Why? Tell me why Bill Cunningham hasn't linked to this article from the New Yorker yet? ;-) (Sure, it's about a big player, Lion's Gate, but in telling about the audience and the story and the marketing it's everything we little companies need to be doing and aware of.)*
My favorite quote:
“I’m managing my stress that they want a guy named Doobie to cut the trailer.”
Abandoned building in Central Michigan. Isn't it funny that Windsor Ontario is south of Detroit?
I've used up 57% of my allowable image quota on Blogger. It won't be too much longer that I'll just have to move to a new blog account. Or something.
Tomorrow I send out the last (I hope) of the contracts for Alien Uprising.
*************
Here are some notes on Nikon lenses. I've concluded that we do indeed need to use the Nikon D90 for exteriors in New York in order to shoot with available streetlight. And we need the fastest lenses.
There is some merit to the Vivitar over the Nikon 85mm. But nominally it would be better for us to use the same lens manufacturer just so the color and such tends to match when going from wide to closeup. We think.
Vivitar Series 1 85mm f1.4 $375 Nikon 35mm f1.4 perfect optics and operation $500 store -- $255 cheapest auction. I just got outbid at $358 for one in perfect condition.
Does the dystopian alien city end up only being seen in a wireframe because the pollution makes it impossible to actually see things further than about 20 meters away?
We can do wireframe really well. Of course, to a visual effects person wireframe looks "cheap". That's because it's the first thing they learn to do. But to the audience it looks really cool. I say if it's good enough for John Carpenter, it's good enough for me! ;-)
Oh the things we musts do in order to shoot on a no-budget budget.
The Blade series I'm watching on Joost.com has me pretty well hooked. I'm surprised at how good the art direction is. And the mix is better by episode 3 than it was for the pilot.
The characters are strong. It's not as predictable as TV series' usually are. And it looks like each episode is more than 12 days of shooting. I have no idea how they budgeted for this.
The analog of the racial politics is vastly more interesting in the series than in the films. At least what I interpret as the analog of racial politics. And it sure looks like they actually shot in Detroit. The exteriors don't look like LA, that's for sure. Maybe they shot in Canada somewhere where it's grey outside all the time*. That's the right exterior look for Blade.
I'm a big fan of the second Blade movie especially. But the series has things which I think are even better than the movie versions. Oddly, in the TV series the "world" seems a bit more complete.
************* Mpix makes photo books. ************* The Hacker's Diet. How to lose weight and hair through stress and poor nutrition.
So we just inked a deal for a new movie, Clonehunter by Eric Steele. Good news? It's not an ensemble piece. Bad news? It wasn't written as a low-budget but rather as an off-world noir thriller about a professional clone hunter... well, this actually:
2525 A.D. David Cain is the Clonehunter - employed to capture escaped clones so that their genetic fathers can use them as hosts to gain immortality. But when this particular clone uses his mutant powers to control a planet's entire mafia, Cain becomes the hunted instead of the hunter.
I have no idea how we're going to shoot it. I think I have the hoverbikes figured out but the dystopian city on the alien planet is going to take some work.
So I finally watched the first two parts of the pilot of the Blade series (which is linked below.) I thought it was surprisingly good. The story is strong, the performances are mostly very good, it looks terrific and the music is especially good. I wish the dialog were just a tad better/louder.
Why did it fail? I bet that it was really expensive to produce. And I bet that it really only skewed on the male demographic of SpikeTV which may have hurt its ratings. I bet somebody knows a lot more about what happened and why regarding the cancellation of the series. I know that I could never figure out what time it was on.
*************
So, I gotta come up with about 35 more pages of contracts for Alien Uprising. I'm workin' on it. I've worked on movies which have gotten theatrical release and never had to get a release from the boom operator. But our distributor wants releases from everyone we credited in the end title crawl. I don't know if that's what his buyers want or what. I should have that done by the end of the weekend.
I did some tests to figure out a "look" for a couple movies I have coming up. Here's a bit of Solar Vengeance with "no effect". Note that there is color-correction and some Magic Bullet Looks on it.
First up I tried the FXFactory Pro "Artist Sketch" effect. I had high hopes for this effect. Possibly with different lighting it would do something. But I don't want to prejudice you, go ahead and look for yourself.
Today has been contract day in the Pandora Machine. About 35 more pages of deliverables (contracts and other paperwork) went out to the distributor on Alien Uprising. Sheesh!
I know that New Zealanders naturally elide like there's no tomorrow, but Zoe Bell really could take some elocution lessons. It's like she went to the Kira Sedgewick school of diction.
That's the beautiful and talented Kiwi actress Juliet Furness as Lucifer in the trailer of my second movie Apostasy.
You know, I hate telephones. I didn't always, but I do now. I hate telephones for a reason. I used to think that it was because I felt I couldn't articulate responses fast enough to technical things in "real time" without (to me) unacceptably long pauses. But no, that's not it. What really ticks me off is how sucky telephones are now.
Back in the olden days (about the time of dinosaurs, shortly after the Constitution was written), telephones worked because a pair of twisted wires came to your house and connected to your telephone. A high(ish) voltage AC current would make the telephone ring, and a low-voltage DC current would sit on the line during the call to operate the phone while you talked. In real time.*
You only had a speed-of-light delay between you talking and the other person hearing you. And with the relatively simple circuits they had in the whole system that meant pretty much they heard you right now.
Between VOIP phones and digital cell phones there must be a 750ms delay in the audio between when they talk and you hear. So you start to respond but your response is now a second-and-a-half off. And that makes. I'm sorry no, you were saying? I said... I... I said... Oh. What? No I was just... I... I was... could you repeat that?
So of course there's no freaking side-tone. Words get dropped in addition to the delay. You just can't talk on 'em! I hate all of them. Phones! A failure to communicate.
So There! Bleh!
******************* Today I started singing a song with the lyrics:
My love, my love, my love My love is a monorail.
*************************
*When I was little my dad once hooked together a couple old phones with a 6-volt battery for me. That's all they needed to be able to talk to one another (the ringers didn't work of course). I thought that was the coolest thing in the world. I still do.
The Panasonic GH-1 is out of the bag. The image sensor is smaller than the Nikon D90, but not by much. On the other hand, lenses for the four thirds system are more expensive (and there aren't that many of them available used.)
The kind of compression they do (I believe) is i-frame, not as good as the Nikon. But the Nikon has other issues (like "jellycam").
I have a couple pictures coming up where I fear I'm going to need to shoot some exteriors at night and do some set extensions to make the Gowanus part of Brooklyn look like a post-apocalyptic 'nother place. I'm not concerned about the set extensions. I'm concerned about speed. I need a fast lens (f1.4 preferred) on a fast camera (ISO 400 equivalent) with a fast car and a fast dog*. The Nikon with $1000 worth of lenses (an 85 and a 35) might just do me. But the Panasonic is intriguing.
"All of the government's pesky market intrusions have people snapping up copies of Atlas Shrugged like they were bailout packages. Since it's not likeAyn Rand's laissez-faire fantasies got us into this mess."
Wow. I just dropped $3270 at the dentist today. For a single crown. And that doesn't include the implant surgery. Angel of Death. Via Bill. Apparently shot with the Red system. I'm not entirely convinced that Red is substantially better than any other hi-def system. It sure is a bigger pain in the booty in post-production than other HD systems.
I've been using Skype to call my computer in my studio. It auto-answers and that way I can take a look and see... well... nothing. Like what you see above.
If I want to kick some light in there I could turn on the monitor by using logmein.com but that would be simply ridiculous.
When Blake Snyder (the writer of the brilliant Save the Cat -- get your copy today) wrote to me he referred to me as a "writer". I thought "yeah but OK, I'm not a writer".
Hmm -- even though I've in fact written... (I had to look it up) 4 features I produced.
Part of the reason I don't think I'm a "writer" is that I've only written so that I had something to actually make. And perhaps another part of the reason I don't think myself a writer is that I've only written with writing partners (indeed, the screenplays I have sitting around that are all-but-finished are the ones I haven't thrown at someone else to help work on them.)
*************
A YouTube video on the proper way to wrap microphone cable.
