Missed Opportunities

It's frustrating when you discover a contest that has been going on for a while, only to catch it two weeks before the deadline (which was May 31st).

I have discovered a new forum: DVXuser.com- which I have found to be highly impressive. I've seen all sorts of independant filmmaking forums- some are pretentious, others are exclusive and demand you pay to even post anything and view some of their threads. Most often they are dominated by twenty or so users who post ten or fifteen times a day and ignore any new users.

DVXuser has a fantastic community of filmmakers- though as the name implies, production is video not film. Which is okay with me, I love film but it's far too expensive for a guy with a family and too many bills.

They have genre based festivals which seem to come out every six months or so, the last one being "Spy Fest". Spying of what ever sort was the prerequisite. Two of COTME's actors were in two different entries, unfortunately their productions didn't quite make the deadline... and these teams started clear back in the beginning of March). I feel like it's a missed opportunity because with COTME's main production on hold, I could have had reason to shoot a small prequel to it. It's such a strong concept, I think it could have had a chance.

There is a possibility of doing something, though- the Gloria Film Festival is holding a 7 day filmmakers challenge that starts on 7-7-07, and the short can be no longer than 7 minutes long (are you sensing a theme here?).

Well, in anycase, COTME is on hold. There are dozens of reasons which I will not go into here, but suffice to say, the script is currently in competition at Slamdance and I will submit it to other screenplay competitions as they are announced.

In the meantime, Todd and I have been working on Finnigan's, our shoot last Saturday went extremely well, but now I'm focusing on trying to produce the rest of the production ready in a couple of weeks. Jessie, one of the twins is getting married on the 16th (yay Jessie!) but she'll be available for the second shoot.

Lastly, I'm seriously considering purchasing a new DOF adapter to use with my little HD camera... I'll let you know how that goes.

Reel it in!

Howdy! Long time no post.

Todd McGowan and I have began working together to produce short :30 spots in High Definition to showcase our abilities. To accomplish this, we've created an advertising campaign from scratch for a beer that we've decided to call Finnigan's Irish Stout. The mock-commercial would target males 21-45 who watch popular culture channels like MTV, VH1, Spike TV or sports programming... much like most beer commercials do.

Pre-production included the design of a beer label (which I did), and it's placement on a couple of empty beer bottles. Easy and fun enough!

I've enlisted many of my longtime friends: Robby Messer, Jaymi & Jessie Hampton, Mark Throckmorton. Todd and his wife Allison McGowan, and my wife Charlotte Maestas have been pulling our resources to gather props, equipment and locations to make this possible. Hopefully we can get a few more team members help with the production of our second shoot.

Our first shoot was earlier today, which was an apartment scene where our would-be beer drinking bachelors are watching poker on tv. We also shot the end of the spot where Robby answers the door to find the girl, or rather girls of his dreams delivering pizza. Here are some frame grabs from the apartment scene shoot:

The next shoot will take place in the next few weeks- I'm currently looking for a sound stage that can handle 13 actors and a small crew... it should be fun!

Although this is a reel-building exercise, I'm fully planning on using this for any background television filler for my feature length production "Corner of the Mind's Eye" (which I've entered into the Slamdance Screenwriter's Competition).