On hold until further notice

Duty calls.

Update - Still hammering at the markets

Update - I'm still hammering away speculating in the stock market, and am managing to claw back the money it took from me.

With any luck at all, I'll be able to resume production later this Summer.

In the meantime, here's my market and finance blog: http://thetaildoesnotwagthedog.blogspot.com/

Rough cut done... We watched it... And...

It actually DOESN'T SUCK!

Ah...

I was a bit nervous before watching the rough cut with our director Bill Mitrus, our editor Caleb Kerlin, Bill's friend Jeff (who has a pretty broad depth of movie experience). After all, the possibility was that it would, em... Suck, and the only thing we could do to fix it was to start from scratch. But it doesn't. It's actually pretty good. Overall the quality is good, and there were some especially sweet moments, acting, camera and lighting-wise.

We knew ahead of time that a movie consisting of two people who don't get along trying to escape a cell or face certain death (or worse) ran the risk of being agonizingly boring (at least visually), and that we would need certain devices to get the audience out of the cell periodically. While we had planned some of these in advance, we realized there were many other good opportunities to do this, so we will of course take advantage of them.

So... On to phase two: Plan out those other scenes and the reshoots... A few of our scenes were 'blown out', most likely past the point of salvaging (and we'll need a little ADR)... So we'll get out the green screen, shoot them, edit them together, and then it's off to post.

So far so good!

WarIsBoring.com offers to give us some footage!

Hey All,

Good news, independent war correspondent David Axe (check out his excellent blog War Is Boring ) has offered to give us some real Third World hellhole war footage and stills for our opening montage.

I can't believe how lucky we are he's going to do this for us, I hope he gets home safe and we can make him a tidy sum.

-Dave

Production photos uploaded!

Here's a sample below, or browse the whole lot of them (there's a few hundred!) here.

Any photos with (Isaiah) in the filename were taken by our Intel Officer (Isaiah Tannenbaum), all others were taken by Kevin Pittinaro. Thanks Kevin!

Update - Rough cut done (sorta)

I'm going to try and update this more frequently so that everybody who helped make this movie can stay... Um... Updated.

Caleb is finished with the rough cut and is going back to make another pass at it. There's some clips he had trouble finding that somehow didn't make it onto the external hard disks I gave him. Not to worry, I have two other copies here.

Sometime after Thanksgiving we should have the VO work he needs for the "dream sequence", I'll probably shoot some more of the kids during that period.

With any luck, we'll have the President and Rebel Leader shot by the end of December. I hope to have comittments for the CG SFX, sound design and music composition by then.

So far we're on track to be at the festivals by Spring.

So far so good!

Best always to all of you,

Dave

PS Once we have a full rough cut we're havin' a parrrrty wooo! : )p

Finally going back to see my wife...

...After TWO MONTHS away from home. Which in hindsight, isn't all that much time considering how much we got done.

I think I misunderestimated how much fourteen days of very high levels of mental effort combined with a fair amount of emotional strain coupled with the physical requirements of 14-16 hours of work take out of you. For the last six weeks I feel like I've been operating at 50%.

BUT... In addition to getting most of the secondary photography done, I also managed to flip 23 hours of high-def footage, get it into a suitable editing computer, and get it to our editor Caleb (who's last editing project looks like it's goin' to Sundance(!), whoo hoo!)

Oh yeah... Did I mention that using a 35mm adapter makes your recorded image come out upside down, and then will require you to flip it in post?

I was aware of that going in, but one thing I hadn't counted on is that it would take 34 hours of processing time on a fast* computer to flip that much material... And Premiere will CRASH if you try and flip much more than 50gb at a time (we had just over a terrabyte), so I'd have to set the computer to flip clips for 1 1/2 hours, set a timer, then come back and do it again... And again.

Next time I'm using multiple computers. Actually, next time I'll have enough clams to use a 4k camera and will have a ginormous raid storage device, and will probably have a whole other set of post-production hurdles to vault.

Anyhow, the footage is now going through it's rough cut stage. Yeaaahh..!

-Dave


*Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.40GHz (quad core, 8MB Cache 1066MHz FSB), Intel 975XBX2KR socket 775 Motherboard, 4 gigs of PC6400 DDR2 800MHz Memory, ATI Radeon X1650 Pro 512MB GDDR2 PCI Express Video Card, RAID 0 w/4 Seagate 320GB 7200RPM 16MB cache SATA-300 drives. Fast.