Last weekend I finally got to get behind the camera again. The shooting was for Craig Stagg’s upcoming new short “Fuck This Fucking Town” (which from this point forward will be abbreviated as FTF’NT). The movie is a romantic comedy about dating and relationships in Austin, TX.
We had 2 and a half days to shoot over 20 pages of script. I normally subscribe to the rule that 5 pages a day is a good number to shoot for, so this shoot required working fast and smart. The thing that allowed us to move faster than normal is that the final film will be completely animated via rotoscoping. This means that all the video footage will be drawn frame-by-frame by Craig and a team of animators. Craig was one of the animators who worked on Richard Linklater’s A Scanner Darkly, so he knows a little bit about what he’s doing in this area.
Every time I get a lot of e-mails wondering if I’ve dropped off the face of the earth, I figure it’s time for another update. I’ve been logging lots of work hours lately working on the following projects:
Movie Stuff:
Ruby Mae – Editing and color correction for a short film by director Briana McKeague.
Jerry! – Editing and color correction for the micro-feature by Austin comedy group Big Ol’ Tire Fire. It will be online in some form or another soon but you can check out a quickie (not-color-corrected) trailer here.
Comedy Videos - Also for BOTF. Editing and launching a daily series of comedy sketches. This turned out to be a lot more work than originally planned. But this project has served as proof that the way to get good and fast at something is to to a LOT of it.
Web Stuff:
Big Ol’ Tire Fire – reworking the web site and developing some web promotional strategies that seem to be working pretty well. This is a trial run for what we will be doing for The Spider Babies. I will post about this in greater detail soon so that other filmmakers can use it as a starting point for their own pimping campaigns.
Coming Soon:
Headed back to OKC shortly for a casting session for The Spider Babies. I’ll have lots of details soon. (I’m looking for a few people in OKC to help out as far as keeping track of release forms etc. If you’re interested and available between 12-4 on Saturday October 4th, let me know.)
Once we start really gearing up on this project, expect lots of updates here. Also, I will be sending out updates via Twitter, so sign up and follow me!
The studios are buzzing with new creative activity. From the outside, it may just look like we’re drinking vodka and having parties, but a lot of work is actually happening. Briana has been here editing her short film Ruby Mae… I’ve been glued to my MacBook writing The Spider Babies… Craig has been cranking out animation… Crystal is painting a giant Buddha … and I don’t know what’s going on in the other studio.
