Thursday, September 28th, 2006 Weekend At Fango Pt 1

Sept 28th

Today(Thursday)--I'm going up early and meeting Tom Proctor, one of the actors. We're going to try to loop his dialogue in the hotel room. Should be interesting to see if it works.

Anyway, the panel is Friday at 2:00pm.

I fully expect a two-person audience. Crickets chirping in the background also. 2:00pm on the first day is not exactly a great time.

But hey, you know about beggars and choosers, right?

I'll get ya some pictures maybe. Something interesting hopefully.

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Ok, gonna give you the cliff notes version.

Set off to leave for Fango on Thursday afternoon. My car--which I have not had one single problem with since I bought it four years ago--doesn't start. Can't even jumpstart it.

I ignore the omen. Me and Zig(that's Ziegler) head to Enterprise and get a car, and bolt. We get to the hotel without incident. Then, as I'm turning around because I was at the wrong parking lot, I back into a metal pole set into the road. Yep, in my rental car. Scratch it up pretty nice.

Zig is amazed that the convention is being held in the exact same hotel as Chiller a few years back.

We get the room and I start setting up so I can loop my actors that are coming into town. A quick problem: The television is not set up to accept any input other than coaxial. My dvd player(that I need so I can play the video that my actors will loop to) won't work.

So we head out to Wal-mart. Only--in Jersey--that takes about an hour. The Wal-mart is about two miles away.

Adam Green(of Hatchet 1&2, Frozen)--

we ended up watching a flick in a hotel room with him that weekend...

Anyway, to make a long story short(too late)--we get a doodad(that's the scientific name) to make the dvd player work with the TV. We get Tom Proctor to loop his dialogue. (which is funny--he's screaming at the top of his lungs during the fight scene he's looping; it's like midnight; we're on what's been designated "The Quiet Floor"; I keep waiting for security to show up)

We then head down to see what the main auditorium looks like--it's big. And like I said--seeing Shivers on the banner, as one of the largest icons up there, was very cool.

Had some vodka, tried to get to sleep, but what really happened was I watched the remake of The Blob, then The Dead Zone, and fell asleep somewhere around 5am.

Adam Ciesielski, one of the actors from FOC2, who would also be on the panel

Day 2 to come.

Meanwhile, here's that highlight of the weekend: The banner they had on the showroom stage--that's right, Shivers is right below Bruce(the shark in Jaws). Very cool.

September 7th, 2006: Fango Invite

Pics and report to follow in the next post...

Very cool! I've just been invited to be a guest at Fango's Weekend of Horrors at the end of the month. I guess my picture will be up there sometime next week.

The very cool thing is that my 2nd wife(I'm on my 1st right now) will be there--Charisma Carpenter(of "Buffy", "Angle", "Veronica Mars", and oh yeah, Playboy). So this will be my first chance to charm her.

But seriously. There will be a special FOC2 panel with some of the cast/crew including Mark Lassise, Tom Proctor, Adam Ciesielski and Robert Ziegler. I'll premiere footage from FOC2 with a slideshow of pictures, and I think we'll even give out an actual prop head used in the film.

It's in NJ, so if you're in the area...check it out!

August 19, 2006: Director's Concern

Ok, I'll name drop. The friend noted in this post is Academy-Award nominated screenwriter Josh Olson("A History of Violence"). I've known him for something like fifteen years. That's a story in itself. (and there's a pic of us coming up in this log)


I typically send him my flicks to watch before anybody else. He gives me good feedback, which I then integrate before showing more people. 

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August 19, 2006

Let me state at the beginning that this is not meant to be a dig at my actors. (But because I'm stating this you can probably assume it's going to sound like it)

One of the things I'm mulling over as I consider my next project is how much emotion to instill in the story. You see, a story where not much happens between characters is unbearable to watch unless you've got great actors who can live and breathe your characters, so the audience can't help but identify with them.

One of the problems with my original cut of FOC was that it seemed boring. Yet, no one who read the script seemed to be bored. So after I sent the film to one of my buddies out in LA he said, "Dude, you gotta cut all this talking between the characters."

I said, "But it's character development."

He said, "Well...yeah, it would be if you had better actors. But what you got now is just boring dialogue."

So I considered what he said and maybe he's right. Again, I'm not blaming my actors--many of them are very talented. And the onus is 100% on them. Amateur directing can be unnoticeable if the actors on screen are great; the reverse is not true: Shoddy acting will be noticed regardless of how nice it's shot.

The project I'm considering is cheaper than my last couple of films--and with cheaper comes a deeper story. But the problem is, if I can't get an actor who can really sink his teeth into this main character then all I'm doing is wasting my(and my audience's) time.

Anyway, FOC2 cut is down to 1:54, but now I'm about to go through the tough-love cut. Where I trim the fat regardless of how much I like it. I expect the final cut of FOC2 to be about 1:40(100 minutes) with credits(front and end credits typically add about 6 minutes--that's right, you people with brains or calculators can figure out that the actual movie will run about 94 minutes)

August 7th, 2006

August 7th

Three words for you.

Rough. Cut. Done.

July 20th--Missed Post

Whoops, somehow skipped this one. Reading it now cracks me up, because actors and their forgetting-their-wardrobe is something that plagued me big time on my new flick "Garden of Hedon"...

July 20th
The Tuckahoe pickup. I grab some Slim Jims for Bullet, then Ziegler and Stull help me load up the car and the truck. We head to the eastern shore again.

It’s weird coming back. But I get that good memory feeling.

Frank forgets his shoes. All he has to bring is his outfit for the day. Me, I have to bring my script, all the equipment, various props for doing foley sounds, and more—no problem.

We shoot the pickup. It goes easy. We get some foley—still have that damn lumber mill making a racket but we added a line of dialogue rather than try to loop everyone’s dialogue during the day shots.

I take the guys to dinner while we wait for O’brocki to show up. Burger King. Oh yeah, craft services has nothing on me...

We go back. Frank leaves, and the rest of us go to the barn to get a couple pickup shots there. We toss O’brocki’s Pez head around for a while, then shoot a shot of him running into the barn. Only problem is that the corn, which was about 1 foot high when we shot it before is now about 6 feet high.

It’s not going to match too well. We’ll see what happens. It’s a pretty dark shot.

Then we go back to Tuckahoe and Ziegler and Stull help me do some foley. We can’t get it all done—we run out of time and the train car is locked.

But we get some good stuff. We shoot some guns which is always fun.

At this point I have 43 consecutive minutes of the film rough cut. Almost halfway there. There’s good stuff and there’s bad stuff. Will be interesting to take a look at it in the whole.

July 2006

July 23rd, 2006

Not Much To Report...


...except that it's only been about 6 weeks since we finished principle photography on FOC2, and I have 49 minutes rough-edited together. That's right, you can sit and watch 49 consecutive minutes of FOC2 already.

My rough cut should come in around 2 hours long--I'll cut that to between 90-98 minutes long. So by that account I'm around halfway finished.

But the reality is that I've edited 95% of the tough scenes. There's only two big scenes left to edit--Attack at Lynn's House and the Finale.

Sound issues are going to be huge though. There are some big problems I'm working on right now.

But when I say I'm living at my editing machine, I'm not exaggerating...

 July 9th, 2006

If you weren't on set during the shooting of FOC2 this won't make you laugh, but I think the rest of you will.

There was a scene in the film where one of the clowns, played by Clarence McNatt, shouts "WHYYYYY?"--and it became this running joke among everybody. Clarence shouts it so dramatically and his voice is so deep that it was like some booming Shakespearean query.

After that, a day or night didn't go by without someone in the cast or crew mimicking the shout of WHYYYYY--and everyone would start laughing.

Tonight I'm logging footage from the B-camera. The scene with Clarence comes on, so I'm typing the timecode and what's happening on screen. There's Clarence's face, and he suddenly yells "WHYYYYY?"

Behind me, my three year old(just turned it today) mimics in his mousy voice: "whyyyyy?"

I couldn't stop laughing--which made him do it a couple more times.

Casual Filmmaking

The funny part is that I edited a little homage to my crappy crew. It used to be up on Revver, but that web hosting service doesn't seem to be up anymore or you could see it.


But I still stand by my words here. Amateur crew can kill you, and cost you many hours of work later.

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June 27th, 2006

Ok, I'm gonna have to go off a little here. If you're one of the cast/crew who this applies to, and you get offended...well, screw you. I don't care.

I guess I was in a haze during much of the filming--there's so much on my mind that I really kind of take things minute by minute. I have to be prepared to change the plan at a moment's notice so we don't lose any time, so I'm wrapped up in my own mind a lot.

So I guess I never really quite noticed, to the full degree, just how amateur a lot of my cast/crew was. I'm speaking particularly of their habit of chatting during takes.

Seriously. I'd say roll sound, the sound guy says "Speed". Typically, on a real movie set that's where people shut up. Then I call "Action!".

But I guess I never realized just how bad it got on FOC2 until now, when I'm going through the footage. On just about every take you can hear either myself or Mun(the DP) saying "Be quiet!" or "Shut up!"

Nevermind that you'd think it was obvious that once I call action, we're taping sound. So if you're talking--DUH!--I'm going to hear your fucking voice when I later listen to the takes.

And nevermind that there are actors attempting to concentrate and put themselves in a mental place where they can believably portray a character, and hearing people whispering or giggling in the background doesn't help them.

For Christ's sake--you're on a movie set. Mun actually asked members of the crew, during more than one take, "Have you ever been on a movie set?". Mun works on real movie sets for a living, and he couldn't believe the lack of professionalism displayed.

But now it's really starting to come across now that I'm hearing it in tons of takes. And it's really pissing me off.

It's going to cost me literally WEEKS of extra work, as I go out and record a lot of foley effects I wouldn't need to--my back-up mic had excellent audio of that car driving by, except for the fact that there are people chatting in the background.

As Mun said in exasperation a number of times, "Casual filmmaking at its finest." Well, I know a number of people who won't be returning to the set of my next film.