Josh Oakhurst has something to say on his blog about Four Eyed Monsters and I must say I agree with it. I won’t steal his rant so head over there and read what he has to say. He also has a recommendation for a great web series called The West Side. It looks pretty interesting and seems to be the antithesis of what the FEM kids are doing.

OK so here are my own thoughts on Four Eyed Monsters. BTW if you don’t know about this film and the story behind it, then just do a google search. There has been so much press written on it that there is really no point in me trying to rehash it.

Maybe it was out of charity. Or maybe a feeling of solidarity with fellow struggling filmmakers. Or maybe its because if we can game the system to make their film some money, then that option will be there for me in the future. For any one of these reasons I went to the website i was told to and signed up for their service I will never use. Just so this service would give another dollar to the FEM “pay our credit card bills” fund. I guess as of today (7/07/2007) they are up to $33,000.

As usual, with stuff like this I am very much “Love It” and “Hate It” all at once. And here’s why:

I love that the creators of FEM have found a way to get their money back. Supposedly they have spent $100,000 on this film, all credit card debt. I predict they will get to about fifty grand and then this approach will dry up. Either everyone who was going to sign up for this will have done it, or Spout will realize they are getting nothing out of it and try to change the deal. And they are going to get nothing out of it. I don’t know what Spout is. Some kind of online film community. Like there aren’t enough of those. I don’t care. I haven’t been back to it since I signed up. This is a classic dot.com-style pissing away of money. But if a filmmaker can profit from it, then cool. More power to them. Perhaps as the second internet bubble gets larger, more filmmakers will be able to make out as well.

After signing up for Spout I watched Four Eyed Monsters. Or rather I watch pieces of it. I really couldn’t finish it. I’m not saying its bad. I’m just saying it didn’t interest me. Maybe in the future I will try again. I think maybe if I had it on DVD and could just put it on play while I went about my day, then I could digest it a bit better. But I was getting bored as hell watching it on my computer. I wanted to move on to other things.

I wonder if that will be a continued problem for internet distribution. It’s hard to watch a feature film on a computer. Not because you aren’t interested or don’t have the attention span like some folk like to say. It’s because you can’t do anything else on your computer while you’re watching it. Well you can, but its not the same as have a movie playing on TV while you do whatever dark naughty things you do online. The new set-top boxes everyone is working on is probably the best option. You can still distribute online, but then the content would go to your tv where it belongs.

OK back to the film… One last thing. This film should not cost $100,000. I am totally at a loss to where all that money went, but it’s not on screen. I’ll have to see if I can find a rundown of what the money was spent on, but all things considered, the film appears like it could have been made for a tenth of that sum.

Well enough player hatin’. I wish them well. I’m sure that Arin and Susan are lovely people and I did my part to try and get them out of the hole. Maybe someday they’ll do the same for me.

UPDATE: Now with video clips!

I thought I’d actually post some progress instead of bitching about money woes. So here goes:

This shot is from Adjudication, the short film I’m trying to finish up post on. The story is our character Michael (played by the lovely and talented Nikki Meauvais) makes her way up to the roof of a hotel after assassinating a man. Originally, we were supposed to have had access to the roof of the Ben Lomond hotel in Ogden, Utah. That’s where we shot all the hotel interiors except the elevator (another story all together). But for reasons I won’t get into, it became unavailable at the last minute.

Danny Thompson (who plays Michael’s “mark”, The Executive) offered up the roof of his rental store, Flix Club. We had some other options, but no time to pursue them, so Danny’s offer really saved our asses. It was only after arriving there that we realized the issues:

1. The roof was flat. Nothing except light domes and an antenna.
2. It was a one-story building (not twelve floors like the Ben Lomond).
3. No city skyline. Orem, Utah is not what you would call a metropolis…

Actually we knew the shop was only one floor. But sometimes a problem doesn’t register or you forget little details. At least I do.

I’ll explain how we fixed the flat roof thing in another post. For now let’s concentrate on the roof height issue…

We had to think fast. We went over several options. The best options included rigging a last-minute greenscreen and also rotoscoping by hand. But neither of these really excited me, plus I wasn’t so confident it would even work.

So I decided to make it as easy as possible. We would shoot from a high angle and block out the scene so that Nikki’s head never came above the edge of the building. I reasoned that in this case, it would be far easier to roto out the background if it was just a simple boxy matte instead of having to paint around a moving actor with hair, clothes and what have you to contend with.

So thats how we shot it. Here’s what we shot.

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Note the ladder. It was our sole means of getting up to the roof.

Not too awesome, but a beginning. Now on to my favorite program: Adobe After Effects.

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First I need to stabilize this footage. It’s a bit too jittery for my taste. Plus it’ll make the rotoscope job easier. And I’m all about easier…

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A little camera move would help this shot. I decided to add a camera tilt to the shot. Since we are adding scenery above, we can afford to run out of headroom here.

So now we need to choose our background.

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I used some stock footage of an Eastern European skyline i bought off of istockphoto. The actual stock video clip pans around the city in a ninety-degree swivel, but I froze it about midway through when I found a frame I liked. I’ll use the rest of the clip for other angles in this sequence. I also matched the tilt move by parenting that layer to the original clip.

I put the skyline clip in a layer beneath the original clip in the timeline. It’s time for the matte now.

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Bye, bye Orem!!!

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Hello, “Fakeovia”!

There’s the finished composite. This clip hasn’t been color graded yet, so the two clips are slightly mismatched color-wise if you look really close. And the building really should have a ledge. That will be a little bit harder. I’m leaving it alone for now and just telling myself that its like that ledgeless(?) rooftop Al Pacino likes to hang out on in The Devil’s Advocate. But I am still pleased with how it turned out.

More walkthroughs on the way. As soon as I finish the shots.

Last night I finally snapped out of my two-week mini-depression and got some work done on the so-far-unfinished short film Adjudication. In a way I’m glad I missed the deadline. It’s given me more time to make a finished product. But on the other hand, it kind of took the wind out of my sails for little bit. This is the second project in a row that has been in limbo.

Actually, three if you count the stalled Archangel Alpha feature. But that is turning around now as well. I’ll catch my “audience of five” up on that later…

I hadn’t realized at the time how much VFX work was going to go into Adjudication. But it’s coming along nicely. I fixed the ghosting problem i was having with my footage. I had the premiere project set up for the wrong frame rate. Lesson learned. Project fixed. Life goes on.

This was the first time I’d shot on HDV. We lucked out due to a reservation mistake and got upgraded from the Canon XHA1 to the XLH1. And boy was it nice to work with. If it wasn’t so damn expensive I’d seriously consider getting one. But come on Canon, that beast is way too high priced. Yeah right. I can’t afford any camera right now…

Anyway…

I’m slowly getting my filmmaking groove back. Hopefully this weekend I can stay on task and make some real progress. September is coming fast and thats when I wanted to start shooting Archangel Alpha. But I need to finish this other stuff first. Plus I really need these projects done so I have a bit healthier demo reel so I can get some paying freelance gigs. My up and down financial cycle is the number one reason I have been feeling so down. So it needs fixed soon.

Rather than ramble on and on, I will try to hit the main points:

1. I have been in a consistent state of broke-ass since I moved to Cali.
2. I am getting increasingly dissatisfied with being broke.
3. I am realizing that my filmmaking has become an obsession, and not in a good way. It’s all I talk about. My friends have got to be tired of hearing me speak when nothing comes out but movie shit.
4. My self-financed filmmaking is contributing to my broke-ass state. But its the only thing that is making me happy right now, so I can’t stop. Vicious cycle.
5. I need to get better at networking. A lot better. My future success and happiness depend on me getting my head out of the sand and meeting people.
6. I need a better-paying job. I need to make about twice what I am to be able to follow my dreams, and have a decent living. That’s not going to happen where I am.
7. Problem is I am scared to make the leap to something different. I want to get into the film industry, but I’m paralyzed by self-doubt. I don’t feel like I’m good enough. Everyone says I am. I really, really don’t see it.
8. I have a great feature film written. And great people want to work on it. And I am terrified that I’m not good enough and will only let them down and make something none of us will be happy with.
9. I don’t want to spend the next year or two chasing an investor for this film. I just want to make it. To do that I have to take care of many of the previous points. Especially the self-doubt and the broke-assedness…

K. That’s enough for now. Peace.

The Michael Bay Blog has new pictures of the Transformers robots. And they are dead sexy:

click the image to see more.

If there is a filmmaker that I feel the most conflicted about, it might be Michael Bay. I am trying to confirm, but I believe I’ve seen every film he’s directed. I even liked some of them

We can all player hate and talk smack on the man, but is there anyone in movie history that has had such a solid record with summer blockbusters? Lucas and Spielberg may have invented the blockbuster, but Mr. Bay perfected it. Blockbusters are the films we love to hate. We know we shouldn’t give in to our base desires and go watch this shit. But we do anyway. Because we want it. Bay gives us hot people, big explosions and slick pretty pictures. And car chases. Always a car chase. Because thats what we want.

And now he’s give us big robots that fight and stuff. Hot people, big explosions and slick pretty pictures of robots? The geek in me just can’t resist. So I will be standing in line opening day. Damn Michael Bay. And damn me for being weak.

I’m running late for work as always, but I just had to take a minute and write a quick love letter to all the actors of the world. These moments of “I love the world and you too” have been few and far between lately, so enjoy it while it lasts.

First I’ll explain what prompted this outpouring of emotion. I was doing my morning routine which involves checking my emails, hopping on myspace briefly, and then checking three of my favorite entertainment/gossip blogs: The Superficial, Best Week Ever, and Defamer.

Best Week Ever has a link to an iFilm clip of a recently aired Law and Order show. The episode was a barely-veiled exploitation of the Anna Nicole stuff. Actually it wasn’t veiled at all. I don’t know what to make of it. But here is a little clip put together:

Now either the show has truly jumped the shark (if it hasn’t happened sooner) or they were trying to have a light-hearted funny episode. The fact that David Cross is in this makes me lean towards the latter. But what I loved watching was how the actors play it straight the whole time. It always amazes me how professional actors (the good ones anyway) will give their best and put themselves out there for shows they know are shit. These people have common sense (the good ones anyway). They know when a film or tv show sucks. Its not hard to figure out. But they soldier through and still give the best performance they can.

My first short film was The Walken Dead. It had a funny little concept: Christopher Walken in a Zombie film. Funny. At least i thought so. It’s accepted that everyone’s first film will suck ass. It just happens. You just don’t have the experience to put together a great film. And my film was no exception. There is a reason that there is only a trailer online for it. I never finished the film because it was bad, bad, bad, even for a zombie flick which is saying a lot.

But the lead actress in it was phenomenal. Her name is Kimberly Cooper. If any filmmakers have a chance to hire her, please do. She’s amazing. She stuck with me through a long and tiring shoot that was plagued with problems. Locations kept falling through so we used her house. She let us make a wreck of her home. It was wild. Filming going on inside and a small gaggle of people being made up as zombies on the lawn.

She obviously knew the shoot wasn’t going well. She knew the film was going to suck (i think) but she still gave me her best. She never slacked off. Not all night. She played the heroine-straight woman perfectly. She was a professional. I love actors like that. And I have always felt like I let her down. She did so well and I did so poorly. We lost touch over time but I hope someday we can work together again now that I have a slightly better idea what I’m doing. Time will tell.

Thats probably enough rambling today. So to all the professional actors out there I love you, and hope we can work together soon. Peace.