sonnyboo's blog, the journal of Peter John Ross

Hell Hath Frozen Over

2011-12-25T17:17:00.001-05:00

Spielberg has edited two movies non-linear in a computer! He himself vowed never to do such a thing, but with TINTIN and also WAR HORSE, Steven has come over to the darkside. Now I understand TINTIN, as that is a CGI movie, but WAR HORSE is live action, shot on film.

Spielberg resisted the new school approach to editing, which is like comparing typing with a typewriter versus using a word processor. Your options become near limitless and takes so little time to edit with a computer versus editing with a work print, a moviola and some splice tape. For 40+ year of a career, this has been the only way Spielberg has edited, and now he has done two movies back to back in the computer.

At least he’s still using editor Michael Kahn. He has edited all of Spielberg’s movies except for 2, JAWS (Verna Fields) and E.T. (Carol Littleton, because Michael Kahn was editing POLTERGEIST for Spielberg superseding director Tobe Hooper).

Raucous Rapscallions

2011-12-02T13:31:00.001-05:00

I’m doing some minor writing of late. Whether it’s scribbling on a notepad at work, typing in Google Docs on the laptop waiting on a render, what matters most is that words from my head are being committed to some form that others might see and eventually say/shoot.

I’ve got a few ideas tumbling over. One compels me because I have never attempted a process shot, that is a shot in a car that appears to be moving when it is in fact stationary. There is the “poor man’s process” which is to say it’s all done with lights rotating across the windshield and windows. That is an option. Next is rear-projection, which is to go out and shoot the street views ahead of time, then project them on a screen near the car to give the illusion that they are moving. You’ll still have to do the lights, but there is clearly a background of moving streets outside the windows. The benefit is that everything is in camera, no post production work on either of those. The last option is greenscreen, which is to “key” in the street scenes in the computer after the fact. This option doesn’t cause the same problems it did as little as 2-3 years ago since technology has improved so much.

I’ll pick one of those and that will be the core of this shoot. The rest of it will tackle some more adult themes, something I haven’t done much of. It will deal with sexuality in a way I do not usually put in film. There is no nudity, as I have not matured enough as a person or director to handle that yet, but since I turn 40 years old next month, maybe with the death of my youth I might gain some of that maturity I’ve heard so much about.

CLIP FRAMES and FRAMELINES continue to grow to other markets. Today I made over 60 DVD’s to send out to various channels throughout the state and in the neighboring West Virginia, Kentucky, and Pennsylvania. I am pleased to hear such positive responses from programmers about the show. In a few months time, there will be no escape from my marketing machine. Too long have I been idle and silent. The time to reawaken my inner marketing whore reveals itself to be nigh. Prepare thyself, Acolytes.

Irascible Rankery

2011-11-19T22:37:00.001-05:00

Slowly the wheels turn. Already got 1 rejection and 5 confirmations of playing one of the two TV series in various markets. No offense to the Population 17,000 market, but Pittsburgh picking up FRAMELINES represents a gain of about 300,000. Pittsburgh is also a much bigger film town. We’re weeks away from a premiere in Pennsylvania, and possibly CLIP FRAMES as well.
I suspect that many of these packages I sent out for CLIP FRAMES and FRAMELINES will go unanswered, whether they play the shows or not. The shame is that if they play them, I have additional episodes and no way of knowing if they can use more of them. I have to assume rejection on the part of any no-responses. I will follow up in mid December to any with contact info.

I laid out two more episodes of CLIP FRAMES tonight. They are skeletons as I need about 10 minutes of material for each episode, but that puts me at 25 total episodes. I like to lay in new material as I have it, so so more FRAMELINES leftover content as well as Behind the Scenes from a few friends round out the shows. Since we have 2 more Roundtables to edit for FRAMELINES, that means I should have no trouble filling in these shows.

I’m formulating my plan on what projects to embark on in the interim before ACCIDENTAL ART, the feature film. I was planning on directing 2 more CELL PHONE MONOLOGUES, but it might be 3-4, depending on a few factors. A couple scripts started to cohere in a way I did not anticipate. I’m not much of a writer to be honest, so when something starts to work, I jump on it.

We’ll see what’s next soon enough.

Elucidating the Erudites

2011-11-12T23:19:00.001-05:00

Elucidating the Erudite

After over $100 in shipping and over 50 packages, I suddenly find myself with less to do for the briefest of moments. I'm taking a weekend off, more or less. I spent today cleaning, and doing a major rearrangement of furniture in the mancave of Rossdonia.

I have many docs on my computer(s), usually transcribed from handwritten notes on one of several notepads. In it are many ideas from THINGS TO DO, to lines of dialogue to project ideas. Because contract negotiations with a key cast member do not permit me to shoot on my feature ACCIDENTAL ART for a few months, along with weather, I want to fill my time with some creative work.
I can’t stand be idle. It happens by the nature of doing something artistic (my own work may not be judged ‘art’ by some). Sometimes the muse just doesn’t visit. Other times, life distracts you from creating.

The already released CELL PHONE MONOLOGUES are an example of something I wanted to start, then become more of a producer for others to facilitate the making of more. The concept is simply to pair great actors with great cinematography to do the otherwise poorly shot acting monologue. There are two more of these that I would like to direct myself, then let others loose on writing, directing, shooting, and making others.

Now that I’ve been screening these, there is some interest by others to participate. That brings up two other similar ideas I have percolating. Well, one more idea that is meant to be done by others that I help with, and another is just a set of simple ideas I had to do.

Firstly, I wanted to do one or two of these other series, based on an old Peter Seller’s joke from the 1960’s, done as a short. I think it has legs in that the concept is modernizing and warping something from someone I idolize.

Secondly, I wanted to create some very short video blogs, but strangely make them quite cinematic. I have only a handful of ideas sketched out, but I think they could be very cool. These I have for myself, but if others want to take similar ideas and run with it, then by all means. I just think these will be far harder to keep up than the Monologues and my homage to 60’s humor.

I want to do the first few of these projects, set a tone, then let people go wild. Seek out some people to make other movies in the series, help provide gear, guidance, or hell even some degree of funding.

Yeah, because I’m not busy enough in life as it is. I feel it necessary to create another MOUNTAIN of work. I’m not providing broadcast content for PBS, Educable, and teaching a class, as well as working full time producing and editing.

Combine that with my antisocial tendencies of late and you might start to wonder why these ideas are pervading my mind.....

Waggery and Whimsy

2011-11-08T22:01:00.001-05:00

Focus is the key. Staying on track and not letting things help you stray from your chosen path; this presents the most common mistake in getting lost. Even on a bad day right now, I still get a lot done. Whether it's for FRAMELINES or CLIP FRAMES, I digitize a tape, synchronize 4 cameras on a multicam timeline, or I edit. My nose presses firmly to the grindstone right now.

And I'm teaching.

Next week I get my own class for 11.5 months. That's a hefty responsibility, but one I look forward to. I don't know as much about the radio side of the course, but I have learned much and the support for radio is tremendous at the school. The Graduate Assistants seem to almost all have a forte in broadcast radio, so it will balance out.

I have over 50 packages to mail out. Thank god a big payday hit. Now I can afford to start the shipping. At least 20 are going out tomorrow, plus some film festival submissions and other opportunities.

I heard yet again today about someone seeing one of the shows on TV, this time CLIP FRAMES, and at a hospital. That was cool. It takes time to build an audience. In prior decades, shows took time to find their place. CHEERS was 87th out of 88 shows. SEINFELD was dead last in the ratings for their first entire season (all 4 episodes!). I have the luxury of not having to deal with ratings or fight for timeslots.

CLIP FRAMES is not wonting in terms of content or episodes. I have 23 half hour shows completed already. FRAMELINES' quality vastly outweighs CLIP FRAMES because it goes out to PBS and in HD. Of course, some FRAMELINES material is airing on CLIP FRAMES, but by the time it gets to the other show, the heavy lifting is way over and only represents a fraction of effort put into a single episode.

We've put together 6 "vignettes" as I call them from last year's 48 Hour Film Project. This is material that never made it to air on FRAMELINES, but makes perfect bonus DVD, web content, and filler for CLIP FRAMES. There was some minor ill will to this year's 48 in Columbus, so some videos reminding everyone about team spirit, good times, hard work, and pure enjoyment seem to fit the prescription. Being an unbiased outside party doesn't hurt either. So far, these web videos are the most popular clips we've put out there so far. The last two are due out over the next week.

Soon we'll get cracking on finalizing another episode of FRAMELINES. Thank god the Interns have been so incredibly helpful on these. It's been so much easier once we get a style established to follow it and I only have to do minor tweaks to the cuts, as opposed to the he

Engaging the Epithets

2011-11-02T22:18:00.001-05:00

Acolytes of Boo, your faithful narrator has returned in more ways than one. As always, I have kept busy, but soon the results of which will be seen by many. A few bouts of insomnia along with some creative bursts of energy have propelled my endeavors to new heights.

My research has yielded some fruit in terms of distribution (of sorts) for the Education show CLIP FRAMES. I have completed and authored 23 half hour shows total including the latest Sonnyboo content and FRAMELINES overflow material, as well as contributions from other select people. To maximize the output and breadth of coverage, I did some homework and found 41 additional channels within the state to play this on. Of course, a decent percentage will turn it down, so I cannot expect them all to love my show as I do, but even if only half play it - that will be an enormous score for getting the work seen. Outside of Ohio, I plan to send to direct contacts to 17 more channels in Michigan, Indiana, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Kentucky. Given a lack of funding for Education channels, 23 totally free episodes of television stands a decent chance of getting air time.

Too many people are extremists of one side or the other. I do believe the television business models are decaying, but they are not gone yet. People are still channel surfers. Getting your work seen is still more likely on cable TV than on the Internet because the web has so much content drowning it. I still think the Internet is the future, so why not hedge your bets and do both? I certainly won't write off any potential outlet for material.

I am making a substantial investment in DVD-R's, the delivery format Du'Jour. 23 episode x 41 channels = 943. Yikes. I'm starting off with the first 2 episodes only (82 DVD's) and sending those out to see which channels say YES and email me back. Then whoever accepts the show, starts the marathon burning sessions. Thank god we have 3 duplicators that can do 100 DVD's at a time. And they all 3 have disc printers no less.

At the same time, I am going to create retail DVD's of the FRAMELINES episodes on Amazon.com. This will allow the show to get on IMDB quicker, and also it will contain the bonus content not from broadcast like the extra interviews, extended episodes, roundtable outtakes, etc. There will be practically no profit to the discs as we want to just make them available to the schools that have requested copies.

Along with those, an updated INDIE FILM TIPS DVD will be available on AMAZON first in a few weeks, then a modified SONNYBOO HD SHORTS disc too. Then I'll retire some content like the MOVIEMAKING TECHNIQUES disc and the old Sonnyboo discs.

So many things wrapping up at the same time. Season 1 of Framelines, Cell Phone Monologues, Clip Frames show, and who knows what else. Clearing the decks for the next feature. Nothing left undone.

Back to work mein freunds.

Penurious Pessimist

2011-10-20T22:25:00.001-05:00

I had a blast last weekend at the Colony Film Festival in Marietta. Saw some great movies, met some inspiring filmmakers, and just chilled out a lot. Without planning it deliberately, it seems every year I make a long drive in Ohio in October and see the amazing leaves changing colors. Now that I'm back to work, the list of things to get done seems somewhat more achievable.

Framelines trucks along. We're shooting 3 roundtables and 2 featured filmmakers in an attempt to wrap up the first season of 13 episodes. I still need to find another featured filmmaker to complete the set. These are for people with a body of work and a distinctive style. The roundtables will be interesting because I'm trying to populate them with people I don't know or at least don't know well at all.

Because of the psychology of the Internet Age, I'm finding uses for outtakes and extra bits we have shot to create more content either exclusive for online or to add to the cable show CLIP FRAMES. I have found that people like a consistent and steady stream of material to be a key to retaining online audiences. Both leftover from the television era of having a show once a week, as well as the plethora of content inundating people on the Internets.

The Framelines Roundtables tend to be anywhere from 45 minutes to over an hour each. The run time of the segments tends to be anywhere from 3 minutes to 7 minutes which equates to a lot of good material that never makes it to air. The Roundtables, although generally considered to be the least polished segment of the show, do have incredibly useful information from a variety of people discussing topics. My pattern thus far has been to take 2 segments from the Roundtable for broadcast on Framelines, then come up with another 10-15 minutes of material from the outtakes to form something for the websites and Clip Frames.

For the two 48 Hour Film Project episodes of Framelines, we shot interviews at the drop off. Since we got not only 3 of the team members we followed, but also 3-4 other people too, I decided to make these vignettes on each of them. Giving face time online and on cable TV to these other filmmakers who struggled equally means a lot to me.

Over time, all this material from Framelines and Clip Frames will add up. With 22 episodes of Clip Frames and 13 episodes of Framelines covering material from close to 100 filmmakers from Ohio - combine all that with repeats and airings in 7-8 markets, and the independent film movement will, at the very least, be seen.

Inexplicable Idiosyncrasy

2011-10-09T14:17:00.003-05:00

Last month when we found out the Ohio Channel was airing our show FRAMELINES, I predicted it might get seen a little. I was right. I keep hearing from people who see me on TV and especially from the people we interviewed on the show about how they keep getting told they were seen on the show. I am so glad FRAMELINES finally escaped into the public.

Now I have to finish 4 more episodes....

I'm 95% done with Episode 9. All it needs are my trademark transitions and music beds for 3 of the stories and BAMM! It will be finished. I get a bit euphoric when finishing an episode. To be honest, I dance a jig after every episode completes.

I'm lining up interviews, roundtables, and other items missing from the board for the show. Season 1 needs to finish and then we'll take a break for a while. Not sure how long, although we have plans for season 2 and stories we can cover, but I want to figure out how to best approach the future of Framelines.

I'm not as down, although I have no idea why not. Nothing has changed really. My money is being drained away just as fast as I can make some. The economy looks to not improve, which means possibly a lower income on the horizon. Roadblocks are in my filmmaking way.

And yet, I am happier of late. Not sure why. I'm getting more done and better. Along with Framelines, Clip Frames continues and airs on cable TV and both will expand to neighboring states. There is much strife in Rossdonia with Lorenzo Lamas Jones and Vladimir Jack Bauer not getting along at all (or "V" doesn't like Lorenzo at all would be more accurate a description). And yet I love them all and play with them every morning and night. I've still been purchasing titles at Half Price Books like and addict.

Who really cares "why" I'm happier. I just am. When the Rossman is happier, more gets done. A lot is getting done right now. 2 new Sonnyboo short films premiere this weekend.

Top 10 Reasons RETURN OF THE JEDI Sucks

2011-09-28T22:26:00.001-05:00

I am a big fan of Star Wars, but I have never ever liked RETURN OF THE JEDI. Having just watched the Blu Ray, I'm gonna spout off a little about this. As I have said numerous times, I'm a much bigger fan of the MAKING OF these movies than I am of the movies themselves, so I will reference many things from various sources such as DVD (and obscure Laserdisc) commentaries, documentaries, out of print books (like John Preecher's THE MAKING OF RETURN OF THE JEDI from 1983), older screenplay drafts, and more.

SPOILER ALERT, if you're you know, Amish and have never seen the movie, this will ruin it.

10. LACK OF DRAMATIC TENSION PART 1 -In the scene with Leia and Han, right after Luke says, "Hey, you're my sister, even though we played tongue twister in the last movie", and the dramatic tension lasts almost 3 whole seconds before Han Solo, a well known scoundrel, gives up and apologizes right away. No waiting until they're in the battle and she gets shot to make up, thus creating some much needed drama. No consistency with character.

9. MATTE PAINTINGS - Okay, having just watched all 6 movies on Blu Ray, why are the matte paintings so blaringly obvious in this movie? In 1920x1080 High Definition video on a 42" monitor, the matte paintings of things like the Millenium Falcon in a hangar show way too much of the paint strokes and look incredibly fake.

8. BAD EFFECTS - In many ways the effects work in Return of the Jedi are STILL some of the best. Then why is some of the worst effects also in the same movie? There are several really poor blue screen shots, like when Han Solo and Lando are talking about permission to take the Millenium Falcon into battle, those shots are so terribly done, complete with the exact same horrendous matte paintings already mentioned. Throughout the movie, several of the blue screen composites rip me out of the movie because of how fake they looked. Sometimes followed immediately by some of the best of the 1980's FX work. See also the shot of Mongo's look alike mourning his dead Rancor, or Luke and Han on the skiff on Tatooine. There isn't a single shot in iV or V that compare to these 7-8 terrible FX debacles in JEDI.

7. DARTH VADER - Okay, even in the context of all 6 movies, When, where, and how did Luke sense some good in Vader? What actions were taken that demonstrate this innate sense of good? The hand cutting and torture in Empire Strikes Back? The killing of a few dozen defenseless children in Revenge of the Sith? Looking at just the original trilogy, there is absolutely NOTHING redeemable about Darth Vader. His newfound good side and thoughts, we have nothing but crappy dialogue to tell us about, is all we have to suddenly empathize with a character who has done terrible things. It rings quite hollow to me, and I am a big fan.

6. KILL LANDO - Also from Lawrence Kasden's draft, Lando was supposed to die and the Millenium Falcon did not actually make it out of the Deathstar II. There is no sense of sacrifice for the good guys in this film. With no sacrifice, there is a lot less honor. Since we the audience start to feel that the good guys aren't going to die, there isn't a lot of concern, or DRAMATIC TENSION. There it is again.

5. DEATH STAR, or LACK OF IMAGINATION - Why another Deathstar? I understand that in 1977's A NEW HOPE, George Lucas did not intend to do the whole Deathstar blowing up and trench run, but did because of studio pressure and thinking he would never get to play that card later. Still, come up with something NEW. Something imaginative. Rehashing a visual and just the exact same thing was kind of lame. Early drafts had not 1, but 2 Deathstars. That was twice as boring to me.

4. RELATIONSHIPS UNRESOLVED - This too plays into a lack of DRAMATIC TENSION, because when last Luke and Leia were seen together in Empire, she was taking care of her favorite idealist, but confessed to loving his best friend. By going back to a completely unused draft of Episode iV (the 2nd draft) where Luke and Leia were siblings, something OBVIOUSLY not adhered to in the previous 2 films. There was dramatic tension in a LOVE TRIANGLE. If Luke and Han are both suitors for Leia, then there might be a tear in their friendship. Even with the sibling reveal, there was an opportunity to play on this, but it gets dropped in favor of.... no tension.

3. HARRISON FORD - Harrison did not want to do this movie. He has repeatedly stated he did not want to play Han Solo again. Of all the principal actors, he was the only one NOT signed for this sequel. In the end he got a substantially better deal than the rest, but even monetary compensation did not inspire a watchable performance. Han Solo in this movie is unmotivated, poorly acted, and completely inconsistent with anything ever this guy has done in the 2 previous movies. Harrison weighed at least 20-25 pounds heavier and his hair looked like the stylist was Ray Charles in a dark closet. Sadly, Harrison was right in saying Han Solo should have died at the end of the first act to show some sacrifice and also to add some dramatic tension. Even Carrie Fisher, so blatantly coke'd out of her mind on every type of narcotic that existed in 1982, delivered a better performance than Harrison Ford in this movie.

2. EWOKS - No, I never liked the Ewoks. As I was all of 11 years old when Return of the Jedi came out and I found the pandering to be insulting to my age group. Having known for years this was intended to be Wookiees like Chewbacca, how on the hell are we supposed to accept these half sized, product placements as a substitute? I will say there was a single shot where two Ewoks get hit by laserfire, and one of them stays dead and the other one mourns him - that was deep. Now on Blu Ray, these things have iris' and they blink. Creepy, but more realistic. But way creepy. Seeing REVENGE OF THE SITH with a full on Wookiee battle, imagine what this COULD have been like...

1. LACK OF DRAMATIC TENSION PART II : FROM A CERTAIN POINT OF VIEW - Even as an 11 year old, I felt the Obi Wan Kenobi scene from Return of the Jedi to be a series low point. "What I told you was true... from a certain point of view"? Come on, that sucks. Why isn't Luke emotional? Why isn't he yelling at Obi Wan about NOT telling him who his father was? How does the moral ambiguity work for THIS, but not the Emperor or all the people who are drafted into the Imperial forces who die in the fight against the rebellion? The worst thing about this one is having read Lawrence Kasden's draft of this scene that George Lucas re-wrote. In Kasden's draft, Luke IS belligerent, asks angrily, "Why didn't you tell me Vader was my father?" and Obi Wan responds with, "We wanted to finish your training and prepare you for the burden but you left in such a hurry." Luke responds with "But I had to save my friends! They were in danger" and Obi Wan wisely retorts, "and in the end, didn't they end up saving YOU?" and that shuts Luke up and they have a civil conversation. DRAMA of the best kind. Never to be seen in this freakin' movie.

Journal of the Whills

2011-09-25T14:18:00.001-05:00

I am a fan of Star Wars. The original 1977 version was the first film I ever saw on the big screen in my life when I was 5 years old. It opened my imagination because everything this fantastical existed only as animation, so this movie just widened the limitation of what could be done with a movie.

Now I just got the Blu Rays and we’ve been watching them one a night for the last week.

Strangely, Phantom Menace wasn’t as bad as I remember it. For the first time ever, I was thoroughly annoyed with the whole JarJar Binks thing. It was never good, but it never BOTHERED me until now. The kid was terrible, but then again the ‘direction’ of the script was all over the place. Whose point of view are we with here? Who is the main character and what are their themes? Overall, it looks great but the emotion wasn’t all there. In context of 6 movies, this one still sets up some story.

Attack of the Clones looked, sounded, and was a lot better than I recall. Memory has a funny way of shaping how things might have been, plus people (meaning myself) change over time. I liked it and it looked amazing on Blu.

Revenge of the Sith it turns out, I have only seen maybe 3-4 times before, the least by a large margin of any Star Wars movie, excluding ridiculous Ewok movies or animated stuff. Again, there was some horrendous dialogue at times, like the previous two movies, but this was much more enjoyable than I expected.

I have seen, what is now referred to as A New Hope, in the theater probably 100 times alone. I know it was over 30 times in 1977. Then again in 1978, 1979, 1980, 1981, 1983, and even made it out to few rare print screenings in the 1990’s. Then the 1997 special edition screenings, including a private only screening a friend of mine did the night before a press screening, where for my birthday, she arranged this for me all by myself without telling me what it was.

I guess I’m not too worried about ‘changes’. I kind of like having something new to see or hear in a movie I have seen literally over 100 times in my life. Still, A New Hope n Blu Ray was not nearly as impressive as the Star Wars Re-Revisited fan edit where some guys did way more than 1,000 changes and ‘fixes’. Having seen this Blu Ray of George’s changes, maybe he should have hired this team of unknowns because they did a lot more and better changes.

Funny how ‘fans’ like this guy making 1,000 changes then complain when George Lucas makes 10-20. I think people like the underdog.
I don’t care of George Lucas changes the movies forever. It’s not really that important, at least not to me. As much as I like the movies, I’m far more interested in the MAKING OF and BEHIND THE SCENES. What moved me was less that actual movies themselves, but rather the idea that whatever George Lucas saw in his head, he could put on a movie screen.

I’ve got several Laserdisc sets, not to covet the unaltered versions of the movies, but because they contain a lot of documentaries, commentaries, and amazing amounts of detail on HOW the movies were made. I don’t own a single novelization of Star Wars, but I have an extensive library of books on the behind the scenes.

We’ll get through EMPIRE and JEDI soon enough. It’s amazing how much I’m liking these movies now that I have no expectations and don’t really care about them as anything more than a movie.

Sonnyboo Podcast

2011-09-25T11:07:00.000-05:00

('http://www.youtube.com/p/2EB857B2872A650D?version=3&hl=en_US',)

Perfunctory Preparation

2011-09-16T22:57:00.000-05:00

Putting the final touches on my next article for a print issue of VIDEOMAKER MAGAZINE tonight, shortly after finalizing the next two Sonnyboo short films that will premiere next month at the COLONY FILM FESTIVAL. Your narrator feels substantially more "up" of late, although not at the lofty heights of days past, but still...

Next month I will be the keynote speaker at this film festival where I attended in 2006, screening HORRORS OF WAR when their name was the "River City Film Festival". Five years later, and I am doing a seminar on big shoots, little shoots. I'm going to show ACCIDENTAL ART along with some behind the scenes footage, showing the bigger crew and comparing it to the new CELL PHONE MONOLOGUES, where the crews maxed out at 4 people. I have no behind the scenes for these shoots because there was no room or time for extra people. My point will be to use the amount of crew you need for the project at hand, not small just to make it small and not big just to have more people to boss around.

I'm pretty happy with the outcome of these two shorts, one of which has taken over a year to complete. I wish I could lay blame on the 2 FX heavy shots, but alas that would be untrue. Procrastination and a changing attitude about HOW to complete movies. I am something more of a perfectionist than I was before. The last 5 years have greatly transformed my attitudes about quality over quantity. My process has proven to be more about watching and re-watching an edit and making changes. Rather than demo this in the public eye, I am more selective about who sees my edits and when.

I let ideas fester and grow before making decisions. This takes a lot longer, but the results are more polished and I am less likely to release something, then make George Lucasian re-edits for years to come.

Clips of Frames within the Lines

2011-09-09T23:00:00.000-05:00

Not only has your faithful narrator been busy, even more has happened in spite of his self. Several announcements to be made here. First and foremost, The Ohio Channel begins airing FRAMELINES on Monday, and 6 times a week no less. The Ohio Channel reaches every PBS station in the state of Ohio, over the air and on cable! The 2nd cousin to FRAMELINES, the cable show CLIP FRAMES, with short films and extra content from FRAMELINES started airing 7 times a week on Educable in Columbus for the last two weeks.

Oh, and I just got asked to be the keynote speaker at the Colony Theater Film Festival in October, where I will world premiere 2 new Sonnyboo short films!

FRAMELINES might actually start getting seen in Columbus (as well as other big cities in Ohio). The show now has a fighting chance. Getting some primetime slots means more eyeballs. 8 Episodes completed with show 9 in the pipe; FRAMELINES will end its first season with a bang methinks.

CLIP FRAMES is not nearly as polished a show. It's mostly material 5 years or even older, as in some 11 year old material is also included. Now that I've been teaching at an accredited college level for several months, I qualify to submit to Educable, and the material has a great deal of educational or student level content.

I still very much believe that at the moment, television is still the best way to reach an audience. The Internet has been very good to me, but TV and cable should not be underestimated. It's still the single most dominant source of audio/visual programming. Yes, it is starting to lose to the World Wide Web, but it ain't gone yet.

So a PBS show statewide and a cable show locally means I am providing over 7 hours of content on TV every week for a while! Granted, it's really 1 hour of content repeated 6 more times, but still that just means more chances for people to catch it.

I got a great call from the festival organizers and I'm going to world premiere the Cell Phone Monologues I and II at this festival, out of competition. Audio post production is in high gear. Scoring and final tweaks aside, I should have no problem meeting the deadline.

I needed this barrage of good news. I am a lot less depressed but we just rescued a kitten, then after a week of 4 cats in the house, fell in love with the little guy, then gave him away tonight. I can sleep easy knowing he's going to a loving home with someone I know and trust; he burrowed into my heart in such a short time. Our house is just a little emptier without him. Sleep well little booger.

Marvelous Legals

2011-07-27T12:18:00.001-05:00

I just saw the trailer for the new AMAZING SPIDER-MAN due out next year. It was way too familiar for me. Seeing a reboot so soon after just starting the last series seems a bit odd. I felt similarly about BATMAN BEGINS and it has been 8 years since the last sequel (1997’s BATMAN AND ROBIN). In this case it will have only been 5 years since SPIDER-MAN 3 and 10 years since the last franchise even started.

As an audience, we psychologically make a commitment to the characters, which means continuity of actors is far more important than film companies believe. It’s also really annoying to see the same origin story over and over again.

Why would a company like Columbia (owned by Sony) do this? I will tell you why…

Sony has an “option” on the rights to the character from Marvel Comics. Sony has made over $2.5 billion on box office alone, excluding home video and television rights worldwide. This is big business. If Sony did not get into production on another SPIDER-MAN film and have it on screen in 2012, all rights to make a movie based on the character would revert back to Marvel.

Marvel Comics started their own film production company called Marvel Films. First they released IRON MAN in 2008 to huge success, and not so great success with PUNISHER WAR ZONE and THE INCREDIBLE HULK, but back to form with THOR, IRON MAN II, and CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE FIRST AVENGER. Next year’s THE AVENGERS looks to be an enormous movie event, meaning gobs and gobs of money.

Both IRON MAN movies were distributed by Paramount, THE INCREDIBLE HULK by Universal, but Marvel produced them. SPIDER-MAN was produced by Sony via Columbia Pictures, so they are taking the financial risks and also reaped the financial rewards for distribution.

Similarly, the X-MEN movies are at 20th Century Fox, and the reason they rushed X-MEN FIRST CLASS was because they tried to slip X-MEN ORIGINS WOLVERINE as a part of their contract with Marvel for X-Men films and it didn’t qualify. So now they could not wait for Bryan Singer’s schedule to open up to direct X-MEN FIRST CLASS and had to rush it into production as fast as possible – just to maintain the rights.

Marvel Films has now been scooped up by Disney. So all the studios that have the rights to Marvel comics characters are rebooting or launching a movie just to keep the rights in their company. So Columbia may not care that the audience could rebel against such a hasty reboot of Spider-man.

In the case of 20th Century Fox’s other Marvel franchise, the FANTASTIC FOUR, it has a history of rights changing hands in the 1980’s and 1990’s. At one point, B-Movie legend Roger Corman owned the rights. He made a $400,000 feature film without the intent to ever release it – just to keep the rights because they sold them later for $1.2 million.

Warner Brothers owns D.C. comics, so Green Lantern, Batman, Super-man, Wonder Woman et al already have a film/television home.

Business Buffoonery

2011-07-12T17:26:00.000-05:00

Okay, time for a lesson on business side of “film business”. As many of my faithful readers know, I was a broker in the 1990’s which helped because I had to know and understand investment laws of what is and is not legal. I recently saw something so glaringly illegal and stupid it blew my mind.

Some complete idiot was soliciting investments in a video on YouTube. Now that alone is bad enough, nonetheless illegal. The Securities and Exchange Commission frowns on any kind of public request for funds, but a flat out sales pitch? Ridiculous! Kids, you cannot state you are looking for investors in any public forum without an Initial Stock Purchase, which is sanctioned and monitored by the SEC. Don’t be stupid.

It gets better. In this same video, the complete imbecile also GUARANTEES a return on investment. Investing 101 – there are no guarantees and it is illegal to promise money back. This can put you on the hook for their investment without the protection of a corporation or you can go to jail for fraud.

I have not researched this, but I would bet money this moron hasn’t even incorporated his film “company”. Now, we’ve all gone through these phases of making up a name and start using a production company name without the little technicality of actually forming a legal corporation with a Tax ID number. That’s where everyone starts. Once you turn 22-23 years old, that starts to wear thin and it’s time to grow up. Spend the $30 bucks and register a company name with your state, or Delaware as many corporations do (because they are very lean on lawsuits against Corps).

Now if you are asking for money for your film company and your company doesn’t legally exist or have the proper paperwork filed with the state treasurer or SEC for specific types of Limited Liability Corporations to sell shares; You are breaking the law. In this day and age of investment fraud being so rigorously investigated and all eyes are against people playing with money – DON’T DO IT. DON’T BE AN IDIOT.

Talk to an attorney. Set up your corporation properly and don’t ever ever ever ever ever promise or guarantee a return on investment. That is fraudulent and you will screw yourself over.

Placable and Patient

2011-06-19T20:34:00.000-05:00

It is official; we did NOT win the Openfilm.com contest. I am not shocked, but I am a little disappointed. Who wouldn’t be? I did however have over six months to get used to the idea of NOT winning, so it all worked out.

Now they did announce the winner and it was Patrick Boivin. This guy is an amazing filmmaker. He made the IRON BABY trailer that was awesome. He also does a lot of innovative stop motion, like with a vintage AT-AT Star Wars toy as a puppy, or action figures having epic battles. He has millions of views for his movies on YouTube.

However, his entry into the contest was a French language zombie clown movie that sucked ass. The contest was supposed to be for a short film that can be made into a feature film. I’m trying to wrap my brain around the idea of the director of ON GOLDEN POND Mark Rydell or Robert Duvall voting for the zombie clown movie. Something stinks. I expected the movie from Katie Maholic with the kids to win or the other movie with the actor Kevin Durand (from LOST and X-MEN ORIGINS WOLVERINE) to win, because their actual movies were great, but without the millions of YouTube views, I guess they didn't really have a chance.

Because of that, I think it is unlikely this (or any online contest) was real. I think they already knew who they wanted to give the prize to and we were all just patsies who paid for the privilege to promote their website for a month to make the owners look good to their sponsors.

I had a friend, a standup comedian, who told me about his experience with contests. He said that they are almost always rigged. They already know who they want to win before they start and that all of the contestants and entry fees do nothing but promote and pay for the contests. I now believe he is 100% right.

Before anyone finds me to just be a bitter, sore loser, the truth is that if I were in their position; I’d have probably given Patrick the prize too. It makes business sense. He has millions of followers and fans. He has proven that he makes movies a lot of people want to see. Mr. Boivin will probably make a great film, so my only regret was wasting $75 and a month of my time.

Win some and lose some, they say. Business is business and I hope nothing but the best for a very talented filmmaker who deserves his shot to make a real feature film with decent money. Just don’t expect me to ever enter a contest like this ever again.

Considerable Commensuration

2011-06-16T16:19:00.001-05:00

PROGRESS! As I may have mentioned, after Alex I increased our intern numbers to 3. My biggest trouble is coming up with enough work for everyone, at least work that is within their skillset and in the time I have along with my own duties. I thought handing them the Cell Phone Monologues was more an exercise, but instead they have some pretty solid fin cuts done on both of them.

I still have to do the final cuts, but the big part of the jobs is done. I love the collaboration. I like getting other people’s opinions and debating the merits of creative decisions. I respect people who just say what they think when it comes to the work. If I agree or disagree, I’d rather just be out with it in terms of what people think. It’s easy to take it when it comes to work. I guess some people are ultra sensitive about their movies, but I learned a long time ago that criticism of a movie is not criticism of the person.

Audio presents the greatest challenge on these. I’ll spend a few weeks in my spare time tweaking and playing with it. I don’t think there will be a score but sound fixes and sound design will be pretty in depth for 2-3 minute long short films.

Have you ever fallen asleep on your arm and then when you shook your arm it’s all tingly because it fell asleep? I may be experiencing that, but inside my entire soul. Or it’s just the last gasps of a great chasm of deep blackness. I’ll let you know in another blog or two.

Intemperance and Insinuation

2011-06-10T22:55:00.001-05:00

This week I started teaching film and video at a school, as a new part time job. These first few days were more acclimating myself to their style and methods. I like teaching. I believe firmly in my methods but it is not for everyone. I try to impart that the “rules” are there as guides, but they are not gospel. They help establish the tenants of modern film and video, as they are less rules as much as methods and cinematic tricks that have been effective time and again for those who have been making movies all along.

Paid editing work ramps down in a week or so. That means getting caught up on FRAMELINES kicks in. Hopefully I can also get these two short films long since shot completed this month as well. Long overdue, getting these complete and out in the world will feel good.

I am not myself right now. I feel numb all over. Nothing excites me much. I don’t care about anything beyond some fleeting emotions. No matter what I do, there is no excitement or passion at the moment. I don’t have extremes of anger or happiness. It makes me somewhat of a bore. I’m still not fit for long social engagements.

Something will break soon with that. I just need a kickstart.

The Vaunting of Ventures

2011-06-02T22:31:00.000-05:00

In my quest to be more productive, there have been some successes and failures on my part. I wanted to do editing on these short films and hour a day. That didn’t happen. I had goals in terms of editing on Framelines and Clip Frames and those have been accomplished, including some minor shoots and interviews.

What has been accomplished thus far is over 3.5 hours of content has been shot and edited for Framelines. For Clip Frames, taking a lot of pre-existing material and several short tidbits that needed to be created for the show, I have made a far more impressive 9.5 hours of shows total, and that has been in less than a month. My obsessive-compulsive side will never let it sit at 19 shows, so I’ll have to make one more half hour episode at some point; most likely when I complete these two short films, so it will make a nice excuse to create a show and get these pieces seen shortly after finishing them.

If only I could lower my standards for Framelines, alas that is not to be. I’m working on the two 48 Hour Film Project Episodes which completely break format for the show. These are unique episodes to the run because several of the segments are all in one. We did a roundtable to cover the interviews, featured filmmakers, and on location. The whole episodes are a “spotlight on” the 48 Hour Film Project. The only thing missing are tech tips, but we did shoot something simple with several filmmakers on their advice to people doing a movie in 48 hours, so we kinda DO have tech tips, but I don’t know if I’ll use them.

My quest to watch more movies is succeeding a bit more. My latest double feature was the Blu Ray Director’s Cut of ALIEN and the Special Edition of ALIENS. Aside from one blatant biological discrepancy between these two movies, the alternate versions of both movies are superior to their originals. I am trying to force myself to watch a movie at home or at the $1 Theater every other night. I have fallen out of the habit of watching films and that is something I don’t want to do.

That’s it for tonight my wonderful acolytes. Your faithful narrator must rest. I start a 2nd job next week teaching film and video at a school.

Tangible Tetris

2011-05-30T22:22:00.001-05:00

The work never stops. Alex the Intern has left to spend the summer with family before starting his grad school film program, I’ve taken in 3 new interns. Training them will take time and then they’ll move on too. The circle of life I guess. I did get a lot done recently. I’ve been making DVD’s of the FRAMELINES shows as well as prepping a new product.

As I stated before, I have created a new education cable show called CLIP FRAMES to go along with FRAMELINES. I took the root of an old show but Alex the intern watched through a few of the pre-made episodes and begged me not to put them on the air as is because they sucked. So I took the plunge and started the re-editing process.

It’s not that bad, in that I already had 75% of the content as raw footage still and thanks to Adobe Premiere’s upgrades, you can drop a VOB file from a DVD straight on the timeline and edit out what you need. With all the raw footage being pre-edited segments; it’s like playing Tetris with the timelines in my editing software. The difference is still being subjectively creative whilst managing run times. There are certain ebb and flow I like to a show from one segment to the other. Again, CLIP FRAMES is nowhere near as polished as FRAMELINES. There’s no hosts, no exact segments, but it does have some worthwhile content, content I feel is worthy of attention and eyeballs.

The first few packages of DVD’s of the first 12 half hour shows of CLIP FRAMES are set to go out along with the first 6 episodes of FRAMELINES to outlying markets in neighboring states. I like the idea of getting short films out there with a nice Behind the Scenes look at how they were made, along with feature film Making Of segments, and other various educational bits. That’s 9 hours of programming, and I’m working on the next 7 episodes of FRAMELINES and another 8 episodes of CLIP FRAMES.

And I’ve been getting full time work too. In a few weeks we’re set to adopt another kitten and that means even less time for sleep.

Overt Obviation

2011-05-23T22:57:00.000-05:00

My how time is not my friend, although we are coming to some terms. Lord knows I feel better being able to edit at home again. Doing the cuts then mastering at work on the tricked out machines makes a huge difference. Even after 8-10 hours cutting at work does not deter me from cutting at home afterwards.

The casualties to this are sleep and movie watching, although I am definitely going to rekindle my love affair with the 2nd run movie theater for $1 movies and $3 for 3D. I acquired 2 Blu Rays for my essential viewings which are ALIENS, the James Cameron film and SOM LIKE IT HOT, which to me is Billy Wilder’s masterpiece from 1959 with Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis.

Today we shot some Behind the Scenes and interviews for the FRITZ THE NITE OWL show that happened to be using our greenscreen. I have never met Fritz before, but I loved his old midnight movie show on channel 10. One of my first memories moving back to Columbus from El Paso Texas was staying up way too late the night before my first day at a new high school watching the Alan Smithee version of DUNE until 4:00AM. The midnight movie hosts are mostly a thing of the past, but nostalgia has a way of swinging the pendulum of popular culture back around; As is evident by the popularity of Fritz on the screenings once a month at the Grandview theater.

For this new Education Channel show I’m working on, I wanted to get some new intro’s and behind the scenes for shorts I’ve made in the last 2-3 years. I almost always shoot “Making Of” footage on my shoots, with a notable exception on the last two. Since we were setup and lit for interviews, I thought it was ideal to just start shooting tomorrow…. And on the drive home I had some vague recollection of having shot these intros last year when I did something else, like the Accidental Art pitch video. I will have to check that footage toot-sweet when I get into work tomorrow.

Editing at home reinvigorated me, but now I need at least 2-3 Terabytes of portable hard drive storage so I can have everything in two places at once….

Ampersands and Ands

2011-05-16T14:49:00.001-05:00

I noticed a strange screenwriting credit back in 1992 (yes, I am old) for LETHAL WEAPON 3 where they credited things as

screenplay by Jeffrey Boam and Jeffrey Boam & Robert Mark Kamen Story by Jeffrey Boam

which struck me as kind of weird.

From the WGA handbook:
Quote:

When credit is accorded to a team of writers, an ampersand (&) shall be used between the writers’ names in the credit to denote a writing team. Use of the word “and” between writers’ names in a credit indicates that the writers did their work separately, one usually rewriting the other. This distinction is well established in the industry through custom and practice.

So, this means that Jeffrey Boam came up withthe main plot points, then wrote a draft by himself, then did a collaborative draft writing WITH Robert Mark Kamen.

I highly recommend reading the WGA's Handbook on credits, CLICK HERE

Imperceptible Impressions

2011-05-14T22:33:00.001-05:00

I am a big fat geek. I know it. I don’t mind it. I know this because I get excited by techie things that no one outside a small tiny circle of people could possibly care about, nonetheless comprehend. That doesn’t make me exceptional or anything, as much as weird and dorky. Matrox released a Codec to the public that used to be proprietary to their hardware, which is what we edit with at work. I haven’t been editing at home for close to 4 years now. This means I can do some basic editing at home, an “offline” edit then take it back to work to master it.

What this really means is that when my inspiration (read – OCD) hits at 3:22AM (just when an episode of Framelines will have ended on WOSU), I can edit or make changes on projects brought home on portable drives.

I have been without the ability to edit outside of work for some time. It made me more relaxed and less stressed on one hand, but a lot less prolific on the other. I want to get back to doing more projects, especially more artistic ones that have been started and left unfinished.

Already today, away from work, instead of surfing the web, meandering on meaningless sites or research on episodes of Dallas circa 1982, I was cutting on a long dormant short and even started to re-edit another 11 year old short, from the master tapes in a higher resolution than ever before, thanks to the newly released codec from Matrox.

This makes me feel more whole, more complete. Next week is lightening up, so I can get on some web work I have to do too. I’m still going to put in a long day tomorrow finishing another episode of FRAMELINES before I accomplish much more of anything. At least my Obsessive-Compulsive side still adheres to a high degree of responsibility.

I hate being torn between multiple projects. I like them all, but there always tends to be one that WANTS to supersede the others. It makes the work harder, longer but not insurmountable. My brain lights up at one project while I have to focus on another, or two or three. What I hate is that there are weeks and weeks where I don’t have that electricity and cavalcade of ideas. Then when the muse visits, I’m buried under a heap of existing projects. It can be frustrating.

At the same time, I LOVE when the creative energy flows like a river.

An Ostentatious Occasion

2011-05-10T23:10:00.001-05:00

This past Saturday, I was a guest speaker at the Alliance for Community Media conference in Columbus. I have a passion for Public Access television. It’s something we have gone without for 9 years. In Columbus, we lost our Public Access. We still have the E and G channels from the PEG, meaning Education Access and the Government Access channels, but nothing for the masses. I was at the conference to speak to some issues for indie filmmaking, especially in terms of distribution.
And here I thought I was going to be the bearer of bad tidings.

It seems others share my view that within 10-15 years, cable TV and the Internet will merge into one entity. With that, things like Public Access might wither away, much to my chagrin. At least in the current form, people are far more likely to find content on public access television. Online, your voice will be drowned out by the tens of millions of meaningless YouTube videos… and if Net Neutrality is abolished, then you can expect even fewer people to hear your voice as it won’t be profitable for those paying for advertising to your internet provider.

These are dark times indeed, although the light has always found a way to puncture through. My crystal ball cannot see what else the future holds. All I know I put forth into the time that is given to me.

Framelines starts airing in more markets this week, including North East Ohio and Cleveland. By the end of June, we’ll be on pretty much every PBS in the state. Now, with these new fresh connections, the show may even start making it out of state as well…

Feel free and check out the FRAMELINES website, www.framelines.tv

Or check out the YouTube channel for Framelines

The Grandiloquent Guy

2011-05-07T22:54:00.000-05:00

I have to tell you, folks. I am having one really really bizarre week. Doing this show FRAMELINES affects me in ways I could not anticipate. In the same day, because of this show, I reconciled two relationships that I had soured in the past.

I interviewed one person for the show that once came to my house to kick my ass. Then for a roundtable shoot for the show, I had two former partners on the panel, neither of which I thought would want to sit that close to me. I put any petty differences aside because I believe in this show. What I may have thought personally seems so distant and unimportant these days. It’s like someone has put Novocain in my soul, but at the same time what I care most about now is doing something bigger than myself. This show is meant to help grow the film community state-wide. It is bigger than me and my ego.

I had no idea what motivated me other than what I thought would make for a good show. I had genuinely good conversations with everyone off camera as well. I don’t see my social coma coming to an end aside from these excursions for the show; alas I am still not fit for long term friendships. I’m still rough around the edges. Baby steps, they say.

Now I’m wrapping up post production on episode 5 and immediately going into 6-8. I added an outline of show 9 to the board.

Ah, yes the experiment. Well, in 4 days I have over 1,100 views of my viral video of Vladimir Jack Bauer. This is what I made…

As you can see with the editing, the close ups, wrack focus, music, and title sequence – I could not make a “straight” pet video like the other ones that get 1,000,000 views. I HAD to do some editing and filmmaking. The edit is intentionally rough, and actually doing that bad was probably the hardest part. Not obsessing over it was not easy. I spent 11 minutes shooting it (6 minutes of raw footage), 22 minutes to edit, including titles and music, et al.

Will it get 100,000 views, which is my goal? I don’t know. It’s a combination of key words, spreading the video, and some mystical game of chance. Maybe in a month or two, someone influential on the pet video circuit will post it and repost it and it might spread to cat fanatics. Who knows? Maybe it will languish as one of the undiscovered movies, or maybe people just don’t find it funny.

We’ll see.

Cat vs Blu Ray Player

2011-05-06T00:50:00.000-05:00

Empirical Experimentation

2011-05-02T21:36:00.001-05:00

Tomorrow I intend to try something, something new. I want to make with total intention, a “viral video”. This one will not be narrative, as that has eluded me thus far. No, I will exploit that which is closest to my heart. My deepest apologies to My Sexy Girlfriend Veronica ™, but I am taking about Vladimir Jack Bauer. Tonight I brought home the trusty Canon T2i DSLR to see if I could make something with my little man.

I will admit, I love a good pet video. Whether it’s :20 seconds or 4-5 minutes, I’ll watch this hilarious romps of animals being animals online. I love them. At the same time, the analytical side of me made some notations.

First, the concept and title are simple. Nothing fancy, just the absolute most obvious aspect of the video is the name you use, like “Cat tries to figure out treadmill” or “Kittens beg for food”. From there, keep it short. Very short. In some ways, the shorter the video is, it almost guarantees views.

In my video, there will be some editing. Minor, but still it won’t just be raw footage as I so often see. I’m also going to add some music, licensed proper music, but music nonetheless. Shooting with the T2i means I used shallow depth of field too. I do some focus pulls and tried to get a decent exposure (but alas, I am NOT a D.P. and have not the greatest of skills with the camera itself).

I just cannot help but apply some filmmaking skills to anything I do. It’s something I cannot let go of.These are risks as they break the formula that has been tried and true. If this doesn’t work, then I’ll probably attempt to just upload raw footage later.

The experiment will take 3 months to allow the search engines to take in the video, process the key words/metatags, and also for the snowball to head down the mountainside. I cannot guarantee this will work. I am more curious if I can get the coveted hundred thousand views on something I spend little to no time on and quite frankly pander to the masses.

Tomorrow, be prepared to see my cat, Vladimir Jack Bauer make his Internet Video Debut…

The Fissility of Felicitations

2011-04-30T23:53:00.000-05:00

Boy, this really is a fallow time for your faithful narrator. I almost missed a screening this past Thursday, and yet again this week I failed to even mention on the blogosphere that the 2nd episode of Framelines is playing in a measly two hours time and I haven’t promoted it yet. Is something wrong with me? Why do I not care more?

One thing is certain. I will make ACCIDENTAL ART this summer. Come hell or high water… although I never thought of Hell as a particularly watery venue or a place where the humidity was high. I’ve made a decision to attract an Ohio actress who is a bit of famous her own self. I have some connection to this actress indirectly and in the past 9 years I never ever dreamed of using that, but this is it. It’s go time. I’m calling the favors on this one, and I’m going ALL IN.

We have $X.XX amount in the bank now and with my last few commitments; we have enough to make the movie. Time to put the band back together again. I’m only going to use the bare minimum crew on this. I’m not out to impress anybody or pretend my production is something big or special. My sole concern is making a movie and telling the story. The more time I spend away from a film “community”, the more I know I don’t care about petty nonsense.

Thanks to this blog, I did make a connection to a local school that is going to provide us with some interns for FRAMELINES and other projects. It will be nice to get some new hands to help…. And possibly initiate.

Preposterous Aspersions

2011-04-24T10:37:00.001-05:00

Want to know how messed up my whole thought process is these days? I completely forgot that my own TV show was premiering until less than 12 hours before hand. No promotion, no hoopla leading up to it, I just plain forgot. Some marketing guru I am turning out to be.

I stayed up to watch it. I’ve been trying to recalibrate my body and go to bed earlier, so a 2:30AM start time of my show has now derailed those plans as I sit here in sleepy misery. I have seen this pilot episode so many times. We finished it last July.

Still, it is very different seeing it on the television live. I put on the closed captions just to read them and because I’ve never seen them on the show. I hope we can break through to general audiences with this. We’re trying to focus on the human interest stories of filmmakers and what motivates them to make movies.

If anyone is going to see FRAMELINES in Columbus, it will be with the DVR/Tivo. The show aims at the key 18-34 demo that PBS doesn’t attract often. There is also a chance those are the types that are awake at that hour watching TV. In all the other markets in Ohio, we’re getting much better time slots. In our home town, we’re getting the shaft with a 2:30AM time slot. I think it’s only a matter of time before they will change us to a better time. Once I get to the point of finishing a few more episodes, I can then turn on the marketing machine full blast.

an intransigent individualist

2011-04-22T16:45:00.001-05:00

Already feeling a bit better. I’ve done some creative work. I had to create an effect where an actor appears outside a large front window of a bar and have a camera travel inside this bar through the window. It’s a pretty common effect these days, but one I have never done. The problem was the actors were shot 7 months apart and with the first actor was shot in a way that was not necessarily conducive to this effect, as it would need to be static on a tripod and we shot mostly (almost entirely) hand held. Also, the “bar” was just a small bar inside a movie theater and did not have a “window”, so I created one in After Effects.

So via much computer generated trickery, I have manufactured the shot I wanted in a way that surpasses much of my original intent. VideoCopilot.net and Andrew Kramer’s tutorials make things like this a lot easier. It opens up the possibilities of what you can do with a simple, non-science fiction project.

That FX shot is the last one in this short. I also editing the opening several bits already, so progress has been made. I feel a bit relieved and relaxed. I’m still behind on the day job work and even FRAMELINES, but feeding this emaciated part of my soul felt good.

I want to get these two shorts done in the next 2-3 weeks. Self imposed deadlines help but usually there has to be an end game in mind. I don’t have one. There is no plan for another screening or a film festival or anything like that.

Regardless, my Obsessive-Compulsive side kicks in and I have to work on it and finish them. I can’t stand unfinished projects.

An Indelible Depression

2011-04-21T22:14:00.000-05:00

I am depressed. There are no two ways about it. I have sunk into a mild depression and it affects everything. As I wrote recently, I was uninspired to promote my screening and attendance was lower than anything I have ever done before. Granted, there were still more than I estimated there would be, but it still was below par. Sadly, this did not cause my depression, but represents a symptom of it.

Creatively, this funk prevents me from concentrating on or enjoying the process. I believe this is in part because my day job work is also editing and graphics. It sucks the life out of you sometimes from delving into the long hours and deep focus of creating a movie. I have two short films I have directed sitting in a queue unedited because I am working long days and at the end, I just can’t sit and edit anymore. I have a hard enough time getting through the regular work because of the routine that has sucked me down.

This too shall pass. It’s not as dire as it might seem. Maybe I need a vacation. Perhaps I need something to inspire me. I know not what can accelerate the process, but these phases are never permanent or debilitating for more than a short time.

I’m stuck at an impasse. Whilst we wait to hear about the Openfilm.com GET IT MADE 2 COMPETITION, we’re not progressing on Accidental Art as a feature film. I don’t want to get too far along the path of a lower budget version only to stop and find out we have the opportunity to make it for more money…. Even though I don’t believe we’ll win. Of the Top Ten, at least 8 of them are just as good as or better than my short film.

This source of frustration only compounds as time goes on. I want to make my next feature. I am ready. It will be in some ways a “last hurrah” as I cannot stomach the heartache and pain of raising money and the rat race therein.

The Machinations of a Madman

2011-04-09T22:21:00.001-05:00

Damn! Work is beating my upside the head. But that’s a good thing. Keeping busy and making money is not a bad thing, especially given how this economy has been hammering at video production. The downside is that I have failed to promote my upcoming screening as well as I would have liked. The attendance will correspond to the hype, meaning low numbers.

I have tried to maintain the things I need to do to beat my bad habits. There was some success and also some failure this week. I did not work on my new web series every day for 30 minutes a day; however I did some days and not others. I did keep my walking and physical activity increasing daily. It’s not much, but there is a lot to overcome there.

Part of “working on” an edit is thinking. The more I tinker or even look at the footage, the clearer the edit becomes in my head. The sad part is that these are each under 3 minutes in run time. I need to be in the right headspace for an edit. I like things to be how they should be. Sometimes this requires being in the right place at the right time.

There are several screenings coming up that my short films will be a part of; at least 4 in Columbus in the next two weeks. I’m still in a seriously anti-social state though. I don’t want to be out and about. I have little to say and what I do want to say pretty much winds up here in a blog. I have no interest in the rumors or speculation of other filmmakers. It has no affect on my movies or what I am doing. My head is turned downwards into my own trenches. So far, the view is much better with the blinders on when it comes to other people’s nonsense.

A Didactic Disposition

2011-04-02T21:15:00.000-05:00

Framelines, our PBS show on filmmaking in Ohio is like a freight train that’s going down a hill. I’m faced with deadlines and a workload that dwarves the small trio that is working on something of this magnitude. The struggle is to maintain quality and not have the time to do so. I endeavor to keep my bar higher on this show. I want this to help bring the filmmaking movement into the view of the public.

I hate doing the multicam editing for the roundtables, but don't mind doing the cutdowns for broadcast, so Scott has to direct the multicam in post for those. I step in at that point and pick the best moments of the usually 1 hour taping to create a 3-7 minute segment that has some level of coherence, plus clips and B-Roll when needed.

We found a nice rhythm of Alex the intern doing the A-Roll cut (interviews), then me and Scott on B-Roll, then I master the show with graphics and music, etc. All of the A-Roll is cut for the first 6 episodes, so it's on me and Scott to get them done. Alex hasn’t fully grasped B-Roll cutting, at least not in the way I want for the show, but he's really really good with A-Roll interviews.

Play to our strengths and work as a team. That’s been the most amazing part of the post production process on this show for me – creating and maintaining a workflow.

Continuing the Cotillion of Conquest

2011-04-01T13:44:00.001-05:00

So far this week I have improved on defeating my bad habits. One of the things about recognizing my obsessive-compulsive behavior results in trying to out maneuver them. Tricking one’s self can be tricky, but possible. Retraining your mind to erase decades of reinforcement is never easy.

The worst thing for defeating my productivity is the OCD need to want to have enough time to complete an entire job, when it is and has never been a job that could be done in a single day anyways. It’s a mindset, and a destructive one. I have the hardest time getting started on big projects because you are facing the mountain before you make any progress and it’s easier to just say…..”Tomorrow…. tomorrow…. Tomorrow…..”

Specifically, I am look at 2 edits for short films. Knowing I have close to 4 hours of raw footage to go through, which will take at least 6 hours to do, my sub conscious mind says I need and entire day to just slug the takes I like and jettison the rest. If I have even 45 minutes of paid work in between, then getting back into that mindset is broken and I can justify procrastination.

So what I am doing to defeat this is to just set aside two 30 minute time periods to start slogging through the work. If I just get rid of a bunch of the gunk, and make the raw footage a more manageable amount, then I can just work towards getting to the edit.

This seems so obvious, but I have years and negative reinforcement to work against.

Operation: Procrastination Obliteration

2011-03-24T22:04:00.001-05:00

Sometimes a plan works. In my last blog I described a technique to force myself to get things done by setting a self imposed embargo on the fun narrative work until the various day job and TV work is completed. So far, so good. I’m now 75% done with another episode of FRAMELINES, caught up on outstanding day job work, and well on my way to getting to the personal project.

In other ways I’m trying to force myself out of bad habits. I sometimes surf the web and read pointless articles with research instead of reading the many many books on my shelf from another addiction, which is Half Price Books ™. Unfortunately, I have no interest in curing that bad habit as I love my books; tactile and solid, books are not mean to be read on some device. I’m now leaving the computer and sites like Facebook earlier and reading in my bed, cats purring on my lap as I turn pages.

I’ve re-arranged my living space. When you want to change habitual behavior, sometimes it is as simple as moving your environment around to change your perspective literally. Tomorrow I inherit a new recliner from my father, and another one from my brother-in-law. I am forgoing the mighty futon we watch movies on in favor of two easy chairs from which we can battle for control of the remote in between us!

Next week I start to panic as I am way behind on marketing a screening. Me, the marketing whore, has failed to capitalize on the timings to get attention at the maximum potential. Please check the Weather Channel, as it might be snowing in hell. I have less interest in attention than I used to. The scepter has clearly passed on to others in the Columbus Filmmaking scene, and that sits very well with me. I just want to make my movies and shows. I have lost all interest in the players and their games. I am so entrenched in my work that I cannot spare the time or energy at pettiness, even for some of those I have helped that do not return the favor. Others do, and I do not do what I do for credit or return favors. I do it because I feel I must.

By Monday I’ll have another episode of FRAMELINES done, and I can start work on the new web series….maybe getting these two complete will inspire me to get the rest going too….

So now, I must return to my reading. I’m on my 4th book in 5 days. Of course that sounds more impressive than it is because the books are “The Art of ________” or photographic journals on Behind the Scenes, so they aren’t very word heavy. The book on BABEL by Inarritu was amazing. The Art of IRON MAN provided insight into pre-production too.

Après Moi

2011-03-21T22:15:00.001-05:00

Editing on my own personal projects resembles a treat or a dessert. Because I have obsessive-compulsive tendencies, I cannot allow myself to start work on editing one of my “art” projects until the day job work is done. That means I have to finish editing all the commercial work, then the PBS show FRAMELINES for at least one more episode before I can startp work on the new shorts.

This is my way of defeating procrastination.

So far it works fairly well with some minor infractions. With BITTER OLD MAN, I was driven. Now I am somewhat driven because I have the final shot I waited 7 months to get for this other one. There is a challenging effect I am really exciting to try out. I have reference photos and all kinds of concepts to try. These are the things that excite me on little projects; finding something that I’ve never done before and seeing if I can do it convincingly, at least to me.

I am delving a bit more into drama and adult themes in the writing and subject matter. I am not really “maturing” per se, although many of my interests of late have come into different realms of thought. Is that what maturing is? I still feel like sitting at the kiddie table!

Time to trudge through some more editing on FRAMELINES. Not the worst thing by far, but it burns me out pretty quickly. Once I get the groove on, it speeds up a lot, but getting there can be a bear.

Gesticulating, and not in a rude way…

2011-03-18T23:14:00.001-05:00

About 7 months ago I started a project, a new web series of short short movies. We shot the majority of one of them, but always intended to shoot the last shot on the next one. Life intervenes and here we are more than half a year later and finally getting that shot and doing another short for the series.

This isn’t a series as in one continues storyline or anything; merely a series of vignettes with a similar concept. I don’t want to make a big deal of these because they are simple ideas with elementary execution.

Today we shot with the new Panasonic AF100 as an experiment. We used my Glidecam Crane to get a cool shot, but after being so nice and loaning it out for free to several people it’s now barely functional and several key pieces are missing. Generosity has its downsides.

The AF100 is meant to be the DSLR buster. In low to no budget indie films, the DSLR still cameras have video functions and make pretty images for filmmakers with shallow depth of field. Cameras like the Canon 5D, 7D, and T2i (now T3i) make some great digital films. We used the 5D on the first one of this series, but they are not ergonomic for film work, so you have to trick your camera out with a rig to make it video-friendly. The new AF100 is a video camera based on the same technology. The biggest difference is in the video CODEC (Compressor/Decompressor) software which is vastly better on the Panasonic AF100.

I’ve already started to conform all the video and audio. Even though one of the appeals of these cameras is “tapeless” using SD cards or CF (Compact Flash) media drives, for me to edit with the footage, I prefer to conform them to our Matrox codec for editing and effects. So I save no time removing the “digitizing from tape” benefit of tapeless workflows, but I am happier to have files that work in 1080P in real time with effects and color correction, so I save time on the back end.

I promised myself that I’d get back to this series once I got further along on FRAMELINES and then the re-do of BITTER OLD MAN got in the way. Speaking of which, I submitted the revised BITTER OLD MAN short to a film festival that has rejected my 1 submission a year for a solid decade now. This is my 10th entry that I have no hope of getting into. Every year I also promise myself I won’t submit, but because it has no fee, I always send something anyway.

Call me Sisyphus.

Oscillating the Scintillating Conversation

2011-03-17T10:00:00.001-05:00

Got a great message last night about the Sonnyboo.com
site of mine. I am always proud of what my little site has done in terms of helping filmmakers with paperwork, free music, and now video and sound effects for free.

So here’s what I was sent:

I was on a panel of producers for "Eat, Drink, and Be Indie" an event sponsored monthly by the Atlanta Film Festival. We had a decent crowd about 100 folks out to listen to myself and two other producers share our thoughts and experiences about producing features.

Well, the question was what sites would be helpful and before my turn one of the other producers on the panel Terrisha Kearse ("10-20") mentioned "Sonnyboo.com" as a great site for beginning filmmakers to check out and use as a resource.

So, congratulations on the great site (and yes, I've been there before and found it very helpful myself over the years) and getting some Atlanta love.

Pretty damn cool. My secret plan to destroy all the real artists and trick people into enjoying mediocre films is coming to fruition! The evil Sonnyboo plot to take over all and abolish artsy fartsy nonsense can now begin! ahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha

Supercilious Superstitions

2011-03-12T00:23:00.001-05:00

How things change on a dime! We have our air date in Columbus for FRAMELINES. It will premiere here on April 24th at 2:30AM in full HD on Channel 34.1 with repeats to follow (on better time slots I assume) on 34.3 the “Create” extra digital channel. To help promote the show, I wanted to do a live presentation sneak preview with more of a Super Show at a theater. That’s now officially booked at Studio 35 on April 16th, Saturday at 3:00PM. The biggest difference there will be that we’ll show entire short films before the segments about those films or filmmakers.

The screening should be a fun time, as I’m still ironing out the details, which segments of the show to present, etc. So far, I have most of my picks. This event might also make our local sponsors happy, as it’s yet another chance to see their logos in front of the niche audience. We aren’t going to charge to go to the screening, but we will be asking for donations to support the production. The cool thing is that donations will be tax deductible thanks to our fiscal agent being a 501C3 non-profit.

In the last few days, the stars lined up and I’m doing a short film shoot next week. It’s another in my series of shorts that I started last year, but have not completed. I wanted to work with another editor to make them a different style than what I normally do, but it looks like I’m on my own. As I have said recently, it feels like I’m waking up from a groggy state and wanting to be fully creative, at least my own definition thereof, again.

One of my biggest stumbling blocks remains the writing part. It doesn’t come as easy as it used to; in fact I rather procrastinate quite a bit when it comes to writing. Not this time. I knew what I wanted, and it nearly wrote itself inside of 20 minutes. I had the luck of relying on a semi-true story which made it substantially easier than most.

Just putting the final touches on the cast on this bad boy will shoot before the end of the week. Then my series will have more than 1 short!

Extenuating Webstats

2011-03-07T17:15:00.000-05:00

I like to see how well a marketing push does. It determines if my ideas are hitting with the intended audience. That helps me shape goals and informs me as to a realistic expectation of how my work is received. It’s my mini non-studio version of test marketing and thanks to a few tools, it’s completely free. Like all demographic information, the results are subjective and all you really have are hypothesis and conjecture, but in some things the numbers do not lie.

For over 12 years I’ve been doing stuff online as “Sonnyboo”, the name that means little. The one thing I have learned with absolute certainty is that in most people’s minds, the Internet means “free”. The most popular things online are when people get something for nothing. Knowing that, I have used things to my advantage in that way.

First and foremost, I started as a musician. I wrote songs and did multitrack recordings from the time I was 16 years old playing multiple instruments. I wanted to pursue that as a career, but I did not have the skills. I know that and accept that without regret. I wrote well over 200 songs and I’ve put some of the “best” of them online for free for anyone to use in any way they want ('Best' being incredibly subjective since they are beneath the quality in every way from music I would use today).

Along with contracts and paperwork that makes filmmaking easier, I made a section of Sonnyboo.com exclusively as a free site that anyone can use to do whatever with the things and tools I have acquired over the years.

Now my webstats flourish because there is free material. As you can see what a single day can do to the unique viewers on my site. That’s a lot. It’s overwhelming. Probably 90% or more just get the downloads and leave, but the other 10% or so look around. I can track it and see. They look at the movies, read on the blog, etc. That is effective marketing to me.

Other tools like TUBEMOGUL paint a great picture as to what people like to watch and what sites offer the most viewers, find things via referral, create niche marketing plans, etc. I can upload once to TUBEMOGUL, then track everything from one site. I can see how a single video does on multiple sites or I can see how all of my videos on a site are doing in comparison to the other sites.

Without a doubt, YouTube is still the king. With little to no effort, most of my views in the last 10 years are on YouTube. It’s just the site Du Jour for random people finding and watching things. Vimeo may have the best looking video, but it’s got a fraction of the viewers.
Right now, Sonnyboo videos get more and more views online. Combined between all the sites, I have well over 2 million views for all my videos. I have not yet gone “viral” as it were, as in no single clip has exceeded much more than 100,000 views, although I did on a site that no longer carries the videos.

I don’t make the kind of movies that will go viral per se. If I wanted to, I could try to do something with “V” my cat just to see if one of my :30 second clips might go that route, but that is not my goal. My eyes are set on something a little different…

AIDAN 5, sci fi web series

2011-03-04T14:51:00.001-05:00

I believe in karma. There is too much evidence of it in the positive and negative for me to deny its existence. So in that vein, I am going to promote a project with as much passion and energy as I would my own, although I had nothing to do with said project.

AIDAN 5 is a bold and amazing web series. They have been in production and post production for 2 years trying to bring to life the ambition and style that it promises.

Now, they are releasing the episodes one every two weeks. Episode 2 is now online. Part Blade Runner, Part Sin City, AIDAN 5 comes from John Jackson the director, Ben Bays the producer, Tim Baldwin a writer and editor, and Vidas Barzdukas (that is spelled correctly, as I had to check with the Lithuanian embassy). Starring Bryan Michael Block and Maya Sayre, against an almost entirely greenscreen world that was then put in by artistist like Ben Brown.

Here are the first two episodes and a trailer for the entire 15 episode first “season”.

sneak preview II : Lost in New Albany

2011-03-02T00:27:00.001-05:00

As work continues on FRAMELINES, our PBS filmmaking show, it tests my limits of NOT being able to show the vast majority of our work until it airs on TV. Now we have our air dates. April 26th, 2011 FRAMELINES will begin to air in the Columbus market on WOSU the local PBS station. It will premiere earlier in the month on PBS in North East Ohio from Cleveland to Canton to Kent to Youngstown.
Here is a sneak peek at the ROUNDTABLE segment I host, this one on screenwriting:

I am mired in my own bile at the moment. For the past several months I have been living in a self imposed exile. My attitudes have not been conducive to human contact. I have a great deal of cynicism towards people. Strangely, my overall attitude towards “filmmaking” and even our local scene has never been more positive. What an odd contradiction that I have lost faith in many people, but not what they can achieve!

As the weather melts the frost, as does my darker thoughts. Of late, my endeavors seem to be achieving their marks; my own motivation increases on various projects. As I begin to work out my obsessions on outstanding projects like BITTER OLD MAN and finish more and more of the episodes of FRAMELINES; I find it curtails my cynicism and erodes the cobwebs of negativity.

Perhaps this spring might see even more positivity increase? Mayhap, more ambitious projects may come to fruition?

Mitigating Impatience

2011-02-26T16:35:00.001-05:00

Still tinkering with the FX work on the re-do of BITTER OLD MAN. I indulged by obsessive-compulsive side quite a bit, working until past 11:00PM after work tweaking and experimenting. The thing about FX work is that you need to try things out, audition them in real time, which means a long “render” then look at it in context. This means tinkering, then waiting 20 minutes to see if it works, and then go back and adjust settings minutely.

I do not have the matte paintings yet, so in my impatience, I created some temporary ones. That way I could audition some virtual camera moves, particle effects, and blurs. I’m very happy with the things I’ve made so far and the overall “look” is achieved, but without the final artwork and style.

When I put the current drafts against the original shots; I feel ashamed for what I did 10 years ago. I learned so much in the last 10 years about not only FX in a practical sense of HOW to do it, but my interest in a style and framing are much better. I’m sure there are other directors who are much more visual than me and would even direct this in ways I cannot conceive, but alas, I am me and not them.

I’m thinking of abandoning the 5.1 surround mix. Already this project has taken a great deal more of my time than I anticipated. I do not want to spend this much time in my past with old works. I want to move forward, move the new works forward. I have added some new sound, tweaked the overall edit, and remastered a lot of the sound as it was. The cleanup of 10 year old audio is easier now, but not easy. Some all new audio effects have been applied and a new score added to the end section too.

On my plate exists another project shot months ago that I have not edited myself since the assistant editor did a pass. I need to get to that too. Moreover, that is a new piece and has a stellar look, so it represents my more current cinematic aesthetics.

As for OPENFILM.COM and the GET IT MADE CONTEST 2, I still have no word. I have no doubt getting James Caan, Robert Duvall, Mark Rydell, and Scott Caan even on the phone together at the same time is a scheduling nightmare. No one is handing out $500,000 without a great deal of consideration. I do not think ACCIDENTAL ART will win, though. The competition and bar is pretty high. Most of the other entries are substantially longer, and I chose to go short and sweet. Also, I represented myself as more of a professional, someone who has made a feature film in distribution already. Some of the other entries went with the “never made a feature, have never worked with a budget” which may be more of what they want to have win the chance to do so.

But then again, no one really knows or could know what they might think or decide? Let’s just say, I’m moving on because I don’t think I have the kind of luck to win this kind of opportunity.

Maybe I’m obsessing over Bitter Old Man Redux to keep from thinking about the contest….

Something’s in the Water

2011-02-19T22:18:00.000-05:00

My old video on the 180 Degree Rule has been featured in VIMEO’s VIDEO SCHOOL, a project where they highlight the best videos to demonstrate making your videos better. The views spike from 1,200 to over 12,000 in less than 3 days. I love vimeo.com as a site, but I hadn’t been able to get the # of views I sought. Now I am seeing bleed over into the hits on the other videos too.

Upon my return from a week long shoot for a friend, the first thing that nagged at me was getting back to the 10 year old short Bitter Old Man. I promised myself I wouldn’t work on it more until I finished Episode 3 of FRAMELINES, and I didn’t get that done until 10:00PM before leaving for the shoot.

I began by tweaking the picture lock and made some tweaks. Then I started on the new shots done also the day before I left. Adding these into the mix and making the dolly shot work took some After Effects noodling, then I decided to blend that into the 3rd shot as well, which meant creating a CGI element in 3D to gel it all together.

I want to have all the FX done before I do a final sound mix, but in the original rough cut 10 years ago I used a Vangelis song from the Blade Runner soundtrack called “One More Kiss Dear”, which in itself was a major homage to the 1930’s music. In the end, I went with a sound design intro sans any music then. Now I found a truly royalty free song with no copyrights that happens to be very much in the style of that temp track. I’m going to use it for now and see how it works in the mix. I may go back to the simplified, no music aspect, but why not try it out?

Started compositing and FX work on the shots that don’t need matte paintings, just get ahead a little. I’m so glad I took notes in Google Docs because I forgot to add some elements that I notated to myself weeks ago, so already all 3 shots need to be re-done come Monday. Or Sunday depending on if I can stave off my OCD.

Nongregarious Nomenclature

2011-02-16T00:00:00.000-05:00

Big news up first… ACCIDENTAL ART is now officially a Top Ten Finalist in the OPENFILM.COM “GET IT MADE COMPETITION 2”. My little film will be viewed by film legends James Caan, Robert Duvall, Mark Rydell, and the no-so-legendary-but-equally-important Scott Caan. As much as this surprise hit me, I have no prayer of actually winning. The other 9 films are so good, there’s not much chance for us. It’s truly an honor to have gotten this far along.

It is quite miraculous to have gotten into the Top Ten. At least 1 cast member and about half the crew never even voted on the movie (yeah, ‘go team’). To get 1 of 3 siblings and my own mother to vote took more effort than it does to get someone to vote in an election year.

I have no idea when they are going to announce a winner. It may be a week or a month or the contest may decide “eh” and not do it. Who knows? Not me. No one’s gonna hand out $500,000 without a great deal of consideration.

I was on a shoot when the news came. Doing the hefty 12+ hour work days and digitizing at night for someone else’s enormous multimedia project would have been the perfect distraction if I hadn’t made the Top Ten. Instead, actually GETTING into it was a distraction for my work ethic and all the emails and phone calls that ensued.

The short film version of ACCIDENTAL ART is also going to play at the Detroit Independent Film Festival next month. I don’t even remember entering it, but I sent so many DVD’s out that it wouldn’t surprise me if there are still 2-3 more fests that got the movie.

Back to the grindstone of working on FRAMELINES and the re-tooling of BITTER OLD MAN…

More soon, my pretty acolytes.

A Vassal for the Verbose

2011-02-09T13:52:00.000-05:00

Okay, so the OPENFILM.COM competition initially said they were going to announce the top 10 and winners on Feb 8th, then changed it to 2 of the top 10 per day for 5 days starting on Feb 9th (today) and the winner of the whole contest later. Eh, I got a lot on my plate so my patience can take it. I don’t think I won. There were so many great films in the contest, most of the comparable or better than ACCIDENTAL ART. With the guy who did IRON BABY and all of his films not only in the contest, but the first one to be announced as a Top 10 finalist (even though his movie only ranked 2 stars out of 5, but most likely due to cheaters since it was a rocking good movie), means no need to get my hopes up – we ain’t beating someone of that caliber.

We shot a new establishing shot for Bitter Old Man yesterday. Mike McNeese came out with his Canon 7D DSLR and a tripod 36” dolly thing and I wiped the screen to make the new transition into the original footage. It was snowing hard, a crazy business owner complained at us for “being on his property”, even though the sidewalk is public property, but we got ‘er done. The Derek was there. He was AC on the original shoot and AC’d this shoot too. He thanked me for making him feel like in 10 years he hasn’t progressed at all on the crew totem pole. The Derek’s presence on this shoot was for more for sentimental reasons than any practical ones.

I did not permit myself to do any real work on BITTER OLD MAN until I finished episode 3 of FRAMELINES before I left to do a bigger shoot. I wrapped up the 3rd episode last night before doing laundry and packing for the shoot. I will most likely tinker next week when this shoot is over, but it’s done enough for closed captioning and review by the stations. I want to work on this short and get my laundry list of new FX and tweaks done, but patience prevails.

I did however re-do the opening and end titles. I added a more appropriate “style” to them. I could do those at home over the weekend where I no longer prefer to do any film work. Depending on the outcome of this short and if I can make the FX as top notch as I WANT them to be; Bitter Old Man might warrant an expenditure on film festival entries and I can start anew on a festival run on yet another short film.

A Regrettable Recompense

2011-02-04T21:55:00.000-05:00

So as I stated in my last blog, I’m revisiting my short film BITTER OLD MAN for the 10 year anniversary of that work. We (meaning Alex the Intern) have made the picture lock of the current edit, which technically is not a “re-edit” since we selected all the same takes (except 1 I think). Once I started down this dark path, a snowball turned into a miniature avalanche of ideas.

Firstly, the impetus was to update the FX work at the end of the piece. There are only 9 shots total, and of those, only 6 are from different takes and angles. Not that much work, but I wanted to take some decent time and put forth all that my skills had to offer. As I formulated a game plan for the workflow, I decided to put the call out to a friend who is an amazing artist/conceptual designer.

If I’m going to do this, why do it all myself when I can make the work much better than what I can do alone? So I have some matte paintings in the works now that might take a full 2 weeks to come in, especially in layers so I might add some virtual camera movement and have parallax motion in those shots. I am applying my current aesthetics and attitude towards work. I’m a lot more of a perfectionist now than I did 10 years ago. I strive for more quality over quantity/speed than I did before. Rather than rush to get it done because I am excited; I slow down and push my own expectations higher.

Another first for me will be to do a 5.1 surround mix on this. In the last 10 years my audio editing experience has increased so as I heard several sound and noise works that had to be done; I figured why not challenge myself and do a full short film in 5.1? I had tested a title sequence in 5.1 a few months ago to learn the basic tools, but I have no attempted to do an entire piece this way. Placing voices and sounds in a 3 dimensional space sounds like fun and a challenge.

Looking at the piece today, the opening two shots, the exterior of a building were subpar by my standards. Even though this existed in standard definition, and the HD is only an uprezzing of the original files, these two shots did not pass mustard. Seeing the next shot is a nice dolly going left to right, I have decided to re-shoot the establishing shots as a dolly shot and I’ll wipe on a car passing to transition into the piece. Now I’m reshooting an element for the movie too.

So what was originally supposed to be a 5-6 hour simple hobby job is now going to take the better part of a month in my spare time. I will be much more satisfied in the end, but I really don’t like looking backwards into the past, but this piece warrants the extra special attention. BITTER OLD MAN delves quite a bit deeper into serious issues and the acting stands up to my raised bar for performances.

I cannot figure out exactly what is motivating this inside my head and heart. What drives me into thinking about this a lot, in that obsessive “must do it!” mode? I do not know. All I do know is that my subconscious mind into that creative zone and the muse visits me a lot more often when I’m awake, asleep, and in between. Never neglect the sweet voice of inspiration when she whispers to you. NEVER.

A blast from the past, shortly after BITTER OLD MAN was shot in 2001, but before it was completed…

George Lucas Junior

2011-01-29T01:13:00.000-05:00

With all that I’ve got going on, do I really need to look into the past and re-visit a 10 year old short film? Apparently, yes I do. I was in the shower, naked as I usually am, and it occurred to me that yesterday was the 10 year anniversary of shooting my short film BITTER OLD MAN, a harsh take on racism. I thought about how in the last 10 years I have advanced quite a bit with FX work and how the FX in this film, particularly the greenscreen work, was pretty dated and horrible.

The problem is that I did not have the master files anymore. They have been deleted for 9 years or so. At the time that I edited this film, we shot in true 16x9 widescreen, but my master copy was a letterboxed version of that in 4:3 which does not look good uprezzed to HD (or even SD). The project files are so old and using proprietary codecs and hardware that are not remotely usable by today’s standards. Why on earth would anyone want to have an anamorphic widescreen version of the movie? It's not like TV's will be rectangular in the future, or a 16x9 aspect ratio....

16x9 originated standard definition uprezzes so much better to HD than 4:3 (old TV shaped material) that it is almost worthwhile to re-do this edit just for that, but what I am capable of today with greenscreen and visual FX far surpasses what I could do 10 years ago. Armed with tutorials and product from VIDEOCOPILOT.NET and we have the makings of an epic DO OVER.

It also doesn’t hurt to have an Intern to digitize the footage and the mandate to re-edit the short from scratch. I don’t want to spend a lot of time on this, as it is a 10 year old movie. I just think that if I modernized the FX for the end sequence, it might find a new life. It’s an important work to me.

Bitter Old Man is about a more modern racist, someone who doesn’t mind his son dating an African American woman, but it somehow crosses a line to marry one, has current overtones. It is especially relevant in the Obama years, where old prejudices seem to have been reignited. I did NOT base this on my own father at all. He’s not racist. I based it on a friend I knew after High School in that other worldly time before going to college, a guy we nicknamed “Skid”. I took several real life conversations we had and morphed it into this script. I felt a father-son relationship was more interesting to explore dramatically. Movies aren’t real life. Shocking, but true. I like nudging something real into the realm of fiction. It just makes for better storytelling.

So between finishing 6 more episodes of Framelines for a deadline, a shoot in San Diego, on top of whatever commercial work finds its way in front of me, I have decided THIS is how I should spend my free time. I need to go to the GEORGE LUCAS SUPPORT GROUP and stop tinkering with my old movies.

A Dogmatic View of the Red State of Distribution

2011-01-26T00:15:00.000-05:00

Kevin Smith announced his retirement from directing at Sundance this past Sunday night after screening his latest movie, a horror film called RED STATE. He has one more film to shoot, but then he intends to “retire”. He has decided to self distribute RED STATE and do a roadshow tour of the film, selling himself and a Q&A as a part of the ticket price. There’s also a promise to help promote and distribute fresh filmmaking talent.

This move was unexpected on one hand, but unsurprising on the other. It makes sense. His last several movies have bombed at the box office. As I described in a previous blog, COP OUT was a chance to get out from under the thumb of the Weinsteins, and that ploy failed. Kevin Smith lived (and died) by the Weinsteins. If they didn't like the project he was going to make, there was nowhere else to go. He tried MALLRATS (Grammercy/Universal), and more recently COP OUT (Warner Bros) out from under the Weinsteins, and both bombed at the box office. Now he's been consistently losing box office for the Weinsteins. Looking at his career purely from a mathematical standpoint, he's a risk to invest in. The costs of his film go up and their return on investment goes down. In other words, he's paying the price for being unconventional.

Self distribution for Kevin Smith makes sense. He has an enormous fan base… by the standard of indie film, but apparently has not been able to cross over into the Studio System’s definition. Almost always profitable, but the studios want more than to spend $9 million and make $30 million. They want to safely invest $50 million and make back $120 million or more. Except the Weinstein’s because that kind of gamble could sink them like New Line or MGM did. So what is a modestly successful, very notorious filmmaker to do? Put the movie out his own self.

What a lot of Kevin Smith fans don't realize is that his bold statements and total transparency on sets, as well has incredibly scathing and detailed descriptions of Hollywood in his podcasts/college speaking/DVD's are NOT appealing to their productions. When the big studios sink millions of dollars into a movie, they want control of every part of how that movie is leaked to the public. Kevin Smith tells everyone everything. Combine that with stories like he did of head of Warner Bros. and Tim Burton on Superman Lives, and you have the makings of a Hollywood Pariah and hero to the underdog.

We all related to Kevin Smith because he represents a generation and a movement in indie film, but his actual success within the industry is not very high. He never scraped out of the indie cult hero and into mainstream with a crossover hit. It's hard for our perception to see that since he has successes that most of us dream about; works with actors that win Oscars, etc.

Now he’s in that purgatory between famous and infamous. He has the time to interact directly with fans via TWITTER and FACEBOOK, but can’t really relate to their lives, struggles, or concerns. It’s not as easy to make pop culture references when you are one. Maybe most of the early devotees related more to the author when the guy writing characters talking about Star Wars wasn’t going to Skywalker Ranch to mix his movies.

As a fanatic for his movies in the 1990's, I can say without a doubt the last 10 years have yielded only a single movie I liked, CLERKS 2. I hated JAY & SILENT BOB STRIKE BACK, JERSEY GIRL, ZACK & MIRI, and even the CLERKS ANIMATED SERIES.

Some of this “retirement” might be coming from Kevin Smith’s issues with reviewers. When COP OUT received bad reviews, Kevin Smith went on a tirade about how it’s unfair because reviewers see the movie for free. Whilst I agree in principal that you have a radically different view of a movie when paying (I disliked TRON LEGACY more because it wasn’t worth $31 for 2 people), that’s not the same as accepting that many people may not like the movies he makes.

The Semi Annual Birthday Blog

2011-01-24T21:42:00.000-05:00

Another year come and gone. So far, 2011 looks like a good year. We’re barely into the year and a lot of good things are coming down the pike, and I’m not even a fish, nor do I live near a river. I’m working on so many projects at the moment that I’m frying my brain. I hear the sizzle of my noodle in the frying pan right now.

FRAMELINES, our PBS show about filmmakers is taking off. Two episodes complete and another 6 on the board being completed steadily. I love this show and what we’re doing. We premiere in North Eastern Ohio on Feb 26th, and roll out steadily in the rest of the state. WOSU in Columbus won’t start airing until April sometime, and even then not in primetime. In the age of DVR’s, that won’t be a problem. I like the 2nd episode a lot. We’ve got a new template for the show and the transitions et al. The rest of the shows should be a little easier to finish now that some of the “creative” is done.

ACCIDENTAL ART continues to push its way into the world. Investors have started to put money forth slowly, but most certainly. This OPENFILM.COM contest has started the whole “online cheating” that I mentioned in a previous blog. Someone is logging in and voting the exact same 8 movies, 7 with 1 star and 1 with 5 stars, all inside of the same few minutes and from accounts with derivatives of the same name. EG jgreen, jgreen2, jaredgreen, etc. (actual accounts doing this). At least we’re still in the Top Ten so far with only a week to go.

HORRORS OF WAR still manages to invade my life as we got released in several European countries without anyone telling us. Or paying us. Distributors are criminals. No exceptions. Never trust anyone in the film selling and buying business. At least there is some new poster art coming from this. In some countries the title is now “NAZI ZOMBIES”.

The cats continue to perturb and cause trouble. Mister “V” has grown quite large and plump to boot. He burrowed in a hole in the side of the couch, which now has become his new fort. He sleeps on my head like a Russian hat, keeping us both warm in the winter months.

I’ve got a music video shoot in San Diego coming up next month, so more on that later.

The Return of Horrors of War II : the Wrath of Hitler’s Finger

2011-01-23T18:06:00.001-05:00

It seems I can never escape my first film. HORRORS OF WAR just popped up in Sweden. All new DVD art, and without any notice to the producers, directors, or anyone else. The new cover art is obviously inspired by Inglourious Basterds, but pretty darn cool. SEE PIC BELOW

Along with this surprise DVD release that no one thought to tell me about, I also received an email from someone in the UK who bought the DVD. Now this became interesting if for no other reason than the interesting content of the note.

I live in the U.K and films are my life. I own over 500 dvds and still have over 300 vhs video tapes stored away in a cupboard. I love any kind of film from comedys,action,thrillers,mysterys,sci-fi and horror films are my favorite.My wife brought me this film for my birthday last year but it was titled Zombies of War and when I opened it I could not wait to watch it as I love zombie films.That night we watched it together and to be honest we both thought it was a pretty bad movie, the sound and picture was bad and the story kinda jumped from one thing to another. I didn’t really get it and the film felt like it went on forever.

Now I have not sent you an email to bash the film,quite the opposite. Im sending you this to say well done.

I have read all the posts about this film on IMDB and while I agree with most I was really surprised to see that you were on there responding to the messages.

I have never seen that from a director,actor or producer before and I have to say it was pleasing to see that you and the people who worked on the film went on there to not only defend the film but not to get all shitty about the negative response from the posters. You answered all the posts with a very positive attitude and I salute you and your crew for that.I can imagine how hard it is to make a film with all the time and effort and money that goes into it all and if you don’t make a great movie then you can still hold your head up high knowing that they are selling and renting copies of the film around the world and you can say I MADE THAT.Not many people can say they have made a film and had it released on dvd so well done to you. I will continue to follow your work and hope that one day you will have a blockbuster on your hands.Im sure if you keep working hard it will happen for you.As I say movies are my life so I will give anything a watch and if you ever do any filming in the U.K and need any extras I would love to help.

Much like the mixed signals in the email, I have mixed emotions. I am quite proud of the movie HORRORS OF WAR, but it also resides as a perpetual pain in my ass. I failed critically and artistically with my own intentions for the film. We did better than 95% of indie films made in that we got distribution and my feature film is available at Blockbuster, Netflix, and Amazon.com as well as in over a dozen countries. We put money back into the investor’s hands, which even fewer independent films ever do.

As for IMDB, I’m not famous or even infamous. I have the time to go and respond to my critics on the Internet Movie Database. Being polite and respectful of dissenting opinions is just a common courtesy. Grown ups realize that not everyone will like your work and you have to accept that and learn to live with it.

I respect this guy's opinions and criticisms, even the ones I don't agree with. If by some miracle I shoot a movie in the UK (very unlikely), then he's more than welcome to take part.

Accidental Art

2011-01-15T11:37:00.000-05:00

Accidental Art: "This is the short film ACCIDENTAL ART, which is itself the first 5 minutes of an upcoming feature film. The story revolves around Becca, a frustrated artist living in suburbia who is having a creative block and turns to the repairman Jack. Her affair has an unexpected affect on her artwork..."

Compensable Competition

2011-01-13T15:08:00.001-05:00

I have entered Accidental Art into this competition online from Openfilm.com called “Get It Made”. Basically, after the one month voting period, they select the top ten films based on votes and the editors picks and then an “advisory board”, which includes Robert Duvall, James Caan, Mark Rydell, and Scott Caan, select the grand prize winner. The grand prize includes a $500,000 financing “package”, that I can assume is part cash and part in kind services and equipment rental donations from sponsors. I put Accidental Art into the fray to see what happens.

I’m a big believer in math. Simple math cannot be refuted. There are a little over 100 entries in this contest. Already, a 1 in 100 chance is better than most film festivals or contests, but take into account that several of the entries are not going to be on the same level of cinematography or story, and the odds get better. Also factoring in that the subtle rule of the contest states that the short film itself has to be expandable into a feature film, and Accidental Art fits in like a glove, whereas many of the best entries are not really adaptable into features.

I am hopeful, but there are always X-factors. In virtually ALL internet based contests there is a degree of cheating or at the least highly unethical means of trying to win. I abhor these acts and will not lower myself to do things like vote down all the movies with 1 star whilst giving my own 5 stars. It’s already happened with this contest where I noticed that my film suddenly dropped in status and with all my marketing, I have only just recovered with over 50 people I personally know genuinely going out there and voting my movie up.

There are of course the enemies. People who have had issues with me in the past who are more than happy to go out and vote my movie down, not because of any artistic merit, but simply out of pettiness and jealousy. Again, it’s all in the math. The good votes will outweigh the bad, and I have to accept the causality; I made mistakes and have to pay for them.

Part of my marketing strategy entails adding the links to all my Sonnyboo.com downloads pages (check), posting on film related websites (check), and emailing family and friends (check). I have to find some other ways to promote at the end of the month as the competition wraps up, but I’m also in heavy post production on the TV series FRAMELINES for PBS as well as day job work. Time is not my friend.
http://www.openfilm.com/videos/accidental-art

Sedintary Streak

2011-01-04T19:09:00.001-05:00

Today we shot the intros for 7 episodes of Framelines, plus an interview for another “On Location” segment. We have a deadline staring down at us and a ton more work than I thought. I made a board with an index card for each segment, listing who is in it, what part of Ohio the story pertains to, and then line them up with the type of segment it gets categorized to. I wanted to see where we were at with everything we’ve shot so far.

This made for an easy viewing for organization. If I wanted to make sure we didn’t have two Cleveland stories up against each other, or we didn’t want to see any one person in two concurrent episodes, we could simply re-arrange the cards before we even get into editing.

We have 3 people editing on the show between myself, Scott, and Alex the Intern. Usually Alex does a first pass, then Scott does a B-Roll pass, then I clean it all up and setup a whole show. We’re preparing 8 episodes running 26 minutes and 46 seconds each. That’s like 2-3 documentary feature films we have to edit in less than 7 weeks for delivery. And we haven’t finished shooting the roundtables discussions and featured filmmakers for these episodes. Today was a milestone because we did get the Host, Dino Tripodis, on tape in front of Ye Olde Green Screen for making the introductions for each segment and episode.

I am sooooo glad we tested the pilot episode with audiences at things like INDIECLUB in Columbus and Cleveland. Tiffany Arnold had the best suggestion and we are including clips from the movies we are featuring to make it more palatable for the general audiences. We need to help let the audience know more about the material we are featuring.

I also re-edited the pilot episode today to include the newly recorded theme music from Parker Wiksell, which fits like a glove. I will replace the VIMEO video tomorrow with the new music so people can give it a whirl.

I foresee mucho stress over the next 2 months. Goodbye weekends!

Editorial Bliss

2011-01-03T14:56:00.000-05:00

Should you edit your own movie? This is a question I think needs to be asked more often. Some of the great directors never edit their own films and others do. Kevin Smith and Robert Rodriguez famously edit their own material, as does James Cameron, but he usually is on a team of editors with him. Steven Spielberg never edits his own films and relies on Michael Kahn as he has for 35 years with only 2 exceptions in his feature film career. Why would you want to work with an editor?

I cite as an example a single scene from Star Wars A New Hope from 1977. The scene where Luke and the droids are sitting with Ben Kenobi in his house. In the script and in the shoot, the scene started with R2D2 showing off the hologram of Princess Leia saying “Help Me Obi Wan Kenobi” and then they talk about the Clone Wars. Do you remember this scene?
During post production, editor Paul Hirsch looked at this and told George “I don’t think this is right. You have the princess begging for help and saying her ship was under attack, and THEN you have Ben and Luke talking casually about his father and going on about historical things. I think we need to reverse this because once you see this hologram, they need to be in a hurry and get on with the story…” and George agreed. As a writer/director, sometimes you are so close to the material you lose sight of how the audience will view it. Simple mistakes like this might slip past the goalie if you are creating in a vacuum.

Paul Hirsch won an Oscar ™ for Star Wars by the way…

Editing is the process of possibly fixing mistakes and re-motivating characters. It’s a 3rd chance, after the script (1st) and the shoot (2nd). They call editing the Final Re-Write for a reason.

The Crescent Curve of Popular Culture

2010-12-30T11:50:00.000-05:00

The girlfriend and I are re-watching the entire Battlestar Galactica recent series on Blu Ray, the gift that keeps on giving. We even placed the two straight to DVD movies in their proper place, chronologically. By complete accident, I saw an original series episode on one of the new sub-channels for digital broadcast and I was struck by how different the two series are, if for no other reason than the aesthetic tastes of today versus 30 years ago.

I was a huge fan of the original BSG. Meeting Richard Hatch a few weeks ago was great because he was a childhood hero. He bridges the gap because he was on both series. Even then, one of the things we talked about was how they gave him not just a throw away cameo, but a real character with depth that provided an acting challenge.

So far (as we’re only at the beginning of Season 3 of BSG) the most striking difference between the old series and the new series is in the character of Baltar. In the original series, the part was of a guy who betrayed the human race. Why? Just because. He was the bad guy. Like the flaw in a lot of TV shows and movies from the 1950’s to the late 1990’s, there was no motivation or complications. The old adage “the villain is the hero of his own story” somehow got forgotten. In the new incarnation of this same character, we have a man who is rich in motivations, very real in intent, and relatable in his complexities. To show a person offered choices and making the wrong ones based on selfishness is a bit more “realistic” and relatable which exemplifies why the show Battlestar Galactica garnered so much acclaim in its current incarnation.

Since the 1990’s, we’ve experienced a surge in anti-heroes. Batman really is more of the Dark Knight when comparing the 1966 Batman to the 1989 and now to the 2008 version. That trend began with the Dark Knight Returns graphic novel by Frank Miller in the late 80’s but that realistic and very adult version didn’t start to appear on screen until 2008, and even then in ways for more down to Earth than imagined.

In popular culture we’re in a phase of “realism” and it’s even bled over into our fantasy worlds because the audience demands as realistic as possible effects and worlds like Lord of the Rings and Avatar provided. The goal remains to engage the audience by making something relatable to their own experience, no matter how fat fetched or deeply imaginative like aliens or robots or goblins.

In the 1950’s it was about the big spectacle movies, period costume dramas and big musicals. By the late 1960’s the pendulum swung back to realistic movies, like EASY RIDER and it ushered in a decade of similar such movies like THE FRENCH CONNECTION and MEAN STREETS. Then George Lucas came in with STAR WARS and ushered in another several years of big fantasy. Everything is cyclical, but even the current trend of big fantastical movies have a more “realistic” edge; trying to appease both sides.

Arthur (1981)

2010-12-20T15:19:00.001-05:00

I recently rewatched a movie from my youth that I had seen countless times on videodisc (RCA’s analog video equivalent to the LP) and also on cable. I hadn’t seen ARTHUR with Dudley Moore in over 20 years. Lately, many films from my youth do not stand up to the scrutiny or aesthetics of what I like to see today, whilst a precious few still hold up or even find much deeper meaning in my elder days. Arthur had deeper meanings and even a few great lessons for filmmakers.

I even named my cat from a line of dialogue from this movie “Can we name our first child Vladimir, boy or girl?”

There are several major plot points that happen off screen. ** SPOILER ALERT ** When Sir John Gielgud’s Hobson dies; it occurs off screen and is probably more effective being that the audience filled in the blanks. It’s a rookie filmmaker mistake to always SHOW or SAY what’s happening. The audience deserves more credit for thinking.

Sadly, this movie has been remade with Russell Brand as the titular character and Helen Mirren as the butler. I don’t see how they can contextually make the scenes of blatant drunk driving and other aspects of alcoholism charming as they were 29 years ago, before becoming such serious and unfunny as they are today.

I can’t wait for this era of remakes and unoriginality to end. The cycle of bland, tasteless movies grates my eyes. I recently watched the 2007 UK movie (directed by Frank Oz though) dark comedy DEATH AT A FUNERAL, that was remade in less than 3 years. It was a wonderful and brilliant comedy and as suggested by Alex the Intern (May he rest in peace) as a great tonal comparison to what I want to do with Accidental Art.

The Verism of a Cubist

2010-12-16T15:48:00.000-05:00

Now that the Sonnyboo Intern series is over (maybe), time to re-focus on some other objectives. Fundraising is difficult in the best of circumstances, but in a super recession, it is near impossible. There are some fruit still on the trees, but they are much harder to reach. Exposure helps a lot, so I’m exploring some newer sites to help get the name and work out there.

OPENFILM.COM shows off more dramatic and engaging works. Anyone can upload, but much fewer get featured. In the past 3 days, I have had 3 films featured, including Accidental Art, Refractory, and the now ancient Bitter Old Man. On the advisory board for this site are James Caan, Robert Duvall, Mark Rydell, and Scott Caan (which one of those names is not in the same category as the rest?). They have a contest with a $45 entry fee to try to win a $500,000 development deal to make a feature from the short film. Seems like ACCIDENTAL ART is a perfect fit, but $45 for a contest is mighty steep. I’m weighing it over.

Atom.com used to be AtomFilms.com which was one of the crown jewels of internet video before being toppled by YouTube, which basically destroyed most of the sites like this. Now owned by Viacom and networked with Comedy Central and MTV, Atom.com runs a weekly “get the most views, win a couple hundred $$$” kind of deal. I uploaded the Sonnyboo Intern series just because, who knows? Well, I didn’t. We’re in the top 10 with one of the videos, and in the top 30 with 4 of them. We have already surpassed the YouTube views by several thousand views. And then other videos in the series have 1-2 views total. It’s hard to gauge what this site is really about and what any of that means.

Fan Edits/Remixes

2010-12-14T17:19:00.000-05:00

Most people don’t realize that the word “Fan” is short for “Fanatic”. Nowadays being a “fan” of something can mean getting creative with their fandom, either by creating a “Fan Film”, meaning a movie set in the universe of their story, or they can re-edit an existing movie. Today, with computer power and video getting to be more and more a part of everyday life, editing or re-editing movies into new things are hitting an all time high. In the short form, there are video “remixes”, like the misleadingly happy trailer for The Shining (dubbed “Shining”). Or people are taking all the deleted scenes and putting them back into a movie without the studio or director’s involvement.

In 2002, the first world renown fan edit hit the world in the form of someone taking the un-copyprotected Japanese laserdisc of Star Wars: Episode I The Phantom Menace and re-edited the film, removing almost all of Jar Jar Binks, changing the running time by nearly 30 minutes shorter. Not only did they do this, but they started renting VHS tapes from the local Blockbusters and taping over the copies of the real movie with their fan edit. Here’s the weird part, the public PREFERRED this cut of the film. The reaction from Lucasfilm however was “You may not edit our copyrighted material without our permission”.

Here’s the greatest irony of the situation. George Lucas created the world where anyone could digitally and nearly lossless quality, and edit anyone else’s movies. Starting with the “Edit Droid” program, on to the latest Avid and Apple and Adobe editing software, we’re in a world where anyone can edit with ease, especially from a DVD.

On such sites, Star Wars is still the most re-edited set of movies by far. People seem to spend an awful lot of time trying to make the Prequels more of what they intended, but one version caught my eye and I have no downloaded and watched it. Star Wars IV A New Hope Revisited. There are hundreds of big and small changes to this edit. This guy upped the ante and did full out ILM quality CGI renders and everything. He even did a 5.1 surround sound mix.

It’s as if someone took the super-fan list of things we noticed having seen this movie hundreds of times from age 5 on (I’m projecting) and went ahead and really fixed them. Things like a line of dialogue from Han Solo saying “I know some maneuvers, we’ll lose them” and then showing a shot of the Millenium Falcon flying straight. Or every time they cut to a close up R2D2’s head, they were re-using the same shot from the Death Star even when he is in the Falcon or Chewbacca not getting a gold medal at the end, and all kinds of nit-picky details that only the most fanatical devotee would notice. They are ALL fixed in this guy’s personal edit of Star Wars.

Director’s Cut vs. Special Edition

2010-12-10T16:36:00.000-05:00

Fans of movies love to see alternate or longer versions of their favorite movies. There are basically two different types of extended cuts for the most part, a DIRECTOR’S CUT and a SPECIAL EDITION. What is the difference between a “Director’s Cut” and a “Special Edition”?

I remember reading the back of a Laserdisc, an album sized video disc, in 1991 of James Cameron’s Special Edition of THE ABYSS, and shortly after a laserdisc of ALIENS special edition, where Cameron clearly wrote that these are NOT “Director’s Cuts”. Contractually, James Cameron had final cut on the theatrically released films, so his cut was the one released. The concerns about running time and the impact that has on box office returns is a part of his job and duty, he went on to say. Home video affords him the opportunity to add back in scenes and for James Cameron, whole subplots back into the film and they can be seen as alternate versions, and thus “Special Edition” is the apt title for these versions.

Usually a “Director’s Cut” implies that the studio or the producers made editorial decisions against the wishes of the director. In the case of James Cameron, he was fired from his first feature film, PIRANHA 2 THE SPAWNING and he did not have final cut. He vowed and has upheld that he would contractually have final cut on every movie he directs. After the debacle of what happened to Ridley Scott on BLADE RUNNER, you would think he would have similarly made sure, but even as recent as 2005, over 20 years later, he still has to release a Director’s Cut of KINGDOM OF HEAVEN because the theatrical version was not what he intended, although there have been extended Special Editions of BLACK HAWK DOWN and GLADIATOR released, that are not considered “Director’s Cuts” because in his DGA contract, he had final cut on those films.

Peter Jackson got proven right when he made KING KONG. During the LORD OF THE RINGS and the huge success of the “Special Editions” (not “Director’s Cuts”), when asked why he didn’t release the extended cuts of the films, he said that the only reason people say that is because they have something to compare them to, and that the initial films were very popular. With KING KONG, the main criticisms (including my own) are that the theatrical cut (technically a “Director’s Cut”) was too long and self indulgent. He even then released a LONGER “Special Edition”.

The Sonnyboo Intern Program 6 ; FINAL CHAPTER

2010-12-09T15:36:00.002-05:00

Everyone Lies and Misspells

2010-12-09T14:20:00.001-05:00

My reading habits have not changed. I read a paperback of some kind of pulp fiction, then alternate with some kind of film production book, whether it be a picture based Behind the Scenes, an Illustrated Screenplay, or a text based Making Of. I just finished one of the very few brand new books I bought, as I am addicted to Half Priced Books. I can’t even drive past a Half Priced Books without losing money and getting no less than 3 books. I just finished reading HOUSE the Official Guide.

Usually these “official guides” are not great. They tend to be fluff that just rehash moments from the scripts or worse have the producers and actors play a game of “State the Obvious” where they rehash what should be clear about their characters motivations. I hate those. This book managed the impossible and was a delicate balance, weighted in the production side, with some fluff, but not too much.

I loved reading about the various department heads and “Below the Line” crew and how they contribute to the whole of creating a TV series. Over 10 years ago, before I ever thought of doing filmmaking, I bought a similar book that strange as it sounds, taught me some of the best knowledge EVER about television production. The MAKING OF DEEP SPACE NINE, the Star Trek series had information on how a pilot works, how residuals work for SAG actors, the process of a “show runner” and how writers go from Executive Story Consultant to Executive Producer and what all that means. Learning that a TV Producer is more akin to a feature film director was an eye opener. Directing TV is not the same thing as directing a movie. There is NO AUTONOMY; it is such a team effort.

I feel much better about my book TALES FROM THE FRONT LINE OF INDIE FILM because there are more grammatical errors in the HOUSE book and that’s published by a big company.

Next in my film book queue is THE MAKING OF 1941, a period 1980 book on the Spielberg flop, that I sentimentally love.

Multimedia Musings

2010-12-08T13:46:00.001-05:00

I own the multimedia playing device called the WDTV from Western Digital. I love this thing. I first bought it for the Cowtown Film Series (in 2009) because I hate playing things off an optical disc at a screening in the movie theater. DVD’s and even Blu Rays have inherent flaws in that the videos are greatly compressed to fit on a disc. So you lose color, sharpness, and basic picture information before you blow it up on a giant movie screen. This seemed counter intuitive. So I found this little box that plays the video in full 1080P HD glory off of a hard drive and if needs be, even in surround sound.

Many people are musing about the future of optical discs because standard definition DVD is definitely on the natural decline. Sales in 2010 are down over 20% from 2008 at the same time. Blu Ray has not taken off as it was intended, mostly because of the economy being stressed, which is not a great time to launch a new format, especially under Sony’s guidance which means way more expensive without dropping in price. Another factor is that the saturation of HD TV’s into the home is merely catching up to the Blu Ray market, and even then the importance of picture quality is not weighing well against the idea of re-buying DVD collections.

The other factor oft-theorized as to why Blu Ray has not expanded is digital downloads and file-based distribution of movies. Netflix’s ever expanding Video On Demand service indicates that the market is going for this hard. Between 6PM and 8PM nightly, internet traffic heavily takes a beating from Netflix On Demand, which now includes HD content. Does their “HD” on demand look anywhere near as good as a Blu Ray? Hell No, but as has always been the case, convenience wins out often over quality.

Back to the media devices… The WDTV models now have YouTube and Netflix compatibility, meaning even without a Blu Ray player, you can access the Internet and watch movies and videos like this on your TV via a media player box. There is the APPLE TV for mac lovers and various other similar devices from so many manufacturers.

One of the things people claim prevent the demise of DVD and BLU RAY are the EXTRAS, bonus features, and behind the scenes clips. On this point, I agreed… until this past week. As my recent blog entry told, I loved this film called MONSTER. On the YouTubes, I found a bunch of videos in 720 and 1080 HD definition that could be downloaded via Mozilla Firefox to the MP4 file format, which my HDTV can play flawlessly. I can see it in full high definition on my TV, which means in an entirely file based world; I can have a movie and all the extras.

My prediction for the future is that everything will go file based because at the rapidity of change in file formats, image sizes, and standards, being more computer based will pave the way to handle those better than physical discs that are locked into one size and format. As for “extras”, those will be given away freely online with sites like YouTube or any site where they can be obtained for anyone who does want them, and keep the files on their own hard drive or ported to media players for TV. These bonus features also serve as perpetual EPK’s (Electronic Press Kits), promoting the movie as much as “added value”.

I find I’m moving my WDTV around from my bedroom to my screening room (the man-cave basement) to work. I find that looking at HD content on the computer to the 42” TV versus playing it to the same 42” with the WDTV I can say with a large margin the picture quality of video is substantially better from the media player box. The added surround sound output means that this is the best way to view file based videos.

This is the future. I like discs and I love the “collection” feel, but in 20 years no one will know what a disc is, much like high school kids may not know what a “video tape” is now.

Industrial Light and Starz

2010-12-07T16:03:00.001-05:00

In posting on the forums, I stumbled across a discussion on a Starz documentary on George Lucas’ effects company INDUSTRIAL LIGHT + MAGIC, aka just ILM. This 1 hour HD doc studied how this ambitious company shaped movies over the last 35 years. It was an amazing set of interviews and footage. Starz really went all out on this one. Interviews with Lucas, Spielberg, Ron Howard, and narrated by Tom Cruise.

Starz has been batting the Behind the Scenes game out of the park. In 2004, my all time favorite Making Of DVD came from them called THE CUTTING EDGE, not to be confused with the ice skating movie. This in depth set of interviews, B Roll and examples dissected film editing and its relation to film history.

I just got this Starz Original DVD called FANTASTIC FLESH on the special effects make up industry and its entire history from the first days to the most current. Sadly missing is Ohio’s Bob Kurtzman, even though his former cohorts Greg Nicatero and Howard Berger are prominently interviewed, along with Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez with Frank Darabont.

And this is just a part of a DVD series from STARZ called “Starz Inside” where they examine the different departments and functions of filmmaking. I love it.

Monsters

2010-12-06T15:00:00.001-05:00

This past Saturday I got to see an indie film from the UK about two U.S. people in Central America called MONSTERS, which is sci fi-lite. The UK director Gareth Edwards is known for making big FX for small $$$. This feature length film shows his abilities in spades.

The movie is slow paced, which for many viewers is apparently some sort of crime. I like slow pacing and especially when the cinematography soaks in the environment. The cinematography and sound take “indie” to an all new level, nonetheless the fact that the director/writer/camera guy also did all of the FX work. Not most of them, but ALL of them. Wow. They FX are on par with anything you’d see from a Hollywood studio production, but he did them all. From adding simple warning signs for alien invasion, CGI jets, to the giant 100 foot alien monsters themselves, Gareth Edwards made them all and inserted them into his film all by himself. Impressive.

Now the film itself managed to avoid several clichés I thought I saw coming and that surprised me a lot. What I love most about the movie is that it isn’t about the “Monsters” at all. That merely serves as a backdrop to a story about two people. Every movie tries to invent a world, whether fantastical or realistic, but we hope an audience can recognize and accept the universe we put on screen. Here, a filmmaker made a radical and beautifully damaged world as a backdrop for his story and I bought it hook, line, and sinker.

The local theater played the movie off of what seemed like a standard definition DVD and not in HD or Blu Ray. The details on text and little things weren’t that sharp, but the sound was killer and the camera work was so good with the soft focus (shot on a Sony EX3 with a 35mm lens adapter) that it was still a very theatrical experience. They only did 1 show a day in a smaller theater, but it is also already available on Video On Demand on several cable operators. Traditional distribution is on the outs.

The Progenitor of Processes and Statistics

2010-12-05T16:03:00.000-05:00

I’m doing an experiment with this new web series. We already met our goal of 1,000 views on YouTube for the first video. I wanted to put the emphasis on the YouTube videos just because the quality has vastly improved on this site in the last 2 years compared to where they were in 2008. It’s just the main site where most people on the planet find videos. As much as I prefer VIMEO even for quality, it just has a fraction the number of videos and people, plus their limitations on uploads and bandwidth just don’t make it the most viable option right now.

I have however been posting the Intern videos on all the video sites I have accounts with anyways, but posting the links and doing marketing via YouTube. I posted the VIMEO links here on the Blog site, just to keep track of traffic coming from my blog to the videos in a separate tracking.

The results are that YouTube does tend to be the dominant site for people randomly finding the videos moreso than my own marketing efforts. My marketing involves posting links on various sites and forums related to film. The key is to be involved with those sites. Personal connection affects the reaction to the videos. If you are considered a “spammer” or an outsider, the reactions tend to be bad, although the ratio of positive comments even on sites with minimal to no prior postings was much higher than almost all of my previous videos in a similar scenario.

The last video has had a strong initial impact and the views went up higher in a faster pace per day than the others, but they are all steadily averaging about 20-30 views per day or so, taking into account the initial days of marketing skew these much higher, but taking that out you can extrapolate that the average daily views are somewhere between 20-30, and they become somewhat self propelling as I don’t continue to post links after the initial boost.

At this current moment, the views are as follows:
1st video is at 1,037 (Youtube), 2,677 total from all sites combined
2nd video is at 673 (YouTube), 1,322 total from all sites combined
3rd video is at 490 (Youtube), 978 total from all sites combined
4th video is at 443 (Youtube), 883 total from all sites combined
5th video is at 269 (Youtube), 521 total from all sites combined

So there’s one more video to go in the “Sonnyboo Intern” series. It could make a nice ending if we choose not to continue, which I am leaning towards not making more. As per the feedback and interest levels, it seems like we’re beating the same joke into the ground over and over again. I want to curb my obsessive-compulsive impulses rather than entertain them. I think this 6th video will be the last one of these, unless we continue during production of the feature. I think for pre-pro, we’re done. Alex had better start working towards his counter arguments to convince me otherwise, but I think it’s over for me.

Ubiquitous Carrion

2010-12-01T16:59:00.000-05:00

As paid work slows down, the unpaid work ramps up. Time to put a lot more effort into FRAMELINES, our PBS show on filmmaking. I was changing directions on the short film show, as many of the films were not as PBS friendly, but they may really want this, so retooling the show means a lot more work. I still don’t know what is the best direction to take the show yet, so I am mulling it over. A more conservative, yet higher quality production, or something a bit more mainstream with a looser chain around the neck?

We shot a few more Rountables for FRAMELINES this week. I think the “Very Special Episode” for the 48 Hour Film Project Columbus may actually get bumped to either a double sized 60 minute episode, or possible edited into two separate 30 minute episodes. We have a lot of great material, and some killer soundbytes. Combine that with Mike Tavares working the crane with his virtual reality glasses to monitor, and we have a killer looking roundtable discussion.

Still, I’m dealing with technical issues that threaten to demolish one of the original studio shoots. I think I fixed it but I won’t know until editing. I love the multicam editing function, being able to “switch” live in post production, and then going in to tweak and adjust it after. It’s a strange and fun process for taking 4 cameras of the same event and creating an edit weeks (and months) later like it was a live event.

I’m gearing up to shoot more things like my 180 Degree Rule video and more short educational film tips. They are for the show, but they are also the most successful videos I have online. I like to teach. It’s something I enjoy. You can’t please everyone, but I never wanted to try.

Accidental Art Video Blog - Collaborating on Screenplay

2010-11-30T19:47:00.000-05:00

The Sonnyboo Intern Program 4

2010-11-23T23:01:00.001-05:00

Passionately Preoccupied

2010-11-20T00:10:00.000-05:00

These new video blogs are popular with people I know. Maybe it’s the slightly exaggerated “me” or maybe people like seeing cruel and unusual punishment towards an Intern, but they are growing in popularity as we go. Alex’s idea of doing this combined with our team writing coalesce into combination of promotion and humor.

I initially agreed to make 6 of these, but we only had outlined 3 of them, all of which are shot and edited and out there. When it came time to do the next few, I had no ideas. Alex pitched me several ideas, and life imitated art whereas I didn’t bite on any of them. It did lead to a healthy set of combo concepts. The idea of doing some kind of homage to famous movies struck a chord with me.

To be honest, I wasn’t that keen on doing any more, even though we’ve had some really good feedback. The new ideas got me reinvigorated. I cannot wait to shoot these and release them over the next few weeks. The video blogs are simple and not complex, so no need for a lot of flash to them. There are several subtle touches that we’re doing to the insiders; things like my lower 3rd having a ton of titles whereas Alex only has “intern” and the like.

My deal with Alex is this, if we get an average of 1,000 views for each video by January, we’ll make more of them. I’d have to be really really compelled to keep doing these. I have other projects in need of attention, but as long as we can keep the quality up, we’ll keep at it.

Accidental Art Video Blog - Caffeine Free

2010-11-17T20:43:00.000-05:00

top 5 MAKING OF sites

2010-11-16T16:52:00.003-05:00

MAKING OF
http://makingof.com/

Natalie Portman is one of the founders of this site with tons of great EPK videos of behind the scenes kind of things.

ART OF THE TITLE SEQUENCE
http://www.artofthetitle.com/

Art of the Title Sequence has great info and in depth interviews and videos on the title sequences and effects for the coolest opening or closing sequences of film from the earliest days to the latest craze.

SOUNDWORKS COLLECTION
http://soundworkscollection.com/

For sound design, sound mixing, film scores, and all things audio - these videos are amazing and insightful for one of the most under-appreciated aspects of filmmaking - sound.

JOHN AUGUST BLOG
http://johnaugust.com/

John August, the screenwriter behind BIG FISH, GO, and others, shares opinions and ideas.

DREW'S SCRIPTORAMA
http://www.script-o-rama.com/table.shtml

An old classic that still has and adds screenplays, even separating the "transcripts" from the "screenplays", where one is a transcription of what was in the final edit, the other is the WRITER's intent. Great reads, especially if you read unproduced drafts or early drafts of film classics. I still recommend reading THE GREN MILE or SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION for the art of effeciency in screenwriting and description.

a confounded nuisance

2010-11-15T14:28:00.000-05:00

Friday night I interviewed a childhood hero, actor Richard Hatch from Battlestar Galactica (both versions). He was doing an acting seminar in Cincinnati and we wanted to do a story for FRAMELINES. He was a really down to earth, nice guy. It turns out we know a few of the same people and that was a nice ice breaker.

As fate would have it, I wrote a part with Richard Hatch specifically in mind for ACCIDENTAL ART, but we’ll see if he’s interested at all or if schedules work out when it comes time to shoot the movie. So many variables can conspire to make these things not work out. I have in mind several genre actors for this very non-genre movie. I love the idea of casting against type. Taking a science fiction or fantasy icon actor and putting them in a dark comedy has the appeal to their acting skills and because most people would only want them to play a variation of their past characters. I know I don’t want to be pigeon-holed into any one genre or style of film, so I can relate to an actor not wanting to only explore one type of character.

The new intern Blog videos seem to be doing well. A lot of people are positively commenting on the various sites. We’re shooting with the Canon T2i DSLR still cameras in 24P. They take about 30 minutes to shoot and a little over an hour to edit, do FX work, and finalize. I have in mind about 5-6 of these total, but we’ll see if there’s continued interest. There would have to be about 1,000 views each for this initial run before I’d consider doing more. Right now, they are purely promotional for the movie and the simple fundraising, as something to do and create that doesn’t take a lot of effort, but has some entertainment value. I am learning something, as in I am doing some very complex compositing work with 3D motion tracking on multiple planes of focus, etc. I am putting the focus on YouTube over Vimeo as an experiment with these.

I re-edited FRAMELINES pilot episode. My original running time was 29:00 minutes and PBS needs 26:46 which meant some serious trims. From feedback at screenings I wanted to add more clips from the films we are discussing, which meant even more interviews being trimmed. I finished and delivered Friday at 4:00PM what I believe is a vastly improved pilot episode. I’m considering some kind of screening or debut of an episode and then highlights in February, which is when we’re now set to premiere the show. It’s been over a year since I did any kind of screening.

Accidental Art Video Blog - Screenwriting

2010-11-12T00:42:00.000-05:00

Bedevilment and Predation

2010-11-08T13:39:00.000-05:00

So we put out the first video blog for ACCIDENTAL ART. I think the idea of taking a few potshots at myself and my reputation will make for a humorous thing. People have a certain perception of me and what working with me is like. I don’t mind make a slightly exaggerated parody of this.

I started making silly pictures of myself and opening this up on Facebook for people to make fun of me a bit. Why not? Apparently people want to take me down a peg or two, so now they can.

We’re going to do 5-6 more of these. We sketched out the plan, and now that I showed how easily it is to do the FX work, the ambition rises. Alex had this idea that we expanded on and have made into something that is already getting some really good feedback.

I’ve been in something of a social coma of late. I have strong antisocial feelings towards most of the people I normally have hung out with. I’m in this creative head space and I don’t want to be distracted by unimportant drama. Word still reaches my ears about this, that, and the other in terms of who is making what movies and the opinions of such. I’m out of it and I don’t care.

Some people can spend years making movies and not improve. So what? I honestly don’t care what other people do or don’t do. It’s none of my business and they have every right to make movies and suck or not suck.

I just want to work on my own projects and create things that I like. Come January 2011, when FRAMELINES hits PBS, we’ll see how much I can stay out of everyone else’s business…since the premise of the show is to go onset and talk to as many people as we can about their projects.

Bedevilment and Predation

The Sonnyboo Intern Program

2010-11-07T10:39:00.001-05:00

Gesticulating the Syndicate

2010-11-04T13:55:00.000-05:00

I am going to speak at Ohio State to some students about film soon. I used to let things like this get to my head, but doing a little homework, some of the students I’m speaking to have been on bigger sets than I have. One girl worked on THOR and met Natalie Portman, whom I am supposed to stay at least 50 yards from. I was a PA on Traffic over 10 years ago, but that’s not a big deal. I’m not some huge success, at least not by any definition I have set for myself.

I’m headed to Indianapolis for a film festival soon, but it’s for RELATIONSHIP CARD playing. I got the nicest phone call from the festival organizers saying it was a great movie and that they watched it frame by frame to see my inside jokes in all the graphics. I’m glad someone did because I took a lot of time to write out a lot of little inside bits for that.

Framelines is coming along. I have to re-edit the original pilot down from 28:59 to 26:46 running time. I got a great suggestion from Tiffany Arnold when we screened this at IndieClub a few months ago. She said we should show more clips from the movies we’re profiling, and she was right. So I need to trim out even more material to make room for more example clips. Looks like January will be the premiere and that will lead to a lot more exposure for everyone.

It’s official; I have avoided a lot of drama in the local film community. There is a big ado about some people’s work and how they are presenting it etc. and I have no part of it, nor really that much of an opinion. I’m so buried in my own work right now I wouldn’t know what anyone’s doing. I don’t have time to care about he said/she said.

Because of the fundraising, Alex and I came up with a quick bunch of shoots to do as promotion. I think these might be funny and they will be really really short. People will like getting a peek at what working with me is like.

Director's Reel

2010-10-27T19:43:00.001-05:00

After working on the site and resume, I realized my reel hadn't been updated in over 4 years. This is something I want to do for potential investors as we gear up for fundraising hard core. If they want to see some snippets of my other work in a shorter period of time, this is it. I'd probably also include the entire short RELATIONSHIP CARD as a follow up.

A director's reel is a tool to demonstrate a larger body of work in a short amount of time. You want to put your best foot forward. It's my opinion only, but I like to show some versatility too. I like a broad range of styles and looks, but I wanted to shed the look of my movies from 10 years ago as much as possible. I got rid of most of the work from over 5 years ago.

In the case of this particular reel, I still wanted to show 2 whole scenes to demonstrate storytelling abilities. The two best things I've got are a clip from HORRORS OF WAR, one of the very few things in the movie that I am entirely proud of and now from ACCIDENTAL ART, the short. There are snippets and samplings from various other projects, including my new web series, but that's for another time...

Revamped Revised and Renewed

2010-10-22T23:27:00.001-05:00

So I have put a little bit of time into the Sonnyboo.com site again. It’s been a while since I did more than just change a picture or add a screening. In the hopes of putting good will into the world and seeing how much gets returned, I doubled the amount of music for the royalty free music, added some public domain videos, images, and contracts. I have the strictly voluntary donation button for Accidental Art on these pages. Money donated (not invested) from these sites will go towards simple things like the wrap party or screener DVD’s.

I put some real time into updating things like the images to HD (1920x1080) and adding new videos that will be useful. Fonts bundled together for filmmakers along with new storyboard templates et al will help a lot of people out. I found in the past that tossing this good will into the universe tended to see it come back, so I want to get back to doing more things like this.

In preparing for this marketing push, I realized many aspects of the Sonnyboo.com site have not been touched in years. My resume didn’t even include directing HORRORS OF WAR in 2005 or anything at all after that. I’ve consolidated a list of all the awards I’ve accumulated over the years and it sits at 16 total, excluding the award for special FX or acting, which are not awards for me specifically. All this resume stuff lead me to look at my Director’s Reel, which has not been updated in 2006, so that’s sadly missing my better work. I’ve tried to work on that for 2 days in a row but there is no time and I do not edit at home anymore.

In the last few years, I have not marketed myself or the work as much as I used to. Partly, because I have a life and enjoy spending time with my girlfriend and cats, but also because work and other projects take a lot more of my time away from those kinds of endeavors. In looking at the stats, the Sonnyboo.com site had dwindled in popularity. Of course, I had not been making as many movies, but in the intervening years, sites like YouTubeand Vimeo are dominating the way people see videos online, but I didn’t miss that boat, as my views on YouTube continue to skyrocket into the tens of thousands on some of them (not merely dozens on the others).

I also noticed I had not updated the pages for the older short films. They still link to outdated sites that don’t exist, but also they haven’t been touched in years so they do not have the embedded videos from the other sites. I’m still only halfway through updating these pages for individual movies. It’s going to save me a ton of bandwidth by deleting the video files on my pages and having the movie sites take the hit on downloads. Vimeo is my preferred site, but YouTube is not to be underestimated.

So I added VIDEOS, CONTRACTS, PRODUCTION PAPERWORK, STORYBOARD TEMPLATES, IMAGES, DVD/BLU RAY INSERTS, FONTS, doubled the FREE MUSIC , and a bit more, all in the name of shameless self promotion that helps other people a lot more than it does me. If it helps Accidental Art get a little extra, then it’s all worth it.

Genus Festuca

2010-10-15T16:37:00.001-05:00

Yesterday we went to the Cincinnati Oxford International Film Festival, both to do a story on the festival for FRAMELINE and also because ACCIDENTAL ART the short was playing. We arrived a little late and I thought we missed my little 5 minute movie. Instead it played much later in the set of short films.

All of the movies I saw were of a surpassing quality of camera work. The prevalence of 35mm film adapters, DSLR, and the Red One camera are all raising the bar on indie film in a huge way. Digital Cinema is no longer hampered by the deep focus of DV and regular camcorders. Shallow Depth of Field and using that cinematic tool is now completely in play for under $1,000 cameras. It shows, people with no money are making incredible looking movies. The artistry and craft of cinematography has never been this energized.

ACCIDENTAL ART played pretty well. It hits where I wanted it to. The lines I thought were funny get a laugh and the tense moments make the room get thick. It’s working. I like being in a room with no lights and the sound booming from beyond the screen as we, as engage in the communal experience of watching a story unfold. I’m getting better at it, but I don’t think I’ll ever master this entirely. It’s a lifelong endeavor and I enjoy the pursuit.

We got an interview with one of the original creators of the festival. It started out at Miami University in Oxford Ohio 4 years ago and has since expanded into Cincinnati. There used to be a Cincinnati International Film Festival, and I attended the last one in 2003 where I had 11 movies play. These two festivals combining is a great chance for the good buzz to keep on percolating.

I did the Q&A after the block of short films. I love doing the Q&A with an audience. It’s the same pattern every time. You ask if anyone has any questions, no one EVER does. So you have to start talking about what you did and if you can find something interesting about your project or the making of it; inevitably someone will ask a question. I got about 8-9 good questions be rambling on about changing from the exterior location to the interior house which were 2 miles apart.

We’re trucking along on FRAMELINES. Doing more shooting than editing right now. I’ll get some more footage this weekend for the show. We’re snagging stories here and there throughout the state. I can’t wait for this thing to start airing. It’s gonna turn some heads and I’ll make some noise.

Peace out homies.

How Ohio Filmmakers Got Screwed by Politicians

2010-10-08T21:58:00.000-05:00

I think all politicians suck. They are out for themselves and never for us, the people. I lean a little to the left, but who on Earth would want to be associated with the Democratic Party? That's like wanting to get beat up and have your lunch money stolen on a daily basis. Similarly, who would want to be affiliated with the GOP or Tea Party? Good God, it seems like your choices are either radical this or pathetic that. No thank you.

In Ohio, we have an ugly race for Governor. Two guys, Strickland versus Kasich. Neither choice is very good. As is evident, neither can articulate any good ideas, so they both sling mud. Unfortunately, it has decided to use Columbus Film as it's slime.

For one of Kasich's smear ads, he hired a local actor to portray a steelworker attacking Strickland's policies. Hiring an actor is hardly a new thing, bad, or controversial. Well, someone decided it should be. Someone from Strickland's campaign decided THIS should be the issue. Not jobs, not the economy, not gay rights, not terrorism... not anything REMOTELY IMPORTANT TO ANYONE. So they made this web-commercial (that may be airing on TV, but I don't know)...

Are you kidding me? from Jeremy Froughlin on Vimeo.

Thanks to the blogosphere, someone went so far as to research the actor and found out he had some kind of record. They made some blog entries about "Kasich hiring a felon" or something like that. This crosses a line for me. He's an ACTOR and he ACTED a part. Who on Earth thinks it's a good idea to crucify HIM in the name of politics? Which one of these two sides thinks causing this actor to NOT get hired because his alleged criminal record is now all over the web? Who thinks trying to paint some innocent actor who probably didn't even get union wages as a sex addict by using pictures from his MySpace page with a stripper at a birthday party? Who's looking out for the little guy? Who's looking out for privacy? What does this really achieve?

Now in the commercial above, they used footage from two short films from Columbus Filmmakers WITHOUT PERMISSION. The politicians and the campaign are claiming "Fair Use" laws to defend their decision to steal movie clips. I guess they figure "Hey, they're from Columbus and it would cost them more money to fight us than Hollywood, so screw them! USE THEIR CLIPS!".

Well, THANKS politicians. I don't care which party did what. That's not the issue. The issue is intellectual property and the rights we have over our WORK. We can't let fat cat politicians step all over us and use our clips in whatever way they want.

This is MY video to all the politicians. Get off your lazy asses and do something for the PEOPLE, not yourselves, you worthless sycophants.

I guess if they can claim "Fair Use", then so can I, right? Is there anything wrong with my artistic decision to show both candidates with random word phrases like "PEDOPHILE" and "TERRORIST"? I'm not saying they are these things, nor do I intend to imply such outrageous claims. I guess if they want to sling mud, I prefer to bring a gun to their little knife fight.

Why not go out and make your own videos with their commercials and FAIR USE it all up and go for the throat? If our once and future governor(s) can steal clips, then so can we!

These two idiots running for Governor are spending MILLIONS in TV advertising, and they want to claim "Fair Use" on using a poor independent filmmaker's clips? Yeah, even if by some miracle it's legal via a loophole, that doesn't make it right.

Arithmetic & Budgeting For Film

2010-10-04T12:06:00.000-05:00

As the script revisions finish, the business plan and budgeting has begun for the next feature film. Since I was a broker, I have some idea how to write for the people with money. It’s never easy and it’s never fun, but I have a knack for knowing numbers. What’s odd is that most filmmakers are terrible with numbers. I’ve seen people throw out numbers and budgets as if they had a clue where that money goes or what it’s for when they clearly do not. Anyone who randomly says, “I could make 5 feature films for $100,000.00” clearly doesn’t know how to budget a movie.

A lot of people hear about El Mariachi for $7,000 or Clerks for $27,000 (rounded up from the actual $26965.00). Or the generic budgets of $1 Million for an indie film and they just turn into parrots repeating numbers they heard vaguely somewhere or they just pick a budget amount from a random group of numbers without doing any kind of break down.

For people who intend to make a feature film for under $10,000 some harsh realities have to kick in. It’s possible to make “a” movie for that, but its profitability is limited to similarly low amounts. The price you pay is a crew that is all volunteer and mostly inexperienced. There’s nothing wrong with this model and business plan, but it’s not for me and most people are deluding themselves into thinking they have the next indie feature hit film like PARANORMAL ACTIVITY.

The problem is when people have such a low amount of money to play with, like $10K and think that everyone will get paid at least something. This is unrealistic.

Here's a line item on MEALS alone....

$6 per meal x 20 cast/crew x 3 meals a day x 15 DAYS shooting schedule = $5,400

That's a combined cast and crew of 20. Add some extras and your costs start to go up a lot. Add more shooting days, price goes up. This does not include craft services either, as having food and drinks available all day is the least you can do for a free or cheaply paid crew. That $6 per meal includes beverages. Making that stretch and not buying pizza for every single meal is the art of a good caterer and there are some that specialize in film and video shoots.

Let's look at a basement low pay rate for crew. Let's say you are going to have 8 crew people.

$50 a day x 8 crew people x 15 days = $6,000

I don't even want to know how much experience your grip has if they can afford to work for $50 a day. I randomly chose 8 positions, some will cost more and in some cases, you might need more people, or less people at a higher rate. Most professionals start at about $200-$300 a day, and a good D.P. or sound person will be higher, especially if they are bringing their own gear to the production.

Right now, you are already over budget by $1,400 of your $10,000 budget and this is paying peanuts to the crew and nothing to the cast and feeding everyone for meals during the shoot. This amount does not include any money for tape stock, editing, on set special effects, stunts, props, sets, location fees, transportation, hotels, equipment rental, post production, editing, sound, deliverables, E&O insurance, Production insurance, contingency, batteries, walkie talkies, printing of scripts, printing of call sheets, production reports, taxes, and the few hundred other expenses that come with making a movie.

My advice to anyone starting out making movies or moving from short films to a feature film is to get out a calculator and work out some very basic numbers with arithmetic before spouting any potential budget ranges. Everyone wants to focus on the “art” and not worry about the costs. If you want someone’s money, you will start having to worry about the costs, or you will have to get money and hire a PRODUCER to worry about the costs for you. If you only have $10,000 – congratulations Mr. Director, you are also your own Producer.

That leads to another topic for another time….

The Pudency of the Pariah

2010-10-01T15:10:00.000-05:00

I am attempting something. I’ve taken quite a bit of time off from promoting myself, the Sonnyboo.com site, and the free things I have for filmmakers. As we gear up for fundraising for ACCIDENTAL ART as a feature, it seems like a good time to spread some love, put out the good karma and hope it comes back.

I doubled the number of songs from 20 to 40. I think 8-9 years ago when I first put some songs out there, I held back a few things for sentimental reasons. Even though several of the songs out there were personal favorites, most of the songs were throwaways. I have become so disinterested in anything I did in music that nothing is sacred or worth keeping to myself, so I uploaded 20 more songs that either had quality (a relative term when referring to anything I did in music), or just might be in a genre of music useful to people no matter how much the sound or composition sucked.

I’ve added some new images, now adding HD sized (1920x1080) FBI warnings, film festival laurel leaves, etc. For video, I only had a countdown leader, because AVID users didn’t get one with their software and everyone else did. It’s still standard definition. Now I’ve thrown together 4-5 new HD videos of things too.

I think helping people is essential. I have to do it in the broad strokes because my time is not my own anymore. It’s important to pay back to the world for what help and good has come to you. I want to help others and I will need help in the future. Helping others first, and knowing full well that it’s a 1,000 to 1 help back ratio (if I’m lucky). The most I’m doing is putting the links for donations for INDIE GOGO and KICKSTARTER. Anyone can download for free and some want to give something back.

I’ve barely started letting anyone know about the site re-vamp and we’ve already gotten in $50 in donations. It’s a “soft opening” and pseudo beta testing. I’m finding more new things to add, re-arrange, tinker, and poke at the site. I’ve done some new designs and looks, and even this blog might get a little new look soon.

I felt like making a silly action movie style promo and here it is.

Draconian Disturbances

2010-09-21T13:03:00.000-05:00

Oh how time dogs my every move. I have so much to do and not enough time. Re-writes are my highest priority. Learning my lesson from the past, I am not going to shoot a frame until the script is at 100%. The table read proved we were at 90%, but still not all the way there. My newly adopted method is to solicit more opinions, get more feedback.

I think it’s a great thing when out of all the harshest criticisms, there is absolutely NO CHANGE to the structure; the scenes are all solid. Just some character and dialogue tweaks. When the only major revisions are on your second and third string characters to make them as well rounded as your leads, then you know you’re working with a decent script.

In my mind, I know there are a 2-3 tent pole moments missing from this script and I need to adapt scenes that are there and make them better. I want the screenplay to be the strongest it can possibly be before I shoot. I did not do that on my first feature film, so I paid the price for that. This is my blueprint that the rest builds on. I will not proceed until I am convinced there is nothing more I can see done to the words on the page. Lesson learned.

Money has started to trickle in for ACCIDENTAL ART. I’m trying out the whole INDIE GO GO and KICKSTARTER sites. We’ll see if those yield any results, so far INDIE GOGO is more active. I don’t think we’ll see a lot on those sites, though. It’s all about private investment for indie films with a larger budget over $10,000. We want to book at least 2-3 name stars, so our costs will be higher.

Once we get enough money and we start to book talent, then the world will come down on us. The sycophants and haters will converge. I don’t care anymore. People will do what they are going to do. Don’t mistake my notating and predicting as actually caring. At this stage people are so predictable. One of my favorite lines from a movie rings even more true now than ever before…. “People are unreliable, but at least that makes them predictable”.

Maybe I’m too cynical right now, but that’s only in some of the people I know, not about myself or my projects.

Petulant Interjections

2010-09-10T15:08:00.000-05:00

A rough cut of a new short is done, but needs some work. It needs a new style that I’m not capable of delivering, so I’ll be looking for another editor on that. Someone with the newer cutting style. Luckily, I saw some work from the latest Columbus 48 Hour Film Project from editors that would be perfect. Here’s where an event like that benefits people. The display of style creates a forum for people to work together.

I’m also knee deep on the feature length script. We did the table read. This is the 2nd table read of the script, and I recorded audio both times. I think the script is much stronger now. It’s not 100% there, but we’re in the 90 percentile. Listening to the words out loud changes everything. No matter how it’s being performed, hearing dialogue spoken gives you an entirely different perspective to just reading it silently to yourself on a page.

Getting opinions on a script is always a sensitive area, but I’ve tried to be more calloused. Since I’ve been working on this with many other writers, like George Caleodis, Chris Gavaler, and now Alex Newman, I can be less personal about criticism. Even though the beat for beat story arc is 100% mine, somehow it’s still less personal when it comes to critiques and suggestions.

I want this script to be 100% with no compromise. What I learned most from HORRORS OF WAR was to make sure the script is as close to perfection as you can get BEFORE shooting the movie. Having the freedom of time without a lot of pressure to make the movie on a schedule means I can wait to try to shoot until the script is the absolute BEST it can be.

Apparently, via the private messages and emails my last blog inspired, people are unhappy that I am viewing this as my “last chance”. I guess I can clarify, although I don’t usually feel compelled to explain myself as often as I used to. I am giving up the idea of being a feature film director as a career. I won’t stop making movies, I may not even stop making feature films; the only change is that I won’t delude myself into thinking THAT will be my career or key to job security.

With that, people are trying to tell me it’s bad that I am applying allegedly undue pressure on myself by thinking this is my last chance, (sorry KC, you’re finally getting mentioned in one of my blogs!), but I respectfully disagree. I think constantly being on guard and adding stress to myself to make this the best movie possible can only result in making a BETTER movie. I want to be constantly striving to make this the best, to always be pushing myself and everyone else to make not just a good movie, but a GREAT film. I cite the behind the scenes footage of the great Francis Ford Coppola while working on THE GODFATHER. He was the most passionate and motivating director I’ve ever seen on a set, in rehearsals, in the edit, and even talking on the phone to whoever was listening. If I’m not pouring every ounce of my soul into the movie, I’m not doing it right.

I’m not quitting film. I’m just going to shift some priorities to getting a nice house, health insurance, being able to afford vacations, and even retirement at some point in my life. Ironically, these are things that most filmmakers I know is already have those as higher priorities.

It’s not as dramatic as it reads in a blog.

Peace out homies.

Lamenting the Lascivious and Lucidity of Certain Ladies

2010-09-02T21:12:00.000-05:00

Ah my droogies, your faithful narrator has been more than a bit busy. Between fundraising for the next feature film (which has already gotten us some decent cash on INDIE GO GO.COM, and shooting a new short in series of shorts, and plus shooting for the PBS shows things are non-stop. Combine the day job work and me is tired.

So I got to work with the Canon 5D Mark II with Greg Sabo. It was a really gorgeous look with this DSLR. It has some minor limitations, but for shorts and quick things, it can be staggeringly impressive. Low light, shallow depth of field and portability… the DLSR craze is very much justified. I immediately converted the footage to a low compression, high quality codec for editing. It will maintain quality better in color correction and effects this way.

Alex the Intern has already done an edit pass on the latest short opus, but it needs some magic, as in the Twitch type magic to make this one shine. I can’t even think about getting to it until next week some time because our annual big editing project came in and I’m ensconced in the trenches of my edit bay toiling away for longer stretches of the day. It’s something basic, but will be pretty cool when it’s done; Might take a while if I get some good sound design, sound mix.

I feel really really good about the ACCIDENTAL ART feature script. It’s in the prime shape to get made. There are going to be some tweaks, etc. when it comes time to shoot it, but I’ve gotten some feedback, etc. and this looks to be the one. If… scratch that… WHEN I get to make this, the movie will be the one I was meant to make. It’s got more of my personal tastes in it that something like HORRORS OF WAR. I’ve been honing the skills to make this movie for the last 10 years. This will be the best movie I can make at this point in my life and career.

I’ve made a momentous decision in regards to this. If this movie does not do for me and my career that I intend it to, then I will no longer pursue being a feature film director. I’ll still make movies, shorts, TV shows, etc. but if ACCIDENTAL ART doesn’t do it, then I’m going to change directions in my career path and my life. I want to focus on things with a certain amount of stability and raise my responsibility. I have made many sacrifices to live the life I’ve lived and to do what I have been doing. I’ve reached the end of this rope, and if this movie doesn’t take me to the next plateau, then I don’t think I have the movie in me to ever be made that will.

That’s it for now. There are people reading this blog that talk smack about me and this is all I feel like divulging for now. More is happening on all fronts, but actual friends know how to get in touch with me.

Kubrick’s Kinetic Kinescope!

2010-08-24T22:06:00.000-05:00

As I trudge throw my stack of books to read, I should not go near a Half Priced Books ™. If my car drives by, the money flies out the window and into a register. I picked up 5 new books, one of which is about the master, Stanley Kubrick. Now I love me some Kubrick movies, but there are all kinds of myths about him as a person. This was a book written by the screenwriter of EYES WIDE SHUT.

This book stirred some controversy because it was hurriedly published right after Stanley’s death in 1999. Kubrick’s family immediately denounced the writings as playing up all of Stanley’s eccentricities while downplaying his normalcy. In the documentary his family put out, they went to great lengths to portray Stanley Kubrick as a normal person, which he was for the most part. He was obsessive-compulsive, perhaps even clinically so, but he was not a freak of nature.

The book paints the screenwriter as more of an ass than it does Kubrick as anything other than a very controlling director…. As if no one could have guessed that before reading the book. I like hearing Kubrick’s voice. I have obtained his screenplay draft of NAPOLEAN, something I still haven’t read yet. I also got FEAR AND DESIRE, his first feature, and some of his early documentary work. Fantastic stuff. Stanley had a great eye. His still photography from LOOK magazine blows away a lot of people’s lifelong pursuits in stills.

One of the things in this book that’s great is reading how much he loved PULP FICTION and Quentin Tarantino. I don’t know if Q ever knew this, but I’m sure he’s heard this. Kubrick was also very competitive with his contemporaries, but by the 1990’s, very few of them were making movies. He never considered someone like Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, or George Lucas as “competition” because they were still young upstarts, but they also worshipped Stanley from before they were in Film School; he liked that, obviously.

As a kind of “answer” to this book, I had already read Michael Herr’s book on his experience writing a screenplay with Stanley. It was far kinder than the current book’s view. Still, Michael Herr based FULL METAL JACKET on his own experiences, plus he had already worked as a writer on APOCOLYPSE
NOW.

Anyways, I do like reading anything about Kubrick. It’s interesting to see his world from various people’s points of view.

48 Fastidious Predilictions

2010-08-16T17:47:00.001-05:00

For this year’s 48 Hour Film Project in Columbus Ohio, yet again I did not get involved in making a movie, but I did participate in a way. We are doing an episode of FRAMELINES about the project. So I personally followed 3 teams stopping in on the three phases, scriptwriting to production to editing. Scott followed another 3 teams.

What did I see? You’ll have to watch the episode to find out. The greatest thing about documenting is that it doesn’t matter what their movie is like because we’re solely about finding an interesting story about making a movie. The most interesting subjects may not make the most interesting movie. There are many characters in the film community, so we were able to get in on some of their creative processes.

While shooting for the show, Scott actually fully JOINED a team that needed help. Of course, when you know Scott and how inoffensive he is and that he helped Sam and Sean’s team, two of the nicest guys, no one will go “boo” about this. If it had been me however, I’m certain it would have been the controversy of the year, but alas, I do not give a Shiite about such things. If I was a cameraman and I was covering Katrina disasters, I’d drop my damn camera and pull people into the boat. Scott did the right thing.

The 48 Hour Film Project has become something really special here. The friendly competition inspires a lot of razzing, but also support. Shane Howard drove his lights to Sam Javor’s team on Sunday to help a competitor’s team make their deadline. That’s classy.

Coolest thing I saw? An iPad Slate that worked like a real slate, but with digital entries. Kinda cool, I have to admit. Other than that, over 75% of the movies were shot with the new DLSR still cameras that shoot video. This new trend is indicative of the new movement of “digital”, where they are no longer calling it “video” because there is no tape involved.

Facebook is alive with pictures from everyone’s projects. Congrats to all, it looks like another great year of movies.

help make ACCIDENTAL ART the feature film!

2010-08-11T15:09:00.000-05:00

Just go to http://www.indiegogo.com/AccidentalArt and take a look around.

We've got the videos,

SCENE:

PITCH:

So thanks for taking the time to consider our project!

Sanctimonious Sweethearts and Scurvy Dogs

2010-08-01T15:40:00.000-05:00

I finished them both, and on time. I don’t like waiting until the last minute, but since these are not-for-profit ventures, they took a bit of a backseat. There was a technical glitch with the LOOK AT MY SHORTS TV pilot, which meant my system crashed and I lost 3 hours work. To prevent this again, I kept working at it obsessively until it was complete.

As of my last writing, I was complaining of the lack of idea for the background to my hosts for LOOK AT MY SHORTS TV. I shot these lovely ladies against greenscreen, but had no idea what to put behind them. Leyna came by and in about :15 seconds, she gave me the inspiration to make what I needed. From there, I had 4 different backgrounds designed, created, and rendered in about 2 hours. That eased my mind quite a bit. It also looked pretty kick ass; so many thanks go out to Leyna.

Now I need to immediately shift focus into the short(s) I’m about to do, and also the feature length movie I want to do next. We’re 2 scenes away from having the most solid draft I’ve ever had. Some support is coming from the most unlikely of places, so we’ll see what happens in the next few weeks. I’m going to be slowly rolling out more info and plans on how I want to get this done.

Something was brought up to me recently. Someone who has observed me more from the outside over the years, and has just started to be a friend, approached me about how I am perceived versus what I am actually like, at least like now. I’m not interested in how I am perceived. Who cares? I’ll get judged on my actions and my work. People making any other assumptions or assessments don’t really interest me. I’m not trying to win a popularity contest, nor am I running for Prom Queen of Columbus Film. The things I need and want, I can get with or without the consensus of the cool kids in the film scene.

I’m about the work. The dichotomy is that I’m doing a TV show that requires me to know what people are up to and to even help put a spotlight on their activities. I’m prepared to ignore the peanut gallery. I’m certain there will be allegations of favoritism or prejudice. I have no obligation to anyone or anything beyond making a TV shows that I want to see. I will be unaffected by the talk behind my back that inevitably starts. Knowing its coming has won me half the battle.

I picked up a DVD yesterday for the movie BLACK HAWK DOWN, one of the best movies of the last 10 years. I already owned this movie, first from the initial DVD release, then the EXTENDED CUT DVD, then a BLU RAY. I’m not inclined to buy a 4th copy of the same movie, but this was the 3 DVD set and it was only $6 at a Dollar General. I wanted it because the 2nd & 3rd discs include a 2.5 hour documentary on the making of the movie and another feature length documentary on the actual events. I love my BEHIND THE SCENES discs. I have a 255 disc flip folder of various DVD’s that relate to the MAKING OF for movies. This is my 3rd RIDLEY SCOTT set of discs to go along with KINGDOM OF HEAVEN and GLADIATOR. Ridley’s movies are usually very well documented, and I like his style a lot. For a guy in his 70’s, Ridley Scott is still in top form.

Aggregating the Advert

2010-07-25T15:13:00.000-05:00

Well she left me. I got used and abandoned. Sometimes she does this. She just ups and leaves when I need her the most. There’s nothing like getting your teeth kicked in by someone you love and care for. I’m staring at a deadline that can’t be escaped and all she can do is think about herself and not about me and my needs.

I’m speaking of course about the muse. I need to come up with something to put into a giant sea of green and I just can’t think of what to put in it. I was even contemplating some form of white, as in a digital white cyke with gradients, etc. but that stinks of desperation. It might also be my only answer if that mythical bitch doesn’t come back to visit me and give me inspiration in the next 48 hours.

I’m presenting my two TV pilots at the end of this week and I’m still putting together what should be the easier of the two episodes. Well, it isn’t. I have no idea what to do with the greenscreen elements I’ve been shooting this past week. I’m officially out of ideas. I’m mulling over some white-ish ideas but that seems lame. I also don’t have a title sequence or even a remote concept of what to do with one.

My brain is effectively jell-o right now. I can’t think. I can’t concentrate. I’m sleepy. I’m tired. I’m worn down. Nothing is relaxing me. Friday night I watched AVATAR on Blu-Ray, simply because I could turn my brain off for 3 hours with this brainless entertainment. I had only seen it once in 3D, and to be honest, I preferred it in 2D. In my opinion the whole new 3D thing is a fad, not the salvation or future of theatrical releases. It’s mildly entertaining, but story, character, and meaning supersede spectacle every time. Can you imagine a Woody Allen movie in 3D?

Anyways, FRAMELINES is done. The intro and title sequence are doing well in responses. I just put out the first real story, focusing on Mickey Fisher from Ironton Ohio. This guy is an inspiration. Mickey rocks and has made some of my favorite low budget features, period. Scott shot, directed, and edited this with our intern Alex Newman.

We’ll be screening the first 30 minute episode of FRAMELINES tomorrow night at the INDIECLUB COLUMBUS meeting. It should be interesting to see how people react to it. From what I’ve seen from the intro and Mickey story, we’ve got a good show. My sights have gotten a little loftier with the final product of the show than I originally intended. I thought a UHF station with limited reach would suffice, but the show is better than that, thanks in large part to the efforts and participation of others.

Maybe in a few weeks I can make a happy announcement about where and how to see the show(s).

Dubious and Perfidious

2010-07-18T13:30:00.001-05:00

I am burning myself out. I am working on the feature length script for ACCIDENTAL ART. I’m promoting FRAMELINES, the 30 minute TV series I just finished yesterday. I’m working on the LOOK AT MY SHORTS TV and getting that pilot episode ready. I’m about to shoot a couple small shorts. I’m hustling to get some more paid work in the door. I still get some freelance work, usually all at the same time or it is a drought. All together, this makes for a singed and strangely happier Rossman.

I guess I want to describe some of my motives behind the TV shows. FRAMELINES is yet another one of my philanthropic ideas. I want to help legitimize the filmmaking movement that myself and my peers are involved in. Getting a widely viewed and accessible magazine style TV show on PBS all over our state felt like a good way to do that. Making a TV show that features human interest stories and Mickey Mouse explanations about the basics is one way to get our work known to people who otherwise not ever take what we do seriously. Somehow, being on TV makes it “real”. This show is not about me, but about all the great stories and ways in which people make movies. So far, I’m really happy with the show as its progressing. I love when you can exceed your own expectations.

Then there’s the educational aspect. The filmmaking tips and basic instructional elements are something that has been important to me for years. Gaining a public forum to put these out there on broadcast television in an easily digested format seems like a perfect fit.

Overcoming personal differences to interview someone objectively because they are doing good work, even though they might have acted like a 3rd grader and called me names behind my back, or to ask for a short film from a moronic ass because it’s still a good movie, these are all obstacles. I guess I’ll have to be the bigger man and just try to do good work and not worry about the rest. I’m far more interested in the big picture. I believe in success without competition, as in a win for everyone, not just me.

A backlog of used books in my queue

There is no outlet or wide audience for a lot of the short films, so a short film compilation TV series makes sense to me. Even with Public Access 8 years ago, it was a way of reaching thousands of people with your work. Doing yet another variation of that idea today, I’m going to try to reach as many viewers as possible with a multi-state show that really gets people to see the short form movies. The crux here resides in trying a more radical idea in a more conservative format. I predict I’ll have to actually edit two completely different forms of the show, one more conservative, and another more hip and aimed at the key demographic of 18-34 year olds.

Like I said before, sometimes the Muse comes in and I can straddle her and make her my bitch. When she comes, I make the most of it. None of the petty politics or idiotic things people say or do matter when you can create something that lasts forever. All the nonsense, and even the irrelevant people will be forgotten, but the work will be there until the end of time.

Framelines

2010-07-18T10:00:00.000-05:00

Your faithful narrator has been busy. I occupied this fallow, low income time with many projects. I finished the pilot episode to 1 of 2 TV series. I just worked a ton of long days editing together the whole 29 minutes, including graphics, intros, and even shooting some last minute greenscreen and studio work. Now on to the 2nd series pilot!

Sunny 95’s Dino Tripodis hosted the show for us and we had 5 distinct segments to the show. A Filmmaker Profile where we look at someone’s body of work and interview them, a Spotlight On segment where we look at a person or place or group and get a quick story on that, filmmaking tips, like the ones I’ve already made and that Scott Spears has made, then we go On Location for B-Roll heavy interviews with a movie during pre-production, production, or post-production and get an inside look, and finally my baby the Roundtable discussion.

Sometimes I can pull a rabbit out of a hat. I think I did that with the title sequence and intro to the show for sure, but possibly with the show as a whole. I was deeply inspired by the show VIEWFINDER in Cincinnati, but I wanted a completely different format, a magazine style show that went on location and legitimized the indie film movement as it is today. Scott came up with a great name for our show, FRAMELINES.

Here is the opening and title sequence for FRAMELINES

Framelines Opening Title Sequence from Framelines TV on Vimeo.

Bequeathing Asperity

2010-07-05T17:05:00.001-05:00

I am keeping busy. I have more projects than I have time for. I widdled down the 3 TV shows to 2 total. I have had the conundrum of trying to figure out what to do this year, as in should I do a more ambitious short before attempting another feature film? What about the dwindling income? I have found answers and some have found me.

Scott brought us an intern at the studio, an ambitious film geek named Alex. He’s been a godsend for us, as a lot has gotten down since his arrival. Funnily, his hard work makes me feel like doing more work, so I try harder and get more done, especially on my own works.

Alex took an interest in ACCIDENTAL ART, after seeing the recent re-cut. He had not seen it before and I pitched him on what the rest of the story is. Then that lead to him seeing the whole script. This took us down the road of him taking a crack at a draft.

I think by this weekend I’ll have the draft of this script I always wished it would be. It’s no offense to any of the great writers who took a pass at this, but it’s about very preferential things. I want this script to be something very specific and I’m only partially capable of writing that.

Now ACCIDENTAL ART is now online. Dig this,

Accidental Art from Peter John Ross on Vimeo.

Pythagoras and his silly Numbers

2010-06-22T21:15:00.000-05:00

A 2+ year project has finally happened. We removed the kitchen set from our studio, so I quickly put together a shoot in that space that I had intended for several years. I needed some depth and room to make it happen which was not possible with an entire kitchen cabinet corner sitting there. Our studio converted nicely, along with a lot of love and care from several people, we will have a fully functional set place soon.

A television show has long been gestating for us. Over 2 years ago, we shot segments for this program. We’re not only editing these, but we’re also creating new content. I have set a deadline for early July to get the first pilot episode completed. I’ve already got a handful to make that happen. My brainchild segment is one of the 5 anchor pieces. I love Jon Favreau’s DINNER FOR FIVE, but did not want to be a ripoff. I modeled this on filmmaker panels I’ve attended and been on over the years, but in a more casual way. I am moderating these, but I don’t want to make it about me. It’s about the topic or movie we’re covering from Ohio filmmakers.

We did a 4 camera shoot and luckily there is a kick ass multicam editing part of Adobe Premiere, even in HD. I have started using this to edit even 2 camera shoots because of its ease of cutting. Another great upgrade to the CS4 (specifically 4.2.1 upgrade to Premiere Pro) is a DVD to Timeline ripper, which is incredibly time saving. I can bring a *.VOB file directly to the timeline from a DVD or DVD’s VIDEO_TS folder to the timeline, and then export it to any format I need. Since I can create a nearly lossless AVI file with the Matrox codec, this means a lot of saved time and great quality from DVD. Normally DVD files don’t edit well because they don’t have the whole frames, so I tend to capture them analog via component video, but this direct-to-timeline way is quicker and superior picture quality.

Soon I will have the pilot episode of this show put together. We shot enough roundtable discussions for the first 3 episodes. The other segments will be a focus on various film related items for Ohio filmmakers. Hopefully we can make it educational, yet entertaining enough to bring in “Normies”, meaning normal, non-film people.

Why is it when my income goes down, my ambitions and projects multiply? Things take longer than they used to. I’m less obsessive-compulsive than I was even 3 years ago. I like my time off and relaxing a bit. I blame “V” for chilling me out. I can’t take my cats with me to the studio, so I want to spend more time at home and I don’t like to work at home anymore. I’ve divided the two worlds completely.

Looks like I will be shooting some new narrative works within a few short weeks. I’ve got so much to do and not nearly enough time to do it, but I’ll manage to make it all work. Especially with a lack of paying jobs. A part of me is still a workaholic, so this just means manufacturing more work via self imposed deadlines. I’m a self motivator.

Fractal Asperity

2010-06-20T20:30:00.000-05:00

Why is it taking me so long to do another feature film? That’s easy to answer. I don’t want to just make another film. I want to make a good film. This starts with the script. Choosing a script or writing one is also easy. Getting a great script is extremely hard. I want my next feature film to be great, not just good and definitely better than the movies I’ve made before.

I have raised my own bar. I do not want to compromise the quality of the movie unless there is no other choice. I don’t need another mediocre movie. I only want to make movies of a surpassing quality. This is all subjective of course, but I have my own standards to live up to.

The culmination of my decade of making film must be used to service a story. In reading my 8th draft of my intended next feature, ACCIDENTAL ART, I am not pleased with it. It starts great, there are a few very small bits in the middle that are good, and it ends great. That’s not good enough for me. I want it all great or it’s not worth doing. I have been working on this since 2006, on and off. Mostly off. My mind has to be in a place to deal with all the issues left undone.

Part of the problem is going at this alone. I like collaboration, but a script is such a personal and private thing. I’ve tried working with writers, several on this screenplay. Only one has worked out well, but I get derailed pretty easily when it comes to writing. I even did a table read of this last draft. I have a recording that has been on my hard drive for 3 years unlistened to because I am afraid of the massive amount of work that will proceed from this.

My first feature film left me wasted, emotionally and energy. My physical condition has deteriorated immensely. I have gout, about 40 more pounds of fat, substantially more gray hair and a lot less of it on top of my head. Now I am losing teeth. Getting old sucks. I’m almost 40 years old. That’s not young anymore and I failed to take care of myself at all.

I don’t want my only finished feature film to be HORRORS OF WAR. I love the movie like it’s a child, flaws and all. It is special to me and taught me a lot and still has some shining moments, but overall it is not the best film I can make. I can do better. I know how to make a better movie now. So maybe I will.

The cruel mistress that is serendipity visits me on occasion. Sometimes I can make that bitch do what I want, sometimes she controls me. I feel like taking her by the reigns and not letting go until I’m done. In the last week or so, I’ve grabbed her by the horns and a lot of good has come from some simple conversations.

I’m not inspired by competition. I’m just not interested in the drama or how two faced people have become. To have a “friend” compliment you to your face after you’ve helped them to having that same person consistently bash you behind you back is not something that interests me. Cowards and weak-willed individuals will never gain the respect of their peers or achieve anything worthwhile in life. Or maybe they will. Either way, it’s got nothing to do with me directly. I don’t care if other people make movies, have success or not. It’s none of my business what other filmmakers do or don’t do, say or don’t say. I’m staying out of the social bureaucracies of local film for now.

None of this junk helps me make a movie. I’m just not that interested in being friends with film people right now.

Revisiting the Revisions of Revolt

2010-06-03T14:03:00.000-05:00

I am a tinkerer. I like to revisit my old works and sometimes re-edit. If I see something I suddenly feel needs changed, I change it. I don’t like to do this on some levels because I should focus on new works, not the old ones. Therapeutically, I have ceased doing these types of things for the most part. There are exceptions…

I went back in and re-edited a bit of ACCIDENTAL ART, my latest real piece. I had a legitimate reason (excuse). Since the festival run is starting to slow down on this, as I won’t shell out much more money on festival submissions and the free invites have started to wane, I decided that if I put this movie on the Internet, it needed to be trimmed some. I thought a “web edit” was called for because the attention spans for the WWW, and the experience of watching it on a tiny screen versus in a theater with other people is very different.

So I went ahead and did some trims to the first half. The problem was, now I think it is a vastly better edit and I’m not going to use the original edit anymore. I only got rid of 3-4 lines, but somehow I think the movie moves and feels WAY better. We get out of the first scene quicker and we didn’t REALLY lose anything in terms of performance or story. Looking at the movie now, I let things meander, as in the actors have redundant lines that are unnecessary. I wrote the lines, and then I directed them, so this is all on me. In the end I can’t believe I didn’t see this sooner; as in 7 months ago when we edited it the first time. Sometimes I’m not that bright. Most people I’ve shown the new cut to have no idea I changed anything, so that is actually a good sign.

So probably around July I’ll put this movie on the web.

As I have mentioned recently on this blog, I’m doing three separate TV shows regarding film right now. The “call for entries” for the short film show has been a bit overwhelming. DVD’s and tapes are coming in from all over the country already. I’ve been busy digitizing a bunch of movies and preparing for the show all week.

I made this little promo because I had never made anything with the virtual white cyke and I had this idea I wanted to try in Adobe After Effects. It works for me. It’s a little :08 little ditty with some tricks gleaned from Video Co-Pilot.net and even the music is from the Pro Scores pack from Andrew Kramer. I thought something silly visually and impactful and dramatic audio would make a fun little bit. Take a look:

The Kubrickian Phase

2010-05-29T18:23:00.000-05:00

For a little over two years I’ve been struggling with how it feels to be liked and hated with such intensity, and usually by strangers. I tried to say I didn’t care, but I obviously did. Looking over blogs of the past few years, since I’ve been blogging a journal for 6 years or so, you can clearly see someone who cared a lot what other people thought of himself. Things have changed though.

I can say in all honesty I don’t care anymore. I’m going to do what I do. I’m not interested in how other people will think about me. I do have an interest in how they feel about the work, as in my film work, but I won’t spend any of my time thinking about how people feel about me. It’s not my job to try to convince anyone to like or not like me or to change their minds about who or what I am.

If someone wants to buy into the mythology and rumors of days long gone or even the wild interpretations of my motives for doing things, I cannot be held responsible, nor do I have any need to change their mind or work to convince them of anything.

I have found a peace that I have not known in my life. I am uninvolved in most of the dramas in my film community. I tend to leave my laptop at work even on weekends just to get away from filmmaking as an all consuming thing. I want to live something more of a life, so I’ve taken up bowling for fun. I love it, even though it is minimalist physical activity; that is still an increase for me. I take little interest in what other people do or don’t do, as it has no affect on me.

All I want to do now is more work. How other people want to perceive me is none of my business quite frankly. I’m not going to go to many MOFA (Mid Ohio Filmmakers Association) meetings anymore. I’m getting plenty of social outlets and I don’t feel my physical presence will do much, as in I see the people I want to see whenever I want to anyways.

I’ve entered what I am calling my “Kubrickian Phase”, which is not to do with comparing myself to the master himself, as it is that I don’t want to be in the public much and I’ve clearly changed my output of work to be more about quality than quantity. No, I do not think everything I’ve made is golden. Some of my movies are quite bad actually, but I’m okay with that. Those are what I made at a certain point in time and with whatever skills I had at that moment. I won’t abandon these pieces as if they didn’t exist, but I intend to improve and make better films. I drew a line in the sand and I want my work to be better than what I made in the past.

In the near future, some of my new projects will start to go public. There are three separate TV series in the works, all with broadcast outlets. The first one, a short film compilation show that I am calling LOOK AT MY SHORTS TV will probably hit first. Already, I have enough material for 6 of my first 13 episodes of one hour shows. Within the first 24 hours of making a call for entries, I got several options of expanding the show from 4 cable markets in Ohio to several more states and several more prestigious copyright holders of short films contacted me about submitting their catalogs.

The other two shows need more gestation before I announce anything, but along with TV, I have come up with another idea that I’m going to move on sooner. I wanted to do something with actors where I can help promote some of the better acting talent we have in Columbus and an anthology idea occurred that came together in no time. I’m still selecting the other directors and working with writers on the scripts, but this seems like another project that will be popular one it gets finished later this summer.

So, in the end, I am busy. I have my nose to the ground and I’m doing work. A lot of my vices are dwindling away and all that is left is a desire to do better work and to live a little outside of movies.

‘S’allright.

- Ross

Rare Film Books

2010-05-22T23:09:00.000-05:00

I love books on filmmaking. I devour a few books a month on the topic. Half Price Books and Amazon.com used are my new best friends. I can find rare and hard to find books for next to nothing. This week I’m getting two used books that I’m looking most forward to.

First on deck is ALIENS THE ILLUSTRATED SCREENPLAY. Talk about rare, this was released in the 1980’s and only in the UK. James Cameron’s opus, often forgotten that it’s his because it’s part of someone else’s SciFi series. Storyboards and concept art along with the shooting script in full color; I can’t want to have this one to my collection. I love illustrated screenplays. There’s a new ALIEN ILLUSTRATED SCREENPLAY from 2002 from the UK that I’ll try to acquire next, but it’s still a little too high a price for me.

Speaking of which, a rarity I may never be able to afford is THE ILLUSTRATED BLADE RUNNER with a ton of “Ridleygrams”, thumbnail sketches by the director himself. As well as some Syd Mead graphic design essentials and this is a book that sells used in crappy condition for over $300. I still want it for my favorite film of all time, as I have most of the other books regarding this film.

My 2nd purchase this week came via discovering it even existed by seeing it on Phil’s shelf in his office, as our filmmaking book library is very similar with a lot of the same titles. I fell in love with the Wachowski’s V FOR VENDETTA adaptation of the graphic novel. I had no idea there was even a book covering “from script to screen” for this. Since I watch this movie at least twice a year, I figured I would thoroughly enjoy a book on the making of the movie.

Another hard to find essential reading is another UK only publication. I love my 2 copies of Robert Rodriguez’s REBEL WITHOUT A CREW, but in less than 2 years after its publication, he wrote another book about the making of his 2nd, even harder to find film, ROADRACERS, a Showtime original feature for cable. His book “ROADRACERS : THE MAKING OF A DEGENERATE HOT ROD FLICK” sells also north of the $300 mark and is well sought after being that it was only published in the UK. I know I’ve wanted to read it just to see more about the process of someone’s SECOND feature after having done the first on indie, with a then unknown Salma Hayek. In theory, it should be a fascinating read, but I might never know as the price is extremely high.

And my final rare book mention is the non-fiction book FAST TIMES AT RIDGMONT HIGH by Cameron Crowe. Yes, he is a filmmaker and he wrote the screenplay to the movie, but this book is an expansion of an undercover article he wrote for Rolling Stone that the film and book are based on. Cameron Crowe, at 29 years old, could still easily pass for a high school student and he did research for this article and eventual book for several months. This one goes for $50 on paperback or so because it never got reprinted. I saw a physical copy for sale at a rare book store and that’s the closest I’ve ever gotten to reading it.

I love my MAKING OF STAR WARS coffee table book. Some reviewer sold their copy here in Ohio on Amazon and I snagged it for only a few dollars and it was a $75 hard cover. This fall the comprehensive MAKING OF EMPIRE STRIKES BACK is due out to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the release of that film. Hopefully I can get this new book on another bargain hunt.

A Sedulous Artifice

2010-05-22T00:34:00.000-05:00

My long dormancy will soon end. I’m about to embark on several projects and all of them have their individual challenges. I hate that word “challenges”, at least the way it has replaced the word “problems”. Regardless, your faithful narrator has a full plate and none too soon.

First on deck, finishing a TV show pilot I’ve been working on just nigh of two years. Scott Spears and I have been tinkering with this show and idea for so long, and we’ve already shot a bunch of segments, but we have no edited a single one. I was unmotivated because the anchor to the show could not be shot whilst we had a giant kitchen set in our studio. Now that this monstrosity has finally been removed; it wasn’t even 30 minutes later I started booking crew for the shoot. We’re going to do a 4 camera studio shoot and I’ll do the camera switching in post because software allows a great multicam edit function.

Simultaneously, I will be putting together two separate TV shows for a different network and I will need to shoot some intros and start to gather up content. If you have a short film, or preferably several short films, that you want to show on TV, by all means drop me a line and let me know. These will have to be broadcast TV friendly, so no bad words, no nudity, and nothing that sucks. Given that there are many good shorts over 20 minutes; I’ll even be seeking those too. Exposure is always a good thing. So if you’re interested in getting your movie seen, let me know. I’m going to ask several of the more attractive actresses to host this show in my stead.

Similarly, I want to finish out the CREW JOB DESCRIPTION videos I started. I have several more to shoot. Again, I’m going to find some pretty girls to be on camera instead of me. That tends to make more people watch them. I don’t really care if technicians get upset, as they aren’t trained to say lines and no one actually wants to see them on screen. The target is people who have never made a movie before, so why people with experience care is beyond me.

Then there is an outlet for feature films too. I’m going to be editing some features I have access too for broadcast. Again, no money, but with proper work, an ambitious filmmaker could make the opportunity something more. Print press and something to use to entice a buyer that is what people who want to work their projects can do. I’ll be on-camera talent for this show, which I don’t particularly like, but I’m cheap and available.

My personal exposure is about to go up. I was not looking to get more in the public eye much. In fact, I wanted the opposite. I’ve entered my self-imposed Kubrickian phase. I want to focus on quality, not quantity. I’ve already done a lot of shorts and even worked a few features. My desire at this point is to make things that I am proud of and that exceed what I have done in the past, at least in my own opinion. These projects are more side projects.

I felt I needed to warm back up. I shot ACCIDENTAL ART in late August and have not shot anything since. As a director, I need to stay in shape. Before I embark on another big shoot, I want to scrimmage a little. I have come up with a mini-web project that suits this need. I am deciding how to put it together as a whole, but I think I can show off some of our local acting talent in a short form that is simple to make, but elegant in its execution.

After these enormous targets, I have to decide if I want to make an ambitious short film or proceed with my next feature film. There are benefits and downsides to either choice, but so far, there is no clear path. At least I can be distracted by many weeks of hard work and organization with these other projects before I have t make a decision…

Peace and goodwill towards men and women and cats.