Thursday, March 31, 2011

Text Deliverables

Here's the place I'm putting my list of extra deliverables for Battle: New York, Day 2


EPK or standard press kit or production information stats; synopsis, trt, aspect ratio etc etc. Any quotes, any festivals, any write ups, anything? Who's in it? New art will be up in June.

We don't actually have an EPK but we'll come up with... something. And of course there's no festival play. Ooh. But we do have some extra and groovy pictures of Tina Tanzer (in front of a blue screen) we should send them. 

Oh but wait. That's not the really exciting part of the coming week. Our sales rep wants pictures of Robowar before we begin shooting!

And then we also need to finish with the visual effects shots for Earthkiller... soon. Like in 2 weeks.

"Would be great to get a few stills of the robot(s) in the next week or so for the teaser artwork.  Maybe one or two of the lead actresses/actors.
Can I get all /most of the Earth Killer finished efx shots by mid april for the trailer?"


OK. I'm on it!

Monday, March 28, 2011

I can has robots?

Ian came up with a couple sketches of robots for Robowar. This first fellow with the round head is your standard-issue combat robot.

Next up is the "big bad". It's an arachnid-type bot with an unusual head.

Saturday, March 26, 2011

New Schedule

OK, so now we're down to an 8-day schedule for Robowar.
Actually, we're lying. There's a hidden 9th day of robot fighting.
Does this mean we get to keep 8-hour days? Nope. It means there's going to be a couple 12-hour-days. I see them. In my mind's eye, Horatio.
But we do get to take Easter weekend off.
Anyway, our schedule looks like this now:

Saturday
Sunday
Chamber C/Chamber C Airlock (4)
Saturday April 9
1. Foxwell
2. Hammermill
3. Yurra
4. Rathbone
Offices/Elevator and Lobby
Sunday April 10
1. Foxwell
2. Hammermill
3. Yurra
4. Rathbone
5. Tango
6. Cage
8. Doc Ponce
Guardian Corridor (2)
Saturday April 16
1. Foxwell
3. Yurra
EXT Newark (7)
Sunday April 17
1. Foxwell
2. Hammermill
5. Tango
6. Cage
7. Moony
11. Arkady
12. Beckett
Easter weekend offEaster weekend off
Corridor B (7)
Saturday April 30
1. Foxwell
2. Hammermill
3. Yurra
4. Rathbone
5. Tango
6. Cage
8. Doc Ponce
Fabrication Shop (5)
Sunday May 1
1. Foxwell
2. Hammermill
3. Yurra
4. Rathbone
6. Cage
Robot Rooms / Welding Shop
Saturday May 7
1. Foxwell
2. Hammermill
3. Yurra
4. Rathbone
5. Tango
6. Cage
8. Doc Ponce
INT Ulysses, EXT Compound (8)
Saturday May 8
1. Foxwell
2. Hammermill
3. Yurra
4. Rathbone
5. Tango
6. Cage
8. Doc Ponce
9. Bellware

Friday, March 25, 2011

Costume Notes II

Millennium Crisis -- Foxwell?

1. Foxwell -- F
Pleather pants
Boots
black top
Nehru-collar jacket


2. Hammermill -- M
is dressing himself -- 


3. Yurra
I think we may end up going with a wig and black tights with accessories -- the "Solar Vengeance" look. We have all the costume pieces


4. Rathbone -- M
I have no idea


5. Tango -- M
No idea


6. Cage -- F
We discussed a dark body suit with mock turtle collar
boots (she owns a pair of chamois black boots)
A red collar, perhaps some sort of red wrist accessories? 
A short "Ike" jacket with epaulets?
A flashlight on her shoulder


7. Moony -- M
Is dressing himself
Solar Vengeance -- Yurra?


8. Doc Ponce -- M
You got me. We do have this tan flight suit. 


9. Bellware -- M? F? 
No idea at all

Robowar bible

A simple android assassin.
I love the arm-thingies on this. Perhaps Cage has these sorts of things.
As always, nice armor.
So I'm working on some ideas for costumes for Robowar.
Spoke to Juanita Arias about Cage today. She suggested dark blue tights with a red collar. I like the idea of maybe a kind of stylized Ike jacket, big red chronometer on her left wrist, and a light on her left shoulder.

Martin, Our Teacher

The groovy Louyi Tang directed this feature, "Martin Our Teacher". It looks hugely expensive. Tim Naylor was DP (he's also directed stuff our own Maduka Steady has been in.)
Check out the Trailer.

Thursday, March 24, 2011

Three Important Business Issues Today

Troma gets a video on demand channel.

Netflix, obviously irked with HBO, is doing its own producing now. Interesting that Netflix is in competition with HBO. Now if they'd only buy 26 episodes of my TV series.
British complaining about the level of background music on TV. The BBC is very hierarchical about audio levels -- worse than any US network. It's a problem because discussing "volume" in recorded audio can get very complicated and subjective very fast.

Wednesday, March 23, 2011

The Schedule For Robowar

This convienent schedule shows you which character plays on which day. Did I really spell "convenient" correctly?
Welding Shop (6)
Friday April 1
1. Foxwell
2. Hammermill
3. Yurra
4. Rathbone
6. Cage
8. Doc Ponce
Fabrication Shop (5)
Saturday April 2
1. Foxwell
2. Hammermill
3. Yurra
4. Rathbone
6. Cage
NT Offices (7)
Sunday April 3
1. Foxwell
2. Hammermill
3. Yurra
4. Rathbone
5. Tango
6. Cage
8. Doc Ponce
INT Elevator/Lobby (7)
Friday April 8
1. Foxwell
2. Hammermill
3. Yurra
4. Rathbone
5. Tango
6. Cage
8. Doc Ponce
Chamber C (4)
Saturday April 9
1. Foxwell
2. Hammermill
3. Yurra
4. Rathbone
Guardian Corridor (2)
Sunday April 10
1. Foxwell
3. Yurra
(depending on how we shoot Rathbone could be here)
INT Ulysseys -- (8 cast)
Friday April 15
1. Foxwell (11 days)
2. Hammermill (10 days)
3. Yurra (10 days)
4. Rathbone (9 days)
5. Tango (7 days)
6. Cage (9 days)
8. Doc Ponce (7 days)
9. Bellware (2 days)
10. Westley (not real person)
Robot Rooms (7)
Saturday April 16
1. Foxwell
2. Hammermill
3. Yurra
4. Rathbone
5. Tango
6. Cage
8. Doc Ponce
NT Corridor B (7)
Sunday April 17
1. Foxwell
2. Hammermill
3. Yurra
4. Rathbone
5. Tango
6. Cage
8. Doc Ponce
EXT Newark (7)
Saturday April 23
1. Foxwell
2. Hammermill
5. Tango
6. Cage
7. Moony
11. Arkady
12. Beckett
EXT Ulysses, EXT Compound (8)
Sunday April 24
1. Foxwell
2. Hammermill
3. Yurra
4. Rathbone
5. Tango
6. Cage
8. Doc Ponce
9. Bellware
10. Westley?

Getting guns for us

I just got a couple of these M249 airsoft guns.



They're pretty nice. They look good and have the right weight to them. One issue though is that although it says they're only $19.95, the shipping is another twenty-five bucks. So yeah. There's that. But it's worth it as a $45 gun.

Now the man with the plan Brian Schiavo is going to do some makeup on the guns so they look more right for us.

We have to have guns for:
Foxwell
Hammermill
Rathbone (unless he uses David Frey's Autogun)
Doc Ponce
Cage
Tango

Battle: New York, Day 2

So we have an official title for the movie previously titled "Day 2".

Battle: New York, Day 2

David Ian Lee came in and did the voiceover (in the first person) for the new North American trailer:


Battle: New York, Day 2 Trailer North America from Ralph Boswell on Vimeo.

Costume Notes

FOXWELL (F) Tight leather pants, tall black boots, a bomber jacket over a sleeveless undershirt, a BLASTER strapped to her thigh. She scans the horizon with BINOCULARS.
To her left:
HAMMERMILL (M) Black fatigues and flak jacket, he has a RAIL GUN slung over his shoulder and his eyes are down, intently reading his SCANNER.
TANGO (M) Communications specialist. He has a BACKPACK with an ANTENNA sticking out. He wears a HEADSET.
CAGE (F) Sniper.
MOONEY (M) Heavy weapons specialist. Carries a quad-mini gun with 50-caliber incendiaries.

Other than Bellware, who wears a star, and Doc who wears a faded RED CROSS, they wear no identity badges or insignias; they're ghosts.
They're also, each of them, battle scarred and in some way BIONICALLY ENHANCED. Clearly, they've seen some action.

Doc Ponce, the medic - holds a TABLET. The computer projects a 3-d hologram of a transvestite stripper. PONCE salivates, adjusting the PROSTHETIC EYE PIECE that is attached to his head. The stripper will be played by your mom. UPDATE: this bit of business has been cut.

Here's a list of Russian Swear Words

It's implied that Rathbone carries a grenade launcher. And they're apparently carrying explosives. So a couple knapsacks are in order.


Monday, March 21, 2011

Script notes

You're sitting around thinking to yourself  "Boy I'd love to see the raw, unedited, script notes you get from David Frey about the robot war screenplay which, apparently, you have to finish before you start shooting the movie in 10 days."

The ISS. Note the complete lack of visible stars in the BG. It's like a bad composite.
So I'll help you. We'll start with a question I asked to the guys:

Why isn't Doc Ponce with the rest of the guys when they save Prince Beckett? Is it because we don't like the actor playing Doc Ponce and want to have fewer days with him on set? Is it for some other reason? Is that just a legacy issue in the script? 
That's a good question. One would assume that the team have a medical person with them, although Predator didn't have any medical people around. Doc Ponce not showing up until later didn't bother me, although you may be right, you might have to explain why.
Ending version 1:
Foxy is running back to save Yurra. Foxy begins rescuing yurra, but it's too easy, the trap snaps. Foxy learns the A.I.'s evil plan.
Foxy says "you'll stick that thing in me over my dead body". Foxy and Big Bad start battling it out. Foxy is kicking the bad bots ass, until, bad bot rallies and gets the upper hand. About to have the chip inserted,
A.) Yurra sliders her laser sword to Foxy and foxy strikes the final blow
B.) Yurra comes flying through the air striking the final blow
C.) Yurra says "No Momma bad bot, she's mine" and in Temple of Doom Fashion winks at Foxy and jams her laser sword into the big bad.
Yurra and Foxy make their Hollywood run, jump explosion escape by the bionic skin on their behinds. 

Ending version 2:

1.)Foxy grabs BFG from bellware and says she's gonna go balls to the wall and save Yurra
2.)Foxy stalks her way down to AI mainframe to find Yurra
3.)Foxy get's to main frame and falls into the A.I.'s trap. A.I. explains the thing about inserting the chip to kill all humans
4.) Foxy want's Yurra to insert the chip or Yurra offers to insert chip
5.) Foxy grabs laser sword and kills big bad, or Yurra does "Hollywood Explosion Jump"

Sunday, March 20, 2011

Screening

Today we had our screening for Day 2. You know this picture is going to end up being called "Battle: New York, Day 2" right?

Screenings can be harrowing for me. There's always some dang thing which goes wrong. Today the sync in act 5 on the screener DVD went out. Yeah, it's all part of our screener DVD curse.

Other than that, though, it was enlightening to see the picture with an audience. One thing I've always felt about this movie is that the performances are strong. Like S T R O N G. And it's a good little script, which helps.

We probably got a few more laughs just because the actors delivering those lines were actually in the audience. But people kept with the story. And almost everyone dies. Oops. I didn't mean to give that part away.

Friday, March 18, 2011

Somebody's making notes again.

According to this article, an episode of Burn Notice costs about $2million to produce. That's for between 4 million and 6 million viewers. That's fifty cents a head. Well, up to fifty cents.

Looks like Leverage gets high 3 millions of viewers in the US. And according to the most infallible of sources (posts on messageboards):

Doctor Who has a budget of about £1M per episode (which translates to about $1.7M). That's not much lower than American TV - I know Firefly had a budget in that region, and John Rogers referred to Leverage (which, I'll grant, has less FX than Doctor Who, but OTOH they have five regulars instead of two) as having a "bog-standard" $2M per episode budget.

So when budgeting air time, what do the Networks think their air-time costs? Or do they even think of it that way? I suppose if you could guarantee 6 million people watching your show, you get to spend two million dollars per episode.

But it gets weirder. Battlestar had a decent run and its ratings were lower than Firefly's. So the decision-making isn't that straightforward. We intend to learn it.

IRL

Our man David Frey is designing his own gun for Robowar.
Also, I finally met Ian Hubert. In real life! We've known one another for nigh on 10 years online. He's in the midst of a bunch of exciting projects, many of which include Project London.

Hey -- you know we have a screening of Day 2 on Sunday the 20th at 2pm at the Gibson in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, right?

Thursday, March 17, 2011

Zombies and Teenagers

Remember how this is my Internet notebook? Ha! It don't always make for good reading. Well here are my notes:

So I've been thinking about how I'm going to make this TV series. I even picked up a copy of Crafty TV Writing (Crafty Screenwriting is one of my favorite screenplay books). And I've been watching a lot of Buffy on Hulu.

That should be enough, right?

So I'm thinking the two natural elements that provide instant drama.
Teenagers and zombies.
Making a story with teenagers in it means that any amount of drama can happen. Teenagers specialize in the stuff. The fascist zoo that is High School is prime breeding ground for drama. Going from child to adult is really really emotionally rough. It would be rough even without the hormonal catastrophe that's being a teenager.
_____
How does Buffy not turn into a soap opera? There's plenty o'drama, interpersonal relationships, but... it goes somewhere. And that's what I like. The seasons each lead up to killing a "big bad" and each season explores more about Buffy and her friends. And her friends are fascinating. You want to hang out with them.
And not only do you care about their problems, their problems are going somewhere. This is something that drives me nuts about soap operas -- the actors don't even know if they're lying in a scene because they don't know what direction they're going in.
_____
I'm also thinking about the movie Brick which set it's noir environment in a modern California high school and it just made so much sense. Emotionally that was just right.
My series will be more like X Files I think. More "monster of the week". But the through-line must be as put together as Buffy, which is pretty much the model of TV shows that have 7 real seasons. The story in X Files wasn't all that awesome. But seeing Mulder and Scully fight supernatural crime was pretty awesome.

The other thing is that I don't want to do all this work myself. I want a writer's room.

And lastly it seems to me that 44 or so minutes of TV show is just a wrong amount of time for a show. I also think that 22 episodes a season are too many. Law & Order does a nice save on the 44-minute timeline. They do two different shows. One is a bit longer than 20 minutes -- that's the police procedural part. The next one happens in the last third where the show becomes a courtroom drama.

And there are some Buffy and X-Files episodes which just aren't very good. And even in the middling ones you can tell they're juicing for time. And that just doesn't happen in Law & Order. But also L&O shows are completely self-contained, they can be shown in any order.

So the teenager device with Buffy works great. And so does the overall arc of the show. There are enough characters to keep up a 44-minute show (although 22 episodes a season is just too much.)



Ephraim Hoffman, Vampire Hunter
Ephraim O'Connor, Vampire Hunter
_____
Zombies make for instant drama. You can add zombies to any story and instantly the stakes are higher. You can make a zombie tale inside of almost any other genre. And no, I'm not talking about Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.
_____
Gotta say I agree with this article. Being the smallest of the micro-studios, and actually being faced with the same problems albeit on a vastly smaller scale, I have a lot of sympathy for the big studios and the way they make their decisions.
_____
I heard from... er... a source -- that even NuImage gets complaints from buyers about using the same stars in their movies over and over. Good grief, if they get complaints, what about us?

More Specifics

INT Ulysseys -- (8 cast)
Friday April 15
1. Foxwell (11 days)
2. Hammermill (10 days)
3. Yurra (10 days)
4. Rathbone (9 days)
5. Tango (7 days)
6. Cage (9 days)
8. Doc Ponce (7 days)
9. Bellware (2 days)
10. Westley (not real person)
EXT Ulysses, EXT Compound (8)
Sunday April 24
1. Foxwell
2. Hammermill
3. Yurra
4. Rathbone
5. Tango
6. Cage
8. Doc Ponce
9. Bellware
10. Westley?
EXT Newark (7)
Saturday April 23
1. Foxwell
2. Hammermill
5. Tango
6. Cage
7. Moony
11. Arkady
12. Beckett
INT Elevator/Lobby (7)
Friday April 8
1. Foxwell
2. Hammermill
3. Yurra
4. Rathbone
5. Tango
6. Cage
8. Doc Ponce
INT Offices (7)
Sunday April 3
1. Foxwell
2. Hammermill
3. Yurra
4. Rathbone
5. Tango
6. Cage
8. Doc Ponce
INT Corridor B (7)
Sunday April 17
1. Foxwell
2. Hammermill
3. Yurra
4. Rathbone
5. Tango
6. Cage
8. Doc Ponce
Robot Rooms (7)
Saturday April 16
1. Foxwell
2. Hammermill
3. Yurra
4. Rathbone
5. Tango
6. Cage
8. Doc Ponce
Welding Shop (6)
Friday April 1
1. Foxwell
2. Hammermill
3. Yurra
4. Rathbone
6. Cage
8. Doc Ponce
Fabrication Shop (5)
Saturday April 2
1. Foxwell
2. Hammermill
3. Yurra
4. Rathbone
6. Cage
Chamber C (4)
Saturday April 9
1. Foxwell
2. Hammermill
3. Yurra
4. Rathbone
Guardian Corridor (2)
Sunday April 10
1. Foxwell
3. Yurra

Here is the actual schedule for Robowar.