Cool Blog Alert: True Porn Clerk Stories where you will find out that $6.50/hour does not cover cleaning up bodily fluids and other entertaining anecdotes from a real porn clerk.

Monday morning again. Damn, Mondays always come way too soon. After a weekend of partying and having screenings, I am incredibly excited for how this film will turn out. So the wrap party went very well. Anne had surprised me with the fact that it was also my birthday party, and folks had all chipped in to putting together a fund for my next tattoo which I'd been planning to mark my third decade. I'll post a picture here when I get it. So just about every last person who was involved in the film was at this party, including Elizabeth who flew in from California just for this party, and Adam who drove down from Pittsburgh. Anne and I had gone to the paint your own pottery place and made tiles for each of the main cast and crew members and we also ordered custom engraved medals for every last person involved. Anne also surprised me with a bottle of kickass single malt scotch which I drank a whole lot of. After folks had signed their releases, we started the screenings and I got a lot of very positive feedback from lots of people. The party scene went over very well thanks to all of the great improv, and the fight scene is a huge crowd pleaser. Now I just can't wait to get this thing done.

You've never heard Black Sabbath like this! Read the article and search for this stuff on your favorite file sharing program.

Besides putting together a rough cut of the first 15 minutes of the film to show at tomorrow's wrap party, I am now completely immersed in the process of acquiring music for the film. The Citypaper ad went up on Tuesday and so far I've gotten several replies from a wide variety of musicians and the CDs should be coming in the mail soon. The mp3s that I've heard so far are great and I've already stuck one into a scene. Filmmaker magazine just ran a great two part series on music for independent films, from getting clearance for big hits to whether to just go with music cues or to hire a composer or any combination. What I'm going for right now is to get as much music as I can from local independent artists and fit it in wherever I can and then fill in the holes by recording some stuff with friends. One thing that was mentioned in the article was the danger of dropping in some song that there's no way in hell you'd ever be able to afford the rights to as a temporary track to edit to while waiting for music that you can use, and falling in love with the scene cut to music that would cost an arm and a leg to secure the rights to. I swore I wouldn't do that, but I just couldn't resist seeing how the fight scene would go with Beat It going into Beat on the Brat and of course I love it that way and of course the finished product will be completely different and I'm sure I'll love it just as much with different music. So tomorrow is the big wrap party and the entire cast and crew is going to get to see what we have edited so far and I'm very excited. I held an informal test screening at work yesterday and it went over very well. People laughed in all the right places and even in some unexpected places. Despite the fact that they're hardly an unbiassed audience, and that they got to see one of our co-workers get killed onscreen by his own wife as well as seeing parts of our office used as a set, their reaction got me pumped to see the reactions of people who don't know anybody or any place involved in the film.

So I'm going through and realizing that the majority of posts on this thing are on Mondays. Jeesh, is this the lamest blog on the internet? Well, no, there are definitely worse ones out there. Well anyway, it's yet another Monday and I'm sitting in my office thinking about anything but work. I had a very productive weekend, making serious progress in the editing room. The first few scenes out of the opening credits are all done, mostly color corrected, with some sound cues and even some music. The scene before the credits is also fully editied but awaiting color correction and some sound tweaking. This week the Citypaper ad will go live to put out the call for more music, though the music that I've been getting so far has been great. Matt Patner, our lawyer as well as a very talented musician has given me a CD of some very cinematic sounding instrumentals that he's recorded and I've already dropped one of the songs in. I also have 2 CDs from his band Sumac to cull from, as well as the amazing talents of Milkmachine, and I'm hooking up with a great guitarist who I used to play with who has lots of cool stuff. I'm going to try to do some recording myself of some incidentals and possibly the themesong as well as some 70s porno funk to use as our congressman's theme. The color correction is not nearly as difficult as I had originally thought, though waiting for it all to render is a pain in the ass. I wish I had some money for a realtime editing system, but such is life in the world of no budget guerilla filmmaking. The wrap party is this Saturday night. I can't wait to show what we have done to the full cast and crew!

Aw man, it's Monday again. Overall it was a pretty good weekend. Friday we ran a bunch of errands and I wrote the lyrics to a themesong for the film while waiting to pick up a prescription. Then that night we went to a midnight screening of Toxic Avenger 4: Citizen Toxie. It was the first time I've seen a Troma film on the big screen and it sure didn't disappoint me (though Anne could have done without all of the gratuitous blood, disembowling, shit and boobs). It was very cool seeing all these places on the Poughkeepsie, NY waterfront just blocks from my grandmother's house posing as Tromaville with Ron Jeremy playing the bible thumping mayor. Saturday my friend Jon came down for a Guided by Voices show, but minutes before he knocked on our door we found out that the show was postponed until October, making this the third time Jon has come down for a show that for some reason didn't happen. The first time was for a Yo La Tengo show at the 9:30 Club. The electricity was out through the entire U St. corridor and the show was cancelled, though the band played a 4 song acoustic set in the alleyway which was pretty cool. Then last summer he came down to see Radiohead and the venue was flooded. So instead we just went out to Adams Morgan and got drunk at Common Share while trying to dominate the jukebox and making fun of all the republicans and drunk kids. After Jon left, Anne and I tried to go see Sunshine Coast but it was sold out and we wound up seeing Thirteen Conversations About One Thing which was nice and artsy and thoroughly depressing. Afterwards, I got to bang out some freelance work and then get myself neck deep in Adobe After Effects, almost getting it to do what I wanted it to with masking an image into a TV screen.

Ladies and gentlemen, this blog now has an official themesong. Thanks to Philip from swordfight.org for rocking this blog!

It just sucks to be Eddie Van Halen

So it's Tuesday and I've already been back to work for a day and a half after a great vacation and it's taking longer than usual to get back into the swing of things. The vacation was a blast. Anne and I rented a Toyota Prius hybrid car and took off to explore a big chunk of central Virginia in just two days. We saw part of Shenendoah National Park, Luray Caverns, Charlottesville, Culpepper and Staunton. Pictures are here. The hybrid car allowed us to cover 450 miles with just 1/2 tank of gas! We also saw a big black bear in the middle of the highway! In terms of the movie, I have another couple of scenes edited and Wednesday night is going to be an edit-athon. I'm also putting together the behind the scenes feature with Jenny Carden's footage and some casting reel stuff. I think the idea is to put together a CDRom press kit with that, trailers and other goodies. Also, I just asked this guy to write a theme song for this blog. Check back for details on this. It should be dripping in ironic cheese.