To Waste Much of Your Time

If you're like me, and if you're reading this blog you're probably enough like me for the analogy to hold, then you're going to spend the next 140 minutes of your life watching this documentary on Star Wars.
You get to see deleted scenes. Hear David Prowse perform the dialog of Darth Vader.
Via.

Koo Stark was considered for Princess Leia.

Aesthetics

At one point Ethan had mentioned that he wished that steampunk weren't quite so popular because that would tend to be the aesthetic direction he would naturally go in.

To me, a lot of steampunk is just "too much". The aesthetic is overwhelmed by the "stuff". Steampunk becomes kind of a Mannerist parody of itself.

What I'm thinking is that we want to do more of a Victorian/Edwardian psychedelia vibe. Although I do have a penchant for old microphones.

The Third Solution

So we have this screenplay for Robot War. And I went in with what Nat Cassidy thinks of as a class of 2nd graders to do a rewrite on the screenplay he and David Ian Lee wrote. And I very damaged the original B story in the screenplay.

But we have a very tight first and second acts. What we're not happy with is the 3rd act. Now the fact is that a 3rd act problem is usually a 1st act problem. So we're going to fix that. By the end of the weekend. And then we can break down the script and start scheduling the darn thing.
Now we have the original solution to the movie which David and Nat wrote. We have the 2nd ("bad") solution which I wrote. And we're waiting for the 3rd solution which fixes everything and suddenly everything makes sense. Again.

How To Start a Band

Remember:

Bergen Paradis

A prophylactic measure against stupidity.

1 - To get the name of your band, go to Wikipedia and hit “random” or click here. The first random Wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.

2 - To get your album title, go to Quotations Page and select "random quotations" or click here. The last four or five words of the very last quote on the page is the title of your album.

3 - For your album cover photo, go to Flickr and click on “explore the last seven days” or click here. The third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradis,_Bergen

http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/33962.html

http://www.flickr.com/photos/wenninparis/5432424148/

Your Three Things from the Pandora Machine Today

Betty Ouyang, whose career has really taken off since she got the hell away from us moved to LA, is in another feature. This one is in Chinese language and is called A Girl Named Magic. She says this is her first Chinese language film but if you'll recall the minutia of detail in the movie Pandora Machine she did curse in Chinese just before being brutally murdered by an Austrian robot. Or wait, now I don't even know the plot of my own movie. Who killed her? That was Sikorski, right?

Gorgeous Machines is a retro groovy act. Good as film music too! Just go and groove out. Or, contact them about using the music in your film.

If I haven't been posting the beat sheet calculator enough, here it is again. I wish they'd just integrate the thing into Celtx. I bet there's a way to do that.

Notes on Loudness and Mouses

You know, as much as I complain about people trying to regulate the "loudness wars", I do think that we're going to tend to want to keep the brick-wall limiting on the Tyrannosaurus Mouse record to a minimum.
The drums will be louder and bigger than the majority of records made in the early '70's. But we're certainly not going for that new-rock monster wall of sound wall sound.

And really, I'd love to look at how compressed the Beatles were. Because on my iPod the "loudness" of late Beatles records is pretty freakin' loud.

Notes only I will understand:

Mouseverture
3:00 gtr flub
9:20 go ahead and clean the guitar up here
11:50 gtr noise before entrance

Mercury
Has the noisiest vocal tracks. Especially that first line.
"Lash me to the mast" is also noisy.

Eleven Oh One

David Ian Lee & Nat Cassidy have written the screenplay for the next Pandora Machine film. The present title is "Robot War" and the job number is "1101".

The project has a green light. We are a "go" on it.

I want to start by the Ides of March.

In a future where the Earth is run by warring Artificial Intelligence computers, Foxwell is an expert robot hunter. Sent on a mission to rescue an android, she and her team of mercenaries find themselves up against a bigger threat and have to trust the dangerous android to help them fight an evil A.I. and her robot army.

We keep the most current screenplay here.

Shooting Ratios

I'm shooting more than an hour a day on a feature. That's the equivalent of 7-10 rolls of film. That's what I figure. I dunno.

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The new thing over the next several years is going to be the average levels of (especially) TV shows. Nobody seems to know what the average level of a program really means but Dolby has an expensive box to measure it.
My whole thing is that I don't know how long we're talking about when we say "average". How long should we be measuring RMS to determine the average level? Peak levels I got. Never go above 0dBfs. Or in the world of broadcast then maybe -12dBfs or whatever.
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Joe Chapman is responsible for sending me this image.
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Movies you may have missed is a very amusing blog/review/'cast thing.

The Second Day

Hopefully our distributor won't be yelling at us. We told him we'd get Day 2 out to him last week and we found some devastating errors in both picture and audio which we had to fix before sending to the lab (at least we didn't find them after sending the picture to the lab.)
Now we can look back on the movie and see it with a bit of disinterest and distance.
And by that I mean we're not terrified that we'll see traffic in the background of shots which supposedly take place in the apocalyptic future. Nor will there be random audio dropouts.

To be kind, the movie starts somewhat old-fashioned in that it takes a couple reels to build up. And I went to a lot of trouble to try to make the opening "bang" just right. So maybe it's a tad slow to start. You know, just like the 1970's.

Soleil

A neat thing about Bandcamp is that you can use it like you used to use MySpace. You'd see that friends of yours, or friends of friends, were fans of some band and then you'd immediately go and listen to the band yourself.

With Bandcamp you don't have "friends". It's simply a brilliant back-end to your band's website and such. But you can surf around on Bandcamp.
That's how I found this Portishead-ish German outfit called Soleil. I expect to hear them on SomaFM soon.

What I Want to See

In the near future, zombies and werewolves and vampires are real (and licensed by the government). But when a paranormal creature goes rogue, regular law enforcement isn't equipped to deal with the problem. So the government creates a special law enforcement agency to deal with them when they get out of line.
The trick is that you can't be "trained" to detect vampires and werewolves, it's an innate ability. So people from all walks of life become Special U.S. Marshals under a Presidential Order.
One man, a former Texas Sheriff, is the only law enforcement professional in the new Special Marshals. He has the best vampire arrest record in the country.
And he's just been given a new partner. And she's a vampire.

See? It's a TV series. And because the monster of the week can be virtually any paranormal creature, it can be as romantic or icky as you want. Some of the monsters will be good. Some will be informants. It'll be like Law & Order only with vampires.

Pontypool

I finally saw Pontypool last night. OK, you could make some arguments that it falls apart a bit at the end. And I'll tell ya, the thing at the very very very end? After the credits? I have no idea what that was.
What I was impressed with, what is brilliant, is how they managed to make this movie watchable. No, I'm not kidding. Here's the pitch:
"It's a zombie picture, but we spend the entire time inside a radio station -- you know, because radio stations are so photogenic. Anyway, we never really see more than a couple zombies even though there's a zombie uprising -- destroying houses, medical buildings, all kinds of stuff like that. Instead, we just hear about the holocaust from people who call into the radio station. We don't see them hardly at all!"
As a producer I'd just say "Uh. No."

But it's great at being a movie. I'm an hour into the movie when I realize that I haven't seen a single zombie yet. And we're gripped in the middle of a zombie holocaust. The way people go zombie is beautifully horrific. There's this amazing moment where a girl is in the late stage before she starts killing and she's just standing in the half light emitting a single note from her voice which is seriously one of the creepiest things in any movie.
Indeed, there is a radio play of the book too.

Some notes before I am done

Foxwell makes everyone dump their mods before they go in. That way nobody will be affected if the EMP failsafe goes off.
They should have more like 12 hours rather than 22.

They need to go back in order to kill the alien queen A.I. that built the nastybots. Foxwell ends up in a room full of dormant nastybots. The nastybots then become un-dormant.

I Swear I'm Going to Finish This Rewrite Today

So far my favorite line from this alien robot holocaust picture is:

"FOXWELL, looking like four newly discovered varieties of shit, crawls out from under some rubble."