Here are the posters for my upcoming F3, The Treasonist.  Enjoy!

I’ve been a little busy recently, to account for the lack of updates.  I recently took part in Apple’s Insomnia Film Festival, where we are given 24 hours to complete a film with some parameters.

PLEASE help us win this contest!  Use your Apple ID (or make one if you don’t already have one, it’s really easy), and vote for our film.  I would appreciate this a lot; if you vote for it, let me know!

You can see it here:

http://edcommunity.apple.com/insomnia_fall07/item.php?itemID=544

Happy voting!

I was editing A Glaring Emission (scene 10, as a matter of fact) and came across one of the very, very many random frames of Sean Dennison’s face that strike my funny bone.  I thought I’d share it with the internet.

Speaking of Scene 10.

Scene 10 was a pickup shot, and what happened was, we’d brought out a wheelchair and some tools to use as a dolly.  However, we had failed to notice that the sidewalks were made of cobblestone.  So, we nixed the dolly and went handheld all the way.  Thanks to a certain little trick, it barely looks handheld at all.

Here’s an awesome, awesome, awesome thing I’ve found that can improve a lot of amateur films immensely.  It’s a plugin for VirtualDub called Deshaker.  It will basically take your video and magically stabilize it.  I’ve taken obviously handheld shots from A Glaring Emission and turned them into what look like glidecam shots at the least, and dolly shots at the most.  I know it helps to have shot it in high resolution HDV, but I know it will stabilize anything you put in it to its best ability.

Oh, and VirtualDub and Deshaker are both completely, 100% FREE.  FREE FREE FREE.  Much cheaper than a dolly.  Way cheaper than a steadicam.  And it’ll take you way less time to shoot.  I love this tool, and if you’re a filmmaker that doesn’t care for the look of handheld sometimes, you will too.  Oh, and there are tools for Vegas Video that allow you to use VirtualDub plugins inside of Vegas.  PS, get with the program, world, Vegas is the best editing tool for video, period.
Here’s a great piece of documentation that will teach you how to use Deshaker properly.  Give yourself an hour to get used to its workflow and your films will never look the same.  In a good way.

My F1, Thomas and the Clerk, was accepted into the Independents’ Film Festival in Tampa!  This is the same fest that For the Motherland was accepted into back in 2005, and I attended it with Andy Nguyen and Jesse Newman.  It screens in September, hopefully in the Tampa Theatre again…it was so gorgeous last time.

One year ago today, the production phase of A Glaring Emission wrapped.  In celebration, I’ve decided to be completely antisocial and spend the entire day editing this film.  As postproduction draws to a close (well, editing and sound mixing at least), the film is looking better than ever.  I’m going to be really, really sad to be rid of my first feature.  Here’s to you, A Glaring Emission.

It’s been a slow couple of weeks at the film school. Since we’re wrapping up the end of the semester, our documentaries are shot, our F2s are locked (screening tonight at 7!), our interviews are transcribed and we’re all sitting around twiddling our thumbs.

I’ve been able to put in some very solid hours with A Glaring Emission as a result, which is awesome. It’s shaping up exceptionally well. It’s amazing what polishing on the rough cut footage and sound can do (although I’m doing significant recutting as well). This second cut is now being finessed for comedy rather than just getting the basic story out like the first assembly. Significantly different and better than the rough cut. It shall be enjoyed by all!

JP and I have set up weekly deadlines for scene delivery, and every week, normally on a Friday, we sit down and honestly critique every little thing about each scene that I have completed. There are a lot of free-flowing ideas and creativity, so it’s a lot of fun.

I’m having some worries about the running time of the film. It needs to hit 90 minutes to be marketable, but the rough cut is clocking in at 87 minutes and it seems like all I’ve done recently is cut things. Granted, the footage we shot with Ben Daniele will extend it, since I’ll be using his stuff as transitions.

While I was cutting scene 18 and 19 , I had a Coppola moment. Or basically, I copied an idea from Coppola.

As Burt Reynolds™ once told me, he was sitting with Francis Ford as he was cutting The Godfather, and Frank said “Man, this baptism scene is so boring! You know what….I wonder….I wonder if I could…” and so the memorable, ingenius intercutting scene where Mikey’s enemies were all murdered while the baptism went on was born.

So, I wondered if I could make my incredibly boring Scene 19 a little better by intercutting it with Scene 18, which was exceptionally long (although interesting). What was REALLY cool was not only did it work, but it changed the entire mood of the second half of Scene 18! I still cut scene 19 down significantly (it was two characters talking for an exceptionally long time in roundabout ways), but I was really happy that it worked.

I finished my F2 project, Power.  I don’t think that I’m allowed to release it online, but I think I can send out a copy to anyone who asks.  It was cool because it was my first project shot actually on film.  Gina Papabeis rocked out the DPing on this project.  Here are some screenshots.

This weekend was the 2nd annual Sunscreen Film Festival, and I can’t stop talking about it. I absolutely loved it. It didn’t feel like a festival on its second year. It had a relatively large amount of films in a very swanky venue. It was absolutely abound with intelligent and interesting people, and same goes for their films. I met someone who worked on Borat (dunno if names are allowed), John Fitzgerald (the founder of Slamdance, who I had coincidentally read a book about the previous week), and tons of local and distant filmmakers.

For the Motherland screened there and was received extremely well. I was told that I was pretty strongly in the running for best Florida Film or Audience Choice, which really surprised me but I felt pretty honored by how well such an old film was taken. I know I was covering my eyes and in a cold sweat throughout my screening, because all the errors from FTM were glaring to me. However, the people that saw it seemed pretty taken with it, and I was pleased.
The people there were all so cool — the entire time, I was just awestruck and I kept commenting like an idiot on how cool it was to be there, because I was genuinely having the time of my life meeting these other incredibly talented and creative people. I now have lots of business cards, and I know I’ll be calling those numbers when I get “out there.” A big congrats to Derek and Troy for putting on a beautiful festival, as well as Darwin and Bryan and all the other volunteers for organizing it.

Something I recently took notice of again was the Quicktime.com movie trailers.  It’s lots of fun to spend hours just watching what’s up and coming.  At the top of the page, it randomly loads eight movie posters for upcoming movies, and there is a trend, it seems, to release teaser posters for films that are simply lazy.

I took a look at the Scifi, Horror, Thriller, Drama, and Comedy genres on Apple’s website, and after about 10 minutes of searching, here are all the posters I found with this stupid design.  By the time they’re making teaser posters, they’ve exposed and cut some film — they have the visual material to make a full poster.  But there is a trend, possibly a result of the classiness of the simple “Apple-like” design or the Web 2.0 look, to simply put the title of the film in a cool font in the center of a solid color.
I’ve been told that this is standard for a teaser poster.  I don’t believe it is, but if it is, I definitely don’t believe it should be.

If I were the designer, I’d justify it to the producers by saying “Look how stark the title looks against simple black.  I was going minimalist with this design, so it draws all attention to the title itself without all those distractions.”

(Thanks to Teague Chrystie for pointing this out in the first place a long time ago)

I haven’t gotten the photos we took in Los Angeles and Miami yet, but I’ll have them up as soon as possible.