Tuesday, August 11, 2009

The Update Where Things Are Happening

I realize the title of this post may have deceived you into thinking that something happened with Glory Days. Not yet. Plenty of people are passing on it though. We had one agent who is terrified of a sports movie in this market. Terrified. This is an agent. Sometimes it's fun to get rejected if only to see what their reasons were. It would be very easy to start getting discouraged at this point, but honestly, I'm so busy with other things, new projects, that whatever, let us know.

It also reminds me of an anecdote I read in some screenwriting book about rejection. Some realtor was having trouble selling a house and getting very discouraged. It had been months since it went on the market.

Her boss asked to her, "How many no's does it take before you get a 'yes' and sell a house?"
She replied, "About fifty, give or take."
"And how many have you gotten?"
"Five."
"Well, the sooner you get out there and get those no's the sooner you'll get a yes."

Or something like that. Look, the basic idea is that it can take forever to find someone to say yes. You have to earn those rejections in order to get there. So, neither Travis nor I are in any way shape or form getting down and giving up. We're going to keep doing what we can to make things happen. When the time is right, the right person will read it, and we're off. In the meantime, we've got plenty of other things to rock! And things have been happening! Do I have a million in the bank? No. Am I super busy working on several projects that I am getting paid for? Yes. I call that a win.

One of those things, obviously, is the music video for the White and Crazy Kids. We spent last week trying to reconcile some elements that we were unable to shoot during production, and trying to find the best way to deal with it. After exploring a couple different angles, we eventually settled on shooting some additional footage, for the video finale, which would be added in to the cut I had initially put together.

So, now, as of today, I've locked picture on the video (minus the additional footage, which will be shot Weds and edited in on Friday) and tomorrow it goes to my main color corrector, James Cohan, who's done color correct for me on the Ronnie Day Project, the Esfand music video and the Bubba Gump commercial. He's got his work cut out for him...the coloring is the easy part, but he's got to deal with back end issues we learned about after shooting. For instance, if you plan on shooting slow motion footage, you might think that it's smart to shoot 3k (4k will only shoot 24fps) so that you can get the best resolution, right? Wrong. Unfortunately, for some weird reason, Final Cut Pro can't handle 3k footage AND when you bring your 4k footage into color (that is, the Color bundled with FCP 6, I think FCP 7 fixed this issue) it drops it down to 2k anyway. So, it's actually better to keep everything at 2k.

Since we're downsizing all of this to 1080p anyway (since we don't have a film out for a music video) none of this matters, but, rather than taking all the footage and down-rezzing, James has to deal with clips of various sizes. He'll work it out though. He knows his ish.

So, while the picture is off to color, I have a few effects things to work on for it AND...

On Thursday, I'll be producing and directing a "VH1 Storytellers"-like live concert taping for MySpace artist Mateo. Yup, the same guy I directed the mixtape videos for. The video is intended as a DVD release for Mateo's tour this fall.

What makes me even more excited about this is that we'll be shooting it all using the Canon 5D Mark II cameras, a setup I've yet had the pleasure of using. Mateo's manager, Quddus, had sent me a video example of what he was trying to go for. Basically, it was the depth of field, slightly soft focus look that he loved (the video had probably been shot on an HVX with the Red Rock Micro adapter...you know the look) which really excited me because it meant we could play a little, and not just have a boring multicam shoot. It would be a live to tape show with a distinct visual look, something that I feel always separates you from the pack.

If you're unfamiliar with what the 5D Mark II can do, check out this video.

Yeah...

I've also brought Dan onto this production. We also decided to bring on a DP and through Dan, we managed to get Will Eubank who will be bring his kick-ass 5D with a Panavision mount and Panavision lenses.

It should be an interesting experience and I'm excited to see how it turns out. Other than that, when I'm not directing, Travis and I continue to write. We've got the first act of the new script written (and on page 40! Yikes! Our first draft of Glory Days was 150 pages, so, about par for a comedy from us).

And Travis has been working on an outline for a project that we're developing with our manager. We hope to have something solid on it soon and I can let you know more. But, I'll throw this out there, it's a musical!

Never written one of those before. We'll see how it goes.

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