Key Art

Why am I blogging a poster of this Dredd?

Because I AM! That's why.
As far as you know.
Actually, it's quite a spectacular piece of key art.

Key Kapow

Bill Cunningham does "The Case for Wide-Screen Key Art".
I'm glad I'm not involved in art. Indeed, it seems I'm barely involved in the movie-making process at all.

Kapow is a time-clock program. It seems pretty cool.

Rendering Robots

Annalisa Loeffler takes on the cleaner 'bot in Dead Residents.

Ian Hubert has been compositing robots like a genius.

Strange Works

Strangewerks Films movie Lifeform has quite a bit of crossover to Pandora Machine movies. Indeed the star of Lifeform, Virginia Logan, is the star of our new movie Dead Residents.
Brian Schiavo talks about animating the creature. Our own Nathan Taylor worked on the rigging of the monster.

Maduka Steady as the evil robot Argus in 1202 (stills for key art).

No Live

So that interview scheduled for tonight?

Postponed.

Weather.

Interview, Live

Tomorrow night, Wednesday January 22nd, I'll be interviewed on Nerdgasm with Johnny Horror. Live stream is here. The show is from 10pm to 11:30pm US Eastern Time. There will be a bunch of other filmmakers. It'll be cool.

FCP, Carrara, Vocalign

Oh look. For $150 (or even $50) you can actually fix FCPX so that it's usable in a professional environment. X2ProAudioConvert will make AAF files out of the FCPX timeline.
This is actually a big freakin' deal.
The OMF export issue was the number one problem with FCP X.
Now that doesn't mean there aren't other problems when editing and delivering a feature film. For one I'm worried about the way FCP X handles assets.

Carrara to Blender is not the easiest thing in the world.
You need this Python script.
Thea is another render engine. I don't understand render engines.
Video Copilot Metropolitan.
Synchro Arts makes Vocalign. If I get really frustrated with syncing ADR dialog I might just buy it.

Yeah, "COI-O3" says "Soyuz"

John Bruno on the high cost of free.
Talking to a producer/line-producer I just heard of another way saving money is more expensive: if you have a production which is reliant on tax credits for financing and you think if you go for a cheaper rental (where you have to pay in cash) it can end of costing you considerably over a rental (where you pay by check.)

Here's a great article from Don't Shoot the Costumer on shooting sex scenes. She lists a lot of cool products one can use to "cover up" with. If you're doing nudity and you want tools to make not-nude seem nude, or nude to be non-explicit nude it's a great article to check out.

Joshua James

Hey, dig this: Joshua James (who wrote Alien Uprising) wrote the new Claude Van Damme movie Pound of Flesh.

Festivals

The general feeling about film festivals in the genre world I live in is that they're a waste of money and time. There's only a handful of festivals where anybody ever makes any deals (Sundance, Tribeca?, Toronto, Cannes) and between

1. how difficult they are to get into and 
2. how low is the likelihood of getting distribution out of them, 

they're just not worth it.

Yesterday I had a conversation with a fairly well known art-house movie producer. His opinion of film festivals is, to put it charitably, as bad as mine. Fact is he has more contempt for them than I do. By and large he just doesn't bother with them anymore.

And that's for arthouse movies. I mean good grief.
So anyway, don't hold your breath waiting for film festivals to be in the Pandora Machine business model.
I'm not really sure how film festivals are relevant to most of the film industry. I suppose I shouldn't worry about it as we can't get our movies even into genre-specific festivals.

Music for Dragon Reign

Dude, have you seen the behind-the-scenes video about the composing of the score of Dragon Reign by the Hurry Brothers?


V-Blog Episode 1 from Hurry Hurry on Vimeo.
Click through to embiggen.

The Wills of the Machine

Get into the mind of the man inside the robot suit. Jeff Wills on being an android.

And yeah, where are those elbow rockets?

Day 13 of Dead Residents

I do wish this picture were more in focus. It's hard to selfie with a DSLR. Virginia Logan makes me look much better.

Steve Deighan fights off a plague of zombies. I'm channeling my... what was that movie? Susperia?

Anne Michele and Vincent Marano play the Goldfinches. I haven't seen Vinnie almost since Theatresource went bust. It was awesome working with him again.

Mary Murphy, Steve Deighan, Vincent Marano, Anne-Michele Abbot, Virginia Logan, Sarah-Doe Osborne, and Matthew Trumbull. The walls are by Marcie Kintish. Lighting by the Marsian Queen. Note that the top of the frame will be chopped off at a 3:1 ratio in this movie.

Big day today. We shot this, our final day of principal photography on Dead Residents from noon until 9pm. Without lunch. I feel a bit jerky-terky about that but everybody just wanted to press on through (and we did have lots of snacks) so we make it sort of a "French hours" day.
We did shoot a boat-load of dialog. We actually had the writer on set! He brought a friend. We had another friend-of-a friend. And we didn't feed anybody!

Dead zombies in the hallway. Dirk Voetberg, Tarantino Smith, Khalid Low, Kate Britton, Steve Niles (the writer for crying out loud!) and Pete Torres (who we made play the robot in a number of scenes.)

Here's a great shot of Khalid showing The Martian Queen's brilliance at making bullet holes.

We also had help from Pete Torres, a buddy of Mozz Mendez who lives here in Jersey City. He became our designated sound department.
Did we shoot our storyboards? Not really. I found a better angle than what I could get from the boards and we shot our way out mostly with that.

Instead of Storyboarding

Instead of doing the storyboarding I'm supposed to do for Sunday's shoot, I'm writing this post.

Ian Hubert's robot from Tears of Steel is coming for you in Dead Residents.

If you want to know how real movies are made, read John J. Bruno's blog. Here he talks about color revisions in scripts.
I try to print as few versions of scripts as possible in hard copy. We don't print versions in different colors at all. We try to use file version numbers ("1202 Dead Residents v6.08" etc.) although sometimes that screws us up.
Starting on this movie I've noticed people on set are using iPads much more. There's some fancy-pants software for actors to mark up .pdf files and even read sides with you and such. I suppose I should find out what that app is.

Phillip Drawbridge is selling the 3D model of the HMS Fairborne.

Wow. I wish there were a good Carrara to Blender exporter. I'm totally buying it anyway. We'll figure it out. I wish our ship in Prometheus Trap looked this good.