Yes! Yes! Yes!

THIS is the movie we made!!!

This artwork is "almost 100%".

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.)

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

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.

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.

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. . .

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!