Dig! This

Wow, I am really slacking off on blogging lately. While I don't have anything in the way of original content today, I have just been made aware of a really cool site called snagfilms which streams full length documentaries and allows you to put them on your blog. So instead of my usual rantings, here's perhaps my favorite music documentary ever. It's called Dig! and it's about the Brian Jonestown Massacre and the Dandy Warhols. Even if you've never heard of these bands before, you should see this film. It has a better story and more interesting characters than any screenwriter could have come up with.

Mongol

Years back there was supposed to be an epic film about Genghis Khan featuring Steven Seagal in the title role (scroll down just a little bit). And while the jury is out on whether it was because it was a ridiculous idea to have a white guy playing a Mongolian warlord or because Steven suddenly thought it would go against his Buddhist beliefs, this film died in a contract violation situation with some mafia guys or something and now Steven is lucky to go straight to video with anything. And it's a good thing this film never got made because now there's a real Genghis Khan film out, the first in an epic trilogy, and they really got it right. Granted, I know absolutely nothing about the real Genghis Khan, but I know about film and Mongol was an amazing film, and there was no bad acting white guy in the lead. The cinematography was incredible and the action was furious. There were times when it dragged a little, but the brutally bloody battles and the aerial shots that looked like they were straight out of a nature documentary made up for it. This film starts with the young Temujin picking his bride from the wrong Mongol clan and starting a chain of events that puts him in a lot of trouble at a young age. There's a huge amount of ass that he needs to kick along the journey from being a kid from the wrong side of the steppes to conqueror of Asia, and without giving anything away, lots of asses are indeed kicked and kicked hard. Throughout the film they mention the rules of Mongols which are a lot like the rules of Fight Club, but the obvious one they left out was that Mongols don't fuck around. I highly recommend this film, just make sure you see it in a comfortable theater and don't be squeamish. I also saw some really good trailers for upcoming films like the new Cohen brothers movie and this one which I can't wait to see...

Another Self Indulgent Music Post

Given that my post on bipartisanship got 23 comments and my music posts typically get zero, I'm obviously not giving the people what they want. But I'm kind of burnt on politics and pining away for the days of playing music live. Yesterday I put myself out on craigslist looking for people to play with (music you pervs, not casual encounters!). I got a couple of promising responses and hope to be dusting off the Fender electric within a few weeks. So here's another video of my musical past. This is one of the final performances of the Washington, DC incarnation of Captain Paradox. The Captain is currently rocking Pittsburgh, PA, but for a couple of years in the early 21st century, we rocked the Beltway. This gig was at the holiday celebration of the local progressive activist crowd which explains why there is the silliest looking hippie mosh pit you will ever see in front of us. One person on YouTube asked if this performance was at a loonie bin. You've just got to see for yourselves. For those familiar with my film of the same name of this blog (and for those of you who aren't familiar... upper left hand column of the blog, people. It's not going to watch itself!), you might recognize both the song and the singer.

That's a Wrap!

Whew! Another 10 hours gone and another short film made. This is Murder on the Redwood Express. There is a miniature scale steam locomotive that runs in Tilden Park in the East Bay hills. We take Stella there all the time and she loves it, and I have been wanting to shoot something there for a while since it's an amazing location with lots of great visual potential. The 3 ingredients that we needed to have in this film were something purple, a broadcast and time elapse. We added our ingredients to the script that we already had worked out and headed for the hills to shoot. The folks who run the train couldn't have possibly been any cooler. They offered us special access to places where we could shoot and were very accommodating all around. And the folks who were there to ride the train were also very enthused to be around a real film shoot. The surprise that I mentioned in my previous post is who did our music. I would like to thank Mr. Trent Reznor for putting together his latest album of instrumental soundscapes, for releasing it under a creative commons license that allowed us to use it, and for running his own online film festival for people to make videos with his music. The tracks we used really helped set the tone of the film. We had a great and talented cast and crew for this one. These folks work very well together under a tight deadline, and I love working with them! So, here it is...

Coming Soon to a Blog Near You...

I am working class and I am BITTER! Obama is right and McCain and Hillary only risk showing what a bunch of out-of-touch Washington insiders they are for trying to turn this one against him. But I don't have time for that right now. In one hour I'm leaving the house to go make a movie in 10 hours. My gear is by the door, I'm working on getting adequately caffeinated, and I have a really good feeling about this one. So coming soon will both be a YouTube of this movie I'm making today as well as more on Obama's latest non-scandal, "Bitter-gate."

Movie Making Again

This weekend I'm doing another one of these insane filmmaking contests. It's a Cinemasports event. Cinemasports is "The Iron Chef of Filmmaking," where teams are given a list of "ingredients" and then 10 hours to make a 3 minute film that includes these ingredients which are then screened on the 11th hour. This will be my second time entering one of these events. I did it last fall as part of the Mill Valley Film Festival and it was a blast. This Sunday I'm doing it again in Oakland. In Mill Valley we went in without any idea of what to do beforehand, and we had to spend a couple of precious hours writing and rehearsing. Many of the other teams had obviously written their scripts beforehand and then added the ingredients at the last minute which gave them more time to hone the performances and shots. One of them even had their whole film shot beforehand and then just shot a segment that used the ingredients and stuck it on the beginning. While the latter film was really funny, I don't think it was really really fair, but I don't have a problem with having a rough script beforehand and that's what we're doing this time around. There are other differences in this shoot from the last one. The first difference is the genre. I'm most comfortable working with comedy. I listen to hours of comedy every day. I love making people laugh. But while I really enjoy watching and making comedic films, I also really enjoy watching other genres and I've been wanting to try making a film in another genre. So this one is going to be a thriller/crime drama. We're using an incredible location which is going to give us the opportunity for some unbelievable shots. I'm also going to wear less hats on this production. On most of my films I have written, shot, directed and edited. This time I'm going to focus on shooting and directing while others write and edit. I met my writer on the last cinemasports shoot though that one wound up being mostly written by the whole cast and crew. She's been an incredible assistant director on the last two shoots I've done and I look forward to giving her a chance to write the whole script this time. I've never worked with my editor before, but he's been doing it professionally and he also set up the local video group I'm in, so I have full confidence in his abilities. And the music is going to be a special surprise. I really hope to reach a new level of film making this time around. The potential is there. I just hope I can pull it off. Of course, I will post the finished product as soon as I can.

Sony Entertainment can Suck It!

The man is working hard on keeping me down. Today I got an email from YouTube telling me that one of my videos was yanked due to copyright infringement. I figured it was probably one of my videos where I "borrowed" some music and the idea of that was annoying but not outrageous. When I realized that it was The Writers Room, my levels of rage went off the charts. The Writers Room was my response to the writers strike. It took place in a writers room for a real sitcom, The Office, and while character and company names from the show were mentioned (and half an NBC peacock is visible), the idea that there was anything remotely resembling infringement is laughable. This means that if you even talk about a TV show online somewhere and mention characters, some corporation can go after you for it, and this is chilling. Part of me really wants to fight this, but I barely have enough time to make a short film every now and then let alone getting myself involved in a court battle against an army of slick corporate bloodsuckers even though I know that I'm right on this. But I don't get how a show that actively encourages fan created videos would take issue with a fan created video that pokes fun at fan created content more than anything else. The premise was that the producers of the office hired a bunch of fan fiction writers to write episodes while the real writers were on strike. And when I searched for other Office fan videos on YouTube, there was plenty of it still up. To me, this means that Sony didn't like the idea of their production executives being portrayed as clueless wonks and they flexed their corporate muscle to get it off of YouTube. You can still see it here for the time being, and if that gets yanked too, I will make damn sure it winds up in too many places for these bastards to do anything about it.

Art Imitating Life Again

By the late 90's I had all but given up on the idea that there was any sort of true leftist movement in the US. I even took a job at the DNC in the fall of '99 because to me, the democratic party seemed to be the only place where a progressive could make any real kind of change. But that November, something exciting happened that changed everything for me. The global corporate cabal, otherwise known as the World Trade Organization, was holding their meeting in Seattle to figure out new and exciting ways to race to the bottom on labor and environmental standards at the expense of workers, the planet and national sovereignty. And then out of nowhere tens of thousands of activists took to the streets and shut that meeting down! And while corporate media was telling a very one sided story of these protests, the web was alive with first hand accounts from the activists themselves. I was glued to the computer, reading, watching and listening to the first shots in what I was sure was the greatest people's uprising in my lifetime. How could such a massive movement sprung up without anybody even knowing it was there? Not only was the anti-globalization movement born in Seattle, but so was the independent media movement. A few months later the circus came to DC with a meeting of the global loansharking agencies, the World Bank and IMF, and I took the week off from my job to volunteer with the local independent media center and join the protests myself. And right after that I bought my first digital video camera, loaded up on editing software and embarked on a mission to cover the revolution live from the belly of the beast. Jump ahead a year after major protests at both party conventions and the Bush inauguration to a Tuesday morning that changed everything. Jump ahead another year. The protest organizers have shifted focus on stopping the Iraq war before it started. An incredibly unpopular president lucked out with an environment where he could push any kind of insane in the membrane legislation and paint anyone who might raise questions of constitutionality or rights or any other bits of common sense as unpatriotic and soft on terror. And it was in this climate of political bullshit whene I realized that documenting things wasn't enough. This political atmosphere needed satire in the worst way. So I made the film that this blog is named after, which you can watch in 11 parts on the left column. One thing I really wanted to do was shoot scenes in a real protest, which I did with the closing scene. My hope for the film was to bring these issues to a wider audience, but I had pretty unrealistic expectations about just how far a zero-budget, amateur underground film could go. Jump ahead yet another couple of years to the 2004 republican convention and there was a film shot in the midst of the protests where Rosario Dawson even got arrested. And now four years later, it goes full circle with a film making the festival circuits about the Battle in Seattle. I can only hope that this film does well enough to remind people that the global corporate cabal is still out there plundering the world for profit at the expense of the people, and once we get rid of the neocons in the next election the anti-globalization movement will start back up where we left off.

Friday Zen

There's plenty of stuff going on in the world to get upset about today. Instead of worrying about all that, might I suggest spending an hour and a half of so to blow off whatever it is you have to do and immerse yourself into a beautiful world of music and vision with Sigur Ros. If you're not familiar, they are an Icelandic post-rock band who make music that is so mesmerizing that people literally faint at their live shows. I actually saw this happen to a friend of mine at the 9:30 Club in DC. We missed the whole second half of the show because of it. So in 2006, they went back to Iceland and played in some of the most remote, and visually stunning corners of their country before playing a huge show in Reykjavik. So clear out your schedule and watch it on YouTube now. And if you still want more great full length music film on YouTube, there's also Radiohead in Scotch Mist.

Giant Monster Destroys NYC and oh yeah, Obama Wins SC

Before I get into the boring political stuff, last night I saw Cloverfield and I really liked it. I thought it used the perspective of handheld video by a character much more effectively than the Blair Witch Project. I was a huge sucker for Blair Witch when it came out, probably more from the hype than anything else. But those filmmakers got lucky with the footage they were able to put together. While Cloverfield had the look and storytelling device of handheld video, that's really where the comparisons end. Many of the critics had a problem with the intro where we meet the characters, but I found that to be an enjoyable. Once the shit starts hitting the fan, it's an intense ride through the end. Of course, seeing buildings on fire and clouds of smoke and debris racing down the streets of lower Manhattan brings back the feeling of dread from watching the same thing happen live on TV on 9/11 which while some found to be exploitative, I found to be very effective in raising the level of audience terror (and if you're going to exploit 9/11, better to do it for entertainment purposes than for a republican convention or Rudy Giuliani's campaign). Without the added intensities of 9/11 imagery and the handheld camerawork that practically puts the audience in the movie, this would have just been another monster movie. But the gimmicks worked and made it a great movie. And now on to other monsters... After a week of the ugliest democrat on democrat slugfest so far in the primary season, Obama whupped Hillary's ass in South Carolina. This win felt particularly good after all the shit spewing from Bill Clinton in this last week. While I didn't hate the job he did as president (though I loathed some of the things he did in terms of corporate globalization and the ridiculous war on drugs), last week gave me a very good understanding of why the right hates that man on such a personal level. It's one thing watching him verbally brutalize people when you feel that they deserve it, but seeing him treat Obama like he was Ken Starr has been an eye opening experience. Whether this landslide victory was about rejecting nasty politics or about race is debatable, and in reality it was probably a combination of the two. For the right wing side of this left-right lightly trafficked blog coverage of the primaries, check out Valley of the Shadow.

Friday Roundup

It's been an awfully busy week and there hasn't been enough time to post, let alone any one specific event worthy of one. So here's a few hit and run opinions on various stuff. Hillary vs Obama: Settle down, kids! These two (and Bill) are getting vicious with each other, and if it's not going to benefit John Edwards (which it clearly isn't, even in his own home state), it's going to benefit the republicans. I used to enjoy watching Bill Clinton take on his enemies, but seeing him turn on his own like he has been gives me a glimmer of understanding of the level of hate the right has for him. Not enough of an understanding to ever in my life think that his impeachment was justified, but at least enough to understand why those on the right think that a panty sniffing tabloid scandal was a good thing. Romney vs Everybody: The Plastic Republican has managed to piss off everyone, hasn't he? When a campaign aide goes on record wanting to punch another candidate's teeth out, you know it's going to be a bitter fight. Just seeing that guy's plastic face makes me want to punch him too. I barely know anything about him other than that he's changed his tune on just about every issue and that he has lobbyists running his campaign, but just his look and the way he talks says vile politician who would sell his own mom for a chance to suck off the corporate teat as their shill in power. So Long, Dennis: The only candidate for whom I would enthusiastically vote if he had a chance in hell of winning the election has dropped out of the race. He's on his way back to the House, but he's dropping his bid to impeach Dick Cheney to push for impeaching Bush. While I would love to see either of these two criminals put on trial, impeaching Bush would give us President Cheney, so at least in this case it's good that the rest of congress is ignoring him. And with Kucinich and Thompson both out of the game, there's a serious lack of hot first lady contenders. Whoever wins in November, there will not be a FLILF. Heath Ledger: How sad. So young and so talented and just at the beginning of a very promising career, leaving behind a 2 year old daughter whose only memory of her dad will be watching his movies. Of course, not everybody sees it for the tragedy it is. Fred Phelps and his vile family plan on protesting the funeral because Heath played a gay cowboy in a movie oh no!. If I were into playing silly partisan games, I'd say that this hate and bigotry is sanctioned by mainstream republicans, but I know better. There Will Be Blood: See. This. Movie. Now. That is all.

My Agenda for 2008

This is less a bunch of new years resolutions and more a to-do list for the year. Transition Blog - I'm a little bit tired of this blog. Nothing ever became of the movie Washington Interns Gone Bad. It was a fun and lofty project 6 years ago. The fact that a bunch of DC political activists actually made a feature length comedy film lampooning post 9/11 life in the world of national politics is quite an achievement, but as it was a first project by people who knew next to nothing about filmmaking, it really doesn't grab much of an audience outside of those of us who actually took part in it and the circles of friends and fellow activists who came from that specific time and place. There's really no point in continually trying to milk that dead horse. The fact that one of my cast members is still so obsessed with this film that she talks about suing me about every six months for a stake in something that has lost money (but hey, if you want a stake in a loser, I accept paypal) has really soured me on the whole thing. So the plan is to pretty much just phase this blog out and start a whole new one, this time using WordPress and having a whole new theme that will challenge me to write more creatively than the usual complaints about our lame political system. Be on the lookout in the next few weeks. Make More Money - This one pretty much ought to speak for itself. I'd like to be able to make some extra income doing videography, but I also wouldn't mind really kicking up the ad revenues from blogging. That ain't working. That's the way you do it. Stick it to the Man - Also fairly self explanatory. The Man has been keeping us down long enough and every creative thing that I do in this next year should in some way be part of sticking it to him. Do More Creative Projects - This year I will do more creative writing, more filmmaking, and perhaps even try to make some music again.

Effective Movie Marketing

There are a few things that can get me really interested in seeing a movie. Sometimes all I know is that it's the new movie from a certain director and that's good enough. Sometimes it's based on reviews, or if the movie is based on source material that I love. To a lesser extent the casting might sway me. And to an even lesser extent if the movie is about a place that I know very well. But how do I go from no interest at all in a film to wanting to catch it on opening weekend? A boycott from the religious right! when I saw the trailer for The Golden Compass, I thought that it might be a kids movie with some interesting eye candy. But now the American Taliban are freaking out about how this movie and the books that it's based on promote atheism, I am all of a sudden intrigued. Yes, these poor Christians are once again being oppressed by evil godless liberal Hollywood. As their authoritarian institutions based on, as George Carlin so eloquently put it, "the greatest bullshit story ever told," is shown, metaphorically, for what it is, they cry intolerance and oppression. Ironic, coming from people who preach a doctrine of intolerance for anyone but themselves on a daily basis. Ironic also for organizations whose very existence is protected by the first amendment to be attacking the first amendment rights of others. But when you live in a country with large and vocal groups of religious extremists, these ironies are something that you start getting used to. So good job Catholic League and Focus on Family and all the rest of you theocratic jackasses! You've helped bring this movie to a wider audience of people who are psyched to see anything just because it pisses you off. I can only hope that on opening weekend this movie packs more seats than your mega-churches, and it has more influence on the children of this country than you do.

The Writers Room

I had mentioned before that I was going to make a short film about the writers strike. Here it is. Info on how you can support the strikers is below: As usual, we've got a situation of corporations finding new ways to make new money but without passing along a share of these new revenues to the people who make the products that they are selling. These writers deserve a piece of the new media pie, and whether you support that or not, unless you want to see your TV and movies written by dorky fans or even more of these bullshit reality shows, you need to support the striking writers. Visit their blog and watch their YouTube channel to learn more and see what you can do to help.

TV Without Writers?

The Writers Guild of America is on strike. As the landscape of media changes, huge revenues are being made by producers, studios and networks through downloads, DVDs and other new forms of media that were unforeseen the last time that the writers renegotiated. It seems that everyone is getting a piece of that pie except for the writers, and they are trying to get what should be coming to them. So what would TV be like without writers? You know all of those horrible reality shows? That's TV without writers. Even the most contrived and predictable episode of Desperate Housewives takes more talent to create than any given reality show. Shows where the entirety of the creative process involves putting together a mixture of attractive young people with a volatile combination of personality flaws, gallons of booze, sexual tension and possibly a washed up celebrity, turning on the cameras and seeing what happens (with a bit of manipulation and creative editing, of course) certainly can be just as much of a guilty pleasure as some campy dramas or sitcoms about fat guys and their incredibly hot wives. While we take the good with the bad with the so bad it's good, the casualties of a writers strike (besides the actual striking writers who are putting their lives on the line and the crews of these shows who are in turn being put out of work) are those of us who enjoy well written shows. Instead of new episodes of The Office, there will be heaping helpings of lowest common denominator trainwrecks. Just as long as washed up and broke people who once had a career in entertainment, rich kids with nothing better to do than act like idiots on TV, and other spotlight-hungry rubes looking for a shortcut to fame don't all decide to go on strike too, there will be plenty of crap to watch on TV. So as an independent filmmaker, what am I doing about this? I'm writing a script, of course! No, I'm not trying to be a scab writer. But I am inspired by this strike to make a short film that might make people appreciate good screenwriting by showing them another possible worst case scenario than just replacing all scripted shows with reality drivel. That's all I'm going to say about it now. In the meantime, if you're on the fence about whether to support the striking writers, here's what TV looks like without them:

Who Won Ben Stein's Mind?

Ben Stein is a game show host, monotone teacher from Ferris Bueler and the Wonder Years, Nixon speechwriter and until recently at least a somewhat respected conservative intellectual. But old Ben has gone off the deep end. His new movie is all about how unfairly the scientific community has been treating intelligent design "scientists." Apparently these big bad science nazis are keeping a tight grip on what can be considered science. And what is their criteria for what constitutes science? These satanic science nazis have been indoctrinating school children with this ridiculous thing called the Scientific Method that teaches kids that there is a scientific method for proving the way things work in our world. Why is the concept of a method for proving things such a problem? Because there are millions of people in the world who have based a great deal of their lives on mythology which when held up to the light of science have more holes than the plot of a typical episode of Desperate Housewives. So what we have are people who have no respect for real science, trying to call themselves scientists to prove a mythology, much of which has already been disproven by real science and even more of which is simply impossible to prove. And they are simply outraged that the scientific community is in agreement that what they are trying to do is simply NOT SCIENCE. And the thing is, even most mainstream religion does not consider intelligent design to be science. This is the wingnuttery of extremists. The best thing these "scientists" have come up with was a video of Mike Seaver from Growing Pains waving a banana around as "proof." So when a supposed intellectual like Ben Stein to come out in favor of the most anti-intellectual idea since the concept of dropping out of school, it reflects rather poorly on the entire conservative intellectual community. While it's an entertaining concept to paint Ben Stein as a rebel to the tune of Bad to the Bone, in reality he is now as laughable as email intern asshat turned pseudo-intellectual evangelical bozo Paul Kelly Tripplehorn, Jr.

Hump Day Roundup

Just a few hit and run things today... New Radiohead album available to download today for however much you'd like to pay! But it should come as no surprise that the site is down from the massive bandwidth hit. JSF's latest post talks about how when faced with foreign anti-Americanism, he defended both our country and Bill Clinton who was president at the time despite the fact that he personally loathed Clinton and asks why those of us on the left can't do the same for Bush. While I can't speak for the entirety of the left, here's what I would say if I were in a foreign country faced with somebody asking me why my country and president suck so badly. "Would you want people to judge your whole country based on your politicians? Politicians are slime. It doesn't matter what country it is or what their party is. They are all in it for themselves and their big money sponsors and they rarely if ever truly represent the people who they supposedly work for. Most Americans are good people, but outside of putting on a show where we choose which head of the two headed corporate beast runs our country every 4 years, we have absolutely zero control over what these people do. Feel free to hate our government. I don't know much about your government, but chances are there's something about them for me to hate. But you seem like an OK dude just doing what you can to get by in this life and I certainly wouldn't hold anything your government does against you personally." I've been mentioning how ugly the debate over Children's Healthcare has been lately, with the vilest of vile right wing attack chihuahuas smearing hard working struggling families including my own and that of the 12 year old boy who gave his own personal account of how SCHIP saved his life during the democrats' radio address. Just when it boggles the mind at how low these vermin are willing to crawl to deny children affordable health care (which in and of itself is pretty damn low even without all the personal smear jobs), it looks like they've resorted to stalking now. The question is, would the NRA defend the Frost family if they shot Michelle Malkin for trespassing? And lastly, for those who are wondering how the extended cut of Out of the Can is coming, I'm about half way through and you are going to love it! The one comment I've been getting from a lot of people is "what's the deal with naming the notorious prank phone caller character Prince Albert? Isn't that a genital piercing?" Indeed it is a genital piercing, but I am using it as a reference to the classic prank phone call. There used to be a pipe tobacco called Prince Albert, and the pranksters would call a store, ask if they had Prince Albert in the can, and when the shopkeeper would say "yes," the prankster would say "well you better let him out," giggle, and then hang up. It's so old school that I think it was the second phone call made by Alexander Graham Bell. Should I put an explanation somewhere in the credits, or just leave it in as an in-joke for people who get these kinds of obscure references?

How I Spent My Saturday

I can't believe it. I made a film in 10 hours. And I can't believe that it actually turned out pretty good. And here I am at the 14th hour posting it online. At 9:00am we were given three ingredients to include in the film: Turning 30 (in honor of the Mill Valley Film Festival's 30th anniversary), chocolate, and a muffled laugh. My incredibly talented team brainstormed and banged out a script in a couple of hours, we shot in just over 3 hours, and after an hour of logging and capturing it only left about an hour and a half for editing, sound mixing and exporting before we had to race back to Mill Valley and turn it in. Then just an hour later all the films were screened. I truly enjoyed every film that was made today, and I am particularly proud of ours. We shot so much and had to leave a lot of really funny stuff on the cutting room floor, so I plan on doing an extended cut which will screen in San Francisco in a few months at a festival that a friend of mine runs. So without further ado, I present "Out of the Can." For a higher quality downloadable version, click here.

It's Moviemaking Time!

It's been over 2 years since I've made a film. Starting a family doesn't leave much room for filmmaking, even when it's a 1 to 5 minute short. That's not to say I haven't been spending that time shooting and editing adorable videos of my daughter. My friends and family love these home movies and I love making them, but it's not the same as doing narrative filmmaking. I jumped into filmmaking head first 5 years ago by writing, directing and editing a feature length political comedy of the same name as this blog (you can watch it from the links in the left column). After moving from Washington, DC to San Francisco I joined the crew for two 48 Hour Film Projects. I also did a couple of shorts of my own. So when I saw that there was going to be a Cinemasports event as part of this year's Mill Valley Film Festival, I jumped at the chance to put together a team. Cinemasports is similar to the 48 Hour Film Project, only instead of 48 hours to make a short film, you get 10 hours. I've always found that limitations and challenges are great for forcing out creativity, so I have a good feeling about this. They call it The Iron Chef of Filmmaking as they choose "ingredients" that each film has to have, whether it be a character, bit of dialog, plotline, etc. Then each team has 10 hours to write, shoot, edit, and turn in a complete short under 4 min in length. At the 11th hour is the screening. What makes this one extra special is that it's part of the Mill Valley Film Festival. Anybody in the business who calls Northern California home will probably be there, so there's a chance that George Lucas, various members of the Copolla family, Sean Penn and others could be in the house that night. I really can't wait to do this. I have put together a talented cast and crew and I think we have the potential to make something really special. Now for your viewing pleasure, here are my last two shorts. First is A Guy Walks Into a Bar which I put together as an entry to the Radio Alice 3 Minute Film Festival. It didn't make it in that festival, but it played in the Zeitgeist International Film Festival a few months later and has screened in a few other short fests since. Next is a little one minute piece that I did for a now-defunct website: I will be sure to post the short that we do for Cinemasports here, even if it sucks (which it won't).

Random Tidbits

I'm way too scattered to write a whole post on one thing, so here are some random things that have been happening. Last night I went to take the garbage out and my neighbors warned me that there was a deer in the parking lot back by the dumpster. Where I live isn't that urban, but it's not that rural either and this guy was pretty far into a residential area. I looked and listened before determining that this animal wasn't around and it was safe to take out the trash, but as I closed the dumpster I heard hooves on pavement and this fairly large (probably an 8 point rack) buck stumbles out from between a couple of cars and runs across the parking lot toward the bushes that go alongside our apartments. I yell to my neighbors who are all on their patios that he's heading their way and then he turned around and bounded out of our driveway. Thinking back on it, it was incredibly dangerous of me to put myself in the proximity of a scared and cornered beast with sharp pointy antlers, but luckily nobody got hurt. And on a completely different subject, Obi Wan Kenobi said it best: "I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened." The millions of voices silenced were all of the people who were downloading from Demonoid.com, the second biggest Bit Torrent tracker site of them all. There are conflicting reports of what happened. One story is that they're recovering from a crash of some sort. The other is that the Canadian version of the RIAA shut them down. Either way, I'm two weeks into a download that has all of a sudden stopped working and it's a tad frustrating to say the least. Lastly, I found out that a friend of mine is throwing a film festival in a few months and I have an open invite to show something. I need to come up with a short comedy and I am not only having writer's block, but idea block. I'm drawing a complete blank. I need to find some comedic inspiration soon.

Hooray for Me!

Today is a good day. It started with Stella waking up happy. People tend to take a toddler's happiness for granted, but this girl sometimes wakes up all pissed off at the world and fights any efforts to comfort her (forget about attempting that all important first thing in the morning diaper change). But today instead of alerting me to her awake state with cries, I heard giggles. Then I opened up my email to find that I had won the blog-off! I had seen the first blog off on Blog Explosion and really liked the idea of a writing challenge, so when I saw that there was another round I jumped at the chance to participate. And besides just being a fun challenge in creative writing, this contest is raising money for Courtney's 3 Day Walk for breast cancer research and education. At first I was a bit intimidated at the idea of competing against 19 other bloggers, all of whom write with lots of skill, style and soul. I am quite honored to have been chosen by this great group as the winner. And I look forward to participating in round 3! This is the last round before Courtney's walk, so let's raise some money! Of course pledges are more than welcome, but if you want a piece of the action without having to come up with winning blog posts under heavy deadlines, you can enter as a judge and also have a chance at winning a prize. It's a lot of fun for a great cause. Here are the details. But the day kept getting better. Not long after I got to work, the video gear that I had ordered finally showed up. Now I can start doing real high end videography and actually make some real money at it. I'm like a kid with a new toy. I just keep opening up the case and looking at this camera and finding myself amazed that I finally have professional gear. Now I've just got to come up with an idea for a screenplay.

Want a Slick Press Kit?

In the age of DYI filmmaking, there's a lot more material competing for the same number of deals. Once you've gone into debt and driven yourself crazy with production and post, it's time to get the word out. Agents, distributors, reviewers, etc get so many press kits that you really need to make yours stand out and get their attention. I've seen press kits come in lumchboxes, surplus army bags, hotwheels cases and other attention-grabbers, though the classic press kit comes in a folder. Vista Print can do all sorts of custom printed folders for your Press Kit. When I did a press kit for Washington Interns Gone Bad, we just printed some stickers to go on the folder, but it would have been so much cooler if we could have gotten them printed with stills from the movie, positive quotes and a better copy of our logo than we could do with a cheap inkjet and sticker paper. I've ordered business cards from Vista Print before and they're very easy to deal with, they have quick turnaround and quality goods.

Harry Potter

Last night I got to see the new Harry Potter movie. I don't think I really need to write up a full review since there are already about a million of those floating around already, but I figured I'd share my thoughts. I remember when the first film came out and while it tried to cram in just about everything from the book, there were some nitpicky fans who complained about things that didn't make it in. As the books kept getting progressively longer, this happened more, where entire plotlines would wind up not making it into the movies. I remember reading Order of the Phoenix and wondering how they would manage to cram that whole thing into a 2 and a half hour movie, and while there were some things that I think really should have been in there, they did a really good job of it. Obviously they couldn't fit the whole Quidich story in, and it wasn't really missed though a mention of it might have helped to further illustrate the oppressive atmosphere at Hogwarts. They also didn't go into Harry's fumbling attempt at a relationship with Cho, but that wasn't a glaring omission either. While I would have loved to have seen Hagrid's story about his time with the giants, that was not important enough to the plot (DVD spinoff, perhaps?). There were other little things that I think may have helped contribute to the storytelling, but the one that really should have stayed in was Professor Trelawny's involvement with Harry's prophecy. Besides the importance to the story, it was such a waste of Emma Thompson's talents. She was one of the highlights of the third film for me. Alan Rickman was incredible as always. One of my favorite stories about him is from Kevin Smith. When they were in pre-production for Dogma, he told Jason Mewes that he better know his lines because he was going to be working with Alan Rickman and he really didn't want to look unprofessional in front of such a great English actor. Mewes was so intimidated that he learned everybody's lines. I would have loved to have seen more of him, particularly Harry's reaction to seeing him at the Order's house, but we'll be seeing plenty of him in the next movie. The girl who played Luna Lovegood was perfectly spacey and creepy. It wouldn't have taken much to give more of her backstory, but oh well. Lastly, I don't want to be one of those people who tries to find metaphors for real life events in every piece of pop culture I see, especially seeing how obnoxious that was when the right wingers had their collective meltdown over Happy Feet. And I highly doubt that there was any intention by J.K. Rowling or the filmmakers to make any commentary on world events with these books and movies. But I do think that the themes of good, evil and corruption are so universal that sometimes you can't help but make a comparison. It just goes without saying that whenever I see some big evil character on screen I tend to draw parallels to Bush or Cheney. In this case, it wasn't Voldermort who reminded me of the criminals running our country so much as the Ministry of Magic. Their refusal to believe the truth about Voldermort's return and their smearing of Harry and Dumbledore for their continued insistence of the truth is much like the way the Bush/Cheney Crime Family have dealt with certain MIA WMD's and their entire rationale for getting us into Iraq. Also, the way that they stuck their hand into Hogwards and dictated the way the children should be taught defense against the dark arts reminds me a bit of how they tend to choose religious wingnuttery over science and education whenever possible. While teaching defense against the dark arts in theory rather than practice is not quite the same as pushing abstinence only birth control in sex-ed, creation mythology in science classes, and doing everything possible to stop stem cell research, it's the attitude of politicians thinking they can do a better job than educators to educate our children that is infuriating in fantasy or reality. One can only hope that Bush and Cheney are dragged off in the woods by an angry gang of centaurs! Coming Soon: There were some pretty cool trailers before the movie. Christmas movies can be pretty hit or miss. For every Christmas Story, Bad Santa or Elf there's one with Tim Allen playing Santa or some other crap. So when they started this trailer I had my doubts until I saw that it stars Paul Giamatti as Santa and Vince Vaughn as Santa's slacker brother and it's made by the same people who did Wedding Crashers. Check out a trailer.