Friday, December 29, 2006

O! Spam, How I Love Thee


Some days, I love my spam:


The young man stopped to look at it and a hand, sudden and
and unlocked my handcuffs.
She lowered the small, coin-sized communicator as I stalked towards
to the journalists. Nor had the map even hinted at the many levels
administer it. However there was an accident in transit. Sweat
and the Paradisians I guess, basically, I know absolutely nothing.
assume that he did not.
hope. The door opened and there was a hiss, rumble and clank behind me
There, Steengo said, tapping the paper. Weasel wording. That
with this because I fell deeply asleep.
zonked me? I counted on my fingers. Just about eighteen gone, which

Thursday, December 28, 2006

KaZildjian


OK, so I'll admit that I'm attracted to the cover art.

I'm thinking that Empire is worth working out to. I was kinda thinking that they aren't as compressed as most modern pop. I was kinda thinking that maybe the Easter Bunny is real, too.

Ultimately, I'm not really cool enough to listen to Kasabian. Now, Nephew.dk is all about me.

I'm also thinking about upgrading my password security. The problem is that really I only want one dang password, and that different sites have different standards. Some insist on a *&^ - type character. Some demand only alpha-numerics. Bleh. Oh, and different lengths! Some have weirdly short lengths!

Tuesday, December 26, 2006

Bang, boobs, BOOM

I wasn't all that happy with Kill Bill. But certainly the Rodriguez shows promise.

Thanks to Bill at http://d2dvd.blogspot.com/


And here's a blast from the Katrina past (I'm cleaning out my images folder -- may as well have Google store 'em.)

And finally:

Back, tired, petting cat.

Franz Mark. I think he was one of the Blaue Rider (Blaue Riden?) Big yellow cat. Kinda looks lionish to me.
We're setting up a couple scripts (although Mac ain't got back to me with the completed Angry Planet script, which he said he'd do before Christmas... ahem.) But what's really got to happen is deliverables for Bloodmask/Millennium Crisis. I realized I've been complaining about deliverables for a while. But now we know we need NTSC and PAL pan-and-scan DigiBetas. Bleh. Pan-and-scan. I would've really hoped for letterboxed. We might be able to go with center-extraction. I'll be testing this week.

Monday, December 25, 2006

Merry Christmas


I've been listening to Jonathan Coulton's Chiron Beta Prime Christmas song. Looking at this squirrel from cute overload. Working on my niece's computer.
Now I'm chatting with her friends on IM. I'm sure she really appreciates that.
She doesn't have any kind of web site. So I'll link to my nephew, who took me on a tour of Atlanta yesterday (you'll have to find him on the page.)

Merry Christmas.

Sunday, December 24, 2006

Naked Fighting

Am in Atlanta for Christmas. This is what I've gotten for Christmas Eve:

How To Put On A Bra 101 - video powered by Metacafe

My brother David is responsible for showing me this.

I'm thinking about making this kind of thing my specialty. Naked women fighting. That should be in EVERY movie. This is apparently from a movie called "Dead or Alive" which, I believe, did not open in the United States. It did play, however, in New Zealand and Turkey.

We got some pages for a new script from Maduka Steady. I'm lovin' the characters. It's really exciting.

Friday, December 15, 2006

My New Girlfriend


Hi Ho Silver
Originally uploaded by Bendito Thomasito.

This is Ben Thomas. He's my new girlfriend. Not only does he play an android in what's now "Millennium Crisis" he also did the new voiceover for the Millennium Crisis trailer. But more than that. I love him. AND the horse he rode in on.


O! But wait! There's more (and believe me, there's so much more). Ben tries to get himself fired from his boring office job by making claymation animation at work (because, apparently, riding the copier like a cowboy didn't do it.) You too will love Ben for his new uses of post-it notes, clay, and lots of spare time.
LOTS. Of spare time.

Thursday, December 14, 2006

Christopher Who?


Why does anyone bother to listen to Christopher Hitchens anymore? I mean, he still thinks he's right about the second Gulf War, for cryin' out loud. Now he's on the "Women aren't as funny as men" trip.
http://forksplit.blogspot.com/2006/12/balls.html

And while I'm at it, isn't this the most perfect thing? http://www.fakeyourspace.com/

Wednesday, December 13, 2006

How to Make Money Making Movies.


I'm gonna call them "Chance's Rules" after Chance Shirley. And I'm going to list them like this:

1. Shoot on 35mm
2. Hire "Name" talent (of the B-list variety)
3. Blood, boobies, BANG!

(Waterhouse, Pandora, oops I mean "Psyche" opening box)

Monday, December 11, 2006

Today's Spam: a poem

His name out of my bloodAnd thou.

World taxd and deboshdWhose. Now will I charge you in.

MothersI care no more for.

Angry Planet ah-one


Mac Rogers delivered a big chunk of script late last night for our upcoming movie Angry Planet. I'd thought of making a space-opera Western because I saw a video by Muse. Laura Schlachtmeyer thought the plot should be based on Sweeny Todd and Maduka Steady pointed out that Sweeny Todd is actually The Count of Monte Christo. Laura wrote a treatment. I wrote a scene. And now Mac has written all but the last 10 pages.Here's a great scene which we'll never be able to shoot because we can't get a bunch of mutant children. Oh, but if only we had the money (and the tutors!) Man, we gotta figure out how to film this scene:

WESTERHOLM
Do you like children, Cub?

CUB
What?

WESTERHOLM
I hope so.

Westerholm gives Cub a shove, and he tumbles down a hole into a cave beneath the rock-scape.

CUT TO:
INT. THE CAVE
Cub blearily opens his eyes and looks around. The chamber he is in is lit by torches. There are children all around him. Some are asleep, some are waking up. They are all in silhouette.
CUB
What the fuck?
He stumbles through the children and tears one of the torches off the wall. He turns and holds the torch in front of him. And immediately wishes he hadn’t. All the children are hideously deformed, and they have razor-sharp teeth. The room he’s in is a nest.

CUB
Oh motherfucking god.
He swings the torch around and the mutant children cringe away. He looks up at the hole in the ceiling and swings the torch around, looking for a way up.

CUB
Cale!
One child lunges beneath the torch and sinks its teeth into Cub’s leg. Cub screams and kicks. Another bites into his wrist, forcing him to drop the torch. In an instant they’re on him, biting into his legs, his thighs, dragging him to the floor. Cub screams and screams as he goes down into the hungry mass of mutant children.

Sunday, December 10, 2006

Robo-envy

Chance from Crewless is shooting a sci-fi movie soon. I was privileged to read the script and it's really good.
I've hit a snag in the script I'm working on. It'll take a bit of menuberating to get it back in shape. Structurally I'm basing it on (what else) Blade Runner. But 'till now I've been ignoring the "J.F. Sebastian" sub plot.
A couple years ago I shot a movie with Blair Johnson. Andrew Frank and Mitchell Riggs were directing. Blair is now starting to edit the movie. When we were shooting I told him nobody would ever edit that movie. But hey, as it turns out. I was wrong.

Thursday, December 07, 2006

Freeware


 I'm a big fan of Open Office, but truthfully I end up using Google's Spreadsheets and Documents more than most anything. By and large, I use Samplitude, Final Cut Pro, Adobe AfterEffects, Photoshop,  and... er... Final Draft (although I lost one of my keys so it's only running on one computer even though I switch back and forth between a Mac and a PC .

http://www.thesimpledollar.com/2006/12/01/30-essential-pieces-of-free-and-open-software-for-windows/

This link came from http://kfmonkey.blogspot.com

And the baby panda bear not looking too happy -- that's from www.sfgate.com "Day In Pictures".


Wednesday, December 06, 2006

From an AFM Publication

This is the best idea for any movie ever:

CHRONIC

A busload of teens en route to a rehabilitation camp find themselves transformed into ultra-violent killers after encountering a burning plane full of chemically tainted marijuana.

http://www.returnofthelivingdead4and5.com

And because I don't like to publish without a picture:

Monday, December 04, 2006

No SciFi Channel for you!

So we've been rejected by those who gave us Alien Apocalypse. And even Savage Planet. Dag. That's cold. We can't even get with the space bears!



No, seriously -- we heard back from Ray Cannella (who's a really nice guy) and we will not be getting a sale to the American SciFi Channel. But this really was no surprise to us. We know that they had exactly one spot to fill and we're up against producers like Nu Image and so forth.

The real purpose of this post is that Ray's a pretty straight-up guy and gave good detailed notes as to why they "passed" on us. We found them very interesting.

First off, he thought we bit off too big a chunk doing an "off-world" picture on a limited budget (meaning sub-$1 million budget). That's probably true. Heck, that's definitely true. We're like that hungry hampster. It doesn't matter that we shot a multi-planet epic, we just HAVE to get the whole thing in our mouth! It doesn't matter HOW many metaphors we have to mix!

hamster time!

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He also felt that: "The performances were also uneven. You have a great number of speaking parts here with some performers trying to give an "otherworldly" feel to their characterizations."

Actually, I think that our performers were uniformly very good. Perhaps the real issue (if there is one, and he wasn't being unduly influenced by some lesser special effects we had in the screener he saw) is a directorial one. We tended to play everything really straight. The story is a kind of "Alice in Wonderland" where the character of Aurora (played by the perfect Clare Stevenson) runs into all kinds of various and crazy characters. And I think that perhaps we could have made some characters more "big", instead we tended to go "inside" more. Maybe that's what Ray is saying?

Ray went on, referring to Sci-Fi's Original Movies. "This is yet another reason why we don't attempt these kinds of stories. Budget limitations won't allow us to get the level of acting required to pull off bizarre, unusual or eccentric performances while incorporating the complicated futuristic "techno-speak" required."

Well, the one thing I know from 20 years of New York theater experience is that budget has absolutely nothing to do with acting talent. In fact, most Hollywood film actors can't actually act their way out of a paper bag. The quality of your actors is not a budget thing at all. Especially in New York. (Now, I understand that in LA it actually is hard to find decent actors.)

Ray also didn't like that we'd shot in HD instead of 35mm. (Yes, I know, we shot on a DVX100a -- for those of you who know what that means, well -- you know what that means.)
Here's his comment: "In the case of BLOODMASK there's little to no depth of field with the photography...thus the production looks more like a video game than a dramatic scripted movie."

Now this is what has me concerned. First, some graphics for you. Throughout the movie we have frames emulating Titian's Venus of Urbino. It's partly a joke, because I like the painting, partly just because the depth is nice and pleasing to the eye.


Titian: a man who loved infinite depth-of-field.


My deliberate aesthetic goal is to make movies which look like paintings. Paintings tend to have an infinite depth-of-field (as do many shots in Citizen Kane for that matter). But a lot of modern cinematographers want as shallow a depth-of-field as possible. Ironically, they think things look "flat" when the entire image is in focus, and that it has a lot of "depth" when only a shallow plane of the image is in focus.
How do I put this nicely? Shallow depth-of-field just looks so mediocre to me. I have this argument with Mitchell all the time (well, not really an argument, we tend to go shallow on his films, deep on mine -- I mean "deep" on his, "flat" on mine.)

What's disturbing to me about this shallow depth-of-field aesthetic is how pervasive it is. The prejudice 'gainst a deep depth-of-field has flowed up from modern cinematographers to producers and buyers. And yet still most people will admit that Citizen Kane is one of the best films ever made. And certainly Titian's Venus is in the canon. But will my desire to make dramatic features which look like paintings hurt me commercially?



Oh and O! BLOOD OF THE NAKED MUTILATORS 2: FULL FRONTAL BLOOD FRENZY. Laura was even at the AFM this year. Why didn't she tell me anything about any of this??!!!

Sunday, December 03, 2006

Oh December


I want more robots.
Yes!
Robots!
I've always wanted a Robby. But the ultimate goal is a Maria. Well, in any case, we need to make a movie where a leggy blonde is carried by a monsterous robot somewhere.
Plus: I love this video. Massive space war. It's Battlestar Galactica versus the Star Wars Empire. So exactly what movies should be: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxX0DKE3oqw

Met Chance Shirley, great guy. I really enjoyed "Hide and Creep". I can't wait to see his next film which he's shooting very soon.

I'm thirty pages into what will be one of our next scripts. In a few days Mac Rogers will have a script for us too. That'll be two. Then Maduka's working on yet another script and I'm trying to convince Laura to write a vampire huntress script.

Ato has his own web site. Did I know this? Maybe I did.

And for those of you playing along at home, here's a video showing how to kiss a girl: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ayw9NdlBlA
And just to finish things up, here is my Amazon wish list. Boy, this is a hodge-podge post, isn't it?
My Amazon.com Wish List

Thursday, November 30, 2006

Nephew

OK, so when I was a wee lad, a couple of upper classmen (Pete Cenedella was one of them, although we met up again in 2000/2001 and he didn't remember me) took me into their room in order to teach me about The Residents, another new band nobody had ever heard of called Talking Heads, and the Dead Kennedys. And while I couldn't really get into the Residents, wearing an eyeball with a tophat was, well, aesthetically informative to my youth.


What this means, of course, is that guys with boxes on their heads really appeals to me.


"Igen & Igen &" Music Video

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Monday, November 27, 2006

BLOOD OF THE NAKED MUTILATORS

Would you like to watch a French "not safe for work" commercial? I would too! http://www.totallycrap.com/videos/videos_arayal_commercial/

For "safe for work" I give you this wonderful take on the AFM:
http://sex-in-a-sub.blogspot.com/2006/11/american-film-market-all-losers-in.html
Now, of course, I want to make Blood of the Naked Mutilators just because it sounds like a great idea.

The Attic

The Attic Movie Trailer

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Here's a movie I recorded sound on. About the time I started this blog. Now they have a trailer. (Obviously mixed on the video editing system 'cause they are using my split tracks as though they're stereo -- the voices jump back and forth. Apparently I'm the only one who notices this but it happens all the time in trailers.)

Channel Fiction Science

Or: Off-World action-oriented science fiction films.

Remember when Laura met with the SciFi Channel? Our goal ultimately was to become producers of SciFi Channel Original Movies. That's really not so much our goal now. And this is why:

Up 'till now SciFi Channel's acquisitions has been trying to fill 24 slots/year. 80% of those movies are independents. But things aren't working. First off, they have trouble with movies like Bloodmask as it is an "Off-World Film" -- the wisdom is that "we know those don't work." But secondly, they thought they had the formula for ratings with creature features, but they aren't working either.

Incidentally, if they do buy a movie, they typically get a 90-day window to air it, then they let you have a 1-year home video window, and then it reverts to a SciFi Channel window again for some length of time.

They (SciFi Channel) feel they get Tivo'ed more than network shows are. (Tivo'ed shows don't count toward ad revenue). So now they want to make Saturday night movies more of an event, then they want to do acquisition of bigger theatrical packages -- probably from big studios, not independents.

Now, as far as our being a producer: it's much easier if he's bought films from the producer before. Basically, they will buy your movie for $750,000 against a $2Mil budget. That blows our economics of shooting for $350K and keeping the rest for a rainy day.

And here's a rough estimate of the SciFi Channel act structure:
I. 18 minutes / II. 7 minutes / III. 8 minutes / IV. 9 minutes / V. 13 minutes / VI. 10 minutes / VII. 8 minutes / VIII. 9 minutes

So what does this mean? We won't be producing for the SciFi Channel any time soon. But we will be making action-oriented Science Fiction "off world" features. That's our business plan. And we're stickin' to it! ;-)

Fun bunny butt curtesy of http://www.cuteoverload.com/

Thursday, November 23, 2006

My Bio


I had to send in a bio today because I'm composing the score for Macbeth at Manhattan Theatre Source. And because it was a company - wide email, we were all asked for headshots. Well, designers and technical staff don't usually include their headshots but I thought it would be amusing to take a picture of myself and send it along with my bio. Here it goes:

"Drew is a founding member of ManhattanTheatreSource, a distinction in that, like a little red imp on Andrew Frank's shoulder, he persuaded Mr. Frank into putting a theater in a former dance clothing store on MacDougal Street in Manhattan's historic Greenwich Village.
He's been doing sound/music/film things for a while now. This is actually the second time he's scored a Macbeth, the first time for a comedic film version. He designed sound for Andrew Frank and Doug Silver's Sidd off-Broadway, and composed the score for Woyzeck here at Theatresource. Drew recently directed a feature film: Bloodmask (a.k.a. Millennium Crisis) which stars Ato Essandoh and was produced and co-written by Laura Schlachtmeyer."

I used to write much more satirical bios, mentioning snotty things like being fired from some of the most famous theater companies in New York -- the New York Shakespeare Festival and the Wooster Group (dating Joseph Papp's girlfriend and being chased down the street by Willem DaFoe, respectively) but out of just trying to not embarass Andrew Frank and Doug Silver, I've calmed down lately.

Sunday, November 19, 2006

Things of Interest



You know what's a number that's hard to find? P&A budgets for theatrical - release motion pictures.

I've been reading Business Affairs lately.

From here on out we're just going to make movies as though we intend them for wide national release. The CG will look that way. The quality of the image will look that way. Or so says I. Likewise.

Margaret Dodge as Athena in Pandora Machine.

My dad got his new airplane yesterday.

Wednesday, November 15, 2006

Our first offer(s)


Last night we found out that we have offers from Japan and Thailand. We don't know much about these offers, we'll report more when we know more. And when we know more, we'll have a better idea of what next year brings when we begin working on a slate of movies...
Ted Raimi came up with the idea for this shot. It looks like we're a new wave group from the early 80's -- Devo meets Kraftwerk or something...

Saturday, November 11, 2006

Sometimes a picture of a cat

... is what you need.

We're thinking about a slate of 5 movies. Mostly sci-fi, maybe with a vampire huntress thrown in for fun...

Sunday, November 05, 2006

In the future...


We don't know about, and likely won't have for serveral months, overseas deals for Millennium Crisis aka Bloodmask. But this we do know: In the future there will be more nudity, more action, more alien cityscapes, more robots.
(OK, so I'm the one responsible for the "more robots" part but the "nudity, action, cityscapes" part comes from what distributors need to sell scifi.)
We can do this. And the fact is that "more nudity, more action" is the real core of what buyers want. Other than that, I get the feeling we can do whatever we want. It's going to be the Count of Monte Christo and Treasure Island and... from here on out.

Saturday, November 04, 2006

Laura at AFM


Laura is cruising the American Film Market today. It's the last day of the regular part of the market, before the nuttiness begins. She's meeting with our rep, Halcyon International Pictures. She's hanging out in front of our poster.

Friday, October 27, 2006

To Seneca

Elinor Carucci "And if I don't get enough Attention".

Made a new trailer with the name "Millennium Crisis". Waiting on further Millennium Crisis artwork. Working on the audio for the 2-channel mix. I bet we're not going to get a 5.1 mix 'till we have a North American home video sale.
Mitchell is editing music video. Time to squeeze a cat.

Monday, October 23, 2006

Off-World


Laura had a meeting with Ray Cannella of the SciFi Channel today. We don't know how that's going to work out, but we learned that the kinds of movies we like to make are called "Off World" pictures. This amuses me. Andre Norton used that term a lot. I'm a big fan. . .

A new name.

MILLENNIUM CRISIS
EPISODE I
ENTER, THE BLOODMASK
starring Aaron Paul Low as..... composer
Shockingly, this idea was come upon by... Aaron Paul Low... our composer. I rather like the name Millennium Crisis when it's the series. And "Enter, the Bloodmask" entertains me to no end.

Sunday, October 22, 2006

Pictures


I don't like to blog without a picture of something. This is from www.worth1000.com.

The big news is that Monday (tomorrow) Laura has a meeting with the Sci-Fi Channel about Bloodmask.

Things have been happening so fast with Bloodmask that we haven't sent out a big email to cast & crew telling them what's been going on. That task should move up in priority this week I think.

This past week I DP'ed a music video (directed by Mitchell Riggs). We used the MovieTube (which we rented from Abel Cine Tech.) The MovieTube has quite a bit of promise as a lens adapter system, although it loses 3 (count 'em) 3 stops. We used Zeiss lenses (I think I'd have preferred Cookes) but the MovieTube itself has a specific, warm, "look" to it. After Mitch logs the footage, I'll put up some stills.

Monday we're going to overnight a DVD or two to Halcyon in California so that they have a good DVD screener with a trailer which reads "Millennium Crisis" instead of Bloodmask.

Saturday, October 14, 2006

Bloodmask, er, Millennium Crisis


The overseas version of Bloodmask is going to be Millenium Crisis. Of course, most of the countries we'll be selling to are not English-speaking. Lucky for us, Halcyon International Pictures has an excellent artist in the way of Ryan Brookhart and here is some preliminary artwork.

Friday, October 13, 2006

Readying for Music Video

We're making a pickup today from Abel Cine Tech (lenses and such) to shoot a music video next week. This is Mitch and Catie's Luca. He's helping me render out Bloodmask. Bloodmask may be called Millennium Crisis overseas. Gotta make some textless versions of it.

Monday, October 09, 2006

Signing



Although we don't seem to have the appropriate technology to actually fax our agreement, Bloodmask LLC has signed with Halcyon International Pictures. They'll be taking Bloodmask to the AFM in November.
Clare Stevenson with Ted Raimi. Clare running from multiple androids (Kim Vasilakis), the Terran Ambassador (played by Clare's husband Al DelBene) and Harkness (Ato Essandoh), while Counselor Carrasco looks on (Jeff Plunkett).

Tuesday, October 03, 2006

More Nudity!


Ted Chalmers says we have to have more nudity. OK, so he didn't really say that. But he said that an "R" rating was better for DVD's. We shot two versions of this swordfight. I haven't been all that happy with the edit of the swordfight, but now I'm editing the "R"-rated version of the fight and it seems much better. And Lindsey sure would be ticked off at me if we didn't have this version on DVD! (We were building an edit for TV -- that's why the nudity restrictions on our previous edit.)

Saturday, September 30, 2006

Delivering Deliverables


We've been talking to Ted Chalmers at Halcyon. We need to come up with an HD 1.77:1 master, from which can be struck Pal and NTSC masters, both in letterbox 2.35:1, 1.77:1 fullscreen, and 1.33:1 fullscreen (sides chopped off). I also wanna figure a way to get a 5.1 M&E onto the HD masters, but we start to have trouble with the track-count on HD (there's only 8 tracks). We could do it if we were using Dolby E, however...
How the heck to you encode into Dolby E? I suspect a license is involved so maybe a day at a re-recording studio is in order...
And for that matter, I really want to do a pass on the dialog tracks with a Cedar DNS1000.
For money, Mitchell and I are doing a music video next month. He's directing and I'm DP/producer-of-some-sort. I'm just glad I ain't directing. We're going to rent the movietube and a couple Zeiss 35mm lenses (probably an 18, 35 or 50mm, and an 85). Mitch likes a shallow depth-of-field. Maybe we'll forgo the 35 or 50mm and get something really long then... Nah, that just won't be that useful.
And then there's this pig from www.cuteoverload.com

Thursday, September 28, 2006

Deliverables


For some reason, I'm amused by this picture.

That's Marta fixing Clare's hair, Ato's in the background, and probably me next to the camera.

We're making deliverables for Bloodmask.

Tuesday, September 19, 2006

Hello? Well, finally!


Today we got some screeners of Bloodmask in the mail to some people. I'm working on designing the first week of Estrogenious. And the weather's been great for walking.
If it weren't for www.sfgate.com I'd never get any pictures of Japanese walruses on their inflatable cellphones.

Friday, September 15, 2006

I have a new favorite website.


Indeed, a million bunnies with a million pancakes couldn't have thought up such a perfect site. Especially after a day of politics. Hampsters. The hampsters say hello. Oh la la la.
I think I figured out my sync issues: quonky DirectX plugins in Samplitude. But now I've "frozen" the objects in tracks and that seems to solve the issue. A DVD is being burned right now. Many will go out next Monday if it works and gets approved and is in sync. . .

Wednesday, September 13, 2006

Under Control -- One More Thing



Here's a before and after of a window. We were having trouble with this window strobing, I have no idea why it was strobing, it was only strobing on the DVD copies we were making. But hopefully we have it under control.

Is that the shadow of the camera on Olja's leg? Oh, who knows. I'm desperate to get screener copies out this week. There keeps being just one thing which fouls us up. iDVD seems to be having a little party with sync. I don't really know what's up with that. But hopefully everyone will line up (meaning audio and video) and we can do the last two renders which need to take place before output for screeners (making copies is relatively easy, once the first one is made.)

It's all this one more thing which I've been doing which has kept me for the last few weeks. I really. Really. Really want to be done by now!

Sunday, August 27, 2006

Why -- what do YOU do?

... because I put my hand in front of the camera as a slate when we've done some wild lines directly onto the camera (which is a practice I don't condone, but we end up doing one or two scenes that way on a feature, recognizing that the average audio quality isn't reduced so much as long as one limits the amount of "ENG" sound in the whole movie."

Tuesday, August 22, 2006

Shooting Eyes







 Among other things, tomorrow we must shoot closeups of eyes. Clare's eyes. And here are some images we're to match to.

Friday, August 18, 2006

What do I do?

Here's a picture of my cart.
I've completed most of the picture edits we have on our "punch list" we created last Sunday. One more picture edit to go.
Mac Rogers gave us his thoughts & we turned 'em into a concrete set of edits with further consultation by our "third screenwriter" Anthony Litton, and our special effects director Maduka Steady. Ed McNamee assured us that the story was working emotionally (he's not a big fan of science fiction) and that's all I need to know!
There's about a dozen more sound edits to do, robot foley, and then: reshoots/additional photography! We hope to get all that done on Wednesday/Thursday...
That means we should be able to start duplicating screeners this coming weekend.
I'm not so sure I'm a sound mixer anymore. I think I'd like to do, say, one film a year as a sound mixer, one as a DP, and one as a director. (I bet I'd get paid in diminishing order for those three things!) I'd love to have a Cooper mixer, a couple Shoeps mics, that sorta thing, just to have around.
In any case, we're finishing pickups on Bloodmask on Wednesday. I hope to have all the edit changes done by then.
Here's a quote. You can tell that I've been doing a lot of surfing while rendering.
http://www.overheardintheoffice.com/archives/002667.html

Monday, August 14, 2006

87% Solution


We figure we're at 87% of the movie we want. We need to shoot three sets of things: a reshoot of a closeup between Aurora and Lucretia, some closeups of Aurora's eyes, and Murnau's chamber where he gets his orders to deal with Aurora.

The Power of Christ Compel Thee

... and stop bein' stanky...

Saturday, August 05, 2006

Saturday Night with Descent


Truthfully, I thought Below was a lot better. Similar names. Very different attention to the script. I liked Dog Soldiers though.

I am posting now with www.writely.com

Another Google product.

But I still have to go into Blogger to change the headline. Don't know why.