Watch The Shield

I've said it before, but I'll say it again. Watch The Shield. It's an amazing and very hard-hitting show. It is violent and deals with a lot of evil things (hence the reason it's on at 11pm), but it's well worth it. Season 5 just ended tonight and I'm still in shock. It had me in tears. If you haven't ever seen this show, do yourself a favor and rent all 4 seasons that are on DVD and then watch season 5 as soon as it's available. It's so worth it.

Tonight's episode just blew my mind. Horrifying. Painful. Amazing. Just watch it.

I have to go to bed. I have jury duty tomorrow.

That really helps my stressful week right before the film festival.

The Movie Monkey

The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada

Hey everyone,

This will be a quick post as I'm stressed out and scrambling to do a million things this week before the Phoenix Film Festival hits this weekend.

A friend was in town this past weekend and we took her to see The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada. What an amazing movie! It's Tommy Lee Jones' directorial debut and he does a great job with it. A great story about a rancher who finds out his friend, Melquiades, has been killed. He finds out it was a border patrol agent, played amazingly by Barry Pepper. He then kidnaps the Border Patrol agent, makes him dig up the body, and takes him to Mexico to bury Melquiades' body back in his home town. Such a great story about friendship, with interesting parallels between Jones' character and Melquiades.

See it if you get a chance. It's well worth it.

The Movie Monkey

Chadd's Screen Test

Hey everyone,

My buddy Chadd managed to score an audition as The Joker for the next Batman film. Here is the link to his audition piece that he did that got him the audition.

Chadd's Screen Test

Check out his blog here .

The Movie Monkey

Thursday Thirteen #6

Hey folks. Sorry I've been out of commission. I somehow seem to keep getting busier and busier, which is good on the one hand and creating mounds of stress on the other. So what do I do to get away from it all? You guessed it -- I put together a posting for my blog! Enjoy.

Thirteen Things I've accomplished in the past week 1. I premiered my short film, "Romey & Jules." Technically, it was just a cast/crew and family/friends screening. The official premiere will be 3/24 at the Phoenix Film Festival. There were probably 50-60 people in attendance, and it was well-received. It's hard for me to watch and enjoy, however, as I'm constantly noticing things that need to be fixed. The good thing is that we actually have an opportunity to make changes before the official premiere, now, so that's very beneficial. And truthfully, we may make some more changes after that before we start sending it out to festivals, etc. 2. I finally got to see the Behind the Scenes Making-of documentary that chronicled the making of our short. It was great to relive the moments from the movie and see everyone working again. It's a very different perspective than what I've been seeing for the past 2 months. 3. I reconnected with a long-lost best buddy of mine. He happened to be in town for a conference and I met up with him Sunday night for dinner. We ended up talking about podcasting and may come up with one of our own. He's such a great guy and it's a bummer that we've been so out of touch. 4. I celebrated my Little Brother's 18th birthday with him. This is not a real brother -- we're part of Big Brothers Big Sisters. He's been my Little for almost 6 years now. Zoinks! Where does the time go! Technically, our match ends either when he turns 18 or when he graduates. He graduated last semester but won't walk until this June, so we're officially ending it then. We'll still stay in touch, though. The good news -- he finally got a job. The frustrating news -- he's still impossible about calling me. 5. I found a new favorite TV show -- Battlestar Galactica. I watched the miniseries that started it all and was unduly impressed, and then I watched the 1st 2 episodes of Season 1. What a brilliant show. And I hear Season 2 is even better. I can't wait. (By the way -- sorry about not updating the info in my sidebar. One of these days, I'll do so.) 6. I recorded a commercial (I do some voiceover work) for a small Christian college in West Virginia. Too frequently, my VO gigs are in states other than mine so I never hear them on the radio. I assume they play because they pay me. 7. I got offered a gig to record an audio book, which I've never done before. We're still hashing out the arrangement, and I'm going in to my buddy's studio tomorrow to record a sample chapter so they can get a feel for how it would sound. 8. I found someone to design my short film's website and began compiling info for him, as well as for my Associate Producer who graciously has offered to do the content. 9. I got on a gig as Art Asst with TeeNick to do a promotional show for the upcoming movie "The Benchwarmers" and will get to work with the stars -- David Spade, Rob Schneider, and Jon Heder -- this Saturday. 10. I tried putting together the CD cover for my wife's & my annual birthday CD mix that we give to friends on their bdays, but the program is printing incorrectly and I can't figure out why, so I am stopping in frustration. This is a project I began in the fall of '05 so it'd be ready by the time '06 rolled around. If only there was more time in the day. 11. I found this incredible artist's website. http://users.skynet.be/J.Beever/pave.htm 12. I stepped down as President of a local writing organization that I run. I will remain on the board, but feel that I need to free up more time to accomplish the things I really want to, to find paying work, to plan for the baby, and to actually write (something I have done little of since taking over the group). 13. I began breaking down, scheduling, and budgeting 2 feature film projects that I'm involved in. So you know, the first thing that happens when a script is going to be made is the script gets broken down -- someone goes through scene by scene, determines what characters are in each scene, what props, cars, special equipment, # of locations, etc. This person looks at each scene and figures out how many pages the scene runs so they can best schedule it. Generally, a feature shoots 3-6 pages a day. So a 120 page script (2 hours -- a movie generally speaking is 1 minute of finished film for every page of script) would take 20-40 days to shoot. Some productions can be done quicker, some take even longer. It depends on the type of shoot. The 2 features I'm breaking down/scheduling are too long for the # of days we have to shoot, in my humble opinion. Do the directors listen? No. They want their whole vision. What that means is that they'll hate me on the set when I come up and tell them, "You're done w/this scene -- move on to the next," because they're behind schedule. It takes the creativity out, but that's life. It's a business and money is on the line. Anyway, enough rambling. What have you done this week? The Movie Monkey Links to other Thursday Thirteens! 1. Kimmy at Snickerdoodles 2. Kelly at Diary of the Nello 3. Dale at Just Takes a Minute 4. My personal favorite Paisley 5. Kim at Nothing Heavy 6. Stacey at Broken Spirit

Get the Thursday Thirteen code here!


The purpose of the meme is to get to know everyone who participates a little bit better every Thursday. Visiting fellow Thirteeners is encouraged! If you participate, leave the link to your Thirteen in others comments. It’s easy, and fun! Be sure to update your Thirteen with links that are left for you, as well! I will link to everyone who participates and leaves a link to their 13 things. Trackbacks, pings, comment links accepted!

View More Thursday Thirteen Participants

ugh... tired... need bed... sleep...

It's 3:26am. Just got home from working over at my editor's house all afternoon. And before that, I was working on our taxes.

We finished the effects for every shot except 2 which have to be done tomorrow before the premiere tomorrow night. Talk about cutting it close.

After we finish that, we have to render all of the effects, then watch it and look for problems -- colors that don't match from shot to shot (already know we have some of that ahead), audio that isn't quite right, etc.

But it's all coming together.

And tomorrow's the big night.

And I'm tired... so I'm going to bed.

TMM

Down to the Wire

For those of you who have been there since the start of my blog, you remember me talking about directing my latest short film. Well, we're in the last big push of post-production this week. We're having a test screening, which is basically the unofficial premiere since we really won't be changing much afterward, this Thursday night. We were planning on finishing it this past weekend but things always take longer than planned -- now we're pushing to have it done late Wednesday night. Not much extra time to squeeze there. Zoinks!

One thing I'm realizing about myself as a director -- I'm a producer's nightmare. I'm one of those guys who is constantly saying, "Oooh! This'd be cool! Let's try this!" This is great for the creative process but it pinches the pocketbooks. I'm lucky that my editor is really excited about the project because he'd have thrown me out the door weeks ago. After all of the amazingly hard work he's done just helping get the picture cut together, he's done the following with me to make this the best it can be:
-- Re-record and loop one of our actor's dialogue because of some audio issues. Let me tell you, this is a very difficult process. Try this to see what it's like -- videotape yourself then play it back over and over again and try to say the lines different ways with different emotions, but make sure it fits within how you moved your lips in the video clip. It's insane. I've never been through the process before, but watching our poor actor struggle with one particular line for a good half hour, I realized it's so much easier to get it right on the set. Unfortunately, there are so many more time constraints on the set. It's really a difficult balance between what is reasonable to do without going into overtime (or in our case, since we weren't paying people, going so far that people would refuse to come back the next day) and what is feasible to rework on set to get the right emotion. It was made even more difficult because our lead actor had some difficulty finding the emotion needed for some particular scenes. But it's done, thanks to my brilliant editor.

-- Going through the film shot by shot to do all of the effects work. In case I haven't mentioned it before, this film was shot in color and we're now dropping all the color so the film is in black and white, but we're keeping certain reds. If you've see Sin City, you have an idea of what we're doing. What this means in the filmmaking world, however, is that we have to go through each frame and rotoscope around all of the reds. Rotoscoping is basically a process of creating a mask for each frame of the film around the reds that we want. This makes those pop out while any other reds -- skin tone, random colors in the curtains, etc. -- turn grayscale. But because of movement w/in the frames, he has to move the mask with every frame. Luckily, he can cheat by drawing key frames every few frames. When he does this, the mask moves between the frames. Anyway, it sounds complicated and it is. And he's spending at least 100 hours -- probably more -- doing this. And it looks fabulous.

-- Remixing and normalizing all of the audio. We locked the picture on Thursday last week (which means we're not making any more changes to the edit). Since then, he and I sat down with an audio expert friend of mine who gave us some great advice. Now, my editor is spending whatever time he isn't doing effects work on remixing the audio. And there are up to 10 tracks sometimes. It's a lot of work.

-- Manually animate the closing text slide of the film to make it look like someone is writing it.

-- Add a magical teardrop that brings a character back to life.

-- Add the moon in one shot.

-- Change the name of the motel on the sign. One of those effects you hope no one actually notices -- it's supposed to look real.

-- My latest creative addition. I listen to a great podcast -- Photoshop TV. They had a really interesting tip about making photos look hand tinted. I've been playing around with it. I noticed that it kind of added a smoothed-over look to certain textures. One of the problems I have w/my film is that the makeup tends to look a bit chunky in the closeup shots (my leads are a clown and a mime). I've been vexed as to how to make it look better. And then I saw the trailer for Ultraviolet. I hear it sucks, but it looks really cool. And they did something to make the characters' skin look really slick and shiny, kinda like vinyl. I knew right away that it's what I wanted. And then I remembered this technique from Photoshop TV. And I tried it with a shot of the film. While it smoothed everything over, it also really crushed the blacks so the blacks lose a lot of detail. Normally, that's a bad thing -- you want detail. But this is a really stylized film. My editor and I played around with some possibilities. Today, we finally came up with something. It's an effect that can be applied to the entire film to give it this look. It'll probably be a good 12 hour render time, but it looks frickin' sweet. I can't wait to see how it looks on the finished project.

So that's what he's been up to. The poor guy has a 2-year old and a wife who's about to pop, and his own video business, but because he loves this project, he blocked out today, tomorrow and Wednesday to get this done. He rocks and this film wouldn't exist without him. So this is my thanks to my editor. Who will never read this, but at least it's out there.

And while I'm thanking people who work hard, my composer -- one of my long-time best friends -- has worked his tookus off as well and has come up with some BRILLIANT pieces of music, my favorite of which has some funky 70s jive going on. It's great.

So it's all coming together, but we're really in the last crunch. If any of you are in the Phoenix area March 23-30th, it'll be playing in the IFP Phoenix Shorts program.

While I've been writing this, I've been listening to a loop of the song "10,000 Miles" by Mary Chapin Carpenter. It's such a beautiful song! If any of you saw the movie Fly Away Home with Jeff Daniels and Anna Paquin, you'll remember it as the song that plays during the opening credits when Anna's mother/Jeff's ex-wife gets in a car wreck and dies, and also when Anna is flying solo toward the nature preserve at the end of the film. It's hauntingly beautiful and I can't stop listening to it.

While I have your ear -- Oscars. Did any of you watch it? What'd you think? I thought Clooney's speech was the best, though it's hard to beat Tom Hanks getting beaten by a violin. And it's also hard to beat 360 Mafia winning for Best Song with "It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp." If you haven't seen Hustle and Flow, rent it. Terence Howard is brilliant and it's strange to actually watch a movie that makes you identify with a pimp.
What were your favorite speeches? Moments?

To close, here' s the transcript (minus the "You're a motherfucker") from 360 Mafia's acceptance speech.

ACCEPTANCE SPEECH - Best Song
Oh, my. Hey, we want to thank Keith Young our choreographer. And the whole Sony Records, Lisa Ellis, our moms, our whole families. Thank you, Jesus. And for giving us a chance, the Academy. We love the Academy. You know what I'm saying? Gil Cates. Everybody. I got plenty of time. Ain't nobody else. I want to thank everybody. Yeah. Donnie Ienner. Once again our families. Ludacris. What's up? Going down. George Clooney, my favorite man, he showed me love when I first met him. We bringing the house. We out of here. Memphis, Tennessee!

The Movie Monkey

Thursday Thirteen #5

Oi veh. It's that time already?

Here we go.

Thirteen Pets I've been lucky enough to own and why I love them (If I had the time to rummage through old pics and if I were skilled enough, I'd put a pic of each of them w/my post) This list is NOT in preferential order (except for #1). 1. Muffy -- my childhood kitty cat who was with me from about 3 to 18. She'll always be my favorite because she was there through my entire childhood. She was my friend, my playmate, my pillow. She could also be a little shit, but even more reason to love her. ;) 2. Sam (aka Lady Samantha of Soda Creek) -- our yellow lab. What a loyal friend. She had hip dysplasia and could never have puppies, and also had a hard time running around, but that never stopped her from playing with us kids. She was a high pedigree dog (hence the longer name which we always thought was kinda cheeky and fun since we lived near Soda Creek). Loyal and so friendly. Labs are great. 3. Sierra -- one of our current kittie cats. She's a beautiful, though slightly overweight, tortoise shell. She was from the pound and was so timid and scared when we got her, we figured she'd been abused. She hid under the bed constantly. Only in the past few years has she completely come out of her shell (no pun intended) and now is SOOOOOOO friendly and loving. She has little coo meows and purrs constantly. 4. Maya -- our other current kittie cat. She's a petite black cat who is full of spunk and likes to walk on the line of what we accept and what she knows is wrong (ie. walking on the tables). She loves to play and I run around the house with her mouse on a string with her right on my tail. She isn't a huge fan of being touched or held except when we're somewhere with a tile floor. Strange. 5. Tony -- my Red Eared Slider turtle. He was a vicious little punk and bit my fingers more than once when I was a teenager. I was usually asking for it, though, so I can't blame him. I loved dropping a bag full of live goldfish into his tank and watching him catch them and tear them in half. The downside was having to clean his tank -- what a chore! Nothing worse than moldy fish parts floating around. Ugh. The sad end of my time with him was that I took him outside to run around in the grass as I often did in the summer -- he loved tromping through it looking for bugs to eat. I found a black widow and became obsessed with watching it. I turned around to find Tony but couldn't -- he had run away. I searched the area for the rest of the day but no sign -- he'd completely disappeared. Sad but true. Even sadder that I can say that my turtle ran away from me. Slow and steady wins the race. 6. BJ -- technically not my pet, but was my sister's and I ended up taking care of her for a while. BJ (short for Benny, Jr.) was another petite long-haired tortie. She was a tough cookie -- she'd been attacked by dogs and lived, she'd fallen asleep in an open dryer only to run through a dry cycle and lived, she'd been diagnosed with a fatal kidney disease only to have it miraculously disappear. She died a very old age a few years back and it was heartbreaking. She was old, blind, and going gray. She was like 20 years old. By the end, her meow was pretty obnoxious and harsh, but she was always a great buddy. 7. Niyak -- My early childhood dog. I don't remember him much except for the pictures with him and me playing. Beautiful dog. A german shepherd mixed with something else -- a lab, perhaps? He was unfortunately put to sleep because he'd been busted for biting some neighbors. He never bit me, though. 8. Albie -- our albino catfish (only about 1 inch long). He was so cool to look at. One day he mysteriously disappeared from the tank. We couldn't find him anywhere and figured he leapt out. Suicidal for some reason. It wasn't until months later in the process of a routine cleaning when I noticed his body jammed into a hole on the inside of a plastic log that had been in the bottom of the tank. He had swum into the hole and apparently couldn't swim backward to get out. Very tragic. 9. Snickers -- Our kitty for 6 months. We adopted her because someone we knew had a friend that had to get rid of her. We readily adopted her as she was so stinking friendly and loving. Very overweight but full of nothing but loud meows and loads of constant love. A few months after getting her, she was diagnosed with diabetes. She stopped eating and drinking. A short time after that, my wife and I had one of the most difficult nights imaginable as she layed on the floor emitting pitiful attempts at meows. We put her in bed between us and knew that the next morning, we had to put her to sleep. It was heartbreaking. We put her favorite toy in a small pile of prayer stones on the top of a mountain we hiked. Immediately afterward, a butterfly flew up to us and circled us, then it circled the prayer stones, then circled us again and flew away. We felt as if her spirit was thanking us. It was pretty spiritual. 10. Oreo -- Guess why we named this cat with that name. She was a great cat -- actually, she seems similar to Maya. She was a great cat that had to deal with being the third wheel between my Muffy and my sister's BJ. Both of the other cats would pick on her. She also had some major sick spells in which she'd pee all over the house (including a bout of bloody urine on top of the refridgerator -- talk about nasty!!!). When my sister and I were gone, my mom decided to take her to her friend's farm where she thought Oreo would have a better life (without asking us, of course). Halfway there, my mom thought it would work to stop and let her go to the bathroom in a nearby cornfield. She ran off and we never saw her again. My sis and I still have a hard time (jokingly) of letting my mom forget about that one. Oi veh. 11. OJ -- a huge, fat version of Maya. More my dad's than mine, but OJ was always around when we were at Dad's place. A very cool cat who, sadly, died when his other cat, Odie, jumped on a shelf in the garage and knocked the ladder over. It landed on OJ and killed her instantly. 12. Tess -- My dad's Siamese. A VERY old cat that my dad adopted from someone who couldn't keep her anymore. Very scared at first but definitely came out of her shell. Her meow was horribly painful to hear (it sounded like sandpaper mixed with the whooping cough) and she drooled on you when you pet her, but she was awesome. 13. And this one goes out to all the mice, salamanders, frogs, cats, dogs, insects, fish, and other animals I've raised. I'm sorry if I was incompetent when I had you. I wished you no harm and know you all lived lives as full as you could, given the circumstances. Links to other Thursday Thirteens! 1. elle 2. Mental Excrements (Denise) 3. Paisley Propaganda 4. Kodijack 5. Ann 6. Chickadee

Get the Thursday Thirteen code here!


The purpose of the meme is to get to know everyone who participates a little bit better every Thursday. Visiting fellow Thirteeners is encouraged! If you participate, leave the link to your Thirteen in others comments. It’s easy, and fun! Be sure to update your Thirteen with links that are left for you, as well! I will link to everyone who participates and leaves a link to their 13 things. Trackbacks, pings, comment links accepted!

View More Thursday Thirteen Participants