Fuzzy Bunny Times

Groove to Jonathan Newman's De Profundus. He puts the fun in De Profundus. Crank the speakers. Rock your vole.

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This is our latest copy for the North American version of the Clonehunter trailer. It will be voiced by the very sexy and newly daddied Ben Thomas.

In the year 2525 --
The rich and powerful
Can live forever
Farming illegal clones for their body parts
Just as long
As they can keep them under control

But when one of the clones escapes
They can only call one man.
Me.
The Clonehunter

Living forever
Takes less time than you think.

Sploits

A collection of "blacksploitation" movie posters. Via Martin Klasch.

An interview with Pam Grier.

I've Been Told I Don't Blog Enough

Ha! Seriously, nobody's ever said that. I've been told that about as much as I've been told "Post some more pictures of amplifiers!"
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Today David Frey, giant among men, delivered the new picture edit to the Clonehunter North American trailer. I was expecting to have to do a couple things to clean up the trailer. But I dunno. It looks pretty good. His picture might very well be final picture.

What it isn't is final audio. You see, we had a little problem wherein we didn't have the rights to the edit or the voiceover or the music for the Clonehunter trailer for North America. So we have a deadline of Wednesday (used to be Thursday but of course it got moved up a day -- well it got moved up like four or five days but I said "No way!" and now we're back to Wednesday - I hope to deliver on Tuesday. You know how it is)* to put the trailer up on our distributor's... uh... distributor's** site. Or something. I just do what I'm told here.
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The Red Giant tutorials are actually pretty useful -- even the ones which are product-specific. Here's one on a nice Death Eaters effect.
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Bill Cunningham on triangular composition. Much pulpy goodness included.

More on triangular and other kinds of composition here. Of course, many of the kinds of composition described can ultimately be described as "triangular" but go with it.
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In the meantime, here is the world's most French dude explaining what a Penelope with a "digital mag" would/will be like:

*You know what? No. The original deadline, and I'm looking at it here, was freakin' the end of April, not the middle.

**Or their "jobber" or... I don't even know what you call them. Our distributor sells through a bigger distributor -- whatever that is. This is a fairly typical situation I just don't know what to call the distributor's distributor.

Funniest Conversation

So this week I spent time with my parents in Princeton. And here's the best conversation with my dad when his hearing aids weren't in:

The story starts with me going grocery shopping for my parents. My dad was staying home with the cats to play Sudoku and my stepmom was going out with friends to the theater.

So I go to the grocery store and get pineapple and orange juice and kitty litter, etc. I come back and I think "Ooh, Iona" (my stepmom) "told me there was vodka. I could have SCREWDRIVERS! Wahoo!" It's about 10pm. I'm happily mixing the orange juice I just got with the vodka and drinking it like punch (it's really tasty) and dad is working out some Sudoku (which he really loves doing) and the cats are doing whatever cats do at 10pm and then dad gets a telephone call.

It's Iona. They're stranded at the theater for some reason and need someone to go pick them up. Dad is sort of shouting back and forth into the telephone (he's taken out his hearing aids) and turns to me and says "Can you go pick them up?"

"I just had a screwdriver."*

"What?"

"A screwdriver. I just drank one."

My dad scrunches up his face in that What in the world are you talking about, boy? -- look.

"Why are you talking about tools? Iona needs a ride from the theater?"

"I'M DRUNK!" I shouted.

The look of dawning realization passes across his face.

"Oh. Oh, a screwdriver. You drank one."

This has been amusing me to no end for the past three days.

*Now please note that yes, I am a lightweight but I made a big glass of 50/50 vodka and OJ and drank it down in pretty short order. And for once I (by coincidence) have an appropriate cartoon.

New Alien Uprising Deals

Here. Look at this bunny. Don't read anything more in this post. Just don't. It'll keep me out of trouble.

See? Bunny butt. Now look at pictures of guitar amplifiers.

Goodbye!

(Look at the bunny.)

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O! I do hesitate so in putting details of deals on this blog. As a rule it makes the distributors less than cheery, that's for sure. Hopefully they're just looking at the bunny and not paying any attention. You know, this paranoia about "real numbers" in the movie business is one of the ways that nobody ends up knowing anything about the reality of financing in motion pictures.

Look. At the bunny.

So let me tell you about our last deal for another one of our movies. You will be guessing which is our last picture to get a deal for the market involved. This is for North America: $5K upfront and then the distributor takes something like $15K in expenses and then does an 80/20 split (in their favor) for the next $12K or so and then they split (after the direct costs of making the DVD's) everything thereafter or some such. What it really means is that we get $5K upfront and they get everything for the first $35,000 or so and then we start the 50/50 split (after direct expenses for making the DVD's).

To tell you the truth, the splits deal is so complicated that although I think I understood it for about 10 minutes it has now fizzled out of my wee brain. But it's something like what I've described above.

Are you looking at the bunny?

So what does it all mean? Well, it means we get to make another movie. Ha! No really. What it means is that I split the $5K with my producing partner and we whistle a merry tune while we walk away*. Well, OK, no -- it means we're not likely to make more money but if the movie did as well as Alien Uprising did we'd make a nice additional chunk of change and we'd certainly be paying out money to actors, writer, designers, etc.

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Speaking of Alien Uprising: we just got a small home video deal for Cyprus and the Middle East. For us that's less than a couple thousand bucks. But it does mean that Alien Uprising has earned at total of $40,370 including North American and suchly. I'm sure it made our distributor's distributor much more in N. America because of their spectacular Blockbuster deal, but still that puts us less than ten thousand dollars away from the $50K mark -- after which we actually dole out percentages to the "artistes" (which includes the writer, editor, effects, actors, etc., etc.) And it'll also make us feel good.

(Of course, if we're only, say, a thousand dollars over the $50K mark it could be embarrassing: "Uh, here's your check for, uh, fifteen dollars. Thanks!")

Look at the bunny.

*To make matters more complicated to talk about, but vastly cheaper at tax time, there are two separate companies involved -- Bloodmask LLC (which is owned by my partner), and Pandora Machine LLC (which is owned by me). Sole proprietorships pay hundreds of dollars less a year in "fees" to the State than LLC's with multiple members. Feh on the State then.

Guitar Friday 8 Update Update

Jim sent me the badge on the front of the amp.

That's right -- it's personalized! For Tyrannosaurus Mouse!

I can't tell you how happy this makes me.

The amp will ship next week.

Guitar Friday 8 update and Moar!

Jim at Li'l Dawg has my cabinet almost complete.

Here it is all put together. And the bottom is see-through!

We're waiting on a pair of 12AT7 tubes to come in and we're all set.

Here's a chart of substitution tubes for 12AT7's. I think I don't want 12AX7's. There's a good reason the 12AT7's are in the design.

Guitar Friday 8

Selling the Little Lanilei.



I've decided to sell my Little Lanilei 1/4 watt amplifier. It's a very nice amp but I just don't play it that much and I need to make room for my new amp. It probably has less than a few hours on the tubes. I bought it when the company was still called "Songworks" but now is called Mahaffay Amps.

The Little Lanilei costs $369 new.

Mine has chicken-head-style knobs on top. Finally, after 2 years, I measured the output level SPL. With its own speaker I could get A-weighted peaks of 83 to 85dB SPL at one meter, playing a Gibson Les Paul Custom into it (as hard as I could strum). When I plugged the amp into my Celestion Alnico Blue I could get a peak of 89 or so dB SPL (A-weighted). Thanks to Tom Rowen for helping me test!

The amp has been kept in a studio its whole little life so far so it's pretty much in the same condition now as when I bought it. I almost changed my mind about selling it when I played it the other day but then I thought "No, I must sell it to make room for other stuff."

Here is a recording of the amp set to its "hi gain" setting. I'm not making any excuses for my guitar playing. This is a Gibson Les Paul Custom going straight into the amp. The gain and master are "dimed" or brought up all the way to full. The microphone is an AKG 460 with a CK61 capsule feeding a Brent Averill modified Neve 1272 preamp and then going to an Apogee mini-me converter with some soft compression. I think I rolled off some of the low end in Samplitude but that's the extent of the effects. Yes, it's a very high end signal chain but it does tell you how this little amplifier sounds (and remember, it's no louder than 85dB one meter away.) Oh, and this is the built-in 6" speaker too.


Now here I was going for something a bit cleaner. But I didn't go all the way down to the "lo gain" setting, just the "mid gain" setting. I may have rolled off some volume on the guitar itself for a little bit:

The amp is very musical and the sound sits well in tracks. It's too quiet to play with a band but it's awesome for practicing and for recording. You can tell it's very touch sensitive.
Oh, one thing about it: the "headphone out" isn't really a headphone out. It can drive headphones but it's only in the left channel. You'd have to get an adapter to get it to drive both sides of a pair of headphones.

I do reserve the right to get a Mahaffay "Leslie" sometime in the future.

Clonehunter North American Key Art and Trailer - makin'

Over the next five days* we're going to try to figure out the artwork and the trailer for the North American version of Clonehunter. Our distributor suggests a model in I Robot.

And the tag line we're going with is "They were guns for hire—but what about their souls?" Man, I hope that piece of information isn't embargoed because it'll be much easier for me to remember it if it's on this blog. ;-) SO NOBODY YELL AT ME!

Actually, the primary concern for us in-house is to create the trailer materials. I'm nominally opposed to the filmmaker creating the trailer but we're gonna do it anyway. We're basing some of the feel and such off of the overseas trailer (which we don't have the rights to use). The key art itself is being designed in... Jersey City! ;-)

*UPDATE: Five days? Ha! Deadlines keep moving up on me. Now we need to upload this puppy before Wednesday. We'll see what we can do.

British or American?

So: Star Wars -- is it a British or an American film? Most people would say it's American. It was shot mostly in Britain (and a bit in Tunisia and some in California). But the director, George Lucas, is a US citizen. So Star Wars = American film.

OK, but what about Blade Runner? Shot in LA. But directed by Ridley Scott, an Englishman. So that's British, right? No. It's financed by a major American studio therefore it's... no it's not -- it was actually financed by a consortium wasn't it? And they were mostly British if I'm not mistaken (and I could be, I'm only fuzzy on this.)

Alien then was clearly a British film. It was shot in Britain, with a British director (Ridley again). But with Fox's money so it's an American film.

Aliens must surely be American because it was written and directed by an American and shot in Britain with American money.

How do you actually make a British film then? Aren't all movies, seemingly by definition, American? Maybe any movie which gets a major release in the US (not an art-house release) is "American" all others are "art".

I can't even begin to ask about "Lord of the Rings" or "District 9". Let's just call them all "American" and get it over with. Even if they're shot in New Zealand and South Africa. With writers and directors from those places.

Hmm. I wonder how America became the default location for film production (outside of Bollywood)?

Or maybe we should just all give up trying to have different countries. As long as the English don't irk us with their nanny state and we try to not be jerks about the environment. It'll be like the old joke where the English are the policemen, the French are the chefs, and the Swiss run the trains. The Americans will do what? 40 years ago we could have said "The Americans hand out money." How about: "The Americans pretend that their culture is the right one and everyone else pretends that they don't do anything the Americans do even if the Americans got it from us first."

Yeah. That makes as much sense as Star Wars being an American film. Or this baby hippopatamus. I say we just have one big State and everyone gets to vote for President of the United States. But only citizens of the US are given Telecaster guitars as part of their birth right.

More screwdrivers, Drew?

Who Doesn't Love Tina Tanzer?

We just have to love Tina Tanzer. She's from Jersey, just like me (so of course we all have to stick together).

She is impossible to photograph badly. And she's very easy to work with. She has a great voice and a wonderful naturalness to her performance. Just lovely.

Tina was the only actor of our seven on this show with whom we'd never worked before. So she's "new" to us. And we're so glad she came on board. She was so great and easy to communicate with. She's a fine actor and she put up with it being cold and rainy and having to run around and around and around. If you look closely you might recognize her as one or two of our zombies (although honestly, someone had to point out to me in some of our footage that she was one of the zombies -- she was that good at changing her physicality for it.) So I'm being all gushy and saying how great she is. If this were EBay we'd say "A+++++ will work with again!" (That is, if she'd work with us ever again. ;-)
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Here we're lighting her in what we would think of as the "Buffy" modification on "Lana Turner" lighting. Did you notice that in the first... two(?) seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer people were lit from below the eyes and down through blinds? I mean, almost all the time? You didn't notice that? OK. I'll pretend it didn't happen.

Bouncing Pigs

Reel Creations makes some theatrical blood in varying kinds -- darker and more dried, some brighter from the lungs, etc. Via Chance.
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John August on Zombie Class Situations. I hope one day to shoot a screenplay wherein a character says "We have a zombie - class situation."
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I'm only going to say this a couple-dozen times so listen up. If you're shooting picture you cannot be thinking about sound. Trying to not have a dedicated sound person is a setup for fail. If you want to make your movie sound like a home movie, then sure, fine, don't bother to have someone dedicated to making the dialog sound big and full and present and relatively dry. Otherwise, get a dedicated sound person. Remember, of all the people on set they will be the only person not working for picture. And picture is only 50% of the movie.
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I'm still amusing myself with thinking that Pandora Machine is the smallest micro-studio in America. We don't even have one full-time employee. Although it seems like we must have one. Or two. Including me. Right now they're primarily volunteering.
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Check out Red Giant's tutorial on Magic Bullet Looks.

You Haven't Had Enough Amp Pictures

Here's the finished interior of my new Li'l Dawg Mutt.

More Amp!

Jim Nickelson sent me more pictures of my Li'l Dawg Mutt's progress!

Here's the chassis laid out and marked for drilling/punching.

Then the chassis punched out.

Knobs and such added to the front and to the back. You can see the Mercury Magnetics transformers -- both power and output -- attached.

(Whether or not to order the Mercury's was a big decision for me. They're over a hundred dollars more than the "stock" transformers. But Jim said he liked 'em better so that's what I went with.)








Inside you can see the board all set up.