Dark Design Pictures

It’s the last day of the year. Holy shit, I can’t believe this year is over. The last few weeks have been a blur. I took the week of Christmas off to do some home improvement. The wife and I renovated the guest bathroom. I also found time to work on my Warmachime miniatures. I try and have some pictures posted in a few days. Sadly there was no film making involved lately. Last night I got back to doing the revisions for one of my scripts. Been meaning to get to it all week. I haven’t really been inspired all that much. However last the night the bug finally bit me and I wrote till 3AM. I was hoping to be a lot further than I am, but if I stick with it I should have the script done by mid January.

I other news, my personal trainer Jason has some ideas on some videos and it looks like the being of the year I will be occupied doing those. These should be playing gigs as well. So I’m keeping my fingers crossed. Well that’s all for now. Tonight is our big New Year’s party. We are looking at cramming 30+ people into our house. So it should be interesting.

Happy New Year Fuckers!

This week has been very full and sleep has been in short supply. Between work, weight training, holiday parties and movie related projects my schedule has been very full. Yesterday I captured the final tape for Crosshairs. Tomorrow I plan on beginning to review the footage and start picking out the choice shots. I have the whole week of Christmas off so between household projects and getting ready for out New Year’s Eve party, I’m planning on doing the bulk of the editing then. So far I’ve been playing around with some compositing. Mainly with muzzle flashes, but now it is time to get serious.

I’m still plugging away at the script for my first feature. When I get done I’m going to send a copy to Andy Miller and have him do the editing. Hopefully I can get it finished before the new year as well. My goal next year is to film to features and a few shorts in between them. Hopefully this won’t be to much of a stretch. I want to focus more on my own projects next year, but we shall see.

This Sunday Cup of Joe shooting resumes again. We are way behind schedule. I think Matthew is drowning in projects right now and is having problems arranging shoot days. I’ve been thinking of presumptively capturing the footage in case Matthew asks me to do the editing. lol I guess we’ll see.

Last night I attended the 2007 Film San Antonio Holiday Reception. As always Drew Mayer-Oaks did an outstanding job putting the party together. The part was held out at Sunset Station in the Spire which is an old church, converted into a party room. The party was packed. If you’re a filmmaker in San Antonio odds are you were there. If you weren’t there, well shame on you! You missed out on a great networking opportunity. All the usual suspects were there Andy and Dar Miller, Mister Pete, Eric Bosse, Laura Even and many many others.

Later in the evening Drew announced the winners of the 48Hrs Film experience. 1st Place – Name That Tune, 2nd Place – Nestor-Fest 2007 and 3rd Place – Throwdown at the Pigstand. Congratulations to those teams you did a killer job. Andy, Dar and myself had our own little after party at one of the near by bars. There we hung out, drank some beer and talked about where we went wrong with our short film and what we can next year to make things better. Over all it was a very enjoyable evening.

I really want to do a feature film. I’ve worked on a couple of features for friends but not one of my own. I like short films, they are fun and keeps the content of the web site fresh and they are great at refining your craft. However that is all they are really good for.

Earlier this year I set my sights on doing my own feature film. So far I have gotten absolutely no where with it. Not because of a lack of effort I can assure you. My problem is coming up with a decent script. I’m not a writer, at least not yet. I think I can write a decent 15 page script. But writing a 15 page script is a lot easier than writing an 80 to 90 page script. The question is how do you get from writing 15 page to 80? Should I got to 30, 60 then and 80 pages? If you have 60 pages you might as well squeeze in and extra 20 to have a feature. Their isn’t a whole lot you can do with a 60 minute movie. It’s to long to be a short and it’s to short to be a feature. So what is an inspiring wannabe director to do?

I have come up with 4 ideas for features this year. Three of them have found there way to paper, the fourth is still floating around in my jumbled mind. When I hit 30 so odd pages is where thing kind of go to shit. At that point I’m not sure what direction I want to take. Is there enough character development, is there enough plot to fill 80 minutes, are my joke and plot gags going to amuse the audience and or is it just going to amuse me? So at about 30 pages I get frustrated and decide to move on to a different story or simply take a break from writing. February is creeping closer each day and there is no story in site. The only thing I can do is try to keep moving forward.

As usual I’ve been very bad about this whole blogging thing. So I figured I would do a fallow up on the 48Hr Film Experience. My involvement was small for the most part. Leah had her company Christmas party that night so I had to bug out early. This year we drew Soap Opera as the genre and a restaurant as the location. Andy had a tough order to fill. The script he came up with was rather funny. I ended up play the part of a gossiping queen at a restaurant. The final product wasn’t bad, however the audio quality suffered a lot. The bulk of the short was shot at the Aztec Theater which isn’t a quiet. The cast was down solid and everyone did an amazing job. Myself included. However, I don’t think we will be placing this year. I should have Amberjack Manor online this week, but you can check it out here along with the other short films.

There were some really nice short films that were done this year. “Name That Tune” a Film Noir I think is going to take first place this year. It is very well done and out of all the films is my favorite. Team Nosferatu’s “Throwdown at the Pigstand” is also a personal favorite. Then there is “One Shot Fits All”. The way it was shot was fucking brilliant. The whole thing was shot in one take. Choreographing something like that is a nightmare. Everything has to be prefect or you are start over. I wonder how may takes it took? It had the potential to be a very good short, but I had no idea what the hell the plot of the story was. Basically you have this chick running around kicking the crap out of people. The audio quality was also lacking.