Behind The Camera

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2009-07-29T09:08:00.000-07:00

Sorry I have not finished up the previous story. But it is so damn hot at home right now.
I'll get to it I promise

I Get to Work on a Real Movie - The Hunt For Red October

2009-07-06T09:14:00.000-07:00

Back in the late 80s I was asked to go help work on a second unit crew that was shooting some plate shots for the up coming movie The Hunt For Red October. Knowing really nothing about what to expect I went along to see what was what. Besides I needed the money.
The shot we were getting was for the end of the movie were Ryan and Ramius were standing on the conning tower of the submarine at night as they moved up a river somewhere in New England to hid the stolen Russian Submarine.
The footage of the actors was shot on a sound stage in front of a blue screen and our job was to shoot the back ground of the scene. Which was actually located on Bainbridge island Washington, not new England. Here is the shot
Here is the kicker. The company that was doing the effects for the film, thus this shot as well was Boss Films. Now Boss Films was Richard Edlunds company. Before the days of Computer generated effects or CGI, special effects were done in the real world. There were a number of techniques ranging from simple things like Hanging Minitures and Minuatures to comples blue and green screen process shots to what Boss was famous for, Motion Control. See Richard Edlund was the guy who developed the computer controled camera movement that made the shots of the Millenium Falcon flying through the asteroid belt in Star Wars V possible.
I was working for These Guys!!!
Richard was not on set nor did he ever show but the guy in charge was a fellow by the name of Thaine Morris. He was and still is one of the top pyro guys in Hollywood. Remember Die Hard? he was the guy that blew up the helicopter at the end of the movie.
He had 4 other guys with him from LA and we had about 5 or 6 locals including a UPM and production coordinator.
So this was kind of a big deal. We were going to set up a 275 foot elevated dolly shot that was going to support the camera and a computer rig (286 rack mount state of the art) that were going to match the movement of both the submarine up the river and the pan, tilt and zoom of the camera from the process shot of the actors.
What this amounted to was about 5 days of really hard back breaking work. But man was it worth it.
So here is what we did.
first we were located on the beach on a small bay off of Country club road on Bainbridge Island.
Right about here

View Larger Map

So they drew a line parallel to the beach about 20 feet off the water and we set up a single run of your basic scaffolding. About 275 feet in length.

Next at each connecting point we had to stabilize the scaffolding by running a guy wire to a 3 foot steel grounding stake called a bull prick. Because hey this is mens work and that is what it looks like. Now granted it did not matter what the ground was like, you had to put the stake in directly off the upright on the scaffolding. Rocks, sand, asphalt, did not matter that is where the damn thing was going to be pounded into the ground. So yeah I spent about 3 or 4 days swinging a sledge hammer pounding in 3 foot steel stakes. and a road and been laid there in the past so..yeah lots of asphalt.
Now there was an old grip they brought up whose name is believe was John. A crusty old cuss that had more mad gripping skills in the skin he left on the sledge hammer handle than in all of the greater Seattle area. he did not say much but I learned a lot about just shutting up and getting the job done.
They fed us well and one day during lunch it was raining so we were hanging out in a trailer they had there. It was really cool to listen to these guys talking about doing things like wrapping the spine of a helocopter with primer chord, packing it what napalene and gas and blowing it to little bits and a big ass fire ball. You remember in die Hard when the Helicopter blows up? Yeah that time.
So anyway we eventually get the guy wires all pounded in and then it was on to the next step in the process.

CONTINUED

Wow, just Wow

2009-06-29T09:02:00.000-07:00

OK I know and accept that I have a small readership. Something like 3 hits a day is average lately and that is mostly due to me not posting for almost a year. I vowed to change that and even got the spouse to whore my blog in hers. That bumped me up rather nicely but nothing like what happened on Friday. If you look at my side bar you will not some blogs and comix and that I had acually orginized them to some extent. Well I went out to Wil Wheaton's blog and was reading a post of his that was an exerpt from a column he wrote. Basically it was how the technology of film and television production is changing. he was guest on a show called leverage. it shoots in Portland and evidently it is being shot on the Red One Camera.
I also noticed that there were no other comments on this post. I like to comment on blogs if I have something to say but on his he is so popular that the comments become white noise at some point.
Anyway I posted a link back to this blog since my previous post was about the new camera and the tests. I thought it was germain to his post.
Long story short a plethora of people clicked the link and checked out this blog.
I was not purposly whoring his popularity to get hits but the result was pretty amazing. And if anyone who actually stuck around and read my posts, welcome and I hope you found it entertaining and informative.

On a completely tangental note, Whenever I play Fallout 3 and come upon the Wheaton Armory I always think of and somehow connect it to Wil.

Camera Test

2009-06-26T07:48:00.000-07:00

The Zombie quiz lost its graphics suddenly so I removed it. Too bad I was amused by it.

I bought a new camera last week. it is a Panasonic AG HVX205a Hig def camera that can record to either DV tape or P2 type solid state hard disk. A couple of years ago when we were preparing for Fearless I did some testing with the camera we used a Cannon XL2 which did not have Hi Def and only recorded to DV tape.
Look here for the original tests
With that in mind Mark and I wanted to do an inital test of the new camera. The difference was amazing. Look at how much detail comes out in the background and how it is much less mushy. Also there is none of that bloom nonsense we had with the cannon. I set it at F 8 it stays at F 8

HVX 200 Camera test from Eric Thomas on Vimeo.

So the basic lighting setup was a 1 K Baby as a key with 1/4 CTO on it which reads F8
i mounted a 650 Tweenie on the wall behind her for a back light which reads at F11 and then we filled to the right of the frame with the Kino Flo using daylight bulbs and this read at about an F4. the lampbehind her we replace the bulb with a 75 watt photo flood

How Bout Some Random Photos

2009-06-23T18:57:00.001-07:00

Some Extras that are crew woman on the Phoenix

A Shot of our Set For Phoenix

Another Shot of the Phoenix Set

The WeekendLites Grip Truck

A shot from the Graveyard scend for Black Sheep Boy

So I was bored

2009-06-22T11:27:00.000-07:00

And was checking who is looking at my blog, in particular who is actually reading and what are they reading. See I only get about 3 hits a day since I am not particularly interesting like say Lorraine. Regardless I saw someone took some time to read my bloc this morning and I saw they were linked to me from Site Meter who manages my traffic data. That spiked my curiosity so I looked a bit further and saw it was from a company in Beverly Hills. Ok so there is a company in BH that googled lighting or some such and found my site and read a bit...no wait it was not a google referal it was from site meter. Stranger still. So I looke a bit closer and I see that the company is Headquarter Entertainment. So I do the natural thing and google Headquarter Entertainment. Turns out it is the multimedia empire of an actor named Tyrese Gibson. He is in among other things the new and previous Transformer movies. Plays an airforce Sgt. Have not seen the first but likely will cause the new one looks really cool. As much as I hate to say it, Michael Bay does eye candy well.
So then I start thinking why the hell would someone from this company track back to my blog from Site Meter. That means I would have to have linked to something on my page.....w a i t a m i n u t e. I added some links to my blog last week. And I went over to one called Don't Forget to Validate Your Parking. A minimalist sort of comic by a screen writer in LA named Michael Le. It is basicaly about the incredulous conversations he has with various industry types on the phone. check it out I think it is very amusing. So I go the link and start reading some of the stuff he has had there for a couple of weeks in the side bar. Sort of what I am up to. this included some photos of him and the coauthors of a comic they are doing called Mayhem that they are releasing. Also involved is one Tyrese Gibson.
so there we have it. Mystery solved. Some one at Mr Gibson's company was looking at the hit tracker on Michael's site for marketing information. They see my little blog and come over to check it out.
How nice is that. Hi leave a comment next time.

Some Updates and a networking meeting

2009-06-19T10:14:00.000-07:00

First off I updated the side bar adding some links and removing some dead links. I also added the film centric category that links to all things filmish. Or at least those that interest me.

Secondly I have been a member of a group called Indie club for a couple of years now but saddly they do nothing to promote networking here in Seattle. it is really rather sad. but Leo over at the Star Trek production group has put on twice a networking party over the last few months. The most recent was last night and Normally I do not do things on a school night I decided to go because I needed to get out and press some flesh and promote my grip and electric and new camera stuff. Yups I bought a new HD video camera, a Panasonic AG-HVX205-a which is a bitchen camera and I made a lot of new best friends last night.
The party was in the upstairs of a bar called Bal Mar in Ballard. I showed up at 7 and a number of peeps from the Phoenix crew as well as Lucien from 3rd Eye were there. Lucien bought a few 1 K stage lights about a year ago and was storing them at my place. He picked up all but one that Ihave been tripping over for the last few months in my garage so I took him his light back. I hope he remembered to take it home as he can get a bit rambunctious. By about 9 the place was packed with all sorts of film making types and I wandered around pressing the flesh and introducing myself to strangers. Talked to a nice makeup lady and more then a few producers who were very interested in my grip and electic stuff. I gave them all my basic spiel. If you want to talk about money then it is going to cost you 1500 bucks a day to get me, my truck and all the gear. If on the other hand you have a cool narrative script and have your shit together, I will be happy to come and play so long as you pay milage on the truck and if the HMI plays give me 30 bucks a day for bulb costs. (A secret here, the HMI always plays) Lots of attractive MAWs. (Model, Actress, Whatever) I made an interesting observation here. I guess as I am typing this that it is not great revelation but they all seemed to cluster together and prey on those they thought were producers and directors. I was amused.
I saw Elle and her Husband Adam who do the behind the scenes stuff for STP and they had this really cool looking campy scifi show they want to do. She asked if I would help and of couse I said sure. They are fun and creative and I would be happy to work with them. Leo conviced me to bring the Camera along for the next STP shoot and Elle will operate since that is not my scene.
I also had a nice long chat with Forest Gibson who is a DP and director for a fantastic live actor graphic novel called Night Zero that can be found on line. there is a link on the side bar. all in all it was a great time and I hope Leo arranges some more of these things. We as a community in Seattle must try to get together more often.

Fan Films

2009-06-09T14:59:00.000-07:00

So what else has there been going on? Funny you should ask.
Now I am not one to do fan films. I leave that to the fanatics but Lucien convinced me to go do one last fall for some Star Trek types, called ST: Phoenix. So I show up with Mark Schapiro and we shoot a couple of separate vignettes at the local public access studio. If you want to see them I will post them below. Both involved some green screen work which I am slowly figuring out. Though the productions never suffered.
About a month or so later we showed up again and shot another vignette and then in January we shot again but this time for the primary photography of the show.
Now the Phoenix universe takes place about 40 years after the events of the last Star Trek Movie that does not have Captain Kirk young or old in it. The Phoenix is a huge ass ship. One of it’s nacelles is about the size of the entire ship from next generation. It actually carries a smaller ship in its hold. Their mission is to hang around the Romulan sector while peace treaties are being negotiated or some such. It follows a core crew and that is about all I really know or can say about it. Now I went in dubious about the project but I have to say that the writing is spot on for the Star Trek universe, the performances are fantastic and the Geek factor is not on the level of say Indian Food night with the gang from the Big Bang Theory. Thought production was rank amateurs at the outset they have been learning and are getting much better at running a professional production. And, truth be told I like these guys.
So the shoot in January was a big day. They had lots of bodies on set and we all had little name tags. Very McMovie.
The set was simply 4 flats of muslin and Florescent lights to be corridor walls. They wanted to light through the muslin for the keys and there was a ceiling to the set. They had a lot of work scheduled that included reconfiguring the set to make a Tee corner. The ends of the set had green screens for adding BG and star fields I guess. They also wanted to do a trailer that included the entire cast and was a completely different setup.
Now I had just bought a few new lights including the 2 K and Tweenie and EVERY SINGLE HEAD worked on that setup.
My call was at 6:00 AM which I made. Turns out the art department was not ready and they had not even started building the sets when I got there. I told them not to screw around with the ceiling portion as we would need to get lights in there but they did not listen. Instead they fucked around with it for a couple of hours before they gave up on the ceiling and I could even start lighting the set. The work basically involved having actors encounter each other in the corridors as an introduction to the characters. All happening at separate times. And we had about 12 pagers of script to shoot not including the trailer. Also the effects guy wanted a clean plate shot of the each empty scene for the matte shots. We finally start rolling the camera, I was going to say tape but this is a digital Red One Camera that uses a hard drive. So we will start calling it Poking Bits.
Anyway we finally start poking bits at about 11:30 when they wanted to start at 9:00. Come lunch time I indicate to the AD that hey it has been 6 hours since first call, Where is lunch? Oh go ahead and take a break and get some crafty. We did not break for lunch till dinner time around 7 PM.
BAD production!
VERY BAD!
SIT STAY!
No I was not too happy about that and once I got some food in me and a break under my belt we agreed that we would not reconfigure the set to the corner scene and simply shoot it as lit.
All told it was about 19-20 hours for me that day.
But the next time we shot, which was in the Darth Vader Building in downtown Seattle they split the work into two days, had lunch on time and we got every thing done. Like I said they are learning.
Come Norwescon which is the Seattle Science Fiction convention over Easter weekend ,they had a booth and screened a bunch of stuff that had the attendees all in a twitter. So yeah, am doing Fan Films and enjoying it.
Now Take a look at some of this stuff.

This is the first vignette we shot called Hollow

Hollow from STAR TREK: PHOENIX on Vimeo.

This is the Second one called Third Degree. Note, this was all done in front of a green screen Cyclorama. Also Snaps to Amanda Cherry who plays the young LT. she did the Technobable in one Take. No shit. One Take

Third Degree from STAR TREK: PHOENIX on Vimeo.

And here is a third one we did on a set. It is called No other Medicine

No Other Medicine from STAR TREK: PHOENIX on Vimeo.

For more information about these guys check this out, ST: Phoenix

Also one of the Actors, Ben Andrews was part of this group that produces this really cool High Def Live Actor Graphic Novel called Night Zero. Check them out here, Night Zero It is the Zombie Apocolypse in Seattle.

How very strange

2009-05-19T13:30:00.000-07:00

Sure it has been a while since I posted anythign other then a video from youtube but I saw this when I logged onto my blog thingy today

This blog has been locked due to possible Blogger Terms of Service violations. You may not publish new posts until your blog is reviewed and unlocked.

This blog will be deleted within 20 days unless you request a review.

How very strange I should do the request thingy

EDIT
Turns out they thought it was a spam blog. prolly cause I have not posted in a while.

I've Been Uh ...Busy

2009-05-19T13:19:00.000-07:00

Wow has it really been over a year since I have posted anything substantive? Let's try and fix that shall we?
First I suppose a recap is in order.
Fearless:
I am still waiting on Buck to finish a draft of the sound track. C'mon bro show me some love. Mark and I had listed out some sound sweetening tasks to perfrom. These
mostly involved a few sound effects, foleys and what dialog do we want to re record. it is a short list but I needed a way to record them. I did get a free digital recording software package Audacity that seemed pretty sweet. I bought a two channel mixer and a studio mic, stand and spit guard. that I wired into the Computer. Problem was that the computer was on and the fan was audible over the recordings. And keeping Lorraine and Dylan focused was not the easiest task I had. Not that I can blame them, my urgent need for their time did not exactly meld in with how they wanted to spend a saturday afternoon. And with out a sound track to inspire me I just grew disinterested. But that will change soon. Over the last couple of weeks I bought a new rack mount digital recorder and boom mic kit. I also got a DJ travel box that will allow me to encapsulate the recorder and mixer into one. This I can use to record sound effects and take another shot at rerecording dialog. This is exciting as I really want to finish Fearless.

Other projects
Last summer I did the 48 hour film fest with Anthony. I know I swore that I would never ever do one again but he asked nice and actually the director was a pretty good guy and we got fed on time. We shot at the City Hall in down town Seattle My two lights played and we augmented with a couple other heads and a 1200 PAR HMI though this was an ARRI rather then my preferred LTM. However the City Hall is a BIG space and it was tough to light it correctly. The guy who owned the camera was also the editor. We lit pretty much by meter but double checked using the monitor he provided that he swore was calibrated correctly. It wasn't and there was a lot of darkstuff that they had to fix in post. And the editor got really snippy with anthony over a soft take. Ida bitch slapped him myself. Regardless we finished and the show actually won Audiance choice for the night it was screened. But I still have not seen nor gotten my copy so who knows.

Lights and Grip
I have been over the past 6 months or so been building up my grip and lighting package. I have been spending a major amount of duckets and I now have what I feel is a really nice grip and lighting truck. No more pieces to be added. So...what do I now have?
For Tungstens I now have;
4 Mole Richardson 1 k Fresnel heads complete with scrims and barn doors. Two studio babies and two babie babies.
1 Mole Richardson 2 K Fresnel Junior complete
2 Mole richardson 650 fresnel tweenie complete
1 Mole richardson 1 K Micky Mole complete
I still have the 600 watt Smith Victor cans
My new baby is a brand spankin new LTM 1200 Par HMI complete with lenses, ballast barn doors and a 50 foot head feeder
a Kino flo Diva 200 Kit which totally rocks but I have not yet played it, it is so new.
and of course the happy china balls. This is a long way from the old soft box I built a couple of years ago.
I also now have about 8 nice black 25' stingers for my low tech distro

For grip I added some new light stands two combo stands and 5 new c stands for a total of 8 c stands. and a fancy new c stand cart to move them all around on.
I also scored a full 12'x 12' overhead kit that included all the hardware, a Double, A Single, a Silk and a Solid. Mark and I tested it out Yesterday and fortunately I will not have to get any more stands to play it. The combo stands I have will do and we simply used the head off a c stand rather then getting lolly pops.
I bought a 4' x 4' floppy from Cinema gadgets along with the overhead kit and also a new tool belt and groovy cinema gloves. Though I need to dirty up the belt a bit. I feel a little like the guy with all the new ski equipment on the bunny slope sometimes. regardless they shipped a 4 x4 solid instead. I contacted them and said just refund the 40 dollar difference so we can avoid shipping hassels and they said no. Keep the solid and we will ship you the floppy you ordered. Great guys and service. I keep asking them about Tee shirts but they never reply. sigh.

and all of this fits into my new 2000 Chevy Cargo Van. Huzzah!
I have some photos and stuff that I shot for my Web site but I will post this now and make another post later for the photos and more of what I have been up to.

Finally

2009-04-03T18:05:00.000-07:00

So about 3 years ago I lit this commercial for Northwest Handyman services.
Here is the danged thing

NWH Construction Commercial

Hey a new post

2009-04-02T18:11:00.000-07:00

Check this out

Hey a new Sans Vie Trailer

2008-05-23T19:42:00.000-07:00

Check it out

Sans Vie Trailer - Are we friends?

Trailer for Fearless

2008-03-12T17:57:00.001-07:00

UPDATE
After receiving some comments on the film maker boards I made a few minor changes to the trailer. Mostly to deal with the music track blowing out the mom's dialog.

Almost done. Have some sound editing and looping to do as well as put in the music.
But for grins lets look at the trailer.

Fearless - Trailer

Happy Valentine's

2008-02-14T18:05:00.000-08:00

Ifound this on the myspace home page. Pretty darned funny and well written.
No nudity but it is kind of racy

Happy Valentine's Day

Add to My Profile | More Videos

Rectify

2008-02-13T18:08:00.000-08:00

A couple of weeks ago I gaffed a short called rectify. DP Anthony Taggett Directed by Dan Humphrey.
Here is the trailer

Yeah Animation

2008-02-10T00:10:00.000-08:00

A bumper is a little bit that is like a video logo for a production company
Think "Sit ubu sit"
My bud Marty let me borrow his green screen and I used my little screaming victems action figures and vengful unicorn playset to make this. Mark Schapiro came by and he helped big time but he kept asking for close ups.
Enjoy

Cloverfield Review

2008-01-31T08:03:00.000-08:00

A couple of Fridays ago I had a friend Norbert and his sig other over for dinner. Norbert is returning to LA today to go back to what work he can find. He is an electrician in the local IA down there. I mentioned that I was taking my kid to go see Cloverfield and he rolled his eyes. "I worked on that and I dont think it's going to be that good. Nothing but Green screens and a giant Kermit the frog."
I did ask him the camera and format question. Still rolling his eyes, He said they used everything from 35mm all the way down to a consumer grade camcorder that some guy hand held. Taken out of context I can see where green screen work would look a little pointless but he even said he wandered over to video village to see what they were shooting and he still was not that impressed. Fair enough.
I grew up watching and loving monster movies. Old Japanese monster movies showed every Friday night and up until I was about 15 and had better things to do on a Friday night I would hang out with my other geeky friends and watch em all. Godzilla, Ghidra, Rodahn. I ate em up. Even the recent Godzilla movie i was entertained by. I just like that stuff.
What separates Cloverfield from the others is in their presentation of the story. All the other movies the camera and the audience were omniscient. We followed the Hero, usually a plucky scientist and a cute girl, get into the inner circles of the official response. The teeming masses fleeing and getting crushed by what ever was ripping apart Tokyo were merely extras.
The truth is that Average Joe is not going to be the plucky scientist The average Joe would be stuck right in the middle of the death and destruction. That is what excited me about Cloverfield. The device of having the story framed through a camcorder operated by a rank amateur served to enhance the experience. Here the main characters were the Extras if you will. Only hotter of course.
One of the most powerful moments for me was where we do not see an aerial view of a column of tanks shooting blanks at the monster. No we see this from the point of view of a scared !$%*less voice behind the sideways view of the camcorder as random angles of tanks and soldier’s boots go blasting by amongst the sheer confusion and cacophony of high intensity combat. I think it really worked.
The whole sense throughout the entire show of not knowing what was really going on other then what was in view of the camera and never getting a pat payoff, though risky also worked for me.
I grew to care about the characters and as is my way loved watching the death and destruction as "Kermit" tear asses around Manhattan.
Would I recommend it, yes absolutely. In fact I will likely buy the DVD when it comes out.
Oh yeah my, 14 year old daughter also loved it. She was literally on the edge of her seat through most of the show.

I give it 3 1/2 Frags

Fearless Update

2008-01-28T08:08:00.000-08:00

Yes there has been a lot going in my life and I have not posted much about it for a while. So How about I try now eh?

Fearless – I was getting snow blindness working on the edit so I left it aside for other things since before Christmas. That was until my friend Norbert came by to break bread with us a couple of Fridays ago. Sadly Lorraine was out of town at a funeral for an old family friend so it was just Jen, Norbert, Dylan and I. But we had fun. I wanted to show him a cut of the show so I spun it up and we had a watch. I was really disappointed with the work so far looking at it fresh and all the way through for the first time in months. Over all it was ok. It told the story but there were shots and edits that just bugged the crap out of me. So I spent all of last week re cutting the show. My biggest errors were in shot setup and execution of the edit. My original plan was to really pay homage to the two shot. A MySpace buddy, Gospel John, posted a rant about how the two shot has been forsaken for basic coverage.

Since I had not made any real stylistic choices regarding the show I thought sure why not. I’ll take up the torch.
But when I started cutting the show I reverted to trying to use all the close ups and reverse angles for the dialog. My biggest problem was that I did not frame the close ups well enough to work and they looked weird. The biggest spot was the scene with Emily and her friend Rhonda. We had even used that scene and setup in the test footage. I had a great two shot of the scene all the way through so I replaced it with that intercutting with reshoots if Lucy’s reactions. A bit of tightening here and there and it works great and I am very pleased with it. Mark came by yesterday evening and we went through the new cut with a fine tooth come and his comments were that it now plays like it should...about Lucy not Emily and Rhonda.
I also had issues with the opening scenes. I rearranged the sequences so that the very first shot is that of Lucy walking toward the camera. Removed a couple of Close ups there and now that plays rather nicely. With the addition of music, it will be even better.
In the party sequence I laid down some scratch tracks from a tool called smart tunes which provides royalty free music, but of the rather bland 70s porn variety. This needed fixing and I found a band on MySpace that will allow me to use some of their tunes to fill that in. I am also going to shorten the sequence by a shot or two.
Like I said Mark came by yesterday and we spent a couple of hours working on the color correction of the first half of the show and now the shots match in a rather pleasing manner. So all in all it was a very productive week for Fearless. Yea!
Other films – I lit two other shorts over the last couple of months with Mark. One was for Marty about this guy that is spending a lazy Sunday with his girlfriend who asks the dumbest question of all time – How many guys…? They are still working on that but in doing the show I met a new upcoming DP Named Anthony Tackett. He brought me on to another show we did a few weeks ago that was all dark and creepy that was some of the better lighting I have done. I think the camera has a lot to do with that. This was a Panasonic HD camera with the red rocks 35 mm attachment and the show looks pretty good from what I hear. But alas they are still cutting.
Anthony called me to light another show that the director wants to shoot film. Which will be nice but we are a week or so out from shooting and I still have not heard what stock they want to use or where the location will be.
There is another coming up in April and Yippee Ki Yea I do not have to gaff it. Just show up with my belt. Nothing firm yet but I talked to the guy and he seemed nice enough. He is bringing up a DP and Gaffer from LA. He says the script is 5 pages and he want to shoot it over 5 days so It will likely be stunt heavy.
That is all for now

Happy New year

2008-01-13T11:40:00.000-08:00

I am supprised as anyone by my Oscar nomination. That is what I would say if ever I were nominated. A couple of posts back I did a meme that involved the fist sentance of the first post of each month. My way of being odd.

The film has come to a bit of a standstill as I was waiting on music from Buck but he is having issues with his software. Not to worrie Buck.

I got to do a show last weekend with Anthony and Mark which was kind of fun. I really feel that I am starting to get my groove on for gaffing. Starting to have the solutions in place before I even know they are there.

I opened up the project yesterday and started making some suggested changes from Mark. This is an arduous task as I have te re render most of the project after each change to see how it turned out. But that is cool.

Oh yeah my bro from the 28th, Allyn Edwards has started a blog up. I linked to him on my side bar. Check him out. Some nice ski pictures and stuck Canadian trucks, eh.
Laters
E

I just loved this flow chart

2007-12-21T10:08:00.000-08:00

It came from Web Zen which apparently has a chubby for the bacon.
I think it clearly expresses my feelings for bacon as well. And replace the dog name with Indiana and you have me on a Sunday Morning

Never do these things but..

2007-12-11T08:56:00.000-08:00

...I was reading Jessica Baxter's blog today and she had a great little thing. You take the first sentence from the first post of each month for the past year and you get a year in review.
This is mine

January
Elroy procured for me from his workplace a copy of Microsoft' Flight Simulator X.

February
Matthew Morris created this music video for Ava Drake a Vancouver BC musician.

March
A Coop light is really just a big wood box with a reflective surface in the interior and some sockets for the bulbs that you are going to use.

April
I posted a few months back that I wanted to shoot something and asked if anyone wanted to submit a script idea to be produced.

May
The story so far. We have finalized the script and I broke it down into individual scenes and created a production board as pictured above.

June
The last of my grip gear arrived yesterday.

July
So after the less the optimal outcome of the 48 hour project as noted in the previous post, I decided we needed to recheck our findings on the Benito’s Camera.

August
Been real busy and not had time to post much, first off we are still on schedule to shoot starting 9/8/2007 and should be done by the following weekend.

September
We finished all the shooting on time, actually with time to spare.

October
(Note the first two posts were a couple of music videos)
I have finished editing to the point where the film is assembled and now I am working on fixing up the ugly cuts.

November
In the late 70s early 80s the Seattle music scene underwent a major change.

December
Kenneth

Kenneth

2007-12-07T11:03:00.001-08:00

Get a Voki now!

I read the News Today Oh Boy

2007-11-13T18:59:00.000-08:00

About a lucky man....

In the late 70s early 80s the Seattle music scene underwent a major change. I also entered my majority (Turned 21) The local bars would only sign bands that performed cover tunes. Led Zepplin What ever. They thought that is what people wanted to hear.
But there was a small core of bands that refused to play that game. These where the Heats, The Allies and the Cowboys. I loved these bands. The Allies went on to do a song called Emma Peel that was pretty big on MTV but the others faded to obscurity, thoug You could still buy the cds. I have most but cannot find the Allies. Regardless thanks to these bands the bar owners realized that they could pack their houses by local bands playing their own music. What a great time to be young and on the prowl. This period and those bands represent some of the best and misspent times of my youth.

Today I read that Ian Fischer, lead singer of the Cowboys died of a heart attack in Thailand. He was just 51. I Knew Ian and worked with his then wife when I started making movies.

Seattle Times columnist Erik Lacitis wrote a very touching tribute to Ian. Read it here

Listen to Ian and the cowboys singing Rock n Roll Cowboy in my player in the side bar.

And Turn it up.

It's that time of year

2007-11-09T08:06:00.000-08:00

Sorry I have been neglecting my bloggage duties but I have been busy.

Can you feel it in the air? In the eyes of an excited child? Faint aroma of BBQ and Deep Dish Pie? The clatter of King Cobra cans? Everyone treating each other a bit better?

Thats right today is the first day Of Iwanski Fest. And we celebrate in high style. I am sure the spouse will elaborate further on the subject over at Here's the thing. I just wanted to take a moment and wish you all a very happy Iwanski Fest.

And If you are real good The Great Iwanski will leave a comment on your blog.

Now Crank Up your Speakers for this one

2007-10-19T19:00:00.001-07:00

The Troggs Rule

2007-10-19T18:55:00.000-07:00

But mixed with Cary Grant you get this:

Take that The Association

Here are some more pictures

2007-10-14T08:56:00.000-07:00

I have finished editing to the point where the film is assembled and now I am working on fixing up the ugly cuts.
There was one in particular that was really bugging me. It is a scene where Emily is instructing Lucy to clean her room and then come help in the kitchen. The problem was that I messed up in the shooting. My master was fine but the medium and closeup shots, I did not have the actors enter and leave the frame as they did in the actual action in the master. This was bad since the only cut I have to get out of the scene was a jump cut and that is ugly. I was talking to Lorraine about this in general and she said "You dont have to use every shot". Then last night in a moment of clarity I realised the solution. She was right but did not take it far enough. It occured to me that that scene in particular does nothing to move the story forward. I can cut it altogether and the issue goes away.

Any way here are some frame captures from the show.

Lucy Digs for the lost letter

Lucy Scores

Lucy is lost in her issues

OH SNAP!!!!

Emily is a Snob

Emily is a Scullery Maid

The Gypsy Assault

Score 1 for the Gypsies

Dancing to Fearless

Look Pictures

2007-10-06T00:49:00.000-07:00

Sorry been busy and I really have a lot of things to say but no energy to say em.
Regardless there are a plethora of pictures in my myspace pix folders for Fearless production.But I will share a couple here

I love production stills with gear, cause I love gear. Matt Morris the director of Sans Vie was a grip, electrican and dolly grip extrordinaire. Note how deftly he manipulates the C Stand. that is a 24X36 Single net BTW

Dolly shots are time consuming at best. Here are the boys setting one up

I love this picture of Benito. the shot is through the bottom of the bin as Lucy is digging through the recycling

This is the crew sans our grips and electric crew Matt and Marty. Pictured is Mark, Benito, Bruce and Edgar (in the chair) We have no full frontals of Edgar since he was actually taking most of these pictures. He was our script superviser and did a great job. I know cause I am editing and therein is where the notes pay off.

The last scene we shot was a party scene. This required extras. This is a shot of the cast and extras after we wrapped. Note the Hero Letter and the Hero bunnie
We should also note that missing from this shot is Michelle AKA the Neighb cause she had to run off to choir

And That is a Wrap

2007-09-17T11:14:00.000-07:00

We finished all the shooting on time, actually with time to spare. Yeeha. Looked at the dailies and it all looks really nice and we have everything we need to tell the story.
Film and Video production is a collaborative effort that takes a great deal of time and effort on all participants part. I will post details and production stills later but first let me introduce you to the crew.

This is the Crew shot after we wrapped the show Yesterday Afternoon.
Back Row L-R: Lorraine as Emily, Edgar Script Supervisor, Bruce Production Sound, Mark Director of Photography, Angela Production Assistant, Marty Grip
Middle L-R Myself Director, Dylan as Lucy, Rachel 1st Assistant Director
Front: Benito Camera Operator
Another Important player who could not be here this weekend was Matthew Morris.

Matt is the director and producer of Sans Vie which will be premiered later this month. He agreed to put on some jeans and a tee shirt and come be Grip, Dolly grip and slate guy.

Also to be mentioned

John Iwanski for his tremendous writing talent. He is in Chicago but I wish he could have been here to watch the words come to life.

John 'Buck' Wheat for his musical talent in writing a score for our show.

And Finally to Lessia Bonn for the amazing Song, Fearless
EDIT Oh crap I almost forgot the most important person on the set. The caterer. That would be Noreen Hancock of That Catering Chick who provided sumptious meals every day. Thanks Ree Ree.
My profound thanks to you all.

Eric Thomas

I just found this to be amusing

2007-09-07T13:22:00.000-07:00

So..It's off to the races

2007-09-06T20:37:00.000-07:00

We start primary photography on Saturday.

Nothing else to say

Movie Update and a Title Change

2007-08-28T11:26:00.000-07:00

Been real busy and not had time to post much. But there is news. First off we are still on schedule to shoot starting 9/8/2007 and should be done by the following weekend.
The actors have been rehearsing and though some are not all off book I am pleased with the way things are going, though my Lucy can be a bit of a pill at times about commitment. Being my daughter and 13, she knows everything and I am the stupidest person on the planet. This is natural behavior but it will be a challenge to get her performances. I know she loves to act and to be in the limelight but she is still at the stage where acting is memorizing her lines and going a little over the top. But she is dialing it in and I have every confidence in her. It is really me that I am worried about. We have tested the cameras and I trust Mark to do the right thing by the show. (Mark If you think we need a bit of ¼ CTO on the 1200 PAR then so be it. I need to let go and let you do your job)
I am still rooting about for props but that will all come together soon enough.
As for the music, I contacted EMI about the license to ‘Dancing in the Moonlight’ and they quoted me $750.00 for one year. I will pass on that thank you very much, too much money for too little return. So I continued my search and found some music from a group that is one of my friends on my Myspace page. They are called Vocal by Locals, click the link and go listen to the song ‘Fearless’. Even though it is not my original intended music, I think I was kidding myself that I could actually secure license for the original thought but I went down that road regardless just to be sure. I sent Vocal by Locals a message asking if they would let me use their song. They responded rather enthusiastically and wanted to talk on the phone. So I called last week and chatted with the woman, her name is Lessia. She was very sweet and told me about the group.
It seems that she was a classically trained pianist who in her teens after having played in various venues around the LA area decided she really loved writing music more then playing something others wrote years ago. Jump ahead to the last few years and she put together this group of girls aged 13-18 for a weekly Sunday singing writing performing workshops. They were called the Crew. Being in Santa Barbara, the girls crossed all social and economic strata including the daughters of a noted Musician and Actor. The girls performed publicly a number of times and Lessia recorded a number of the songs. If you listened you have to agree it is pretty nice stuff. Well the Crew disbanded for the most part and Lessia changed the name to Vocals by Locals for the recordings. It gets better. A producer told her that the Groups story is pretty cool and if she could get a script or at least a 2 Page treatment in her hands that she could get the attention of a major studio for further development for a feature about the girls and the music. Lessia tried but was not really a screen writer and asked me if I could help her out. Now I am not a writer of the caliber to do her story justice and further if they were thinking about a development deal my use in my show might queer the deal. Lessia was having nothing of that. Her only issue was that the girl singing the version on the site was problematic and she would have to rerecord the song. But yes of course we can use it. (This is the point where we changed the title to “Fearless”)
I told Lessia that although I was not a writer I knew a few with the chops to pull this off and I would try to find someone to write her treatment. The first woman I asked had just had a baby and really did not have the energy to do any writing but the second woman said sure. I hooked them up and they will start in earnest in a couple of weeks. I hope when the get the Oscar, they remember to thank me.
I Lessia, true to her word, sent me 3 versions of the song and promised that she had another on the way and oh by the way she had written it for the daughter of the famous actor who had been working with the song and that that would be a fourth version and if that were the one that was chosen Dad would likely see my flick. (His dad played a scuba diver of some note on TV and also picked the wrong week to give up Sniffing glue)
I think it is really cool how a simple contact and request of a stranger made all these connections for so many people. Some times things just work out.
But Shit… Now I really got to pull this off.

Camera Test 2

2007-08-13T15:39:00.001-07:00

UPDATED WITH Lighting Diagram

Saturday Mark and Benito came over and we ran another set of camera tests
We changed the rating to 250 and lit to the exposure we wanted. I also wanted benito to get some experience with the dolly. I'm glad I did. The dolly shot was a simple push in on Dylan as she is reading. We tried a couple of different angles but Benito nees work on his operating skills. You can see that he was searching for here in a jerky manner rather than a smooth pan to keep her framed.
Finally we tested the blocking of the reverse angle of the room with myself and the spouse as stand ins. yeah I am kissing my wife of almost 16 years. Get over it.
Also Note that the video did not transfer correctly and I had to do some fiddling around to get it to upload but the point is the lighting at this time.

This is the Diagram of the shots as she enters and sits as well as the dolly

This is the diagram of the reverse angle as we are sitting in the chair

Sometimes They Just Don't get It

2007-08-08T19:16:00.000-07:00

UPDATE: I heard back from ASCAP and BMI to discover they only license live performances not sync rights. I found that that was managed by BMI and I sent them a hat in hand email asking for rights to the song for our show. We will see but I do not hold too much hope
Now on to our regularly scheduled post.
I belong to this online group called The Indie Club. Basicly a web based bulliten board for film makers of all stripes.
So the club in Columbus OH put together a couple of promotional videos for the club as a bit of fun. They were clever and funny but a bit long for being a commercial say about 3 minutes each.
Regardless they posted them on the club board and it raised a complete shit storm of multi paragraph diatribes about how the quality was poor and their sillyness did not represent the group yada yada yada.
Fine but it I was bothered by the elitest attitude so I put together a response to the nonsense.
Here are the two videos posted by Columbus

And

And here is my response Enjoy

Apropos of Nothing, Just for Iwanski

2007-08-08T09:00:00.000-07:00

This Sunday was Seafair here in the Jet City so I got these shots of the Blue Angles from my front yard nonetheless

Nice formation shot

To much contrast but not bad. Note the tail hooks are down.

To get a sense of how low these guys are

check out the inverted flight. these guys are the Patriots Team flying Czech L-39s. They flew before the Angels

And the best for last. I like this shot and they are about 50 feet over my house. You can see the pilots heads

Neener Neener John

License and Registration Please

2007-08-04T11:00:00.000-07:00

So here is the deal. Dancing in the Moonlight is titled after the song that Came out in 70s. It is the song that is posted on my right sidebar. It was the inspiration to the show. I pictured the song starting after the last line as the girls go out and Dance in Triumph.
But...I need to get permission from the publishers to do so legally. I could just use it I suppose but my hopes are to submit the film to festivals and they are pretty persnickaty about having all the Ts crossed and Is dotted. So after doing some Wicky research I found the label which was bought by UMI. I went to their site and found the links to publishers BMG and ASCAP and submitted requests for gratis cover license to the song.
If denied or costs too much I will have to come up with something else but, Hey I tried.

Pre Production Update

2007-08-02T09:20:00.000-07:00

So we shoot in little over a month. And things are humming along from an organizational standpoint. I have an AD, Rachel who has been a great help getting basic documents in line.
Contact Sheet – Every production needs one of these
Call Sheets – Since this is a four day shoot I sat with Rachel and we looked at the strip board and came up with call times and lunch times for each day. I find it very important to follow general union guidelines for this. Meal breaks after 6 hours an d12 hour turn around after wrap to next day’s first call. This is only fair, especially for a volunteer crew. Rachel typed up the notes and I spent about an hour entering them into call sheets for each day so everyone knows the schedule.

I run an exchange server so I set up distribution groups with email addresses and contacts in those groups for Cast, Crew, Extras and All. Send mail to one of those groups and everyone gets it.

I scheduled for this Saturday, to continue shooting basic story boards on the still camera. Benito will join me and we will get as much done as possible as the spouse is entertaining that evening.

The following Saturday, Benito, Mark and I will shoot another lighting and exposure test to finalize our lighting. One thing I forgot to mention in the previous post was that I was very pleased by one thing about the previous test. The scene does not look like it was lit. It looks natural. (Except the sickly tarp blue fill)

I have scheduled a production meeting with all players for the 18th.

I posted an ad on the local Indie Film board asking for a script supervisor but no one answered the call until a couple of days ago. A guy asked if we were still looking and I said sure send me your resume and references. After a bit of around and around it turned out he is a noob with some PA experience, but wants to try. So unless the references come back negative what the hell, he has a car so I’ll give him a shot.

The spouse and the child have been running lines but we need to start real rehearsals now so I am trying to schedule that in along with the neighbor.

I still need to find someone to pose for a ‘grip and grin’ shot of the mom receiving the writing award. We have some nice meeting rooms here at the office with podiums etc I just need to find the bodies and get permission to use them.

I need to meet with my art director and find an old recycle bin for a prop as well as get props in place.

The spouse needs to get here wardrobe for the “Scullery Maid” scene

I need to go to champions and get some makeup and powder.

And contact and confirm with the extras

The list goes on but it is not overwhelming.

Having sent out the call sheets I did get one scheduling conflict with one of the actors. She sings in the choir at the cathedral and the new season starts the weekend we need her. I scheduled the party scenes for Sunday of day four starting at 9:00AM but she will be unavailable till 11:40 so I looked at the strip board and shuffled a couple of scenes that she was not in and viola it all works out with out changing the actual call time.

Camera Tests

2007-07-31T08:00:00.000-07:00

So after the less the optimal outcome of the 48 hour project as noted in the previous post, I decided we needed to recheck our findings on the Benito’s Camera. Mark, Benito and I met on Sunday to do just that.
First thing we had to do was establish the relative ASA value of the camera. We spent a bit more time on it this time around. We set up a Baby and lit a color chart mounted on a bounce card placed about 10 feet from the camera. The chart read about 65 Foot candles and then with a monitor, we adjusted the aperture until we could see the differences between the two white values without them bleeding over. This was a stop of 4.0. Then we did the math and came up with something between 200 and 220 ASA.
We then lit the room for a lighting test to and had the kid walk in to the scene, sit in the chair read for a bit and then get up and walk out of the shot. The look we were going for was that of the Beach house scenes in Reds. We found that these scenes had a natural feel to them where the DP lit the walls and if there were a practical used that for key. The actors would walk in and out of light. I really liked it and that is the look I am going for.
Se we set a Baby to light the far wall with a double net to add a bit of top shadow. In the practical we placed a 250 watt photo flood. Note the lame was way hot so we cut it down with two pieces of 251 diffusion and a piece of half straw. When we shoot I think we will use nd3 and trim it back so we get a bit of a rim off the spill from the practical. Finally we hung a China Ball with a 250 on a C stand just to the left of the camera to add a bit of volume to the room. She exits between the camera and the china ball. There is also a Bounce card to the right of the chair to fill her face.
We shot these using different Aperture settings from 2.8-8 as noted on the slate.
Here is the test footage. I think the focus is a bit soft, something Benito has to work on before we shoot, particularly in the wider shots. I prefer the look in the 5.6 take. The meters were reading about 2.8 on the Baby, and practical and about 2.0 for the fill

Some Days The Bear Gets You

2007-07-23T08:30:00.000-07:00

I finally got to see the entry we did for the 48 Hour Film Project on the 14th. I was the gaffer and Mark Schapiro came along to help out. The team was Matograph, which is derived from the middle of the word Cinematographer. I vaguely recall coming up with that name about 20 years ago but I could be mistaken. Anyway this is the first time that I have seen footage coming out of Benito’s camera. Ever. And I was not happy with the result. It is not awful but to quote the spouse, ‘Here’s the thing.’
When shooting film you know the sensitivity of the film and you adjust your light meter accordingly. It has an ASA rating of 125 then you put on a 10X slide or set the digital to 125, along with the shutter speed. Then you can light with some confidence that you can give a decent F stop to the camera operator or fudge it if need be,

A month or so ago Mark, Benito and I were looking over the camera with the mind to establish the camera’s sensitivity. To do this we put the camera on Auto Aperture, and focused on a grey area. I took my light meter (A Spectra) and with all the slides out took a Foot candle reading. It was something like 65 Foot candles. Then we checked the camera for what it thought the F Stop should be and it read something like 2.4. (If you are at home doing the math please do not take these numbers as gospel since they are for demo purposes only. Anyway, if I am reading 65 FC and my shutter speed is 1/60th second (Roughly 30 FPS) and the camera tells me the F stop is 2.4 I can plug those values into a little mechanical computer on the back of the meter and viola, this camera is relatively X ASA. Now I know what slide to put into the light meter or in the case of my Digital meter, what values to set it to. We did this and determined that the camera was about 125 ASA.

Only later did I discover that my Spectra needed to be recalibrated as comparing it to Marks FC meter and his Spectra, it was not reading correctly. This of course changes the actual value. Further not having seen any of the footage, I was unaware there was an issue until just this moment. I take pride in my work and I want it to be the best I can make it for those that trust me to light for them so this is kind of embarrassing. The show came out overall overexposed by about a stop or two. If there had been time, the editor could have dropped the luminance values to get what I was hoping for but that is not the case here. So This weekend we go through the exercise again, this time shooting examples at different F Stops to see if that is what we really want.
You will notice in the attached video shadows coming off the key lights. I like a bit of shadow, really I do but in this case it is bad. The heads were as high as I could get em and I was shooting to have the shadows minimalized useing the exposure.

Here is the Video, 'Trippen'. Careful for those with sensitive ears, there is language in it.
[EDIT]There are also some really crappy cuts in this show. Especially since there was plenty of time to polish it up. They had two hours to spare when they turned it in.

Weekend Lites

2007-07-07T11:50:00.000-07:00

I think that is what I will call it.
Here is a picture of the package in all its glory

Lots of new toys to play with

It's Here It's Here

2007-06-27T07:05:00.000-07:00

The last of my grip gear arrived yesterday. Yeah Stuff!
I'll post photos later when I have a chance to get it orginized.

MMMM Stuff

2007-06-13T18:45:00.000-07:00

So I placed my Orders for new film stuff for which to shoot the show.
I got a Starter grip Package and two light stands from CinemaGadgets Which has lots of cool techy little bits in it for a pretty decent price.
And from Lights On Retail I got some new lights as follows;
2 1,000 Watt Molequartz 6" Baby Solarspot 1K
3 1000 Watt EGT OSRAM Globe - 1K Bulb
2 1K Baby Barndoor, 4-Way, 4- Leaf, 6 5/8"
2 1K Baby Scrim, Half Single, 6 5/8"
2 1K Baby Scrim, Half Double, 6 5/8"
2 1K Baby Scrim, Full Single, 6 5/8"
4 1K Baby Scrim, Full Double, 6 5/8"
Lee-Roll-216 216 Lee Filters Full White Diffusion Roll
Lee Filters Color Temperature Blue Rolls DENSITY: Half-CTB-202
Lee Filters Color Temperature Straw Rolls DENSITY: Half-CTS-442
Lee-Roll-209 209 Lee Filters .3 Neutral Density Roll

And from Film Tools I got a copuple of scrim bags for the lights.
Yeah Geeky Lighting details but the bottom line is that I can now light just about any small scene with the new stuff and the stuff I already have. I am so Pumped. I love getting stuff.

Everything Is Coming Together

2007-05-29T10:56:00.000-07:00

The story so far. We have finalized the script and I broke it down into individual scenes and created a production board as pictured above.
The schedule is 4 days where the longest day will be 4 pages for the party scene. Though the previous night we will need to go a bit long as the night exteriors will have to wait until sundown. Not a big deal and I scheduled the fantasy stuff for that day as well.
Mark the DP and Bennie the camera operator and I met on Saturday to discuss some technical issues and to decide when we are going to start shooting. Prodction will begin on September 8th and complete on the following weekend on the 16th. It is very exciting and Mark has some great Ideas for matching the look I want and how to transition into the fantasy sequences.
What is left to be done are to finish story boarding the script. I draw for crap so I am staging the scenes and taking BW photos with the digital camera placeing the shots into a word template I set up. It seems to work rather well but I have to shrink the photos down so that they are not too large for the document.
Here is a shot of Lucy discovering the doll.

More to come...

Table Reading

2007-05-10T07:43:00.000-07:00

So Last night we had our first table reading of the script with The Neighb, The Child and of course Lorraine. Nothing will shake out dialog more that actually hearing it read back to you and we got some great notes on minor changes to dial it in.
I have also been using our digital camera to set up images for the story boards and it seems to be working just swell. maybe I will post them at a later date.
Anyway I gotta get back to the day job.
Cheers

Got a Working Title

2007-05-08T18:56:00.000-07:00

OK so my original inspiration when asking for a story was to work in the song "Dancing in the Moonlight" which is on the player in the right sidebar. I was obsessing on the song and envisioned a happy dance of the characters at the end of the story. That was all I had. Thank the Gods for Iwanski to give me something to flesh it out. Lame Idea perhaps but hey what can I say.
so STatus so far is I have the script where I want it and now it rolls over into a shooting script with more technical aspects written in and scene numbers. Then we do the whole strip board exercise and figure out a schedule that is to everyones liking. I have a DP, Mark Schapiro and a camera man Benito Vasquez. Lorraine, The Child and the Neighbor have agreed to play the main speaking roles and the Neighb agreed to be the art department.
I have an Idea for an AD but I have yet to ask the person if they are interested and we also need some Extras and Bit players.
And a Dog.
I hope to shoot after we go to Chicago in July
Oh Yeah the title as of now is 'Dancing in the Moonlight'. Not Casa Blanca

Untitled Iwanski Project

2007-04-27T09:26:00.000-07:00

I posted a few months back that I wanted to shoot something and asked if anyone wanted to submit a script idea to be produced. Well the Great Iwanski said he would give it a shot. After about a week he sent me a script. I had to put it on the shelf for a few months as life took precedence, but last weekend I sat down and went over it. I made some changes to give it more structure and added some conflict. Sent it back to Iwanski and he punched up the dialog a bit and I also sent it off to my DP Mark for his input. The feedback on the script is pretty positive and I will give it another rev this weekend in hopes of finalizing the story. Then we can start thinking about production.
I’m excited. I have not directed anything in a while and if we do this right it just might be pretty good.
It just needs a title.

How To Build A Coop Light

2007-03-31T15:00:00.000-07:00

A Coop light is really just a big wood box with a reflective surface in the interior and some sockets for the bulbs that you are going to use. It can be hung from the rafters of a lighting grid with sash cord or mounted on a light stand. The idea is to create soft light for a flat even lighting effect.
The one I built was made out of 1x4 and 1x2 pieces and will have two gangs of two lights, each controled by a seperate dimmer switch. The cost of building this one not including bulbs was about 90 bucks.

After I cut the main frame pieces I laid them out to make sure they were of the correct size. This box will be 2' by 4'.

The joints are all butt joints but I added dowels for added strenght and used angle and T brackets for added strength. In order to make sure the dowel holes lined up I had to build this Jig pictured.

I then had to clamp the jig to the cut stock and simply drilled the holes. Note I had to take care when drilling the opposite side so that the holes would all line up correctly. It worked out pretty well and though it did not turn out furniture perfect it was good enough for the job at hand

After all the holes are drilled and checked I began the assembly. I started with the two middle pieces. Wood glue and clamped them real tight. I was then able to mount the T brackets with screws.

After the middle pieces dried I repeated the outer joints and below is the finished main part of the light.

The next step is to assemble the side pieces out of 1X2. This is one of the end pieces and it is built so that it will all fit together and be about 15 inches deep

I did not use the dowel gag here as these were small and glue and brackes will be sufficient to hold it all together.

While these pieces were drying I went ahead and started the wiring if the light

As you can see in the picture I got a couple of boxes to hold the dimmer switches.
The power cable is of the same material they use for stingers and I used 12 guage romax for the wiring. Each gang is wired in parallel and while doing the wiring make sure you test with a continuity tester at each step checking the ground, hot and neutral are not shorted and the circuits work. Note that the hot (black) wires are wired though the dimmers and the continuity check will not work form the plug but up stream is fine.

To supply the ceramic fixtures I made a pig tail for the first one and wired directly into the second in each gang. The ends of the pigtails are pushed

through the center holes and then wired into the ground and the fixtures.

Like so

Then wire the ends into the fixtures. Make sure to put the hot to the hot screw and the neutral to the neutral screw.

This is what the setup looked like after I finished wiring it all up

And this is a test. Worked first time. Note that these are just 60 watt bulbs I had laying around the house.

After that was completed the next step was to mount the sides. My original intent was to use hinges and allow it to fold up on itself but after getting the parts assembled I found that that would not work as cleanly as I would have liked. So I changed my mind and decied to use 3 inch machine screws with wing nuts.

This is one of the end sides. I also had to use a screw/nut configuration to hold the sides together at the tops as well. I am glad that I did not toss out the jig cause it came in handy making the holes. Note that I also had to use a 1x2 at the bottom of the end sides to get them to line up with the long sides. This was due to my plan to use hinges and I had already cut the material before I changed my mind. I had to counter sink the screws/wing nuts for those sides so that there was clearance to attach the wing nuts.

And this is the light assembled.

The last step was to line the bottom and sides with foam core. It took less then a full 4'x8' sheet of foam core I got at a local framing shop and I had enough left over for a decent sized bounce card.
This is the finished light.

And a test using the 60 watt bulbs.

Finally it breaks down and stacks up nicely

All in all it was a pretty sucessfull project. I had to send away for the actual photo floods from Lights On Retail which is a film supply house and I got 4 500 watt, 4 250 watt a roll of gaff tape and a replacement bulb for one of my 650s for only 60 bucks which I thought was a pretty good deal.

Once I loaded up the 500 watts I tested the amperage and it looks to draw about 15 amps with both gangs full one. At 7 feet it kicks out about 130 candles dropping down to about 60 at about 12 feet. Inverse Square Law and all that. Not bad.

I also found the 500 watt bulbs (Sylvania) tended to buzz annoyingly so that will be an issue when the coop is used, but I'll figure it out.

Update - Sorry

2007-03-29T08:01:00.000-07:00

No Pictures but I did get to do a commercial a few weekends ago. I answered a crew call for grip/lighting types for a commercial being shot on a weekend. And they were offering 75 dollars. I volunteer on the right projects but when they are offering money then I jump on board.
Now this was a low budget local commercial for Northwest Handyman Services and the script is a couple steps above the Car Salesman standing in the lot or the local appliance guy that is Cra Cra Crazeeee about prices but it was still local so we shot on DV and the theme was your old style Batman ala Adam West. I won’t go into the story too deeply.
So they contact me and being a cell phone call and the fact I hate talking on the phone, I gave him my email and asked him to send me the details of the show. After a day and no contact, I called Benny and he said they had already found a lighting guy so I told him no worries.
The following Monday Benny called again and asked if I was still available. I said sure if he needed me and we agreed to meet later in the week to discuss. (Read Job interview)
We met and talked about the show and here's the thing. in the small pond a medium sized fish can be the big fish.
If I were to rate my skills compared to some of the true professionals that I have had the pleasure to work with, I would say that I am a low end journeyman. I know the gear and have not electrocuted anyone to my knowledge. I know how to load a grip/lighting truck and am fairly adept at all the skills involved in lighting a show. But I get uncomfortable working as a gaffer cause I know how much I do not know. Work with a good one and you learn their style and will wind up emulating it. This is not to say I will not take the challenge, it is just to say that I really would rather not have the responsibility. One that makes me more aggressive on the set. I prefer others to be responsible and to tell me what to do. Less stress and any mistakes are theirs not mine.
Regardless it became clear they needed me to be a bigger fish and I wanted to do a show so I came aboard. Benny wanted a Grip and lighting list and showed me the storyboards of what we were going to do and asked if I could look at the locations on Wednesday and Thursday. After some around and around about how I said I was available for the weekend and not the work week as I had a job and all that he further explained that It was in the evening and about a 15 minute drive from my home. I agreed.
So Wed I arrive about 10 minutes early to the location and give Benny a call to see where they were. He said that he just tried to get me and told me we did not have access to that particular location that night but we needed to meet at the other one which was about 45 minutes away and about 1.5 hours later then agreed upon. I told him that I was not driving out there tonight and that I was sorry but I had to get up at O’dark thirty. I went home and wrote him an email saying that I was sorry and if they did not want to use me then that was fine and that I understood. I also gave him an off the cuff order for PGL that would give them enough to shoot the show.
As it turned out they still wanted me and I wound up gaffing the commercial. I have not seen any dailies so I have no idea how it turned out. We got it done in a day and we scheduled for two. And best of all, the producer/director, Sebastian actually gave me 300 bucks for my trouble.
I took the money and bought myself some new electrical meters and built what is known as a Coop Light and bought some Photo flood bulbs, Gaffer tape and a replacement bulb for one of my lights. I have pix of the coop light construction process and that will be my next couple of posts.
On another note, Fortune Hunters had a screening last weekend here in Seattle for cast and crew. It turned out really great and I strongly recommend anyone who gets the opportunity to see it to do so. It is very sweet and amusing. Good to see the Thom, Mike and Neil again. And Lorraine even got an autograph from Jessica for the kid. She was actually surprised by the request.

A Music Video

2007-02-26T18:40:00.000-08:00

Matthew Morris created this music video for Ava Drake a Vancouver BC musician.
Ghost in the Machine

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Enjoy It is called Ghost in the Machine

UPM on my First Feature

2007-02-17T13:32:00.000-08:00

Not actually my first feature but I was actually getting paid. In working with budgeting and scheduling, and Sean I became pretty good at it, or at least it could do it quickly. Now I had this old comrade Jim who was a decent guy in small doses. He was an actor who was always playing some angle. He was pretty good too.
This is Jimmy playing A dishwasher in a short I made called I 'm Only Human. More on that another time.
Anyway I was starting to get more work and had my sights on getting into the Directors Guild. I was researching all this when Jim called me up asking what the job responsibilities of a 2nd AD were. He had been hired as such on this feature that was going to be shot out in Sequim. So I explained to him the basic career path and job responsibilities. A film is broken down by distinct departments. The Art Department, The camera Department, The Grip and Electric Departments, and managing all this is Production.
At the top you have the Producer then the Director. Then you have the Unit Production Manager, The First Assistant Director, Second Assistant Director and finally Production Assistants. This is the management org chart at its most basic.
Producer and Director aside, these are the responsibilities as best I recall them.
The UPM Creates the Schedule and Budget. She manages the expenditures and makes sure contracts and deal memos are signed and in place. The 1st AD is responsible for making sure the set is running smoothly. He is the go to guy from crew for issues. If a second unit is created He becomes the director of the second unit. He also is responsible for directing Extras and bit players in the first unit.
Second AD is the First Ad's minion and is responsible for most of the scut paperwork and gets to direct background and atmosphere extras. In a second unit they are 1st AD. The PAs are everyone’s bitches. All can be identified by the radio that is constantly attached to them.
Of course there is a lot more to it then that and Jim had a lot of questions. I tried to answer them but for the life of me he really was over thinking it.
So they call me and ask if I could come out and put together a production board and a schedule for them. They start shooting in a week. So off tot the Olympic Peninsula to see what was up.
Lessie’s Rainbow was a family movie that takes place just after the civil war in the west. The cast was Lessie Played by Sondra West, two kids a boy and a girl played by Heather Tomand her brother, David. This was when they were kiddies. Granny played by some local actress. This was the family being harassed by some bad guys. Along Comes Santone, played by Tony Romano traveling home from the war with his Indian companion played by Don Shanks (who also directed). Oh yes there are animals everywhere in the script. Including bears and snakes and racoons and wolves and...... See Don and Tony were both alumni from the old Grizzly Adams series. We shot at this place called The Olympic Game Farm and Old Ben the bear from the old TV show lives there.
So here we have it folks the Trifecta of what you do not want to involve yourself in in a low budget Independent film, A period Piece with Kids and Animals. We had an investor who owned an bunch of real estate here in Seattle who put up about 250 grand to make the movie so I really had no say in budgeting issues.
I showed up and met the producer, a guy named Bob who was a local and the writer, Tony. We agreed on a rate for my time and I proceeded to read and break down the script and in about two days I had a 24-day Schedule for them to begin shooting. See the above link for Production Schedules.
They were pleased and asked me if I could stay on for the shoot to manage the production. I agreed and so we went over into production.
I learned a LOT on this show about what to do and what not to do. I made a few tactical mistakes and though production was completed, on schedule, plus about 4 days the movie was never finished.
1 - I did not stand up and squawk loudly when they were spending about 10 K a day on bullshit.
We had hired all locals for non-technical crewmembers. The props dept had neither practical experience nor a bag of tricks to do their jobs. Production paid for it.
A lot of the crew and cast were acting like this was big budget city. We coddled Sondra and delivered her every whim.
The crew blind-sided us with demands for per diem, fair and standard but not in the budget.
I was doling out Petty cash like it was candy and we were hemorrhaging.
This was mostly due to my inexperience and general naiveté. I should have stood up and pressed my displeasure at how we were throwing money around but did not. We never at the beginning had a “Remember people this is a LOW budget movie”, conversation. There were a lot of people running around with an overwhelming sense of entitlement.
2 - The DP was this guy named Zorba. His deal was Day rate plus camera rental. After we looked at the first day’s dailies and saw that the gate was scratching the film, we still paid him for the camera even though we had to rent others to cover for it. Seems no matter what camera we used there was a problem. We eventually had film from A-F cameras. We should have fired him and his assistant then and there. He eventually ran off to Mexico with the negative after production was complete. Run across a cameraman named Zorba, Flee far and fast.
3 – I asked about negative insurance and was told that it was a waste of money by the Producer, Tony. Negative insurance pays out if the lab fucks up and covers the cost of re-shooting. We shot all of our night stuff towards the end of the schedule. There was a lot too. We sent the film to the lab with clear instructions on the camera report to Push the processing one stop as they lit it dark and pushing it a stop would brighten it up in post. Oops, the fucking lab did not bother reading the report. We had to re-shoot two days worth of work and had no money to pay for it. We talked the cast into accepting deferred payment but the grip and electric still needed payment. And when we were shooting there was no food or crafty services, which pissed off the crew even more. I should have stood up to the producers and insisted on coverage or fled.
4 – there is finesse to scheduling a day’s work. I was so focused on getting the 24-day schedule that they wanted that I lost sight of that and I planned for about 4 pages of script on the first day. We only got 1/8th a page shot that day. So we started out behind schedule and never really got caught up.
So we spent our stake on production and there was nothing left over for post. Nothing. The film was never finished and since it was my responsibility, my name was mud around town for some time. I own up to my inexperience at the time and this was where I began to loose interest in the DGA and production department. Would I do it again? Sure. It was a helluva great opportunity to apply and learn. And like I said I learned a lot.
So in closing, for anyone that reads this from some of the filmmaking boards that I post on. This is why I am so cynical and negative about your dreams. If you do not know what your doing and don’t have a shit load of money to cover the total cost to theater for your feature that you think is a great idea you will fail. I know from experience.

Coming soon Lessies Rainbow

2007-02-17T13:30:00.000-08:00

Sorry I am writing it now

Sure we have Here's the 80s

2007-02-03T11:48:00.000-08:00

But for simple Jr high fun how about southpark
South Park - Kyle's Mom Is A B***h from South Park Movie

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Flight Simulater X

2007-01-23T17:51:00.000-08:00

Elroy procured for me from his workplace a copy of Microsoft' Flight Simulator X.
I love the flight sims. I remember my first time on a sim back at this Apple store back in the 80s wherein I crashed a 747 into the dust from 30 k feet. I was hooked.
I have gone throught a lot of them in the past including the Microsoft Combat sims and those are a lot of fun running around dog fighting Germans and bombing Japanese shipping and they are based on the same physics engine found in their sim. A sim I personally feel is the best out there. The image is me flying south to San Francisco at about 15000 feet.
Flying is not about imelmans and Split S turns to out fox a Zero. It is about doing everything perfectly. Climb at the right rate. Maintain the correct Altitude and speed. Land right spot on everytime. Dont get lost. Dont run out of fuel. Sure it is geeky but not so much as the train simulator which I have also played.
So the new version is much better then that of the previous and far more stable. My old one would crash for no apparent reason and this one has no crashes.
So my Goal is to fly along the coast of the country from SEattle to Bangor Maine. So far I have worked my way down to Sandiego then to Houston and finally I am happly on the beach at Key West. The Next Leg takes me to Virginia finally to Maine.
Zoooom

Sorry

2007-01-18T07:50:00.000-08:00

I have not posted anything in a while but I have been heads down at work and home life took up other avalable time. (I got the new MS Flight Simulator X from Elroy)
Stay Tuned I'll be back this weekend

Then Suddenly

2007-01-06T12:39:00.000-08:00

In a blinding flash of clarity and realization I remembered. Today is Epiphany.
In the Catholic tradition Epiphany marks the 12th day of Christmas and the last day of Christmas time. It is supposed to be when the wise men arrived at the manger. We try to keep the tradition and season.

I am so spiderman

2007-01-05T12:58:00.000-08:00

Your results:
You are Spider-Man

Spider-Man		90%
Hulk		55%
The Flash		55%
Catwoman		55%
Iron Man		55%
Supergirl		50%
Robin		50%
Green Lantern		50%
Superman		45%
Wonder Woman		30%
Batman		25%

You are intelligent, witty,
a bit geeky and have great
power and responsibility.

Click here to take the Superhero Personality Quiz

Thanks Yas it made my Day

16 Years ago Tonight or Carpe Per Diem

2006-12-21T19:58:00.000-08:00

Tonight is the winter solstice. 16 years and one month ago I was hired to work as a juicer on an ABC movie of the week, 'The Marla Hansen Story'. This was an important gig for a number of reasons not the least of which was that I was broke and concerned as to where my next rent check was coming from. It was a shitty summer for those of us in the film biz cause Ted Turner had some sort of Olympic style games going on here in Seattle and all the car commercials and Movies that would come to town stayed far far away. This was also the beginning of the end of the film business in Seattle as we lost our competitive edge, due in no small part to the games, to Vancouver BC which is now a film making power house thanks to the Canadians subsidising the industry and really making it grow. But that bit of vitriol is for another post.
I had just started dating this woman that I had known for a year or so who was intellegent and cooked and had a cool apartment on first hill with a view of Queen Anne, the Space Needle and Down Town. She also had a great job and made big bucks and was pretty and funny and sang and cooked. We danced around dating since we met but just before Thanksgiving we "hooked up". Bow chicka chicka bow bow
The job was for about 4 weeks and so I dashed off to Portland to shoot this film. I stayed with a friend named Stacy and the show was really cool. It was about a model in New York that had her face slashed up by her land lord because she would not sleep with him. Pretty sick fuck if you really think about it.
John Grey was the director and we were shooting at the same time Gus Van Sant was shooting Private Idaho in Portland. It was cold as it was December and we got one of those regional snowstorms that hit Seattle and Portland.
My official title was with the transportation dept cause I drove the light truck but I was really happy to be there and be lighting a budgeted show for a change. Larry Nielsen was on the show as well as a couple of other buds and the guys and gals in Portlane were the best. Really friendly and good to work with.
So we wrapped the show and as the driver I was asked to take one of the trucks back to Seattle to get the shelving taken out at Seattle Cine and then run it back to Portland. I said sure for Per Diem and a plane ticket back to Seattle. They weasled abit even using Mt St Helens coughing as an excuse to put me on a train but I held out and got the bucks. I think it was 75.00 and a plane ticket. Small Victories.
Now the truck I was moving up to Seattle was a Cab Over Mac with testy brakes. I white knuckeled it up to Seattle in a snow storm in a run that should take 3 hours that took around six.
When I got here it was a winter wonderland. At the time I lived on lower Queen Ann on Roy Street and had to drive a 10 ton truck though snow covered roads dodging the families going to enjoy the nutcracker at the old opera house. Dipshits ignored lights and put their precious ones at risk by crossing in front of a truck on snowy roads. I got home and parked.
Lorraine was expecting me and waiting at my apartment cause we were lovey dovey and missed each others little snoogy woogie kissy faces. I walked in the door and said, "Put on your dancing shoes and red dress baby cause I got per Diem and Im spending it all on you!" we went out and had a drink at Harry's that was around the corner and then off to TS McHughs that was across Mercer. It was snowing. Sean McVicker and his irish band were playing and people were coming into the warm bar stomping snow off their feet and a woman even entered with cross country skis. It was really cool. 16 Years ago tonight.
Lorriane and I both knew we wanted to have kids and we were making kiddie noises and Sean and the band were playing 'Silent Night'. I said, "If we ever get married...let me rephrase that. Will you marry me?" She looked stunned and asked me to repeat it. I did. She Looked stunned and said, "Ok."
We then proceeded to get conspiriatoral and decided to keep it to ourselves until..Im not sure what, but we decided to keep it betwixt us. I went and ordered a bottle of Champaigne, Whidelsy Mark if I remember and told the bartender that I just proposed to my date and she said yes. Next thing the band announces that we had just gotten engaged and suddenly the whole 'keep it to ourselves' thing was just out the window. Many congratulations. We drank the champaigne and in love with each other went home.
16 Years ago tonight.

We're Back Baby

2006-12-20T18:58:00.001-08:00

Pix and so forth to follow as well as the continuation of the movie blogging. Norbert was a real hero during the crisis and had us over for spagetti and booze for saturday night dinner. Yesterday he came up and him a neighbor, John and I got out the chain saws and were manly men doing manly things in a manly way sawing up the tree City Light cut up and left by the side of the road. I got at least a cord of pine out of the deal though I am stiff and sore today.
Laters all and thanks for all the prayers and good wishes.

OH and I rearranged my links to the left. Removed some non posters and added my MySpace link and our dog, Indiana's blog typed by Lorraine. It is an amusing read. I also fixed a couple of broken links and arranged in Alphabetical order.

I so liked this guy

2006-12-14T11:10:00.000-08:00

Who's Your 80s Movie Icon Alter-Ego? Find out @ She's Crafty

How I learned to schedule - Or Movies for Mormons

2006-12-11T11:29:00.000-08:00

One of the people I met through United Productions was an attorney named Bill. Bill was a decent guy who worked for one of the first law firms in the area to put ads on TV. You know the type. Anyway Bill was a Mormon who wanted to make a film about the teachings if the Mormon Church. It was all well and good and he wanted someone to manage the preproduction and to get some writers to put together a script. He then wanted a schedule and a budget out of all this. Now I had never done this but I was not afraid of a challenge. We hired Mark and Nancy to write a script based on a treatment provided by Bill. I went and attended a couple of seminars on the business of Hollywood. One of which was put on by Mark Litwak. It was basically how, as a writer to pitch a story and how to deal with and what to expect from the studios after you may have garnered some interest in your story. I also researched the teachings and the beginnings of the Mormon Church. For those of you non Mormons that may not know, The book of Mormon teaches that after the Passion, Christ came to the new world to save one of the lost tribes of Israel aka the Mayans. This is why the Mormons take such an interest in converting Native Americans. But I digress. The story to be told ala a 1950s Bible extravaganza, was that of a young Shamoni or Lamoni or something come to drive the wickedness out of the Nephites or the Laminites or something. He found himself called to do so. Needless to say Prophets are never appreciated and I think this one gets the usual Martyr treatment.
So Nancy and Mark take this story and put together a pretty good script and we pay then 100 bucks each for their troubles. But Bill hates it because they are not reverent enough with the material and one of the characters is this jolly old Falstaff. Bill accuses them of making him a drunkard. So they take his notes and move a barely pitch able story to the world of “This will never get made”. The script is done.
Now in the meantime I was researching how to budget and schedule a film. I found a great book by Ralph Singleton. This is a great book for those who are interested in the process. Granted this was back around 1986 or 1987and it was the days before computers were as prevalent as now. So the process was all manual.
It goes something like this. Read the script once just to enjoy it. Read it again breaking it down into scenes giving them scene numbers. In this context a scene is defined as the same people in the same place at the same time. Scene 1 Day Interior Kitchen. Now if the story has the actors move into the living room adjacent to the kitchen, you would have a new scene. Scene 2 Day Interior Living Room. This is because in the context of the scheduling, they are separate places and need to be lit and so forth separately. Now it is kind of a black art because what if the script calls for a steady cam shot following the action into the living room. There is no clear break in the action and it is really all one big scene and should be scheduled that way. But you get the point.
After you have defined all of the scenes you need to figure out how long each scene is in terms of pages and 1/8ths of pages. Given a well formatted script of double spaced courier font an 8th of a page comes out to the width of the standard wooden ruler you would get in school. So you measure out ruler widths of each scene and note how many Pages & 1/8ths next to the scene. I would mark the scenes out with a pencil line across the entire page and measure from line to line. This is not exact but it is close enough for government work.
Now you get some colored pencils or highlighters and with the red underline or otherwise mark every Speaking character in when first encountered in each scene. Then repeat with different colors for Bit roles (Script calls for a juggler to be doing something) and another color for Extras/Atmosphere (A crowded bar). Proceed through each scene using different colors to mark Animals, specific props mentioned, stunts alluded to vehicles mentioned. Essentially you are noting all of the elements that must be present to shoot the scene according to the script.
Then what you do is capture each scene on a separate sheet of colored paper that has squares or sections for each element type as noted above. The colors relate to the time of day and interior or exterior. Day Exterior is Yellow, Day Interior is red Night exterior green and Night interior is blue. I think that is right but frankly I’m not sure if those re precisely the colors. The point is you have a color code for these things.
Then you get what is known as a production or strip board. Now in the days before computers this were literally colored strips of cardboard with room to write down the high level details of the scene, having then sheets of paper to refer to for more details. Along the left side of the board is the header strip which lists name of show Producer / director and other high level show details. Below this is a listing of all the actors / Characters that have speaking parts in the show numbered 1 – n. Where number 1 is the actor in the most scenes and 2 the next most and so on.
Now as can be seen in the image of the strip board the strips are lined so they appear like columns in an excel spreadsheet. So where the actors are listed in the left, you enter the number of the actors playing in a particular scene in their corresponding cell on the strip. Then you start to assemble the board as the script is written. Then you move the strips around so that all the same locations are adjacent to each other. Then you arrange them by Time of day. Then you look at the actors and how they align. Then you user your own experience to break down each days work based on how many pages of script you want to get done. Realistically 5-9 pages is really ambitious. First day less maybe one page should be scheduled as the crew is getting the kinks out. Also maybe you have a couple of crane shots. Schedule them early cause you have money then. The bottom line is you separate each days worth of work that you schedule with black and white strips and viola. You know how many days you will be shooting. Now you have the information to make a budget. And you can twiddle with it. Using SAG actors you have 3 types of contracts. (Or at least back then) 1 day, 3 day, week or run of the show. Now the run of the show is usually a flat rate and reserved for key actors that will be there every day of close enough. I never had to deal with that. But in my day a Day rate was 350, A 3 Day rate was 575 and a week was 1200. The idea being that the more you worked the actors the more money they made but you also got a break. So you are looking at your strip board and you see Jane is in three scenes and they are scheduled out over say a week. You may want to adjust the schedule to make those 3 days contiguous so you get a better rate for Jane’s work. This is really a black art but it is a great tool for helping you as the production manager make the best decision for the show.
So I put together the production board for Bill and came up with a budget of something like 250 K for a 28 day shooting schedule. Of course the film was never made but I learned a valuable skill that I was able to parlay into some paying gigs and it gave me an entrée into the production department. Next I will write about Lessie’s Rainbow where I actually did this on a show that got made. Pretty much.

Greetings all visitors From the Brat!

2006-12-07T16:01:00.000-08:00

And welcome. I make no claims to be anywhere near as interesting a writer as The Brat or the others that I link to but welcome and if you wish say hello.

My blog is about my life as a film maker in seattle back during the 80s and projects that I am working on presently. I am currently not working on anythign other the preproduction on a simple show and taking ideas for simple scripts as noted below. Thanks to both Matthew and Iwanski for helping me out. Matt is still working on his script but I really like the story. And Iwanski has sent me a draft that I managed to format last night before I was whisked off to the Neighbors for supper. (See Here's the Thing) There will likely be some editorial process involved in both shows to tighten em up for production but that is to be expected.
These are going to be Consumer grade budget productions so I wont be rentign trucks or cameras and Crafty will likely be what happens to be in the kitchen. and thats cool I want to keep it low key and still come up with good story. For lo, Story is key. So I will use daylight for the exteriors and practicals and my two smith victors for lights and like I said color corrected photo floods. Hey Thats how they lit American Grafitti. If Only I could get Ron Howard.
Anyway I intend to do both shows and have at least on in the can before the new year.
I am disapointed that Yas did not have any Ideas but perhaps she did not see the post.
Laters

Perhaps a bit with a dog

2006-12-06T15:56:00.000-08:00

[NOTE] I deleted the previouse post as a bud posted a comment with his email asking that I delete the comment after I got it. I was unable to do so so I just deleted the post
Then republished yet
So I am waiting for a story to tell and I was thinking about lighting. I would love to get myself a small assault package that would be close to what we used for Sans Vie but that would be very expensive. But a boy can dream cant he? I have two Smith Victor lights that are 500 watt tungsten (One of the bulbs is borked) but that is pretty much it. Gripy stuff like a few C Stands and sandbags and flags would be cool but are not absolutely necessary. It suddenly occurred to me that all I really need to do is to replace my practical fixtures with color corrected bulbs. They are certainly expensive but no where near as bad as buying lights. With a variety and the Smith victors I could conceivably light my house to do the show.
Matthew says he would let me use a scene or two out of a feature script he is working on which would be cool. I hope that he comes through. But I was really hoping one of my readers that have an idea for a short film could come through. I can execute but I am just not that good a writer. Again something for the kid 12 years old and the spouse to play off each other. More drama than comedy but it can be humorous or at least have a sense of humor. The location is the home/car and perhaps a not too populated exterior / suburban street. Or the park.

Snow Day In Seattle

2006-11-28T10:10:00.000-08:00

I had to drive in to work today but I got to use the 4wd which is uber butch. If you go to Lorraine's blog you will see pictures and a story from the perspective of our house in south seattle. Pretty pahetic. Now My office is in a town called Issaquah which is right at the base of the foothills of the cascades. here we got some major snowage.
Follows are some pix form the back of my building provided by a coworker, Christine.
Thanks Christine!
Dom, you will note that there are no Zombies.

The view across the little lake.

Another perspective of the view showing the little bridge

The opposite angle

A challenge

2006-11-27T09:51:00.000-08:00

It has been a while since I posted anything having to do with films. And really, that is the whole point of this blog is to be a chronicle of my film making adventures past present and future. So why have I not posted? Quite simply I really have nothing to say. I have been so wrapped up in the new projects that it was interesting for me to write about them. Lots of pictures and new stuff going on. The sad truth is that aside from a show that I have no idea what it is about and was supposed to shoot this past weekend but was postponed, I have nothing going on. Which is sad. I want to do another film. One on the cheap using my camera and lights and kid. But I have no idea what the story should be. I am thinking something Tweenie and angsty with simple settings and dialog so the kid can do it but beyond that I have not idea. I am really not a writer. Any thoughts out there. Yasamine or Iwanski, wanna write up a short 4 or 5 page script and see it done? Something involving a 12 year old kid and maybe her Mom? We can do interiors and maybe some exteriors and I have a cool dolly that I want to use. Any other suggestions would be appreciated. Just clean and simple with basic structure and arc.
And a big thanks and shout out to Barista Brat for including me in her links. She is fun to read.
Now that the flood gate has been opened I think I’ll write up a bit about the past in the next couple of days. There is a lot to say about it.
laters

I think She says it better

2006-11-20T12:30:00.000-08:00

I am speaking of our blog buddie JLo from Texas. The Subject is OJ and the mood is outrage. besure to follow the link at the bottom of her post an sign the pettition

I Admit It, I Did It

2006-11-10T13:21:00.000-08:00

I want to tell the world that I am sorry, I did it and That it was wrong and bad of me.
We saved 3 taquitos for the child to eat with her lunch from dinner Wednesday. I came home last night and found them still in the fridge. Thinking they were fair game I selfishly shoveled them into my cake hole in an act of hubris and gluttony.
I found out that they were intended for Todays lunch packet and she was greatly disapointed.
Sorry boof.

This is the only path to Grish's Redemption

2006-11-10T09:54:00.000-08:00

Take the test and have your geek points redeemed

Presenting Lorraine

2006-11-09T09:27:00.000-08:00

Doing her best Eurotrash
Lorraineskya Fabulovna

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Happy Elections

2006-11-07T20:05:00.000-08:00

In Keeping with the French Movie Tradition

2006-11-04T14:33:00.000-08:00

Last year I found some footage that Dylan had shot on christmas break with her mom. I thought it would be a cute edit. So with out any further ado here is Mon Couer.

Mon Couer

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San's Vie Teaser

2006-10-29T16:41:00.000-08:00

Is right here
Sans Vie - Teaser (Questions)

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Those searching Ryan Sibley

2006-10-24T15:30:00.000-07:00

OK This is just silly. A year and a half after posting this I still get hits from all over the world seeking to check out Ryan's beefcake shot.

That is just Sad.

And Ryan if this is you....That is just sadder :)

And for you DoD fans

2006-10-16T19:59:00.000-07:00

a Linkin Park Video

Finally Saw Dailies

2006-10-16T09:38:00.000-07:00

This Saturday Matt, Mark and Bruce came by and we watched pretty much all the footage we shot for Sans Vie. Overall it all looks pretty good. The performances are fantastic and the for the most part the lighting did exactly what I wanted it to do. The only exceptions being where it appeared on my TV some scenes seemed to be too dark. Increasing the brightness fixed the issues. The dinner scene really was disappointing in that it was colder then I had expected it to be. Very stark. As in the previous post the picture from Jessica Stein, was what Matt was looking for but given the location and the lighting it was really like I said cold. Not bad but was not what I had hoped for. One of the key mistakes I made was that we wanted to cut the light about 2/3s down the far wall. I used the barn doors to achieve this and it took too much of the light off the far wall. I really should have used the scrims to cut this back. Live and learn. It is usable though and that is the good thing. The hallway stuff looks great and it turned out to be exactly how I had envisioned it to be. The deuce played very nicely at the end of the hall and created some really nice layering. Though we are going to have to do some level and color correction in the final copies.
One of the issues we ran into was that we had concluded at the beginning that the camera was running at about 125 ASA and then mark changed his mind and we bumped it up to about 200. These were the slides we kept in our meters. The truth of the matter was that the different lenses used changed the relative speed of the camera and we should have changed our slides accordingly. Mark and I discussed this and concluded that a day of testing would probably have been smart. Again Live and learn.
The exteriors I really did not take part in because I had a wedding to attend but man oh man that stuff looks great too. I think that we have a real special show here and I cannot wait to see a rough cut.
The wrap party is this Friday and Matt says there will be a trailer available after that. When he posts it in his myspace I’ll make a link.

On another sad note, If you recall my post last summer about Fortune hunters at the Kau Kau BBQ, Swish the fish has passed away. Take a momemnt

Also Blogspot seems reticent to allow images so no Picture for you

Whats Next From The Movies?

2006-10-11T20:27:00.000-07:00

First lets get rid of the homo erotic images and replace it with this hamster. Take a look at a preview of my next "The Movies" Film, a satire based on this one we made last year.

Get this video and more at MySpace.com

EDIT Rereading this I find that there is absolutly no preview of my next sim movie. My bad. My intent was to build buzz among my reader, Can you Buzz for me Grish?

Help Out a Bro in the 28th

2006-10-10T08:49:00.000-07:00

One of the guys in the 28th is up for Bacholer of the year in Cosmo. Go figure
Help the guy out and give him a vote. Details Below:

Alright everyone, heres the deal. As some of you may know, I am taking an LOA about a week long starting at the end of this week. The reason being is because these 2 girls I know apparently submitted me to Cosmopolitan Magazine a few months ago for this contest. I received a phone call a while back stating this, and that I had been selected as the 2006 bachelor of Massachusetts. I guess they pick 1 guy from each state. Not knowing anything about this, needless to say I was a little surprised and taken back. But anyways, we flew to NYC back in June for a photoshoot and interviews and what not, which is then put into their November issue. The readers vote for their favorite, and the winner is name 2006 Bachelor of the Year and gets a bachelor pad makeover worth over $15,000 from LG. They are bringing us all back to NYC this week for a big bachelor party and TV appearances so thats why I am going on LOA.

So what I need from all of you is a small favor. Voting for this contest is online, and it opens this Tuesday, October 10th at 12:01AM and closes Thursday, October 12th at 11:59PM (2 days long). I ask that if all of you could go to www.cosmopolitan.com in between this 2 day span and just vote for me, Ryan Sibley, Mr. Massachusetts, so I can win some free stuff.

I would appreciate it very much, and wish me luck!

***UPDATE***

The exact address to my link is Here

Just go there and click vote, and then click Massachusetts. The picture is horrible, but whatever, haha. And they said that you can only vote once, but Ive voted a couple times already and it hasnt said anything different. Maybe cuz voting isnt supposed to be "open" until midnight tonight?? But its letting you now, or so it seems. So I guess vote as many times as you like!! Thanks everyone

Happy Columbus Day

2006-10-09T16:18:00.000-07:00

Growing up we had this set of comedy albums, one of my favorite being Stan Freberg.
This is a link to the dialog for columbus Funny stuff and the original Maytag man played King Ferdinad.

The final Act of the gluey Series

2006-10-05T20:01:00.000-07:00

is now out Enjoy

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This is as real as it gets

2006-10-05T09:01:00.000-07:00

As some may know from a previous post I am an active member of the Day of Defeat Realism Unit, The 28th Infantry Division. (Computer game club) A number of our members are Marines and soldiers, Past and Present. One of our guys is currently serving in Iraq in the 101st Airborn, Easy company (Thats right the same Easy as in Band of brothers) He posted this the other day on the Unit Boards.

Hows it going everyone? Well my deployment is nearing an end, I cant tell you much more than that because I would be breaking OPSEC, but let it be known that Ill be becoming an active member again in the near future.

Anyways, its been getting pretty crazy around here now that the Islamic holiday/fasting month has begun, Ramadan. On the first day of Ramadan, the 24th of Sept. we got hit with a VBIED or car bomb, my squad [Edit-Leader?] was injured with shrapnel to thigh and he is now back in the states recovering. The next day a mortar landed outside our OP wall, no big deal. The next day our OP took small arms fire and sniper shots, which we followed up with a good 5-10 minute fire fight and another 5 minutes of shooting anything that moved, I fired about 200 SAW rounds, the first 100 of it I fired in 20 seconds. Ever since then weve just have IED increases, and ambushes on our vehicles rolling down the highway or sniper shots at our positions, but so far there hasnt been a day that something hasnt happened to our Platoon or Company.

So far Ramadan has turned out be the opposite of what we were all expecting, even the veterans that have been to Iraq before. We thought that they would fight hard the day prior to ramadan, then focus on worshipping Allah, then at the end of Ramadan they would use a car bomb or something to that effect. Unfortunataly its the opposite, they just fight everyday or do larger attacks than they normally would.

The insurgents that are responsible are mostly Foreign Fighters not Iraqi Freedom Fighters, in fact the Iraqi insurgents apparently had a source meet with a unit and tell us that they will not attack US troops and fight the Foreign Fighters if we keep US Troops in Iraq longer. So this is either good news or just a load of crap, but in a small way it brightens our spirits.

Well, thats about the latest, Im looking forward to rejoining the unit and having some fun. See you guys around.

By the way, Im getting eaten' alive by sand flea's as I write this!

Remember to thank the men and women in uniform that you may encounter in your day to day. They serve selflessly and are not the problem. That is in Washington

Be the First

2006-10-04T10:20:00.000-07:00

Thats right be the first to move my page views up to the 1000 mark and win absolutly nothing

Gluey II is out

2006-10-01T19:21:00.000-07:00

I love reading Wil's blog and have been doing so for many years now. I even got his first book. I really related to this post here. Not that I am an actor, but really about how being back in the circus really is a powerful thing. and finally...

Yes thats right be the first inthe blogosphere to see the action packed sequel to Gluey

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The Voice of F.E.A.R.

2006-09-26T12:58:00.001-07:00

I just found this out at lunch today. The woman in Sans Vie that plays Jolie, Melissa Roberts, is the voice of the little girl in F.E.A.R. Be afraid be very afraid.

Sans Vie - Week 2

2006-09-26T09:05:00.000-07:00

This was to be our last 3 days at the apartment location so we had a hard out Sunday night. We also had pickups to get from the previous weekend, these mostly being the reverse angles of Jolie’s interaction with the garbage man. This was scheduled for first thing Friday evening and the call was at 5:00 PM. We were limited by the amount of time the sun was going to be out since these were day interiors and we had about 5 setups to complete the scene. Matt and Stephan were going to show up at 2 to move about the apartment getting various cut away shots of architectural features and the close ups of the garbage man’s machine. This however failed because Stephan could not make it due to other commitments. But we soldiered on. We were lit and ready to go about 5:30 but the cameras did not roll for another hour or so, so we only got maybe two setups until we lost the daylight and had to postpone the rest of the pickups till later. The rest was getting night shots of Jolie in her bedroom at night. There were some great shots directly over her bed where Mark and I at exactly the same time came up with the camera rig solution to get the lens in the proper position. We took a couple of apple boxes on end and spanned the bed with a 2x4 weighted down with sand bags and place two of the tripod legs on this rig gaffer taping them down and extending the rear leg to get the level. The shot looked great and we had it rigged in about 3 minutes. There was also a shot of Jolie crossing the bedroom and entering her bathroom where we did your classic click on the light gag with a baby baby in the hall since that was where the door led to. Matt really wanted a dark room with just a bit if light on Jolie but camera complained about lack of volume and we struggled with a couple of rigging ideas before we finally just used bounce using a baby baby and a Tweenie off the ceiling with just a bit of shadow. All in all not perfect but when we stopped it down it looked good enough. Thus was the end of Friday.
Saturday had an 11 AM call and was going to be a really rough scene with Paige and Jolie eating. This was an emotional scene as Paige is really trying to get Jolie to come out and she almost succeeds until she touches Paige’s hand and Paige tosses her out. I won’t go too much more into the action but when we shot this stuff there were tears on the set. Dixi and Melissa did an amazing job. Mark Shapiro once told me that we get all these people, crew, production and talent, together for just one thing, shoot the performance. If you don’t get the performance you have wasted everyone’s time. WE worked very hard and things got a bit tense trying to keep the production moving along but in the final analysis, no one’s time was wasted. Again, I say, the performances were amazing.
But before we could get to shooting this we had to catch up on our pickups get some more bedroom stuff and get some cutaways of the fish, Mr. Happy.
Like I said Call was at 11 and we did not roll camera until after 1. We were lit and ready by 11:45.
We did spend a lot of time messing around and this was due to the fact that we did not have a 1st AD worth a shit. Matt had to be available to handle those kinds if decisions and the guy that should have been doing that job, was just ineffectual. So my struggle throughout the weekend was trying to keep from repeated relights and to try to keep from a technical standpoint the show moving. Day Night facing the windows or facing the door. This all became rather trying and I don’t blame Matt it is actually kind of how it is. And somehow we managed to struggle through. Now Matt wanted the dinner scene to be “Warm” Mark and I thought about it and mark came up with the idea that since this was supposed to be intimate and sort of sensual that we would us a Cross Back Lighting scheme.
Basically we put two Baby Babys in the corners and focused them into opposite corners creating a cross lighting. Flood em out and use the top barn doors to cut the light on the walls down to about 2/3rds so when the actor enters the room standing the light is about midriff to the floor and they sit into the light.

The intent was to create a sort of intimate setting that I think actually worked pretty damn well. Yea Mark. Matt wanted more warmth so we added the Tweenie to bang off the bounce card on the ceiling to add some fill. This bothered me since we had this great sense of shadow and light and suddenly it was becoming TV Sitcom lighting, the bad kind that is shot on Video. In reality it worked out ok as we just added volume but I have not seen those dailies yet (or any for that matter) But the editor is telling me everything looks great. I will be happier when I see them though.
Later on Matt told me that even though it was not exactly what he wanted Mark and I had given him art.

He was really thinking of this scene in Kissing Jessica Stein. But I think the warmth of this scene really comes from the depth and layers of lighting of the room and Jolie’s apartment is just too stark to pull that off.
Here are a couple if still camera shots of the lighting pointing at the door Thought these are not exactly what the Camera got you get the idea.

Sunday was more of the same and we went a bit deeper that Matt had wanted to but we managed to finish in the location and were able to wrap out. We had some kitchen shots and more living room stuff and a scene where we see Paige enter the doorway of Jolie’s apartment finally ending with a Matt Morris signature scene, the Paige having a breakdown in the bathroom, which by all accounts came off really well. I was busy wrapping out what I could and being a sensitive scene we just stayed away.

Sans Vie - Sunday

2006-09-22T13:35:00.000-07:00

So Saturday we finished up the Hallway stuff and we moved into Jolie's apartment. This was all to be shots of the garbage man showing up in the morning with his big device and telling Jolie she needs a cat. The actor we got for the garbage man was a guy from work who visually fit the role but is not an actor. I had advised Matt against that choice but he decided the the look was more important then the acting. He'll learn, actually I think he did. The point is that the scene is complex and we needed to stay on track so we could stay on schedule. The actor was just having a hard time with his lines and performance and we went through a lot of takes to get to the point where Matt needed a meeting and some ideas as how to overcome this and get the performance and the scene. We gave him some ideas including, Not using a made up language but let him speak english, and Marks Idea of singing the dialog and ADR later. What they did do was give him a couple of beers at lunch and then finally got a decent performance out of him. But by this time we were way behind schedule and had to cut a lot of the cut aways of him running his garbage machine, The Sten Creasy 200 or something like that. You can see it behind me in the photo. We also lost our daylight so we had to put off getting the reverse angles of Jolie responding to his action. All said and done it was a good weekend and we were only a little behind schedule. But the pickup shots were adding up and we needed to keep moving.
As for the lighing of the room for this daylight scene we kept it pretty simple.
We mounted 4x4 squares of whit card at opposite corners of the room at the top of the wall and the ceiling so as to create a sort of parabola and then depending on the angle of the camera would bounce the 2K off the opposite corner for general volume and then fill with a 1 K directly into the other

As noted in the diagram. We then shaped the light as needed but since it was daylight we really did not have to do too much of that. WE ofcourse had 1/2 blue on The lights and covered the windows with 3-ND. WE also had a 1 K burning in the hall to light that portion. You can see the general effect from the Photo at the top of the post and all in all it worked out pretty well.

Happy Anniversary Baby

2006-09-21T13:05:00.000-07:00

Today marks the 15th anniversary of when Lorraine and I were married. Lorraine makes a much better post on the subject but I need to say that if given the opportunity to do it all over again, I would not hesitate.
In the words of the bard Ralph Cramden, “Baby, you’re the greatest”

Very Busy

2006-09-20T09:45:00.000-07:00

Please bear with me as I have lots to say but the day job is taking up much time. new pictures too.
This is what I have Coming;
Week one Sunday We start to get to the meat of the story
Week Two Cool lighting

More Fortune Hunters Shots

2006-09-15T07:31:00.000-07:00

Thom Harp, the director of Fortune Hunters, sent me these shots yesterday so i thought I would post them up

This is me at the local Fox affiliate where we shot a news caster.

Finally a decent shot of Neil Holcomb. he is the guy behind the camera. Todd the 1st AD is to the left and Tamia is on the right. the News caster is Christine Chen.

This is the whole crew, Why am I the only one not smiling. The spouse hates that about me.

Here is a shot of 1st AD Todd being...disturbing at best.

And finally a shot of Gedde Watanabe as Mr. Yu.

More on Sans Vie later.

Sans Vie - Weekend 1 Friday and Saturday

2006-09-13T09:30:00.000-07:00

We were scheduled to shoot Friday evening, Saturday and Sunday down in George Town. And By golly that is what we did. We arrived on Friday evening about 5:00 and I got notes from Matt for the first setup. Basically we were going to shoot all the hallway stuff first. Once Mark and I got our bearings straight we were able to light in pretty short order. At this point I would like to mention that we got almost an exactly perfect package for the show at least lights wise. We have 3 Baby Baby which are 1 K Fresnel by Mole Richardson, 1 Baby Junior which is a 2 K Fresnel and a Tweenie which is a 650 watt Fresnel. I also have my open face tungsten par photo lamps for extra stuff as needed. Mark wanted to use gel for light color so we put some ¼ orange on all the heads and it was off to the races.

The hallway is a sort of L where the short leg has a stairwell to the inside and the characters apartment doors are toward the top of the long leg to the outside. There is an intersecting hall about halfway up the long leg. So we are doing both day and night here and it is of course an interior.
I put my 2K down at the top of the stairwell aimed at the hallway wall to fill in the back ground as we were shooting at or around Jolie’s doorway. Mostly stuff or her coming out and scampering back in her jammies. We also got some great stuff of Paige coming in and smoking a cigarette sitting on the floor. So I put a 1 K on the intersecting hallway to light the middle of the hall and a 1 k at the end of the hall behind the camera (whichever direction we were shooting) to act as a key. One of the things I love about Mark is he despises a world without shadow. So we used solid flags to create slashes of light wherever we were shooting and sculpted with scrims to make it all lovely.
That was the basic lighting for the halls. Once we got it, it was pretty easy to recreate and we simply had to dial it in for each shot. For the stuff with Paige smoking we had to play the Tweenie off a bounce cared cut way down to fill her in but hey that’s why we got the light to begin with. And the open face tungsten lights that I own worked great with full orange as a room light for when the doors open and we needed the splash of light.

We then moved the crew down to the stairs to shoot a hall scene at the top of the stairs where a man with a prosthetic device that gets jammed at the top of the stairs drops his groceries. Jolie refuses to help. We wrapped out about 11 PM which was right when Matt said he was going to wrap and we had every thing we needed except the reverse of Jolie at the top of the stairs.
Saturday was more hallway stuff with lots of movement and a cool scene of Paige and two of her hipster friends going out for the evening. Paige stops to get Jolie to come out with her but Jolie again refuses.
They leave and come across a dead guy being tended to by paramedics in another apartment. Dead guy showed up two hours late but it all worked out in the end. We put some minus green on the Tweenie and just gave his face a sort of greenish tone.
We also used a jib that Stephan had brought to pretty good effect. We wrapped at 11:15 and lunch was provided by some Costco people. It was delicious, Fajitas and beans. Home made.

Mark and Matt and I sat up drinking beer and yakking till late and I got home about 2:30 AM but Sundays call was not till 11 so there we go.
I’ll stop here and Post about Sunday tomorrow.

First Thing

2006-09-10T21:31:00.000-07:00

No pix just yet just a line as I am exauhsted and need my sleepy byes for the day job. I'll give a rundown as with Fortune hunters. I Found enought circuits including a 20 amp one so the distro issue is a non one.
More to come and I do have stills

Sans Vie - The Drama Begins

2006-09-08T10:28:00.000-07:00

So we start shooting tonight and we scouted the location for the next two weeks on Sunday. The space is perfect and Matt did a great job of waiting to find the right spot. It is in an old building down in George Town by Boeing field that is being renovated into affordable artist’s lofts. It’s really cool and funky. There is even a chopper shop down stairs. The location is perfect for the main action.
Except for one minor detail, there are no electrical outlets yet wired to the rooms we are going to be using. We discovered this on Sunday. But not to worry, Eric the juicer has the solution. There is an Electrical service box of about 125 amps that holds all the new breakers for the floor. We just need to get some distribution cable and connectors and tie right into the service. Or at least that’s what we would have done 15 years ago. Basically it works like this, in your electrical service there are 3 bus bars behind the breakers. The two outside bars are each carry 110 potential voltage and the middle one is known as the neutral. So your circuit goes from the neutral out to the wiring and back to the other Left or Right or rather in juicer parlance Red leg or blue leg. The white leg is neutral. So what you would do is take these clamp connectors and clamp one onto each of the busses. The connectors have a receiver about ¼ in in diameter that accepts a pin from the cable we called Banded. The image above is Banded but not the old style connectors this is using a cam lock connector. These came in 50 foot lengths of 3 4/0 cables with a male and a female end color coded Red Blue and white. You also had what were called 3fers that were one male pin that sprout 3 female pins in a sort of a Y. These were also color coded so you could tie into the service and run your power and split it off as needed. To get the 110 you needed in you added another cable called a 4 hole that connected in the same way that ended in a box about the size of a toaster that had two holes about 3” by 4” that accepted a male paddle that connected to a duplex box of regular Edison electrical outlets. Each side providing 110 power supply AC. There were also 2 hole cables for extending further and special ones that provided 220. Wire this all together and you had power anywhere you needed it limited only by the rating of the service. This was also more commonly used for hooking up to a big ass generator. Now I knew that the actual bits have changed since then due to changes in code. That is fine the theory is still the same but I needed to see the stuff to make the proper order from Pacific Grip and Electric.
This in mind I arrived at the day job at 6:30 AM to Leave at 3:30 in order to get to Seattle and finalize our grip / electric order and get a look at how the new bits fit together. Now I called Norbert to talk to him about it but he did not understand that my experience was all old school and I had left the trade just before these new distro bits had hit the streets, completely out of my experience. But He helped.
I also had to reaffirm our order was correct and after much go around with Matthew we agreed on the stuff we needed and I was going to call Stephan to make sure the stuff he said he was bringing was actually going to make it, C Stands and Flags.
So Off I go and I am making great time across the bridge and I get to MLK knowing full well that they have it torn up for the new light rail system but the traffic still flows and I did after all allow myself extra time. Then suddenly traffic comes to a standstill. So it turns out the light at Othello was out and they were having cops direct traffic. So I call Stephan and find out the grippy stuff he was bringing was actually another guys and the other guy was not going to show. So I had to adjust the order to PGL. And while I was in the middle of this discussion traffic starts to move and I start to move and my Jeep dies. Not to restart. I limp to the side of the road and Call AAA. Now all my plans are fuckered and I decided to move forward and call PGL to update and confirm the order.
THE POINT
So as I am talking to Ray at PGL I am explaining that I was coming down to see how all the new distro fit together and I started by mentioning the Clamp Adaptors. Guess what? Those have been illegal in the state for about 15 years. Now he only rents Bare Wire Tie in and to do that you need to attach a huge ass breaker to the service and then attach the bare wire tail to that. So now we are really fuckered. I have No good power supply for the lights. What to do? I tripled my Stinger (heavy duty extension Chords) order and hope like hell we can find at least 4 separate 15 amp circuits to run our lighting on Saturday.
What a great start.

Latest Movie

2006-09-06T19:29:00.000-07:00

I got the game The Movies a few months ago and it is a hoot. this is my latest masterpiece Gluey
Dont forget to vote

Edit For Yasamin my other reader
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Vacation, Now work SIGH

2006-09-06T12:04:00.000-07:00

OK I am now back at my cube after a lovely five day respite. And I have been heads down slaving away so I thought I would come up for air and make a quick post. If for no other reason then to force that scary photo of a 70s pop star gone to seed.
We start primary photography of Sans vie this Friday and that is exciting. It is good to work with Mark and Matt has gotten his shit together and found a decent location for the bulk of the show.
Unfortunaley there are no functioning outlets in the set so we are going to have to tie in to the Bus Bars on the circuit breaker that feeds that floor and I have to remember to call the electricion about shutting the power to that service. But thats cool I have done it before it has just been a while.
More next week on the shoot coming up.

Bad Movies with Leif Garrett fo $500 Alex

2006-08-29T08:01:00.000-07:00

The recent unpleasantness brought me to mind of an experience I had back in the day. And stories of back in the day are really the point of this blog. Sniffing around for work, my friend Dave asked me to go to a meeting with a guy that was trying to put a feature together here and would likely be interested in my preproduction skills. So I went and met and they seemed earnest but had not real funding. His name was Sean McGregor and he was this guy in his mid 50s with a penchant for wearing those photographers vests that are so Roland Hedely.
Don’t get me wrong. After hanging with Sean for about a year, I really grew to like him. He was full of bluster and BS and was responsible for a real bad horror show in the mid 70s called Devil Times Five. It featured a young Leif Garrett. I am not really sure what the story was about but that it involved a school bus full of demon children that overturns and then they proceed to terrorize this house or village or something. Awful stuff regardless. But Sean had history so Eric hopped onto the McGregor express and we were going to make this action adventure film. The basic plot was the Columbian drug smugglers took advantage of an earthquake. There were these children that were all broken up and were being moved to a hospital in the US. The smugglers packed the casts of these kids with drugs and somewhere over the Caribbean they played their hand and took over the plane, sawed off the casts to retrieve their drugs and tossed the kids into the sea. Nice Huh? I forget how the rest of the show was supposed to play out but it ends with a C47 doing a ballistic climb right in front of a luxury hotel in Florida. We fiddled around with that show for about a week then Sean decided against that. He was going to finish a show he started in earlier.
Remember Vanna White? Remember the talk about her doing a titty scene that she absolutely denied doing? I have a copy of the footage. Sean was the guy that made this flick. It was about biplane flyers in the mid west and they actually switch female leads somewhere into the first act. Pretty funny stuff and really poorly acted all around. Vana’s scene is just a shower scene in which they silhouette her in a transparent shower curtain and they dump cold water on her. I remember at a wrap party after doing a college multi camera project I showed the footage and one of my actors noted that, “Somewhere a calf is going hungry.” Think about it.
Anyway Sean was all full of lets start some buzz and the money would follow. WE finally gave up on the Vanna show and he pulled out this script called baked Apple. In a nutshell it is a very Brazilesque dark comedy about capital punishment and it was actually a really good script. I got to work breaking down the script and created a strip board and a reasonable budget. I think it was a 30 day shoot. We then auditioned actors and that was the end of it. You see with out really having the money to shoot you are not going to. And if you try without the money you make crap simply because you cannot afford Talent or equipment, bottom line. You do not need a lot but you need it regardless. In this case it was about 500 K by really scrimping and cutting corners. So after it became apparent that this was going nowhere I politely bowed out and bade Sean Luck.
I am not sure what ever happened to him but I do know he was all about making a gritty news show like Hard Copy that had jus hit the airwaves and was really popular. I found the host of Hard Copy to be really offensive and refused to watch it. I wonder whatever happened to that hack. I think his name was O’Reilly.

Happy Blog Birthday to me

2006-08-25T07:40:00.000-07:00

Today marks the one year birthday of my blog. And the villagers rejoiced. yeah

Of All The Unmitigated Gall

2006-08-24T09:44:00.000-07:00

Last week I recieved an email form this guy that got my contact info from the indie film website. He sent a rather long winded pitch for people to come work on his film which is a feature to be shot in the near future.
I responded stating that I may be interested and that I was busy on another project, Matt's, in september but I could perhaps give them some weekend days in October.
The other day I received another email that he sent to all who responded to him where he claimed he was going to answer all the questions he received. Fine. This turned into yet another long winded diatribe which boiled down to come and work with us on this project for deferred payment. Deferred means you will not get paid. That is cool I am not looking for paid work I just like doing the work. The right people and the right project can be a lot of fun. But given the guys propensity towards writing these incredably long emails that really imparted no information other than to make you gloss over it smacked of some guy on a scam. I have worked with these types before and even though they are sincere in wanting to make their show they never manage to do it. Or it is crap and no one gets paid.
So I check on the web and IMDB produced nothing and Google produced his web site.
I decided to decline. I thought about calling him out on his tactic but thought better of it and simply sent him an email declining participation and wished him luck.
So this morning at 7:30 I am walking to my office from the bus stop and my cell phone rings. I answer it and this guy is on the phone and starts to lecture me on how films dont happen by luck but..and I hung up. Sorry bro but dont call me and start lecturing me for declining to volunteer on your project. He called back immediatly but I just ignored the call. I mean really. All I did was wish him and his project well but chose not to take part in it and this is how he responds? Now I have serious doubts as to the future success of this show. I have been wrong in the past, as in my prediction that Chthulu would never get finished but that is the exception not the rule.

[Edit]
I recieved the following reply in my spam box this evening when I returned home

P: Why such a fucking prick?

E: How would you respond to a 7:30 AM Lecture from a complete stranger? on my cell minutes nonetheless

P: You too good for this?

E: Why yes, yes I am.

P: All I wanted to do was ask you WHY you weren't interested.

E: And I tried to spare him the real reason

P: I don't need to know.

E: Fine

P: You're just one of those overly self important pieces of shit that the industry doesn't need.

E: Not really but thanks for caring

P: Your name is now shit!

E: No, my name is Eric.

Nice huh.
I was going to keep his name out of this but I'm pissed off now so he is
Paul D. Grover
CEO Pontifex Productions

Avoid him like a plague

EDIT 9/25/2009
I deleted and turned off a few comments on this post because it became a public snark zone between the subject of this post and his EX.
Get a room kids

Chuh!

2006-08-23T09:15:00.000-07:00

So I am sitting in my cube yesterday plugging away at looking busy when I really have nothing to do. Matt walks by and says he was out and got a call from Dixi who was the UPM on Fortune Hunters. She asked him if I was available to work on a show We-Fri from ... get this, 6 PM to 4 AM. After I did the Danny Thomas Spit shot, matt explained that he really could not speak for me but the likely answer would be a resounding no. He was correct but I called her that evening and listened to her pitch. I had to explain that I have a full time day job (which she knew or at least should have known) and that I get up at 5:30 in the AM to got to afore mentioned job and Oh yeah I also make about twice what they were offering per day for this job. I thanked her for thinking of me and explained that I would be happy to work on weekends if anything came up and I had no prior engagements. I was polite. I am always polite when recruiters call. It is the the right thing to do cause you just never know when you may need em. And Recruiters like myself have a long memory.
Regradless I was flattered she called and if I had the time I would have done it.

FPS Photo Essay 2

2006-08-21T18:35:00.000-07:00

The exploration of the abandoned compound continues....

Odd Looks as if no one has played this V ball court in quite some time

Moving along the fence line there appears to be no one here. Very unsetteling

Aha Looks like an enterance. What does that sign say?

What does Zetec do...perhaps Cross Dimensional experimentation?

Maybe I play too many Half Life like games

2006-08-17T19:29:00.000-07:00

I was strolling with my coworker Matt the other day and we cam across this old apparently abandoned place that looked too much like a front for an underground Govt. complex. I half expected to see Head crabs an zombies come boiling up out of the ground. So here is my Pictorial FPS Part 1

You are Dropped down on a lonely country lane. and are enticed to corss the bridge

Odd that there should be a block to this seemingly innocent Path

Hmm I must be on the rigth track there are buildings around the bend. Lets go Investigate.

Looks overgrown and they obviously dont want any visitors

Skanky pool and no one on the grounds.

Next the game gets creepier.

Sorry

2006-08-16T19:36:00.000-07:00

Been a while since I had something to say but i had a brilliant idea and will work on the images tomorrow so please stay tuned