours last week doing some tutorials and getting myself familiar with this specific program we’re using (sound track pro). I’ve used other sound programs before and understand the basics but I wouldn’t to get familiar with the controls and options of this program specifically to make things run more smoothly. It also appears that the computers in the lab aren’t strong enough to handle a 90 minute movie. Every time I load the file the program crashes after doing five minutes of work. So it looks like we’re going to have to do specific chapters at a time rather than the whole thing at once. When we have everything assembled and are ready to start doing master mixes then we’ll try again as the files should be less complicated.

As for ADR, we’re going to be meeting with a staff member at the journalism school to use some of their equipment and booths. We’re meeting with him on Tuesday and I should know more after that. When we do have a firm lock on the facilities, equipment, and what we need to replace, then I’ll email the cast about setting up dates. There are a few cast members that are now out of state, but that’s ok. We’ll make it work.

In terms of music, we’re going to start looking to specific record labels for the rights and or festival rights to a few main stream songs we want to use. Also, I’m meeting with our composer sometime in the next week to schedule a spotting session.

In about a month look to the website for a major update as well as a new trailer, and a new poster. We want to do a complete marketing blitz by the end of February.

So in terms of completion we’re not looking to complete the movie till the end of march beginning of April. This is mostly due to the equipment problems we had in the lab over the last four weeks.

Motivation

2007-05-25T14:28:00.000-07:00

I thought that because it's summer i'd be more motivated to post on this diary. seeing as not much is going on because the lab is closed and i can't edit, my laptop was stonen, and i'm moving, i'm having a hard time posting on this. But the fact that i'm writing this most show that i've got some determination left.

December 2006

2007-05-17T09:37:00.000-07:00

December 2006

Shooting:

So i just took a trip down memory lane. Haha. Yeah, I saw in my last December post that I stated we were doing two more days of shooting. I couldn't remember what we were shooting, so i reactivated the old Freshmenthemovie email account and found the call sheets. Man, looking back 6-7 months later shooting was a blast. anyway, we were supposed to do a lot of little stuff that wasn't important enough to shoot with the big scenes due to things like money and time. little stuff like individual character introductions for the opening montage. We ended up shooting it and it went well. The other thing we were supposed to do was shoot at the the west campus police station to wrap some things up with officer price and Derek (Steve and Josh). the police commander that was my contact for the location never responded to my emails and Steve had to end up canceling due to some conflict so we didn't get it done. That was it for shooting till February. I'll cover that in February.

Post:
So after all the work of logging, and it was a lot of work. We were editing at last. however there was the problem that the lab would be closed over the winter break. I basically lived in the lab all the time it was open for the last week of school. I had a few meetings with my professors about the project and they had me compile a dvd of examples of the work that Linnaea and Dan had done. I also put a teaser trailer online. It didn't look very good because i didn't really know how to compress the file correctly. I've since learned a little bit more about that. Anyway, the biggest problem at hand was figuring out a way to work on the movie when the lab was closed. I brought this up during one of my meetings with the professors and Crystal Griffith volunteered her office because she had a Mac Pro and Final Cut on it which was the program we were using in the lab. She gave me the keys to her office and to the building and i worked on editing the movie like a crazy man. I was leaving for Maine for 3 weeks and I wanted to make sure I had at least an Assembly edit of the film by the time i left so i had something to show to family and friends for input and feedback. Once the lab closed i stayed in her office basically almost 10 hours a day editing and it took my roughly 5 day to put a very very rough assembly edit of the film together. It was actually a very disappointing first cut. I had no clue what was going on, and I WROTE AND DIRECTED it. every thing was way to sporadic and we never spent enough time with the individual characters to really set in. but, i didn't have time to start working on a rough cut and so i burned a few copies the day before i was supposed to leave and then flew to the north east the next day. I only showed the movie to my Mom, Brother, Mom's Boyfriend, Grandmother, and Grandfather. They all praised me up and down as they would because I'm related to them. I was prepared with a questionnaire for myself to try and weed out the bias "anyone with my blood is perfect" kind of opinions. My instincts in the movie being to scattered were clear, but a new problem had arisen that i didn't realize. There was no tension from the cops. The idea of a bomb threat on campus did not come out strong in the film, and nobody had any idea that the building they keep driving by and getting into was the one with a bomb threat. I had some work to do when i got home. I wasn't scheduled to land back in phoenix till Jan 6th.

Guess it's been a while?

2007-05-17T09:23:00.000-07:00

OK, So the last time i posted on this site was six months ago. So much has happened since then. But first, let me go into the reason's I've neglected this diary. Well, I shouldn't say reasons. There really is only one. School. This semester (spring of 07) have been the hardest semester I've ever had. Ever. At the end of last semester, maybe a few days after my last post in December, i had a meeting with the three key film professors involved with the project, Crystal, Mike, and Miguel. They had talked to us about not taking classes next semester that required us to make a film. I informed them i was going to try to take directing again, seeing as i had dropped it during the fall because of Madison Hall, and then I was taking Business Ethics, Cinematography, and Capstone II (Working on the feature). I was told that i would not have to make a film for any of these classes. Well, the syllabi's for the classes changed and i ended up making 2 more films last semester. One about Coupons, and the other about Child Rape in the movies. Great stuff. To top it all off at the beginning of the semester I agreed to First AD on this commercial for the school. Man did that take up a lot of time. Then I was the president of the AFA and we wanted to really kick it in to gear and get the AFA really out there in the school so we started a 48 hour film challenge and a retreat, as well as being involved with First Friday's down town and doing an art cafe event, and peer workshops, and screenings, etc. I was also a Senator in the Student Government, of which i ended up resigning from half way through the semester because i couldn't handle all these commitments. and the cherry on top would be the wedding plans, marriage prep classes required by the church, the Phx Film Festival, Going to LA for a weekend, and working in the lab 30 hours a week. I guess that's 5 cherry's but whatever. I had a busy busy busy semester. It was awful. Oh yeah, and the movie. So now it's may 17th, I'm sitting back at my old job at the MU for the summer because the lab closed. I'm working full time here and it's very slow. So what I'm going to do now is do a play back of what has happened in the last 5 months and get us caught up and I'll also finish blogging about the individual days of shooting. More to come.

Post, Posts, & Posters

2006-12-06T00:12:00.000-08:00

Post-Update:

So after Tristan and I finished logging and uploading all the material I had the wonderful job of organizing the project film and labeling every shot. Because Tristan wasn’t familiar with the movie nearly as much as I was it became my job so that it would go faster. It took my 3 full 10 hour days to label all 700+ items on the 36 tapes. Sigh. But we started editing the picture together 3 days ago and have about 20 min assembled. I’ve got scenes 31-61 put together and Tristan doing speratic things in the 200’s. I’ve showed it to a couple of people and they were very impressed. It’s been hard to balance all this stuff because all I want to do is work on the movie and not do anything else for school. I’ve got write this paper for Miguel, produce the last few days of shooting, (which one is tomorrow by the way) and do a few other od jobs and such. Man. I just want to edit. I’ thought I had a final picture lock on the trailer on Friday. Crystal said she was very impressed and told me herself that it looked like a lock and all I needed was a scratch track. I didn’t want to do that but I put some crappy free online music to it for the final viewing for class. The class liked it a lot but had a lot of problems with it visually. Even dan had problems and it frustrated me because I thought I had it locked. But tom can’t start on the score till the break and I don’t plan on putting it out until February anyway. so whatever. I want to put a teaser out by the end of the week but am worried about the time to put it together. I’ll do my best. Truth be told I’d rather just work on the movie. I found out today that I got a job in the lab that I’ll be doing all my editing in! isn’t that great!? During slow times I’ll be able to work on the movie, and get paid! Of course I’d have to stop if someone needed help with something because that’s my job but still. It’s a really really good thing. I’m waiting to here from Kelly Byke if she’ll take on an independent study with me next semester as the marketing director for the film. She’ll be amazing if I can get her. Tristan has a petition at school for an overload so he can get 3 credit hours for post-production supervisor. I had another student call me about the position but I wasn’t sure he was aware of what I was asking for and I emailed him with the details. He hasn’t responded yet with whether or not he’s still interested. Kenny and I did a little photo shoot last night for the teaser poster. He’s already got drafts done and will be sending me a final by the end of the night of which I release on the site and on myspace and facebook tonight. So far it looks great.

Shooting Day 4

2006-12-05T23:52:00.000-08:00

Production Day 4
Monday, Oct 2nd

The Police Car

The fourth day of shooting was our first day with our police car. One of the things we needed to get to use it on campus was a mall pass; at least this is what the police told me. Usually a mall pass was for parking on the mall. We wanted to just drive down the mall. But whatever. So Danielle and I looked into getting a mall pass and it turned out that only departments could request them. So we had Miguel request a mall pass for a project his students were doing and we got a mall pass. We were pretty worried about it but it turned out to be an easy thing. We picked up the pass on Monday, the day we were going to use it. This was also our first day shooting at the Frat house, which was a friend of mines house. We were starting what tonight what would end up a trend through out production: only shooting half a scene in one night and shooting the rest later. We were only going to shoot with the police car. If the car wasn’t necessary in the shot, I wasn’t going to shoot it. So like the scene when the guys at the frat house are rescued by the cops, we were going to shoot the first half of that on a later night and do the second half on day 4 with our police car. That way we utilize the police car as it was expensive (in our terms) to rent. Well, because it was a police car and because we were going to use it and the emergency lights in a residential area I decided to let the local police as well as the campus police know where we were and what we were doing. Dan showed up to load the stuff and Danielle and I went to the two stations. 5 o’clock traffic was terrible and when I got the local police station…there was a LINE! Literally I was fourth in line to just turn in a letter letting the police know where I was and what I was doing. I’ve never seen a line in the front lobby of a police station, but I was fourth! Grrr. Anyway, I ended up being 30min late to the shoot. I had made a big mistake in calling crew and cast at the same time and so when I got there half the cast was already there just hanging around. Thankfully Tyler was a good host. So we started shooting and the footage was good but it was taking for ever. We ended up moving to campus very late and poor Danielle was going insane because all the cast and crew kept getting parking tickets. Also, it didn’t make sense to set up at the MU when we were just going to move to the other side of campus so we had to call the rest of the cast coming at later call times to meet us where we were. Yeah, they couldn’t find it. Then Danielle had to go get some food for everyone. She had a hard day this day. We set up on one of the side walks and it took like 40min to set up a shot. Poor Akshay was going insane trying to get people to go faster. Kenny had his 2nd assistant on tonight, Joe something. He was really good. But for some reason he never helped us again after that night. I think Dan might have yelled at him and he got pissed or something. Not sure what happened. Anyway. We took a break and ate some KFC. It was probably one of our better catered nights. Mostly through out the shoot we just had dominos. So we had also scheduled this day according to Colin’s schedule. Most of the cast and crew don’t know this but the initial schedule was done to get Colin in the movie. It’s big part and so we did as many of his scenes as we could every night for the first 2 weeks of shooting because that was the only time he was going to be in the valley. We didn’t get to our next location till probably midnight. The last thing we had schedule for that night was the scene with the sorority sisters in the parking garage. This was our first night with Kristin Kelley. It would be our second night with Ali. Well, Jamie McKeel is in the scene and she got into a car accident (small fender-bender) on her way over and couldn’t leave the site of the accident and ended up not coming out at all. And Ali got really sick and had to go to the hospital earlier that night so she couldn’t shoot either. Well we got what we could with the other 2 girls and officer price and called it a night. Noel was nice enough to let us use her car for Alaska’s. I had also hauled David, Colin, and Jon (for his Van) out for shooting that night but couldn’t because of what happened to the girls. Oh well. Guess we’ll have to do the scene before Colin leaves on a different night and bring the cop car back again for another day. Maybe we could cram it into the second day of shooting with the vehicle. Over all I was very happy with the footage but it was hard day schedule wise. Danielle had a hard day too. We only shot about %50 of what I wanted to get done. It was looking more and more like the schedule was going to change from 16 days to longer. Especially with those extra tunnels scenes hanging over our heads. Well, Tuesday was our first day off and I spent the entire day in the computer lab and extended the shoot from 16-20 days. I spent all day on the phone calling actors, crew, and locations to make sure we could make it work. I gave an extra day in the dorms and broke the hardest days in two. I did this mainly because we couldn’t shoot more than 5 pages a day, which is what we’d shot for the first 4 days. But we did have 20 pages in the can. Which is a great feeling.

Shooting Day 3

2006-12-05T23:26:00.000-08:00

Production Day 3
Sunday, October 1st.

Ah, today was supposed to be the day we start with Alicia as Alaska. But she had told us a few days earlier that she couldn’t work Sunday because she was in a pageant that wouldn’t let her leave the hotel. Man, was I pissed. I mean it’s not like she had the dates a month in advance. Some how there was a miscommunication and she thought the pageant was the weekend before or something like that. Well, we’ll make due. It just makes shooting for us that much easier because it’s less for us to do. Although it means we had to bring Helen (our waitress) back for another day when she was supposed to be done after one day. It also means we have to secure the dinner location again when we were originally only going to shoot there for one day. Well, all we had scheduled for Sunday was the dinner scenes and the interior of the Rahid’s van for when Colin escapes the dorms. Well, shooting that was really easy. Jamie McKeel’s in the scenes and was a real trooper because she was sick and I begged her to come out and do it seeing as our schedule was so tight. I got to meet her mom. We used Jonathan Baranick’s Van which I had always planned on using because of the kidnapping scenes. The Van stuff went well and was great to start working with the rest of the cast. Up until that point we had mostly only worked with the Tyler, Jeremy, and Daniel characters. But tonight we got to work with the whole cast because everyone eats at the dinner through out some portion of the night. The location was great. The closed at 8pm and we started rolling camera at 9pm. The crew worked great together and we also had a fool cast of extras thanks to a few friends of mine that rounded some people up. From the last two nights of shooting I learned to be a little bit more conservative with my shot list. Each scene had no more than 4 shots and a lot of them were very similar. We did move around a lot though to make the dinner scenes stand out from one another. For example we had the cops at the bar and Will and Rahid at a booth. Helen did a great job and the other actors chemistry was starting to come out. The extras ended up staying till midnight and were sooooo awesome. We ended up feeding them to try and keep them in the seats. Thankfully it worked and none of our dinner scenes look sparse. It’s a packed house all night. There were some conflicts in the crew and some internal politics that I had to deal with but that comes with any game. The best thing to do when people are butting heads is keep the peace. As a producer you have to keep the peace. I’d say that over all Day 3 of production was by far our best day of shooting. My shot list was much more doable, the crew worked great, we had lots of extras, the acting was good,…and WE MADE OUR DAY!!! Yeah! First time in 3 days of shooting we made our day. It was great. Very good. Yippee. I was stoked.

Logging and Importing Done

2006-11-30T22:49:00.000-08:00

Tristan and I finished Logging and Importing. I have about 2 hours left of labeling to do on some of the takes and shots and then we can start editing tomorrow. I met my guideline. Other than that nothing much else happened. I did get a call from a film student interested in helping with editing. I’ll give him a call tormorrow. That’s all for post.

Day 2

2006-11-30T22:45:00.000-08:00

Production Day 2 (or the Official first day of shooting)

So as to how the day started I don’t remember. It was a Saturday, but it seems really vague. I remember seeing Jon Baranick the first time with his hair cut for the film and he looked great! Day 2 was going to be one of our easier days of shooting. It was all the stuff on the mall. Like the jogging scene and the chase scene with Jon and Adam. Our contact that had rented us the police car also lent us a lighting fixture so we could generate emergency lights on a cop car with out a cop car present. We used them with the scene with Colin in the elevator. I wrote a letter to the police and dropped it off with my contact info and information about what we were doing, where we were doing it and the contact info for my prof. as well. Pretty standard really. I did this on all my movies shot at night on campus. During the day your fine but at night they ask questions and instead of running the risk of getting sent home you just tell them where you are and what you’re doing and they leave you alone. Easy. Just be honest. We started shooting on time and it was good to have the crew whole crew there. Some of them were a little bit dear in head lights but got better as the night went on. The location I wanted to start at didn’t work because we couldn’t find power outlets. Thankfully across the parking lot we found some and shot over there. We did the chase stuff first. Brad, the actor playing officer Navarro, helped us with lighting a bit because Kenny and Dan were pretty nervous. They did generate some great shots. Like the one with the emergency call box. We were way behind though. We had about 7 pages to shoot and at about 11 we had only gotten through 1.5 or so. I really started to panic. I had prepared a 6 page shot list and at midnight I literally threw it out. The jogging scene was supposed to be done in like 12 different shots and I ended up doing the whole thing in 3 shots, with one master and 2 small inserts. Man I hope it edits together well. We had Adam and Jon on tonight for their first night. Adam ended up providing his own costume because Linnaea and I weren’t able to get anything. I had called him a few days before and told him what I was looking for and he said he had exactly that. Linnaea had found a great shirt for Jon’s character. It fit him great and says “hotties ride for free”. Absolutely perfect for the character. Ali started that night too as the character of Sarah. She had to come really late and we ended up shooting until about 3am. One of our latest days. A lot of the scenes we did ended up being in one or two shots because we just didn’t have time. It was by far the worst night of shooting. The footage wasn’t nearly as good as the tunnels and turned out to be the worst of the whole shoot. We actually may have to redo it if it doesn’t edit together well. We’ll see. This is the first I’ve ever mentioned this but it just may happen. We got some really good stuff that night, like the chase, and Colin in the Elevator, but it was by far the worst night of shooting. We didn’t make our day either. We were about a page short at the end of the night. Sigh. We were off to a great start!:(

Post Begins

2006-11-29T23:37:00.000-08:00

We’ve started post production even though we haven’t officially completed shooting. Below is a copy of an email I sent to cast and crew a few weeks ago with some information that might be of interest to you.

Cast and Crew:

Good morning. I apologize for the long silence. I've spent the last week logging like crazy and doing some data analysis work. Since the production started on September 27th we've shot roughly 23 hours of footage on 36 tapes. Not my best of shooting ratio's but 1/11 isn't that bad...well...comparatively. So far we have shot 94 pages in 23 days of production. 2 of those days were hard 12-14 hour days for the crew. I know that every one's anxious for a wrap party but we still have 5 pages of this monster left to do. Unfortunately these five pages involve a lot of you, a lot of different locations, and the philanthropy scene. Danielle, Dan, and I will be getting together in the next few days to hack out a schedule. you can rest assure that we will schedule things at least 2 weeks in advance so you can free you schedule and be done with this film.

I actually finished logging the day I wrote that email. It took FOREVER. For the last week I’ve been working on logging my shot logs into the computer as well as capturing and working on the trailer. I have to have a trailer edited for my final for my post production class. I was thinking about releasing it Friday but it won’t be ready because it still needs a score. I’ve actually decided I’m not going to release it until February; I want to make it timely. I don’t want to post a trailer so far in advance that people forget about it. So basically I’ve been living in the lab for the last 3 weeks. Literally I’ve been there almost every hour it’s open. Tristan Ringenoldus (an executive producer) has been helping me for the past few days. He assembled a few scenes and is going to help me get a rough assembly of the film done by Dec 13th. The lab closes then for winter break.

Dan, Linnaea, and I met with my post production professor, Miguel, and the directing professor to talk about where we are in the capstone and what we need to do to finish. I gave them a rough outline for deadlines which are below:

Dec 13 Rough Assembly (Lab Closes)
Jan 16 (Lab Reopens)
Jan 30 Rough Cut
Feb 13 Fine Cut
Feb 27 Picture Lock
March 13 Foley and ADR Recorded
March 27 Score and Rough Sound Mix
April 17 Final Sound Mix
April 24 Final Picture done and turned in
May 1st or 2nd campus premiere.

They said this was a tight schedule and hard deadlines but they think it’s a good calendar. I’m going to bring on a few others to help finish the film. I’ve sent out a few invites and am waiting for a response. It’s great though to have my professor looking at the footage. Everyone was so hesitant before and Crystal, my post production professor says the footage is looking really good. Yes. Score one for me.

Kenny and I have started work on the one sheets. I sent him some movie posters that I liked and we’re gonna start brainstorming.

I’m going to peruse a marking person to help devise a marketing plan for the movie. I’ll make that reach tomorrow.

SAG

2006-11-29T23:21:00.000-08:00

Screen Actors Guild

In my preproduction post I forgot to mention my goings on with SAG. Well I got all the paperwork after I submitted my initial information sheet via email from my representative. I called my local contact and found out he was on vacation till the 14th. Well we started shooting on the 27th and I had to have all this paper work in 3 weeks before we started shooting. Great. It’s not that it was hard or a lot of paper work. I’m just not a lawyer and don’t understand what some of the stuff means and I wanted to make sure that I did everything write and didn’t get in trouble or anything. Well I ended up call the emergency number left on my local contacts voicemail and talked to the regional director. It was a miracle I got her. Her assistant had the day off so she was answering her own phone calls. She helped me for about an hour as I asked her all kinds of questions. I couldn’t believe how nice she was. I filled out all the paper work and sent it in. it was a little late but the regional director assured me it would be fine. When the time came I called my contact when he got back from vacation and informed him on where we where in the process. I had to give the SAG office a deposit of 350 for the Sag actors to ensure that they got paid had we run out of money or something. Well as we got closer and closer to production I got nervous because I wasn’t hearing anything. I called and called and called and it was impossible to talk to anyone that wasn’t someone’s assistant. Like I said, it was a miracle I got the regional director when I did. Anyway we didn’t get final approval until 2pm the day we started shooting at about 20min before we needed to start shooting with our first sag actor. Talk about cutting it short. From there I had to keep a log of the sag actor’s time and the meal and send the paper work off right way to sag along with a check for the performer. Fun times. ;)

Shooting Day 1

2006-11-29T23:09:00.000-08:00

Wednesday, September 27th, Production Day 1.

For those of you that pay attention to me and my blog you’ll notice that the first day of shooting was always listed as Saturday the 30th. Well, that was all a rouse. The actual first day of shooting was on Wednesday the 27th and had been for a very long time. It was our Tunnels day. We kept it secret because facilities management is very very touchy about the location. For one they try to keep it secret from students that the tunnels even exist. Most people wanted to go into the tunnels. So to make sure people didn’t tag along or show up we kept the shooting day a secret. So the necessary cast and a select group of students for crew, which mainly consisted of me, Dan and Joel, were allowed into the tunnels.

Because there were so many different requirements of the tunnel locations, (like ladders, doors, stairs, intersections etc) we spent 3 days down there during preproduction looking for all these places. We found them all after the 2nd scout and I made a plot map of campus with each location and then figured out the most time and cast efficient way of going to the different locations. On Wednesday the 20th, a week before we started, Dan, Danielle, and I and our two facman contacts went and did a walk through of our path for the day of shooting to time the location moves. We had nine pages to shoot on the 27th and it was going to be one of the hardest days of our 16 day schedule. Danielle and I borrowed some walkie talkies from the campus film club to stay in contact. She would run the home base (kind of production office) in the mu and I’d radio to her when we need new actors or where moving or whatever. We had a plan.

The Tuesday night before we started Colin arrived and I started my shot list for the next day. It was exciting to do that. It ended up being like 5 pages long single spaced. I basically wrote the scene number, then all the shots and their descriptions, things like panning from under grate, or two shot of Tyler and Jeremy.

Because the locations were underground and because the facman guys could only help us during there business hours we had to shoot from 7:30am-4pm. doing day for night would be fine because no sunlight was going to make it in there.

On Tuesday we picked up just the equipment we would need in the tunnels, a tripod and a fig rig and a mic and a camera. Sorry, no lights. There was no way we could light down there and run power cords. The facman guys said they would bring a portable florescent that they used often when fixing things. They also said they’d bring a full florescent incase we needed some serious light. That was nice of them.

So Danielle picked me, Colin, and Joel up at my house first thing in the morning and we got the MU about 7:30. Cast was called at 8am. The facman guys were there early. Linnaea was stuck in morning traffic so we had to wait for her to get there before we could start. We started shooting 30min late. Linnaea had forgotten Colin’s Characters bandanna and had to go get it so I had to switch the schedule right away. We ended up taking mike zduniak out into the tunnels at a different location which also messed up our plan. As we walked there we realized that our walkie talkies weren’t working because the distance was so great. We went into the tunnels and set up the first shot and used the slate. But as we set up the second shot I decided to leave the slate out and leave it at the mu when we got back because it was just costing time and it was one more thing to carry. We had to wait for 15min for a facman guy to go grab an extension cord because we forgot one. We had to wait again because this one wasn’t long enough. To make a long story short we ended up shooting 3 shoots in an hour. It took it equaled about 3/8ths of a page in the can at 10am. We had nine pages to shoot. Man was I panicked. I immediately cut the scene where mike hangs himself from my shot list which was about a page long because I knew we wouldn’t get to it and it was one of the least important scenes. It was a cool scene, a character moment, but it didn’t further the story so I cut it. When we got back linnaea was back and we started shooting with all 3 guys. We went to the original location were we were supposed to start and randy Rubin our DVD guy came along with it. We ended up getting him and extra camera fro the DVD stuff. We spent the next few hours shooting at a few different locations and got some really really great stuff. It took the guys 10 takes to get the big camera scene down but it’ll be great in the movie. While we where shooting Danielle and noel were furiously sewing on official patches onto the cop uniforms, something that we had forgotten to do. We took a break and went back to the MU to get some water and then ventured out again. We went to this room where we shot the scene where they split up. It was 110 degrees in there I kid you not. You should see the footage between takes. It was so hot and uncomfortable. You can see the sweat on the guys in the actual footage. It was great though because that’s why they split up, because it was too hot. Method acting hahaha. Well we’re still way behind schedule and I was panicking. I later found out the facman guys were talking to the actors and crew because they’d never seen me so stressed. When we broke for lunch all my cops where there and in uniform. They looked GREAT! So good. After lunch we went to the next location and did the cop stuff in the tunnels and it became about 3:00pm. I made a decision to finish the cops stuff so I wouldn’t have to bring them into the tunnels again, especially our sag actor, john. I was able to finish the cop stuff and by the end of the day I had 56min of footage and only 5 ½ pages done of the 9 we had started with. I was panicked. Then one of the facman guys approached me and told me that he would help me out and bring me into the tunnels again if I needed to on another day. The original agreement was one day but he said that his assignment was to help us out and if we weren’t done we weren’t done. Oh thank god for these facman guys. They saved my movie. I told them I’d be in contact with them on when to finish so I thanked them and we wrapped up. I had absolutly no idea when we could shoot in the tunnels again because our schedule was so tight. but i knew i'd make it work some how. We went back to the house and watched the dailies and I was very very pleased to say the least with the amazing footage we got. I don’t remember what we did that night or in the next few days but the next day of shooting was Saturday the 30th, the “official” first day.

The Rest of Pre-Production

2006-11-27T23:44:00.000-08:00

Phew. Wow. I don’t even know who I am anymore. Man things have been crazy. It’s been roughly 11 weeks since I last posted. In the last 11 weeks we’ve shot 94 pages of the screenplay. 5 pages left. What I’m going to do is go back as far as I can and look at my calendar and try and fill in the last 11 weeks. The easiest way for me to do this will to be to take each aspect of the film and go through what happened up until production. I just can’t remember the dates. So here goes:

Sept 10th-27th.

Dorms

I keep trying to find out if reslife will work. Everyday I call to see if they’ll help us out. Around this time I got an idea. One of the AFA events was taking place at the dorms at the downtown campus so I decided to call them and see if we could film there. The lady was really nice. She said I could just come down whenever I wanted to take a look at the location. On some Thursday or something Danielle and I had gone to the west campus to meet with the police commander for the second time and decided to just stop by the downtown campus and see the dorms. We walked in and met my contact. She couldn’t have been nicer. She showed us the facility, the courtyard, the halls, the show rooms, and even an empty room. She said that she thought the residents would be excited because it would be something neat happening in the dorms. She did for a second sit us down and talk serious. She wanted to know exactly what we where filming. Especially when she found out a few of the scenes involved police officers. After an honest answer to her concerns with things like the only crimes committed were trespassing and underage drinking she was at ease. We still wanted to use the main campus dorms so we told her we’d get back to her if we wanted to use them. In the next few days I continued to pester my reslife contact and things weren’t working out. He just wasn’t’ returning my calls. Out of desperation I had an idea. Miguel’s office used to be a dorm. When meeting with him I looked around and realized that the theatre and film office would make a great dorm because it used to be one. It was renovated in the 70’s or something and was turned into offices. I went to the dean’s office and they showed me an empty office and it was perfect. It was a dorm room. I had to talk to the head of the department and she was wary of letting us film there. She said that if there was an empty office it needed to go to faculty. I pursued for a little bit but eventually gave up the path because it didn’t seem like an option. I was getting to a point of desperation. I thought the dorms were going to go to public events who are the bane of my existence. Public events would shut us down in a second if we didn’t pay them all kinds of fines and stuff and have the script approved. I got so desperate at one point and worried that I actually went to the public events office and decided if reslife was going to go to them I’d do it first. While I was waiting at the office my phone rang and it was reslife. OMG. I answered and it was my contact and he said he was sorry but he’d been busy and he was finally ready to meet with me. Well I had had my professor and the head of the department a few days earlier email him because he wasn’t responding. Guess it worked. Man it would have been so bad had I made it to my public events meeting. Grace of god on that one. So we met with my contact a few days later, Danielle and I, and the dorms were absolutely perfect. But the problem was that we had about 2 or 3 days till we started shooting and we needed to know if we could do it. Apparently they were selling the rights to the property and reslife would no longer be in control of the property, so they couldn’t tell me when we could film there. It would be empty but they just didn’t know when the contracts would go through. It came to the point were we had to start shooting and I made the decision to use the down town campus. I didn’t want to for a few reasons. One it looked like a hotel more than a dorm, (because it was a hotel before it was a dorm) two, resident’s lived there (which means an uncontrolled environment) and three, the commute, it’s about 20 minutes from where most of the shoot is. But, it was these dorms or no dorms so I made my diction and we ended up shooting at the down town campus for the dorms.

Police Station

I finally got a response from the police commander. I set up a meeting with him for Thursday. See for some reason he got transferred to the west campus while I was working on the script. So he set up a meeting with him and with the main campus police commander. I met with them and it was a miracle. Everything I asked for they said they could do. All the police cars, the stations, etc. I showed them my schedule which required them for 3 days and they were fine. They said they just had to clear it with the chief of police. And the chief of police wanted a copy of the script. So I did a little doctoring to make it less of an R and to make the police stuff look a little friendlier and turned in the script. A few days later I met with the main campus commander and he said that the chief hadn’t read it but he did say that what we were asking for was too much. He said that the main campus was just too busy. If we wanted the police’s help we could use them for maybe use on car for an hour on one night. HA! I had THREE FULL DAYS! And needed 3 cars for 2-3 hours. What a slap in the face. How was I going to do this movie with out the police? I called my contact at the west campus because we had talked previously about possible using the west campus station and cars. I left messages but didn’t’ get a response so Danielle and I decided to just drive to the west campus and try and catch him in his office. We went to the station at about 10am and it appeared to be closed. The one thing I was most worried about for the police station was the front lobby scenes. The main campus station had a front lobby that was great. I couldn’t’ recreate it. It had a window for the dispatch office and all kinds of memorabilia. The rest of the station could easily be doubled anywhere for any office like place. So anyway, the station appeared to be shut down. We decided to just wait outside. While we were waiting we saw a police car drive down the road. I joked about following it but we just decided to leave. As we were leaving we passed the cruiser parked so I decided to actually go looking for the officer. Danielle dropped me off and I went walking all around this building looking for this officer. I didn’t find and officer but I did find a police aide. The police aide said that the commander was in his office so he took Danielle and I back to the station and let us in. the commander said he was happy to see us and that he apologized for the appearance of the station being closed. They just didn’t have anyone to manage the front desk so they kept it locked. Anyway, he said he didn’t have good news for us. He said the chief did end up reading the script and he didn’t like it. And neither did he. He said they weren’t going to be able to help us out. I started to protest. For one I knew he wouldn’t’ like the script. He’ wasn’t the demographic the screenplay was designed for. I assured him that this was a school project, etc. to make a long story short I pleaded and pleaded and he finally said that we couldn’t use the cars but we could use the west campus station for all the interior station stuff. And the best part of that offer was that the west campus stations’ front lobby was better than the main campus station. The commander was so generous that he even offered for us to use the east campus because they had genuine jail cells with sliding bars and everything. The only stipulation he put on us was that we had to pay a police aide $27 an hour to basically baby sit us. We agreed because there were no other options and we needed the location. The Tuesday before we started shooting we went down the east campus police station and looked at the cells. Initially after the chief denied us access to the main campus station we thought we were going to build cells in the studio. Man they’d be crappy but we were going to do it. But these cells were perfect! So perfect! So it looked like our police station was going to be made up of both east and west campus stations.

Cop Cars

So when the Campus Police said we couldn’t use their cars I panicked. I had no idea what to do. Danielle and I tried to talk to a few different options. We contacted the local police departments and nobody ever got back to us. Danielle did some research online and found a local collector of police cars and emailed him. She even talked to the local film commission. The commission got back to us and had a service that they set up with the local police in which you pay the officers $51 an hour, $7 an hour for the car, plus something like $.57 a mile. Well we didn’t have that money. We needed the car(s) for at least 2 nights. We need 3 for a few hours and 1 for 2 days of shooting. Danielle’s collector got back to us and gave us a GREAT DEAL. Apparently he did this sort of thing in LA, lending his collector vehicles to film productions. Since we were students he let us hire him for $50 a day and food on the Set. OMG he saved the movie. We hired him right away and he provided one Crown Victoria and he also lent us a light fixture to simulate flashing cop car lights. We picked that up on Tuesday the day before shooting.

Production design

Over the 2-3 weeks we had before we started shooting Linnaea and I tried to get together as much as possible. It was really hard because she was working almost full time and going to school full time. Plus she had to go to Wyoming for a weekend to pick up some of her mom’s stuff. We did the best we could as far as props and costumes are concerned. The most important costume/prop was the cop stuff. The uniforms, belts, boots, etc. Dan found this uniform store that was for Law Enforcement specifically so Linnaea and I went there. The class A uniforms cost us about $250 a piece. The thing we were most worried about was the belts and holsters. They were so expensive. Were’ talking $150 a holster. We couldn’t afford that at all. I went around to a few different Halloween places (seeing as it was close to Halloween). I found some toy guns called “Secret Agent” guns that I ended up using for the cop guns (you’d never know). But I couldn’t find holsters anywhere. Then I had an idea. Gun shops! I found a few gun shops slash pawn places and went to one of them the guy rented me 3 police belts, clip holders, cuff holders, and holsters for like $40 for the month! Wahoo. I was a little worried about the costumes and other props but they were easily found enough. I’d been picking things up for a while anyway. Like the dart board in will and rahid’s room. I got that in June. It took me a long time to get all the paperwork to linnaea that she needed. She spent the few weeks before production gathering the different stuff she had that would work and also she and I made lots of errands. Man things were starting to pile up in my house.

Tunnels

The tunnels were the easiest location to deal with. I did have a quick scare though. There was a period of a few days where we weren’t sure if we were going to be able to get a person to accompany us in the tunnels because one of our contacts was going away to some training or conference or something. I actually went to the office of facman pleading for them to help me and someone there of importance assured me they’d make it happen. Man that was scary. One of my contacts ended up giving me his cell phone number so that I wouldn’t have to deal with middle management anymore. He said they got all confused because it had already ben approved so why was I dealing with them? That made things a lot easier.

Dinner

After travis’ futile pursuits with ihop we decided to try other avenues. But all of travis’ contacts dried up. Nobody wanted to help us. Not even the village inn. I decided to try a 50’s style dinner that’s located in the school and run by campus dinning. They were totally cool with us filming. Basically they said just call a few days before and they’d lock us inside when the restaurant was closed and we could just leave when we were done. We didn’t have to have anyone watch us or anything. HA! They even said they’d turn on the fountain so we could have free soda! How about that?

Construction site

Danielle and I just decided to walk into the big construction sites and strait up ask the people there how we could get permission. It was actually a fun day. It rained like crazy and I almost ruined my Birkenstocks. That would have been a travesty. Well we talked to a construction worked on Saturday and he told us to come back on Monday and talk to Rick and R.C. When we came back on Monday we found out that it was Rick and Arcey. Yeah, way different than R.C. but these guys were awesome. They thought it sounded easy enough. We only needed to be there for a few hours. One of he regulations was we had to where hard hats which sounded like fun anyway. Also had to have close toed shoes. No objections from us. After calling them every other day or so for a week or two they finally gave us the go ahead. We’d meet a night foremen at about 7pm and he’d hang with us till we were done.

Budget

So one day, I don’t remember which, Danielle and I got together and did a budget. We figured out we’d spend about $5000 and raise about $1000 from friends and family to help with a contingency incase we went over. Most of our budget came from me, Then Dan and his mom, then Tristan Ringenoldus ( a good friend of mine), then Danielle, then Kenny, etc.

Cast

When %25 of the cast didn’t show for the read through you can rest a sure I was concerned. I spent the few weeks before production talking to a few of the cast members and trying to woo them into their parts. The hardest was getting Jamie McKeel to play Michelle. She wasn’t too excited about the role at first and I had to kind of talk her into it. Ever since Dan and I did OK with her I really wanted her to be involved in Freshmen. I had asked her to audition but she never did. Then when an actress turned down the role of Michelle I ran to Jamie. She didn’t really agree to the role until the day before we needed the character, which was the second day of shooting. The third day was her first, which was the stuff in the van on the day we were at the dinner. I also had a terrible time trying to find an actor for the Ricky Carr role. Everyone I approached turned it down. I even interviewed a friend of Josh McDermitt’s for a role in the film and he was a real nice guy, good looking, and if he’s got josh’s support he’s got to be good. Unfortunately he was too old for Ricky Carr and too young for a cop. We had a few actors like that in auditions. So I ended up playing myself. Linnaea’s son Jason Kimble ended up as one of our officers and I was able to get a friend from my past job, Jeff Rensel, at the MU to play the other officer. Still no Ricky Carr though. I was finally able to get a hold of Vic and he had a lot going on in his life at the time we were about to start shooting. I told him I’d love the part but would understand if he couldn’t do it. He said he wanted to and I was stoked! Vic was one of the Very First actors I had in mind for the movie. In fact you could say I wrote the role of Ashton for him. The girl who was playing Sarah also dropped out of the cast and I had very little time to fill the role. I was able to get Jamie Israel’s girl friend, Ali Rae, to do the role (I’d worked with her before). Still no Ricky Carr so I ended up playing the role. Oh yeah, and David emailed me out of the blue saying that his girlfriend all of a sudden felt weird about him kissing a girl at the end of the movie. Rahid kisses Michelle. So I told him he didn’t have to do it. I mean this wasn’t Romeo & Juliet or anything. They could do other things beside kiss. But then during production I found out that she broke up with him and he was too embarrassed to tell me. Him. Glad he put the movie first. But then he got back together with his girlfriend so whatever. He still couldn’t have kissed in the end. Is that a pun? Colin flew into town on Tuesday night the night before we started shooting. It was great to see him.

Crew:

We had crew interviews and I made a huge mistake in scheduling them at 30 min a piece. It seriously took about 5 min per interview and the rest of the time we played around on you tube. We gave everyone a job and our crew turned out to be absolutely wonderful. Joel flew in from LA on Monday and spent the next few days with Danielle and I doing preproduction things. He can Colin became good friends real fast. We had our crew orientation on Tuesday. Man what a “success” that was. Only like half the people showed up and it was kind of awkward. At least for me. I had this whole plan and we were even going to shoot a mock scene to get used to working with one another. Yeah that didn’t happen. Not enough people showed. But Joel got to play around with the camera a little and Kenny and Stephanie showed me the lighting equipment they wanted. man oh man. Kenny and Stephanie scared the shit out of us. It was the day before we started shooting and they we had only planed to use lights in interiors at locations we could control, we’re talking like 4 of you 16 days, and they told us they wanted, wait no… needed lights every day of production. Jesus. Well we bit it off and dove in.

Equipment

So from the school we got Panasonic DVX100b’s, a Fig Rig (Which was amazing), 4 c-stand, a mole Richardson light kit, apple boxes, sand bags, stinger (extension cords), a condenser shot gun mike and boom pole, and on the occasion, a 12 foot strait track dolly. Molly’s friend who has a Costco member ship got us some tape. 40 tapes for $100

Extras

Yeah, Extra’s was something I was worried about but never really gave much thought too. I know we need them, and a lot of them, but there was so much to be done and had that I just didn’t know what to do. When the days came that we needed a few I knew I’d just make the crew do it. But the big days. I hadn’t resolved that yet.

Then we started shooting…

New Blog

2006-11-26T15:15:00.000-08:00

So I know I told most of you that I would start posting tomorrow but I'm in a productive mood so I started a new blog with the correct address for the new title. That's write. A new title. http://madisonhall.blogspot.com

Title

2006-11-26T15:00:00.000-08:00

I know I said I'd start this blog tomorrow, but I'm feeling rather productive so I thought I'd just go ahead and post on this new site. I've officially changed the name of the film from Freshmen, and all it's various subtitles from "The night of their lives" to "The 13th grade" to Madison Hall. It just makes sense. That's the name of the dorm all the students live in and it's the reason they all know each other and the title just makes sense. So...

Welcome to the Blog for Post Production on Madison Hall.

Tomorrow I'll release the finishing touches of preproduction and through out this week I'll blog about photography while keeping you updated on post. Oh yeah, the trailer should be done by the end of the week. Depends on the music.

21 Days and the Decision

2006-09-09T15:28:00.000-07:00

We start shooting in 3 weeks. Or 21 days, which ever you prefer. At this point, I've made a decision. I'm going to discontinue this blog for an uncertain amount of time. For one, it's hard for me to keep posting often because of the amount of work that happens in a day. Two, the information is constantly changing. And three, we're going to be starting a video production diary and documentary on the making of the film. Once production's over and the amount of time and work slows down, I'll re-open it. Till then-

Jared

30 Days

2006-08-31T22:22:00.000-07:00

As of tomorrow we are 30 days out from shooting. i've been so busy with school i can barely think. i hate writing these once a week but i just can't seem to find time. Between producing the film, work, school, the club, usg, etc i t's very very hard to find time. I actually did quit my job. i put in my two weeks last thursday. my last day is this coming friday. not tomorrow but the next one. i just can't handle it. i've been tring to finish the shooting schedule with every bit of free time i have. and the lab is only open between 9am-9pm. but I finished it today! so that's good. i'm going to email all the actors tomorrow moring the details. the schedule's not locked but it's done. we're doing it the way it's scheduled. we might switch days around but as of what's being shot in what order in a day is staying locked. it's frustrating becauses some of the actors have piped up with new conflicts they didn't have before. but everything looks like it's going to work so far. speaking of actors the read through went well. some people didn't show and i called them and they had good reasons so i'm excited about that. i had a reading with reslife today. that was both wonderful and horible. they open doors for me and put obsiticals in my way. things were work out well though. you just have to stick through it and not get discouraged. look at me. i'm so tired and worn out i'm not putting this through word, spell check or individual paragraphs. oh well. i got to see some of the equipment the school of theatre and film will be providing. it's soooooo wonderful. so wonderful. it's like i all of a sudden go to a film school. it's so nice to be supported at school in a way i've never been supported. i'm especially excited about the hand held monitors for on the set. oh i can't wait. it's going to be sooo much fun and such a great experiance. see this, even writing about this is like a rollercoaster ride. see, that's what i was thinking of writing about before. is that everyday on this picture is like a rollercoaster ride of emotions. i figure out something going to work and i'm exstatic, then i get knocked down, then i over come it, and so on and so on. a roller coaster ride. well, i'm going to try and start posting more ofter....oh yeah. The Sag thing is rolling along nicely. shouldn't be any problems there. i'm so scarted. going to bed. i'll try to post more oftern. good night.

More Free Food!!!!

2006-08-24T00:22:00.000-07:00

This snowball I got going is rolling along nicely.

I need to email the cast a reminder tomorrow about the readthrough. Hope they all can make it. So far I’ve gotten about a 90% confirmation. It’ll be a lot of fun. Only thing is I gave travis the responsibility of getting the contracts together, then he went on vacation for two weeks and I forgot about it, so guess what I’m doing in the next few days. God I hope I can get them all set before Sunday. It should be fine. We’ve already had some guidance in that department.

I talked to a prison guard today that’s a friend of a friends about getting police cars for the film. He gave me some good leads. I also emailed the commander at asu police to set up a meeting. Haven’t gotten a response yet. Travis (who’s now back) is going to contact the phoenix film commission about the cars to see if he can find a company that rents them.

I talked to my new reslife contact and he was awesome. Sounded really easy to work with. He said he’s gonna have his assistant give me a call to set up an appointment to meet with him and discuss are needs. I’ve got Danielle looking into asu west just in case though.

The schedules coming along nicely. I’ve been in the computer lab working hard on it. Should be done by the end of the week. Freakin upgrade is awesome.

I’ve got the support of the new film professors in the program. I’m meeting with the directing professor once a week to discuss the film starting tomorrow. I’m really excited to have all this support.

We sent out a call for crew the other day. I got a bunch of responses so I’m gonna set up interviews for sept 4th later in the week.

Danielle got us more free food! Yay!

snowball

2006-08-21T23:20:00.000-07:00

things are starting to snowball, it's only the first day of classes, and i'm exhausted at 11:30 at nihgt. sigh.

i talked to my professor that's in charge of the postproduction class i'm taking this semester and she was really cool. i asked her if there was some way i could incorparate her class into my capstone. she didn't seem to be apposed but also didn't seem to happy when i said kill two birds with one stone. oh well. tomorrow i have a "directing" class, we'll see how that goes.

i'm making the copies of the screenplays for the actors and crew tomorrow. that'll be fun.

i can finally start working on locking in the production schedule again, i'm getting up at 7:30 and heading over to the computer lab to work on it all morning till my class starts.

work was really really busy. i'm pondering quiting my job for a bit to help with the film. today was just so busy and overwhelming that there's a few things i didn't get done. i just don't want to over load myself and i don't really need the money, well i should say i didn't budget it in with my sememster bills. i could always use the money. i'll sleep on it and do some more thinking.

niether facman, Sag, nor reslife has gotten back to me yet. just waiting tapping my fingers.

i sent out a call today for crew interviews for the 4th of september. that should be a lot of fun.

jeeze i'm tired. i can't write anymore. i'm going to bed. good night.

Crazy, Crazy, Crazy, Crazy, Crazy, Crazy, Crazy, Excited

2006-08-15T14:47:00.000-07:00

Things are so crazy for me right now. Crazy. Absolutely crazy. Work is crazy. Getting things in order for school to start is crazy. Helping my roommate with the lose of his mom is crazy. Producing a feature in the midst of all this is crazy. But, I’m excited.

Molly stepped down as a producer because it’s too much work for her with nursing school. I completely understand.

Danielle found this subculture of people who collect police cars. She’s gonna look into seeing if we can find a local person involved in this and borrow a few. I’ve yet to here from my contact at the film commission on company’s renting cop cars so I’m going to call him later this week.

Linnaea went over to the police station to take some pictures of locations as well as uniforms. Not sure how that went. I called her today but she’s yet to call me back. It should be interesting.

My computer got a virus or malfunctioned or something and I had to completely reinstall my operating system. That sucked. I was able to save all my files though. It was an obnoxious process involving a Linux operating system running off a DVD in the DVD drive and USB jump drive. But I saved everything. No I’m in the process of rebuilding the computer. But of pain in the ass. Oh well. Better now than a week out from production.

I got something new out of my reslife contact a week ago. She passed me onto someone else. I don’t really know why. But the guy she passed me onto is in operations. This makes me happy. It makes me happy because his job title should mean he only deals with operations and logistics. My previous contact was involved with marketing and had all kinds of concerns that wasted my time like thinking we were doing a reality TV show with out the permission of the students. Sheesh. Well this guy shouldn’t care what were doing. That is at least that’s what his job description suggests. I’ll wait to email him till the beginning of September cause the dorm are crazy right now. Its move in day today and tomorrow. Work is crazy at the MU with welcome week. One of the actors, Kent Walter, had a great suggestion and said to contact reslife at ASU west. He said that have all kinds of empty dorms. Which would be great. I don’t’ mind going to ASU west.

The screenplays locked at 99 pages. I’m very happy. I did one more pass after Miguel approved it and then sent it out to cast and crew on Sunday the 13th. I’ve got a read-through booked for the 27th. So far everyone I expected to come will be there except for one actor. Which is fine. I knew there’d be one. There’s always “that guy”. ;) Unfortunately I had to exclude the SAG actors from the read-through. The reason for this is because if they came I’d have to pay them and I can’t afford it. I’d much rather pay them to be in the film then have other actors that I can invite to the read through. They were very understanding which made me feel better.

There may be a hitch in making the film on an HD format. I’ll look more into it later once school starts.

Danielle’s already gotten us some free food for the shoot! I’m so excited. She’s awesome. The more money I can put onto the screen instead of in everyone’s stomach the better ;) but there will always be free food on the set. It’s one of the fundamentals of low budget filmmaking.

I told the actors I would have they’re contracts for them on 27th at the read through as well as the shooting schedule. I’ve got to get working on these things.

As for the shooting schedule another wrench has fallen into the system. The computer lab where the scheduling software is located at is renovating all they’re equipment and software so I can’t get in there till the 21st. that gives me 7 days to pump out a schedule. But that’s ok because I’ve already got a preliminary schedule. I just need to update it.

We’re going to be doing interview’s for crew on September 3rd. that should be fun. I’m sending out an email this week in regards to the call.

APROVED

2006-08-02T08:36:00.000-07:00

Miguel said yes. he finaly, finaly said yes. let's start this ball rolling.

A Blessing in Disguise as July Goes Bye

2006-08-01T10:14:00.000-07:00

In the past months that I’ve been doing this diary every once in a while it goes dormant. Well no dormancy had yet existed that July has become. Today I break that dormancy as I explain what has been going on.

As most of you know, Miguel through a wrench in the works about 6 weeks ago when he all of a sudden finally read the screenplay. He emailed me and told me he had serious concerns. So most of production has been on hold until I can conjure a version of the screenplay he’s happy with. Well I believe I have done that. I emailed him the current “final” version on July 19th. I emailed him last Friday to see if he had looked at it and he emailed me back with these two sentences: “looks pretty solid. I’ll give you a definitive answer on Monday”. Well Monday came and went and I have yet to receive a definitive answer. But the looks pretty solid part of the email makes me very happy. It makes me very happy because I also agree with him. I think that this wrench Miguel has put in the system was a good thing. Because the screenplay is better. Much much better in my opinion. So I’m calling this a blessing in disguise. Now all we do on that end is wait.

The screenplay is fairly different. I changed all the names that were based on real people and changed them around to fake names. For example Colin is now Tyler and Jared is now Jeremy. I also added three VO at the beginning of the film and at the end. Each of the three main characters go on a very specific journey and the VO’s really help to solidify the story.

Reslife’s been giving me a hard time. There really busy because of school starting soon and they don’t want to help me at all. I’m last on their priority list and there treating me like thorn in their side. I’m gonna start looking for back up locations instead of using real dorms. But I’ll keep digging reslife while I’m at it.

I’ve got a friend who works at the Arizona Film Commission looking into companies that sell services such as renting old cop cars and stuff. I’m gonna see if we can avoid using the actual police. We’ll see.

After talking with Miguel I’ve found out we’re going to have access steady cams as well as a dolly. Thank god. We also might get to shoot in HD. Not sure if that’s going to work yet or not. We’ll see.

I’m all moved into my new apartment so that feels good to have out of the way.

Joel Carr has signed on as camera operator.

I offered Jamie the role of Jeremy and he accepted.

Because of the wrench most of the production has been on hold. But there are other reasons that the production has gone on hold too. On Saturday July 22nd, my roommate’s (the person that the character Daniel is based on) mother died in a boating accident. So for the past week and a half I’ve been doing nothing but being a friend. There are just some things that are more important. But, my roommates doing better so I’m starting to go back to my responsibilities. Today is my first day back at work so I thought I’d do a production diary as well.

Still Holding

2006-07-07T07:40:00.000-07:00

Yes, we’re still on hold. I’m getting sort of pissed. We’re going on 3 weeks now that we’ve had this wrench in the system. I’m tired. I actually canceled my meeting with Miguel yesterday because I’m completely throwing out the Voice Overs. I never intended to use them through out the whole writing process from now till back in November and they just feel forced. So I read through half the screenplay last night and I’m going through the other half today looking for ways to strengthen the screenplay. Miguel did as I asked and went and saw Love Actually. He responded saying he loved the film. I’m glad he saw it so now we both can have a frame of reference as far as structure. And it’s fresh in his mind. I’ll admit that some good stuff has come from this wrench. We did get the screenplay down to 98 pages. Which will make everything easier, and I mean everything. So I canceled my meeting with him and he’s headed out of town for the weekend so the earliest time we can meet is next Tuesday.

I offered the SAG roles to the SAG actors. They both accepted and both sent me there Bio’s for the website right away. Wonderful.

We brought Jamie into the meeting on Wednesday to hear him read. He did a great job. I’m about 90% sure I’m gonna cast him. I need to check out a few other actors and work out some details before I make an offer though.

We had a member of the producing team step down on Wednesday. I’m glad he was able to come to me and tell me he just couldn’t make the large commitment. We’ll work on something else together later on. Believe me when I say I know what it’s like to juggle responsibilities.

Not Cool, Cool, Not Cool, Cool

2006-07-04T22:58:00.000-07:00

Yesterday Miguel didn't approve the script. That was not Cool. Today I saw the shuttle discovery take off today. That was cool. Then I heard that North Korea test fired 3 missiles, one capable of reaching the US. That was not cool. Then I watched fireworks from the top of a tall building. That was cool. It’s been a rollercoaster of a day.

It’s actually been a rollercoaster of a weekend. I talked to Miguel yesterday. I was able to squash a lot of his main problems, issues I’ve heard before as far as too many characters and police car usage. He said his biggest problem over all with the screenplay was that it lacked a central point of view. I explained to him that it’s from Jeremy’s point of view (Jared(Me)). He said he got that the character framed the story and that it was a good device but he didn’t feel he was a central character. I asked him if he’d seen love actually and he said no. I told him to see it and he’d see the structure I’m going for. Anyway, he said he still wanted a stronger central character so I pitched him the idea of adding two voice overs. One at the beginning and one at the end, both by Jeremy. He liked it. So I did it. I sent it to him this afternoon and he’s going to go over it and get back to me by Thursday the latest. He had some notes and spelling errors and I took them into consideration in this version of the screenplay. Well everything’s still on hold till he approves it. Sigh. Just going to have to wait.

I had a busy weekend and had a lot of emails from actors and crew over the last couple of days that I still haven’t answered. Guess what I’m doing tomorrow?

Also I’m gonna update the website. I got some bios. Yippee.

On Hold

2006-07-01T20:38:00.000-07:00

Man did I cut. I cut and cut and cut and cut. I got the screenplay down to 98 pages. Phew. Molly read it and said she couldn’t tell where I cut so that’s good. I guess it needed to be shorter.

I talked with Miguel yesterday and we’re getting together on Monday to go over any issues he has with the screenplay. He said he’s going to read it twice this weekend and make notes. I’ll be glad when this issue is all wrapped up and done.

I was supposed to call linnaea’s son Jason about storyboarding but decided not to. I was also supposed to make a list for linnaea of all the characters and there physical descriptions. I decided not to do either. In face, I’m doing nothing but working on the screenplay till Miguel gives it the final ok. I’ve printed out a copy of the 98 page version and am going through it for formatting, spelling, and grammatical errors. Something I’m not good at but oh well. I just am sick of wasting time doing things like the shooting schedule and stuff when the script keeps changing. Every time it changes it causes a ripple effect through out the whole production. so all aspects on the creative side are on hold till the screenplay is locked. Hopefully that’ll be this Monday. We’ll see.

I talked to Brad Golden and Josh McDermitt and they both said they wanted to accept the roles (pending the contracts of course). Well needless to say I’m excited to work with both of them.

We’re bringing in Jamie Israel to read for us on Wednesday the 5th. I’m excited to see what he brings to the table. I think it’ll work out nicely. Well I hope.

The drama has started. Some of the producers, and although you think you (producers reading this) know what I’m talking about you don’t, have expressed some concern about other members of the team. I’m gonna have to start kicking some ass. Well, not really. But this is the politics that comes with filmmaking so here I go. I’m pretty good at this stuff so I think I’ll be able to handle it well.

I’ve started directing. Kind of. I had an actor email me with a lot of questions regarding their character, character background and stuff. I emailed them back with very little information. I’m a big fan of the David Mamamet style of directing. His book “On Directing” is awesome. I suggest anyone pick it up. I hope the actor isn’t frustrated with the lack of info I provided them. I still haven’t heard back from them when I sent the email.

Speaking of the email by the actor about their role, I’m so happy with all the support I’m getting on this film from the cast and crew. It’s really really uplifting and when things are hard it’s nice to know I’ve got such great support. Thanks guys. Let’s make a great fucking movie!

Back in the Groove

2006-06-29T10:31:00.000-07:00

Yaaaaaaawwwwwwnnnnn. Ah. I’m tired. Really really tired. I think it’s the climate change. I’ve been back in the valley of the sun for about 2 days. But I had to pull an all nighter in Logan airport on Monday night so I’m recovering from that too. It’s really tough trying to get back in the groove of things.

My trip was good. No water skiing. My aunt’s going through a divorce and the boat is “his”. Sigh. Well we did go canoeing and kayaking so that was cool. Got to hang out with some loons.

It took me the whole week I was there to edit down the script. I’d get 10 minutes here, and 20 minutes there. But I got the screenplay down to 104. I’m gonna go through it one more time and look for 4 or 5 more pages to cut. If I can get it under 100 I think I’ll be in good shape. After that I’ll contact Miguel and we’ll get together to do a final approval.

I’ve heard from all the actors that auditioned save one. Mr. Josh McDermitt for the role of Derek Rightman. I emailed him yesterday but still have not received a response. I’ll call him this afternoon. The actors I offered the roles of Michelle and Ricky too turned down the offer. One said the commitment was too much which I respect and the other said the role wasn’t his style. Oh well. Still waiting on Brad Golden. I happened to talk to his boss before I left and his boss said he was excited about the project. So that’s good I guess.

Our production meeting yesterday was good. We went over a lot of stuff.

Noel still hasn’t heard from Microsoft. I gave her an additional assignment. She’s gonna get an inventory list from Miguel regarding equipment we’ll have access too through the school of theatre and film. That was we can plan out way ahead of time what we’ll need for each day with what we have available. We’ll also figure out what we need to find elsewhere.

Travis said Denny’s is looking real good. We just might switch to them. He had a lot of progress with the manager. I guess the guy was excited. I also put Travis in charge of researching deferred payment contracts. I told him to email Miguel for a lead. I want to get the contracts drafted with in two weeks.

Linnaea didn’t get to the police station yet. Hopefully she’ll get there before Sunday’s meeting. She had some questions for me regarding the sorority philanthropy costumes and some of the girls’ outfits. I told her the truth. In that scene I want to SELL SEX. She got the point. I took her down to the stage (which is in the same building as our meetings) and showed her what I had in mind. She liked it and had some good ideas. We’re going to start getting together once a week, just me and her, to go over things for the movie. Linnaea also wants me to send her a list of the characters and their descriptions. I’m gonna do that today.

Danielle said she’s gonna send me the list of contacts for craft services today.

I booked a space for the read through of the screenplay with all the actors. I think I’m gonna change it though. I have for a month from now but I think I’m going to move it closer to the production. By that time we’ll have the whole film cast and the read through will go smoother.

I emailed Jamie about playing the role of me yesterday. He responded with enthusiasm. We’re gonna bring him in for a reading. I’m excited to see what the other producers think. I think he’s gonna work out nicely.

Linnaea had a suggestion about an actress for the role of Michelle. I looked her up on myspace and her look is fine. We’re gonna bring her in and see how she does reading.

New England and a Red Pen

2006-06-20T22:19:00.000-07:00

Well, I’m in New England. Nashua NH to be exact. I’m here for few days then going to a a camp up in north NH to water ski with some family. Maybe this trip will be more fun than I thought. I’m still going to be doing stuff for the movie though while I’m up here.

So I talked to Miguel on Monday. He called me and we spoke. Over all it was good. I’m not so worried. Below is an email I sent to the crew this morning outlining how our conversation went:

Team:
I spoke with Miguel and it went very well. He had some very constructive criticism. The one thing he wants me to do is cut down the script. He said it's too long. He said, from a producing view point, we're going to be traffic cops trying to manage chaos. He said if the film is shorter and more concise then it will be easier and we'll get to concentrate more on making a good product then on just making a product. So, I'll grant Miguel's wish and go through the screenplay and see what I can cut and condense. He did have good points in saying sometimes there are 7 lines of dialogue that could be condensed to three lines and have the same point and content. I also think this is good because it's something we'll all face in the industry. Good Practice you know. So, while I'm on the plane I'll see what I can find from there. Have a good week everyone.

So while I was on the second plane from Cincinnati to Boston I used a red pen I had bought and started going through the script. Surprisingly enough I got to page 60 and was able to cut roughly 7-8 pages. I might actually get it down to 100 pages if the pace keeps up like this. I haven’t really gone through the screenplay in a few weeks and it’s amazing what I find that can be condensed or simplified. I feel it’s better already. I’m glad Miguel put his thumb down. Thanks Valenti! I’m gonna keep working on it tonight.

I am supper stoked! I’ve gotten four responses from actors so far about parts and they’ve all accepted the roles! I was a little worried about Alicia De La Vega, well… I should say I was worried what any actress would think of the role of Alaska. Because of the scene where she gives head. I don’t know, some people are weird about that stuff and I really really wanted her to play the role. But she accepted so it’s all good. Steve Murphy also accepted the role of Officer Price which I’m happy about. I wonder if he’s figured out that he has to shave his head. Well, I think he reads these posts so Steve, guess what!? Well nothings permanent so we can talk about it. I’m also a little concerned about him living in Sedona. Not sure how that’s going to work (it’s about 3 hours away from phoenix). David Aslan and Katie Pengra also accepted their roles. Yahoo! Like I said. I’m excited.

Just out of curiosity I opened up all my past production diary files and found out that so far this thing is 56 pages long in word. Cool. Book deal, hear I come! Haha. With this speling?

Offers to Come

2006-06-18T22:27:00.000-07:00

Miguel canceled our meeting for Monday. He has a good excuse but it still makes me nervous. I tried to call him and he didn’t answer. I know its father’s day weekend and he’s got a young child so I understand that I’m last on his priority this weekend. It’s just inconvenient. I hope I can get in touch with him tomorrow. He wanted to reschedule to Tuesday but I leave at 6:40am on Tuesday. I expressed his concerns to the production team and they were 100% behind me so I’m at least happy about that. We’re going to do the film with or with out the school of theatre and film but we’d really like to do it as our capstone since it’s only appropriate and it’s going to be so much work. I’ve just got to talk to Miguel.

Our production meeting went well. We made final decisions on cast and are going to make the rest of the offers tomorrow. Well, offers to non-SAG actors. SAG actors are going to have to wait till I make a decision on the subject. I wish I could give the actors I offer roles a hard copy of the screenplay tomorrow but I’m going to be gone for a week and there’s no way to get it to them. But I also don’t want to wait to offer till I get home cause that’ll be over 3 weeks since they auditioned. So what I’ll do is send them an electronic copy and then if they want the part, when I get back, give them a hard copy. Instead of giving the DVD’s I’m also going to upload the rough versions of Credit Counselors, OK, and Rock.Paper.Scissors. That way they can see the films and be familiar with my work.

I talked to the team today about finding someone to play the role of Jared. Of all the actors that auditioned, that role is the one we can’t cast. But I had a long discussion with Jon Baranick, my best friend, about it. We talked about different actors that we knew and we came up with a good idea of who to play the role. I showed the production team pictures of him today and we’re gonna ask him in for an interview when I get back. See what the rest of the team thinks. So far that’s the best we have.

Screen Actors Guild

2006-06-17T12:20:00.000-07:00

I talked to Vic and he said he’s gonna give me a call next time he’s in Tempe so he can get a copy of the script.

I made two offers for roles yesterday. I offered the part of Matt Snyder to Kent Walter. Kent did a great job in the audition. During his audition I told him that of all the people we’d seen so far he was the only one that read the dialogue the way it was written to be read. Everyone else did a good job and it was interesting to see how other people interpreted it but he hit exactly how I read it in my mind. We thought for a second of having him play Colin but he was just too good looking. Colin’s not ugly but he’s not as attractive as Kent is. But we knew right away that Matt was the role for him. I’m excited to work with him. I also offered the role of Mike Mason to Adam Roa. I’ve worked with Adam before. He played Chad (the lead) in Credit Counselors. I gave Kent his copy of the screenplay on Friday as well as a copy of the shorts I did. Adam’s gonna pick up his stuff on Monday at my work. I told both of them that they didn’t have to accept the part, but that I was giving the offer and that I want them to read the screenplay and once I figure out what the deferred pay is I’ll let them know. Then they can accept the part. But I wanted them to know that the offer is there. I’m excited to work with both of them. I’m gonna take another look at the tapes today and make more offers this afternoon.

I talked to SAG on Thursday. It went well enough. Basically if I want to do a SAG Ultra-Low Budget Agreement I have to pay all SAG actors a Minimum of $100 a day. There’s no way around it and there are not exceptions or other options. I really want these actors. I have a few options in what I can do about the money. I could try and raise the money. I could re-write the scenes and cut some of the SAG actor’s character’s content. I could try and re-arrange the schedule so that the SAG actors work less days but that seems like the hardest and most difficult option. I’m gonna work this out when I get home from my trip to Maine. I leave Tuesday and come back Tuesday. This and a budget will be my top priorities when I get back. I’ll make the SAG offers after I have made a final decision on what to do about the issue.

I’ve been thoroughly talking to Ron about all the SAG issues and he’s been a great help.

I’ve decided to formally put together a business plan. Although we’re not looking for investors I think it’ll be a good thing to do as far as practice and other things. We’re actually looking for donations. We want to try and raise maybe $5000 in donations. I’m gonna be putting in close to that of my own money. At least I hope.

The website was updated a little. I put pictures from the state press up.

Jon’s coming over today and I’m going to give him his copy of the screenplay.

I was supposed to have my lunch with Mallory today but she had to cancel cause she said her work scheduled her even though she asked for it off. She’s gonna call me when she gets out of work to reschedule.

On Thursday I thought it would be a good idea to post on an urban exploration website and ask for help and money. Yeah, I thought since the movie is about some of that stuff people might be willing to help. Wrong. All they did was make fun of me. So I deleted my account. Oh well. It’s was a bad idea anyway.

The Snags

2006-06-14T22:47:00.000-07:00

Man, these production diaries are getting to be a large chore. A lot has happened in the last two days and I’m tired. It’s hard to sit here at 10:30 at night and write a synopsis of the past few days when I’ve got to get up early for work. But I like it none the less. Keeps me sane. Almost therapeutic.

Well first thing Tuesday morning I got in a tift with Colin about him playing himself. He really wanted to and I wanted him to but I just couldn’t fit the shooting schedule to what he needed. He said his work would probably only give him the time off for vacation and that’s only 11 days. He got kind of offended with me because he thought I was telling him that I’d rather someone else play him. Which isn’t true. I’d like him to play himself. But anyway, I assured him that wasn’t the case and today he had his meeting with his supervisor about his vacation time. I didn’t hear from him at all all day and when I talked to Dan at around 5 I told him we probably couldn’t cast him. BUT THEN!!! I got an email from Colin around an hour ago saying he got the whole shoot off and he’ll be here!!! Wahoo. I’m glad that worked out.

Vic said he’s interested in the role I offered him. I’m excited. He played this naked Native American in Jon’s zombie movie “blue juice” and he’s perfect for Officer Ashton. Hell, I pretty much wrote the part for him. He left me a message saying he was interested. I’ll call him tomorrow and work out the details of how to get him a script.

I finished the shooting schedule today. Well the schedule that is. I’ve still got some data entry to do. Stuff with props and set dressing stuffs. I’ll do that stuff when I get back when I start to do an official budget for the film. I’m just glad the preliminary shooting schedule is done that way I can start offering roles after I talk to SAG.

I did research yesterday into the different SAG contracts. I’m a little worried. Of the auditioners there are 4 actors that are SAG that I want to give roles too. But we can’t afford $1700. We have to pay them $100 a day according to the contract. I’m gonna call the head of SAG in our city and talk to him tomorrow about what my options are. Damn, I really want those actors. We’ll see.

The websites are all updated. I think they look nice thank you. I took everything out about the tunnels. Time to start being super secret.

We were in the state press yesterday. A photographer came to the auditions to take our photos for an article about the new film program. The article’s pretty cool but I was way stressed they were gonna say something about the movie. But they didn’t so it’s all good.

So far in the development and pre-production of this project I haven’t hit as big a snag as I did today. I got an anonymous business like email from Miguel saying in nicer words than this “there are serious issues with your capstone project”. Well I jumped right off the computer (which is why I’ll didn’t finish entering in the props and stuff) and walked right over to his office hoping to catch him. I did. We talked for awhile but basically he said I need to sell him on the fact that we can make this film. Which I can and will. We’re gonna be getting together on Monday to discuss the project. Even though this could be a potential problem, I’m happy it’s happening. I’ve been waiting for someone in the school of theatre and film to have serious issues with this project and I’m glad it was Miguel and not someone else. He had a lot of strange things to say and I’m not sure where he was going but he said he’s gonna go through my screenplay and shooting schedule thoroughly and we’ll talk on Monday. I’ll let everyone know how it goes.

How we Audition

2006-06-12T10:37:00.000-07:00

So, I figured since I didn’t go to much into the auditions in my last post I’ll tell you guys exactly what we did.

I posted auditions by appointment only. Actors were required to provide a headshot and resume. Actors would email me and I’d set them up with a time. I gave actors the option of emailing an electronic copy of their resume and head shot as well. Almost every single one of them brought in a head shot. As I said before, about 40 actors of the 70 that signed up showed up. When they first arrived at the room where they were told the auditions were being held they were given a form and a questionnaire to fill out. The form was generic. Name, date, phone, email, etc. the questionnaire had questions like “are you willing to shave your head?” and “are you comfortable portraying sexual acts for comedic effect” over all there were about 25-30 questions in that nature. We wanted to make sure actors knew what they were getting into and also we wanted to make sure we knew what actors were willing to do if we were interested in offering them a part. Then when, we were ready (the auditioning panel that is) we would radio in to the waiting room and call the actor(s) in. one of our staff would walk the actor(s) to the back room with their forms and headshots and resumes if they had them with them. The actor would come in and if there were two we’d have them read together and if there were one we’d have Linnaea Kimble, our production designer, read with them. I would introduce everyone by name and job to the actor(s) and then I would have them slate for the camera. They would say there name, their audition number, and do a left and right profile for us. Then we would have the actor read the scene twice. First time I told them to read it how they thought it should be read. The scene was two actors telling a story to someone and at the same time talking to each other, kind of like hosts on a morning talk show. If the actor presented the information in a positive manner I would ask the opposite. And if the actor initially presented the material in a negative manner I would again ask the opposite. After that we would go through there forms, ask them some questions about the answers they gave or anything on their resume, and then let them ask if they had any questions for us. And that was it. The actor(s) would then leave and we’d talk about them. Some people we know right away and other’s we’d have to think about. At the end of the day we spread out all the head shots on a table and I had note cards with character names and the whole staff would look at the headshots and we’d debate about who should play who. Over all it was a great, successful weekend and we accomplished a lot.

Yay for Communication!

2006-06-12T10:07:00.000-07:00

Auditions went very well. I just finished sending out a thank you email to all the actors that auditioned and I told them that of the seven shorts I’ve done this was by far the most talented group of actors I’ve ever auditioned. And that’s the truth. We had about 65-70 actors signed up and about 40 actually made it out. 5-6 cancelled and the rest were no shows. It didn’t discourage me though because if they don’t show to the audition they might not show to the shoot or something like that. Weed out the unreliable ones first. I told all the actors that we were giving ourselves a month to make final decisions. I’m actually going to be notifying people on Friday or Saturday. I’m gonna send them the screenplay, the part I’d like them to play, and a DVD with Credit Counselors, Rock.Paper.Scissors. and OK on it. I don’t want them to accept the role till I give them the shooting schedule details (which I should have by that time anyway) and the sag contract (which I have no idea when that will be worked out). I just want the actors to know that I want them to play a certain part and if they read the script and don’t want that part and they decline it’ll give us enough time to find someone else and make another offer. We’re actually going to be doing more auditions. There were a few crucial roles that didn’t get filled, mainly the role of me. But I’m not being vain or anything. I’m a real dork, and there were no dorks that auditioned really. I mean, everyone was either real cool or a woman. And those are two things I’m not. So we’re gonna do another casting call in a month or so.

Travis got a hold of IHOP and it looks like they want us to pay for the time there. I told Travis to look into Denny’s and see what they say. Denny’s could easily replace IHOP, although I’d love to do it at IHOP. I talked to Ron about it and he had some great ideas. He told us to email them and tell them that the actors are eating in the scene and that they will be paying for food and that the crew and extras we bring will be eating as well. He also said we should ask if we could do some sort of casting call with the waitresses so that we could get IHOP more involved. It’ll be interesting to see what they say.

I have yet to respond to Lamont in regards to his email, I’ve just been so busy. I’ll try and do it tonight.

I’m on my way back to the computer lab in a couple of hours to start work on the schedule again. It’ll be fun.

The meeting last Wednesday was interesting. Everyone ended up canceling so it was just me Dan and Noel. I gave them hard copies of the script then and everyone else got there’s at auditions. Well, Travis got his from me at work but that’s fine.

I offered the role of Melanie (the RA) to Kate Haas and she accepted the role. She got her copy as well. I’ve worked with her a lot before and I really wanted her to play this role. It’s gonna be fun.

Still haven’t heard from the story board guys yet. I’ll call them this evening.

I’ve been going through a hard copy of the script all this last week highlighting characters, props, locations, set dressings, and crucial sound effects. This production draft will be my key while I finish up the schedule; it’ll make it THAT much easier and faster. So I hope anyway.

My cell phone is up and running! Yay for communication!

I got an email from Brad Golden, the gentleman I want to play Officer Robert Navarro. He said he was excited about working on the project which makes me soooooo happy. He gave me his address so I mailed him a hard copy of the screenplay on Friday. Now I just wait.

I'll Take What I Can Get

2006-06-06T22:52:00.000-07:00

I’m tired. So tired. I’ve had a busy busy first part of the week. And I’m tired.

So last post I said 5 producers was enough. Well, we’ve added another. Noel Lucas. She’s new to the game so we gonna bring her on as a Co-Producer so she can get her feet wet. She’s film student at ASU and had a class with me and Dan. She had been emailing and calling me about summer projects and stuff and I told her that my only commitment thus far was Freshmen. She said she’d like to help any way she could and I invited her to a production meeting so she could see how we do things. Well at the meeting she signed on so I’ll put her profile on the website in a few days.

My production team doesn’t know this yet but I’m going to Maine in two weeks. My family’s there and I was gonna go in august but I didn’t want to leave for a week so close to production. I leave on Tuesday the 20th and come back Tuesday the 27th. I hope I can find something to do for the film while I’m out there. I’ll let the team know tomorrow

The production meeting went well on Sunday. We went a half hour over. Mostly because I walked them through how exactly auditions will run this coming weekend.

I sent out an email to the school of theatre and film today as one last reach to get actors for auditions this weekend. I’m interested to see how fruitful it will be. I made some alterations today for the auditioning room. It cost $25 but I think it will make a huge difference. What I did was had the room rearranged for us this weekend. It will be set up like a panel setting (like an audition!) instead of just a plane room. I also had the table draped. I’m excited about auditions. I think they’re gonna be fun.

I worked on the schedule all day yesterday. Well as long as I could. I didn’t get it done. I thought 8 hours would have been enough but it wasn’t. I was there from 10am-5:15pm. I only got really close to finishing updating the breakdowns. It took forever! I guess I didn’t realize just how different the old script was from the final one. The ladies on vacation till next Monday so next week my top priority is two things. One is finishing the shooting schedule. I wanted to have it done for auditions this weekend but oh well. The other is to get storyboard rolling.

I haven’t really talked to any of the story board guys yet. I haven’t sent them the script. Dan wanted me to have all the details worked out by tomorrow at our meeting but I’m not gonna be able to make that deadline. It was just something I couldn’t pull off.

I finished the script Sunday. I actually changed the title to “Freshmen: In the Night of Their Lives”. It gives the film a little bit of a cheekier mood (it was Jason’s idea. Thanks Jason). I want people going into this knowing it’s supposed to in fun. The final script clocked in at 117 pages. Well, 116 and a half really. Ha. But anyway. 20 copies were made tonight and I’m gonna pick them up in the morning. I’ll give them to the team tomorrow at the meeting. This is the only copy they’ll get from me. I’m gonna tell them that it’s $3 a copy from now in if they want or need another one.

Today I booked the stage in the MU in October for the Philanthropy scene. The stage goes fast so I wanted to book it ahead of time. I’m gonna go in and look at it tomorrow with the retractable wall closed so I can make sure it blocks out sunlight. If it works well we’ll do that shoot day for night. Which would be great. Save time and money.

I got an email from Chris LaMont today about the screenplay. I haven’t’ replied yet. It was ok. He had a lot of good things to say. The main problem he had with it was that he says the movie needs to be edited down heavily. He says he can’t keep track of who’s who. I think he’s wrong. Especially because of the example he used. Which confused me. He said think of great ensemble films like “can’t hardly wait” and how there were lots of characters and when you came out of the movie you could only remember three of the stories, if that many. I didn’t understand what he ment by this. Cause he said it was a great movie but then used it as an example of what’s wrong with mine. I still don’t understand. I’ll have to clarify it with him. I’ll email him tomorrow.

I’m grooming this girl to be either first AD or UPM on the shoot. Her name is Mallory and she’s amazing in a leadership role. I’m doing her a favor this week with some software for sound editing and then we’re gonna have lunch on Saturday the 17th. She’s been out of the country all semester. I really hope I can get her to sign on as crew. She’d be an even better producer but I don’t think she has the time. I’ll take what I can get.

Entry in Transit

2006-06-03T21:09:00.000-07:00

Here I am in Molly’s mini-van heading back to the city. We had to go up to some hoe dunk town for a retirement party. I guess one of Molly’s mom’s friends is retiring so we had to go. It wasn’t that bad. I would have rather worked on stuff for the film but it’s ok. There’s lots of stuff that I do where I would rather have worked on the film. Anyway.

Auditions are still steadily filling up. As of right now we’re gonna see about 60 actors so I think we should have a good pool to choose from.

I met with Jason and Chad for about 2 hours on Friday. It went fairly well. He had some really good things to say, some good suggestions as well. I took some of them and dismissed some of them. Most of the reason I dismissed his suggestions was not because it didn’t work or was bad but more because the screenplay is already so long. Chad came along and had read the screenplay and had some good things to say as well. I had wanted Chad to come on as a producer and Dan had talked about brining Jason on as a producer. Neither of them were really interested in working on the production. We didn’t talk about it but I could tell by there attitudes and about some other stuff we talked about. That’s fine with me though. 5 producers is enough ;)

I finished everything for the screenplay except for a few technical things. I tightened up the opening tunnel scene and mixed it in with the opening credits. It works much better. I’ve also strengthened the sense of alert in the cops in the beginning by adding some set up for the bomb threat. I’m still in the process of changing character names, location names, and police code. I want to make the police code a little more realistic and concise (Jason’s idea to his credit). The reason I’m changing a lot of names is because I don’t want to offend anyone or get sued. Some of the people the characters are based on have become very involved in the university and are usg senators or presidents of fraternities and stuff. As for the people who dropped, failed out, or I know I’m not changing their name. Like me Colin, and Brandon.

I told the production crew that I would have hard copies of the screenplay for them tomorrow at the meeting but their gonna have to wait till Wednesday or next Sunday. I’ll try and give them to them by Wednesday so that they can read the new draft before auditions on next Saturday and Sunday. I’ll definitely make the deadline for tomorrow for the final shooting draft of the screenplay and I would have had copies for them but the copy shop isn’t open on Sunday. I’ll send them an electronic copy. Hopefully that will appease them before I can get them a hard copy.

Since I was so close to finishing the screenplay Friday I emailed the lady in charge of the computer lab that has the Movie Magic Scheduling software. I’m soooooo glad I contacted her. I asked her when I could get into the lab cause she had told me that during the summer if I needed to use the software I had to contact her directly cause the lab would be closed other wise. So she’s going on vacation for a week on Tuesday! So she’s gonna let me in the lab at 10am Monday and I’m gonna stay there ALL DAY and completely revise the schedule. She’s gonna leave at 10:30 and I’ll just let myself out when I’m done. It’ll be really good to have the schedule done earlier than I thought. This way the production team can really get a head start on different things and at auditions I can be able to answer questions by actors about the schedule much better. Anyway, I’m excited to be getting the schedule done.

As a side not, just to let you know, I saw little scrapper Thursday night. We could here him crying outside so I went out looking for him with a bowl of food. After a few minutes I was able to find him under a car but he wouldn’t let me get close at all. I just left the bowl out for him. I don’t think he ate any of it. It was still full in the morning. I’m not worried about him though. He should be fine. He was wild before.

Help Holding It Up

2006-06-01T14:41:00.000-07:00

This is kind of random buy I got bit by a feral kitten last night. Molly and I were driving home and I saw an undercover cop cuffing a hooker. I told molly and she turned to look and when she turned back to the road we hit a cat running across the road. I turned around and saw the cat run off to the side of the road so we pulled over to see if anything was wrong. When we got to where the cat had been there was only this lone little kitten meowing. I don't think we hit him but we may have hit his mom. This stretch of road was really bad. Lots of traffic and construction, no place for an 8 week old kitten. Molly and I approached him and he ran around a corner. We followed and for a bit couldn't find him but started to here him crying again. I found him hiding up in a small tree. I reached up to and pulled a branch down and was able to pet him alright. He didn't hiss or anything. Molly told me to pick him up by the neck so I did. He didn't like that to much. As I was lowering him to the ground he struggled in my grip and was able to bite my right thumb and index finger with all his might. Writing this post is gonna be hard cause I know it's gonna be long. Anyway. We wrapped him in molly's shirt and took him to my apartment complex and let him loose there. Lots of people feed strays there and there's a big pool full of water. It’s a walled community and it's really safe. I named the cat little scrapper. Hopefully I’ll see him around. Little scrapper. Sheesh. Little bastard.

I met with Miguel on Tuesday. I went over to his office and he just happened to be there so we sat and talked for about an hour. We talked about locations on campus and reslife and the police and he's gonna do some administrative battling this summer and wants me to wait on campus locations till late July early august. That makes me extremely nervous. As of 3 days ago we're exactly 4 months out from shooting and I like to have my locations locked as soon as possible. There were also some issues with selling a product made for a class commercially. But these things will be worked out later. We also talked about getting credit for some of the other key students involved in the project. I'm excited about this because it boosts moral in the crew cause they're getting something more than nothing out of it, and also it kind of holds them to the production. So they have more at stake. These things help prevent no shows on the day of shooting ;)

I talked to facman today about the shooting date, location scout, and run through that I want to do and my contact was just full of yeses and oks. I’m so excited that this part of the production seems to be going off so far with out a hitch. Basically what I told him was that I wanted to do one more location scout. Then I wanted to sit with my crew and pick the exact locations for each and every shot/scene of the tunnels portion of the screenplay. Then we’d do a mock run through and go to every location so that when we actually film the crew that will be down there will be completely prepared for what needs to happen. I also talked to him about when we’d actually be shooting down there and everything looks cool. We’re even gonna keep working with the same guys that took us down before. They’ll be there for all three times we go in. they were awesome on the location scout so I’m really happy about it.

The elevator people emailed me Tuesday. it was a flat out no. in the email they sent was copy and pasted text from laws and stuff about only certified people entering elevator shafts and that the school wasn't willing to certify us or take the risk. I talked to the Miguel and the production team about it and they were cool. We came up with some alternative options.

I talked to Frankie and he's definitely interested he's gonna talk to the other guy, JJ, that did the bunny movie with him. I’m excited that their interested. They’ll officially sign on if they read the script. Hopefully they'll like it.

I haven't done much on the script since my last post. I’ve been super busy. But things are calm today and tomorrow and I’m planning on getting a lot done.

I had an epiphany the other day for who to use as a sound guy. I think I’m gonna ask the guy that did ADR for LOTD. I've got to do some ADR for some other shorts and I’m gonna email him to set that up. During the session I’ll mention to him that I’m making a film and looking for crew. I’ll try and use the same tactic I did with Dan Dredger. Try and get Andy to offer to help rather than ask him flat out.

Linnaea came to the meeting yesterday and it was great to see her. I gave her some old prop and vehicle lists so she can get started. I told her she can build her own team and I think she's gonna bring her son on board. She sent me stuff for her bio on the website. I’ll put it up this weekend

Auditions are filling up nicely and consistently.

Last night's production meeting went very very well. It also went an hour over. It was great though. Everyone showed up but Brandon. At the meeting I couldn't remember why he wasn't there but today I talked to him and he reminded me he had told me it was his girl friends birthday. So we talked about everything I just posted, except for the tunnels. I’ll tell them on Sunday if they don't read this. We also set some more dates. We backed storyboards to July 28th 2006. We want to make sure we have enough time to do it right. Posters and similar promotional materials are due February 1st 2007 and the official trailer’s due February 13th 2007. I feel really great about the team I have. I was just telling molly yesterday before the meeting that I was feeling stressed about the movie because we're only 4 months away. The meeting totally lifted that stress. I don't feel like the whole weight of the film is no my shoulders. I feel more like I’ve got 10 people helping me hold it up.

Wish Me Luck

2006-05-29T22:28:00.000-07:00

Not too much has happened in the last few days. Since it was a holiday weekend I’ve yet to hear from the facman or elevator guys. I don’t expect them to get back to me for a week or so. If a couple weeks go by then I’ll contact them again. I don’t want to be a pain in the ass if I don’t need to be.

On Friday I had to do some financial aide stuff at the student services building so while I was there I went and met with the new person at reslife. I new their office was there and was just hoping she was there. She was. The meeting was interesting. She asked me what the movie was about. She told me I needed to go through public events to get a filming permit, which I sooooo don’t want to do. We’ll see. This is a situation where I need Miguel at my rear, or in front for that matter.

Miguel FINALLY emailed me. I felt like abandoned for the longest time. Well not really. He emailed me with one sentence. “Just got back into town and haven’t’ gotten a chance to read your emails yet. I’ll read them this weekend.” He has yet to get back to me. I’ll talk to him when I contact him tomorrow about Frankie Mendoza.

Frankie Mendoza did this awesome, and I mean awesome, and I don’t through that word around with student films, animated film about dust bunnies. I wanna see if he’s interested in doing story boards for us. Unfortunately Dan and Drew’s schedules clash so much I hesitate to commit drew to the job. I wanna work with drew again and I think he would be a great addition to the team but his schedule and Dan’s clash so bad that it would take literally months to finish story boarding. So anyway I’m gonna contact Miguel tomorrow to get this kids information and offer him a job as a story board artist.

Linnaea Kimble, our production designer, has been MIA for the past couple weeks but finally emailed me tonight. Apparently she was having email problems. I wasn’t worried when she wasn’t coming to meetings though cause her job wont really start for a month or so. All though I’d like to keep her in the loop.

At our production meeting on Sunday we set down dates for the major deadlines for the whole project. I’d like to premiere the film at the 2nd annual school of theatre and film Student Film Festival. I got to talk to Miguel about it but it just seams appropriate since that’s around the time the project would be due for my capstone anyway. Here’s a list of some of the dates we set. Obviously there are some dates that still need to be set but this is what we accomplished on Sunday. I’m happy with it.

2006
June 4th - Lock Shooting Draft of Screenplay
July 14th – Finish Story Boards
August 31st – Lock Locations
September 30th – First Day of Shooting
October 27th – Wrap Shooting
November 10th – Completely Digitize and Organize All Footage
December 8th – Rough Cut of picture

2007
January 19th – Final Picture Lock
April 2nd – Finish and Lock Entire Film
April 30th or there about – Premiere of Film

As for the screenplay. I’ve started the re-write. It’s ok so far. I’m not ecstatic with it but it works for now. I’ll keep plugging at through out the next couple of days and hopefully come up with some good stuff. I’ve since added the scene I talked about with the cat and the tunnels and I’ve removed some stuff. It’s at 113 right now. I’d like to get it shorter so I’m gonna do some serious and hard editing. Wish me luck.

Yup, That’s Right, I Said It.

2006-05-25T23:54:00.000-07:00

Well, I found Miguel...sort of. I still have yet to communicate with him but I did talk to his boss and she said he's been out of town. So I’m just twiddling my thumbs waiting for him to get back to me.

I emailed facman about doing another location scout in the tunnels. I emailed the guy on Wednesday and he has yet to get back to me. I told him we set a date for shooting (which I did) and that I wanted to do one or two more location scouts. I hope the date I picked is good for them. I told him to get back to me if it's not. So I’m waiting for him too.

So while I was at work this lady from the elevator safety department or something like that called to book a room. I immediately pounced on the opportunity to and asked her who I’d talk to about shooting in an elevator shaft. She gave me some guy's contact info so I’m gonna email him this afternoon.

Auditions are filling up nicely. It’s going to be a good turn out. I’m getting excited.

I set dates for production meetings for the rest of the summer. We’re gonna be meeting on Wednesdays and Sundays at 6pm and 7pm. I emailed the producing and creative teams with the details.

I met with Ron yesterday at Chilies for 4 hours. We went over my screenplay and his. He had a lot of really good things to say and some really good suggestions of how to make it stronger. I'm totally excited to do another re-write. Yup. I said it. I’m doing another re-write. I’ll probably finish this weekend. I'm not gonna do an intensive retype the whole thing kind of re-write. But I am gonna go through and tighten up some stuff as well as add a few things. That’s right. You heard me. Add a few things. But what I’m gonna add is crucial to the story. I’m gonna add this scene in the beginning where the cops go into the tunnels because an alarm is going off. What they find is a kitty. But it'll help show that the cops are on high alert and that they're nervous and skeptical of the tunnels at the same time. I'm also gonna strengthen my character as the lead and I’m gonna do some scene re-writes. Needless to say I’m excited.

Miguel, Where art thou?

2006-05-23T16:26:00.000-07:00

I had a little panic attack this morning. I posted to the audition notice web service that I usually use on Saturday and the website said it was supposed to be distributed on Monday. Well, Monday came and went and no news letter with my audition post. In fact no news letter at all. First thing I did this morning when I got to work was email the website to see what’s up. I was afraid that my post was rejected because it was virtually the same as the previous post I put up back in April. But, low and behold, right after I send my email of concern I get the news letter and there’s my audition post. Later the person in charge of the website emailed me and told me they had had technical difficulties the night before. All’s good so far. I’ve already got about 10 actors scheduled for the auditions and I’m sure more will come as people get home from work and vacations and such in the next few weeks. But I was really scared. Where was I going to find actors if this didn’t work?!?!

Monday I sent an email to reslife to reopen the line of communication I started a while back. I got a response from my contact today that I was not to happy with. For one, she said that she was no longer with reslife. This pissed me off because I started talking to her months and months ago to set up a relationship with her and now that seems frivolous. And for two, she said I need to go through public events. And public event’s red tape is soooo thick. I tried to get in touch with Miguel again today but no luck. I wonder if he’s on vacation or something. It would have been nice for him to inform me. Tomorrow I’m gonna talk to the head of the department about the capstone class and the where about of Miguel. Miguel’s gonna be my number one hitter in dealing with all this red tape, as he’s the faculty advisor for my project.