Dark Design Pictures

Today is payday and this means I have the $125 bucks to sign up for the National 48Hr Film Project. San Antonio’s representative is Erik Bosse of our local filmmakers, and a damn good one at that. I have a few people signed up, but I’ll need more. I have some stiff competition this year. I think I may have already posted that? I’m not looking forward to going up against fellow filmmaker and friend Andy Miller. Andy is a very talented filmmaker and writer. I can’t give this guy enough props. Tonight 48Hr Film Project mixer at Ruta Maya. This gives the team an opportunity to meet talent and crew. Should be interesting.

Day 2 has wrapped and principle photography is complete. It was a hell of a day. We started filming at 9AM and went to 7PM. By days end we were all sweaty, dirty, stinky and gross. It was fucking worth it. We have some killer footage. We started the morning off by getting the rest of the footage from Mark’s apartment. By 2PM we had moved to shooting in the parking lot. I think 3 guys carrying a tarp with a body in it may have freaked some of Mark’s neighbors. We finally got to Darren’s property around 5 where we shot the final scene. Because of the rain both the mud and mosquitoes were horrendous. Poor Bronwyn had it the worst. There is one lat pickup shot I will need to get next weekend. It involves the guys from The Darkness so you know I’m up to no good.

Tonight was the first day of shooting Real Friends Help You Move Bodies. So far I am rather impressed. Things got off to a late start but shoot was quick. Only 3 hours. We didn’t get started till 8PM 2 hours later than I had planed. Mainly I was waiting on extras to show up. Bronwyn managed to con one of her friends into helping us, and I conned my co-worker Wes. Everyone did an incredible job this evening.

Tonight we had our first rehearsal and only for Real Friends Help You Move Bodies. I am pleased with the cast. Scott, Christian and Jason are going to do a bad ass job. Friday we being shooting the party scene and Sunday we shoot the rest. I’m hoping the rain will subside on Sunday so I can get my outdoor shots taken care of. I’m really looking forward to this and so is the cast. I also have Manual on board to do so FX.

I’m not sure why I’m making a big deal out of this, but what the hell. Yesterday, the blog has received it’s first comment. Some how people are find the site and for some reason, reading the blog. Thanks for the comments Dan!

In other news, I’ve almost have a full cast for my new SAL project “Real Friends Help You Hide Bodies”. I’ve always stated that I know I’m not a writer. This is why I prefer to direct other peoples scripts. As you can tell by reading the blog my grammar and spelling suck balls. However, I’ve been doing a lot more script writing and I think I’ve gotten better. So fare everyone who has read the scrip has liked it. Hopefully they aren’t just saying that because they are my friends, but knowing them they would say something if it was fucked up. Fucked up in a bad way that is. Like it sucking big time. Everyone’s a critic. This is all good practice to the 48Hr Film Project I will be doing next month. My usual partner And Miller, will be on his own team. Mainly because there are not enough teams so far. So I’ll have some real stiff competition this year.

SAL’s deadline is August 16th, which leaves me no time to film Dodging Bullets and participate in the 48HR Film Project August 10th through the 11th. If I’m going to do both I need to film something quick and before the end of the month. To night I started on the first draft of my new script called Real Friends Help You Hide Bodies. It comes in at only 8 pages and only needs 2 locations. An apartment and a field. I have access to both. If I can get a cast by this weekend I know I can pull this off.

Well I’ve finally posted Just Getting By Episode 1 to the site. I still need to add it to the official JGB website. Check it out

Over the weekend I finally finished the new export of JGB Ep1. I’ve added in some MagicBullet color correction and it takes about a day to do the render. When I left work this morning I left it making the encoding to Flash so if all goes well I should have it online tonight. Now I can start working on the DVD.

Today one of my co-workers (Darren Fransella, featured in Joined and VITD) and long time friends gave me a hand held camera stabilizer. How freaking kewl is that?! It a real nice one to boot. It comes with a built in b/w LCD and camera mounted lamp. Thanks Darren!

Tonight, well I guess technically yesterday Just Getting By was screaned at Ruta Maya. The turnout was surprising higher than I anticipated. Ruta Maya was freaking packed! I’m ecstatic to report that JGB was very well received by the audience.

I’ve been working on the project for a long freaking time, somewhere around 6 months. With all the time I’ve spent on editing I’ve beating the funny out of the episode. So I didn’t think it was as funny as it turned out to be. People laughed and enjoyed themselves so and that is what it’s all about. All the pain and suffering of long shoot days, having problems with actors, having to reshoot over 70% of the footage paid off. After filming Dodging Bullets I’m willing to do another episode.

Unfortunately, this was the last Short Ends screening. Andy Miller showed his first horror film which was very well done. Very fucked up in a kewl way. I got a copy of the DVD because I helped out with the audio. Sadly Andy’s not going to do another horror movie. Matthew Jasso did Who is Cesar Tampico. Which was also a very funny short film. It was also very different to Jasso usual stuff.