Beating the Pavement

It's been more than a month since I posted my last blog and it seems like the time is just flying. I've been working on Living & Dying and Fall Down Dead for nearly two years and now find myself without another project ready to roll. January was a month of transition for me, trying to regroup and reaccess my priorities and goals. I'm back to being in that 'in-between' place.

My first priority of recent has been updating my demo reel. Good friend and fellow filmmaker Blake Calhoun has offered his editing assistance and we've been importing all of my movies and trailers into his Avid. In cahoots with my manager, we're putting together a brand new Director's Reel that will showcase trailers, a new montage and select scenes from all of my movies. Around April, my manager is going to start taking me out to the larger agencies in Los Angeles to see about getting me an agent. With these more recent movies completed, it's time to get an agent who can help me take that next step up the ladder and get me through the studio doors.

The process of making this demo reel has also been an interesting one. In my mind, I would have approached it by selecting the 'best' scenes from each movie and moving forward. However, my manager made a good point in the selection process. It's not just about the best scenes, it's also about displaying versatility and range. Each select scene needs to compliment the others instead of being similar. We've chosen scenes that display a) action and production value, b) strong, dramatic acting, c) creative and stylistic editing, d) comedy, e) horror, and d) tension and suspense. I believe the final demo reel will show an ability to handle various types of movie genres and storytelling styles.

Beyond the demo reel work, I've begun reconnecting with potential film investors that I knew prior to making Living & Dying. Because of these last two movies, I've proven I can handle higher budgeted productions (or at least higher in contrast to my first four movies) and this has instilled a greater confidence in these investors. Between rebuilding those relationships, they've also been passing the word and hooking me up with new potential funders. I'm off to the races, beating the pavement, searching for that elusive 'investor' that is ready to put money into a film.

And last but not least, I'm back in the writing chair. In between demo reel work and meetings, I've spent a lot of time writing again. As movies are my life, it's how I enjoy spending my 'free time.' I've taken the time to do a revision to my Dark Heart script, rewrote my postpartum depression thriller called Angela's Body, completed a rewrite of American Nightmares with Debbie Rochon and now I'm digging into The Hellfire Club, my first crack at a truly big budget, studio level script.

The next few months should be interesting as I push my career forward and keeping building the foundations for bigger and better movies.

End of the Year Wrap Up

2006 is finally concluded and it was a great year for me with - thankfully - a lot of work that included finishing two feature films, directing an episode of Inspector Mom for Lifetime and co-producing a couple of projects.

Living & Dying was wrapped up in the early summer. Here in the US, Living & Dying will be released on MAY 01, 2007 by HBO on DVD. A cable run will follow shortly thereafter. Be sure to hit the rental and retail stores on May 1st. Internationally, Warner Bros. Independent is releasing the movie theatrically. It will premiere in Istanbul on March 16th followed by a run across Turkey, Easter Europe, Germany and several other European countries.

2006 also had me doing one of my fastest movies yet. Fall Down Dead went into pre-production in June and was done and delivered at the end of December. It will premiere at the Berlin Film Market this coming February with, hopefully, release news in the next couple of months.
I also directed an episode of Inspector Mom for Lifetime which plays sometime in May or June. I'll post dates once I have them. Doing an episodic show was definitely a different experience - one I really enjoyed. Hopefully they will do a second season and I can do a few more shows... or better yet, one of the tv movies.

I also co-produced two other projects. The first is the music documentary Teen-A-Go-Go, directed by Melissa Kirkendall. It's a look at the teen music movement in the mid-sixties that sprung out of the British music invasion. A first cut of the documentary was completed in December. A few more interviews need to be conducted along with some additional archival footage put in. Hopefully the doc will be completed by this spring.

The second co-producing venture was on the horror flick From the Dark, directed by Cliff McClelland and Tom Zembrod and produced by Tom Zembrod and Todd Jenkins. It's a cool little movie about a supernatural force that traps a group of friends inside a cabin as the darkness outside tries to suck them into the abyss. Cliff and Tom directed it over the summer (while I was in North Carolina on Fall Down Dead). They did a good job with the movie, especially considering their low budget and time constraints. We are locking picture edit next week so they can get going on music and sound editing.

Now I'm looking forward to 2007. Hopefully it will also shape up to be a good year. I'm supposed to do one more movie for New Films, which hopefully will happen. I'm also excited about Living & Dying and Fall Down Dead both being released. These should generate some interest in getting more films financed and rolling. I have a number of other projects in the works, each in various stages of financing and development. With any luck, 2007 will also be the year that I get an agent that can get me into the studio doors. We'll see what happens...

Best to all and a prosperous and successful 2007!

We Have a Movie

I'm back at the sound studio in Burbank and we're basically done with Fall Down Dead. It was a long, rough week that left me exhausted and sniffling from either a cold or allergies. Either way, the last week kicked me hard.

The race to the finish line was fast. I spent the days at the sound studio and the nights at the lab with Richard and Joe doing the telecine color corrections. Friday morning we headed to Media Concepts do to the Dolby 5.1 printmaster session. It went very well. It was the first time I wouls see the answer print projected with sync sound running. It looks and sounds awesome! I had a very surreal moment sitting on the stage. I finally felt like I'd accomplished making a theatrical quality movie.

Friday night was back at Ascent completing the telecine and I crawled my way to bed around 1am after five hours of sleep in two days. With the picture and sound locked, and exhaustion overwhelming me, the typical happened. I began to second guess myself and some of my decisions. Fortunately, sleep gave way to a better mind set and I'm back to my positive self.
Today we are doing the foreign M&E sound mix and later in the day will be viewing the composite print to make sure that all picture and sound elements were put together properly. With a knock on wood, we are still on schedule for complete deliver of the picture and sound elements to New Films no later than Friday. Once I get through the process and past the holidays, I'll do a recap on the experience of making Fall Down Dead.

What Did You Say?

I'm at the sound studio in Burbank and my ears are ringing. We are on day five of our sound mix heading toward our Dolby printmaster session on Friday. The sound for Fall Down Dead is incredible. The guys at Digital Dreams have been awesome and are doing a top notch job with the sound design. Of course, I can barely hear anymore but that's okay. We are currently doing reel 5 (end of the movie) and will get through it by tomorrow morning. Once done, we'll spend the rest of the day plus Thursday final mixing and going through it with a fine tooth comb. On top of it all, Pinar's score is beautiful, rich and full - perfect for our thriller. The only hitch that could interrupt us is an ADR session from Rome that has yet to be delivered. One of the engineers is going to be on the phone at 2am talking with the studio in Rome trying to get everything uploaded to an ftp server overnight so we can drop it all in tomorrow. If it's not here... well, let's just hope it's here tomorrow morning.

The print is basically done. We finalized reel 5 today. Richard has been bouncing back and forth between two labs working on the print and then doing the telecine color correction for the video masters. The color for both the print and the video masters are going well and it's also planned for all of that to be done on Friday. If Straw keeps us all on track, we'll be looking at a composite print of the completed movie on Monday.

On The Road Again

I'm on the road again to completing Fall Down Dead. I'm currently in Los Angeles and will be here through the end of December doing all the final work on the movie. After having handled all the post production supervision myself on Living & Dying, I can't say enough of how grateful I am to have an experienced post supervisor working on this movie. He is getting to deal with all of the grief and headaches. LOL! And he's saving my ass in keeping up with all the workflow and schedule juggling.

We have now completed all the necessary looping. Mehmet Gunsur finished his in Rome, Keith Harris did his in North Carolina this morning and I spent the day with Udo Kier finishing his. Udo's a master at looping (as was Dominique Swain). They continuously nailed their performance and sync over and over again.

While we were at the sound studio, Richard Clabaugh, the director of photography, was up at the film lab working on the color correction of the answer print. They've completed the second pass on the color correction and are doing the third pass tomorrow. At this point, it looks like the producers will be looking at it Thursday morning for approvals.

And from there, poor Straw, the schedule moves into further mayhem. I'll be bouncing back and forth between the final sound mix, which begins Thursday, and the rest of the print work. We are waiting on titles from the title house, end credit crawl and a few other optical effects to come in so we can complete the answer print and move on to the Interpositive and Internegative. As scheduled, the telecine of the print will begin next week. Richard will be supervising that and I'll be joining him in the evenings after I'm done with the sound mixing during the day. Somewhere in there, I'll find time to sleep. If everything stays on schedule, the final and complete theatrical print along with the final and complete video masters will be done on the 19th. Our official delivery date is the 22nd, so Straw is giving us a few safety days in case of the inevitable hiccups.

Stranger Than Fiction

Just a quick note while I'm away on vacation. My wife and I went and saw Stranger Than Fiction yesterday and it might be one of the best movies I've seen all year. Directed by Marc Forster (Finding Neverland), this is a movie that relies on story and acting to sell itself, and it suceeds in a very big way. Stranger Than Fiction is pure storytelling at its best. It's sharp, witty, dramatic, intelligent and entertaining. The script was written by Zach Helm who, based on imdb, seems to be new to feature film screenwriting. I've always been a huge fan of Charlie Kaufman (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Adaptation, etc.) and Zach seems to have that same mind-boggling creativity and imagination that makes all of Kaufman's scripts so uniquely original in the current world of remakes and bland movies. I recommend Stranger Than Fiction to anyone that appreciates and enjoys pure storytelling without all the big budget hype and frills.

On The Run

The end of 2006 seems to be wrapping up very well with lots of work and success. I directed the episode "The Haunted House Horror" for Lifetime's Inspector Mom show. It was a complete blast. The actors and crew were wonderful to work with and incredibly dedicated to making the best show possible. It was very different doing an episodic show instead of a feature film. Fortunately, the producers gave me a lot of latitude with the look and style. The biggest thing I noticed in directing episodic was that a) the regular cast already know their characters so there tends not to be a lot of series arc work in terms of directing, and b) having to think differently in terms of composing shots for a small screen instead of big screen. It was a great experience and I hope I get to do more.

We wrapped last Monday at 7pm and I jumped on a plane to Los Angeles for a fast "in and out" trip to do ADR on Fall Down Dead. Dominique Swain came in for a full day and we picked up David Carradine, Monica Dean and Jennifer Alden the next day. The fast switch from Inspector Mom to Fall Down Dead had my head swimming and I was grateful to return home and finally get some sleep.

Fall Down Dead is going great. I love the sound team and it's nice having a post production supervisor finally handling post on a movie. It's taken a lot of weight off my shoulders and allowed me to focus more on the creative side of the movie.

My wife and I are off for a short Thanksgiving holiday and then I return to Los Angeles on December 4th. I'll be out there for the rest of the month finishing up the movie; bouncing between sound mix and color correcting the print. It should be a very fun month ending with my wife and I spending Xmas with my family.

From there, the future is unknown. I have another horror project that we are out raising financing for, a zombie flick I'm attached to direct that is in the process of raising funds, and I'm talking with the producers of Fall Down Dead about a third movie for them. Hopefully I can begin 2007 on a high note with one more movie lined up.

Lock Me Up

In what might be one of my fastest edits, the producers called picture lock today on the edit of Fall Down Dead. Overall, I'm happy. There were editing decisions made that I don't necessarily agree with, but unlike some past projects, I don't believe the decisions ultimately do harm to the movie. Fall Down Dead is a good, fast paced thriller that I believe audiences are going to enjoy.

Bob, our editor, will spend the week locking the five films reels and transitioning all the materials to the next post production stage: negative cutting, composing and sound design. I'm very eager to start hearing Pinar's score for the movie after our lengthy conversations about the tone and style. It'll be a modern variation of Bernard Hermann's classic style so familiar in many of Hitchcock's movies.

While transition week occurs, I'm prepping my webisode of Lifetime's Inspector Mom series. It's a Halloween house episode, which of course I love. A murder takes place in a Halloween house and our hero, Maddie, must solve the crime. I've been prepping since last Thursday and we film from Friday through the following Monday. I'm having a ball and it's very interesting seeing how different it is doing an episodic show instead of a feature film. More soon...

Mad Bad

I just got notification that my movie Mad Bad has won the Jury Award for Best Picture at the New York International Independent Film Festival. Congratulations and thanks to everyone who helped out and supported this movie.

In the meantime, I'm still working crazy hours editing Fall Down Dead. I've just mailed out what I hope is the final cut of the movie. Our post production schedule has us slated to have picture lock by next Friday. The producers will have the final say but I'm feeling very good about it.

Not meaning to add more to my plate, but I'm going to be directing an episode of Inspector Mom for Lifetime Channel's web broadcasts. More than anything, I'm curious about directing episodic shows so this will be a nice way to get my feet wet.