The Small One-Sheet Card for "Wife of the Bad Guy"

Here's the one-sheet I'm taking to the Palm Springs Short Filmfest Market for Wife of the Bad Guy

What's Been Happening

I've been pretty busy lately and haven't updated this blog in too long. Here's what's happening.

On Thursday and Friday I'm headed out to the Palm Springs Short Filmfest film market. I'll take copies of both The Wedding Enforcer and Wife of the Bad Guy to see if I can djinn up some interest. In addition, I'll be taking out copies of the script for Storage Space and an urban fantasy series that I'm working on with a friend called Dead and Alive. (I just finished the script for the pilot this afternoon.)

Speaking of Storage Space, I've been talking to a number of potential actors for that film and have some interest from people in working on it. I've also done the storyboards for the first segment ("No Place Like Home") and have been working on the shot list for the third segment ("Hero")

I've done a little location scouting for the movie as well and have found some promising sites. (The local junior high school is closing and I'm thinking that I might be able to shoot some scenes for "Hero" there.)

The latest and greatest

I just finished the storyboards for the first segment of the "Storage Space" film: No Place Like Home. I did 255 storyboards, with 56 of them done today. While no one would ever say they're great art, they do at least tell the basic story through pictures. Next is the second segment "Fair Trade." That one is going to take awhile because it is pretty substantial in length.

In other news, I got more rejections on both "Wedding Enforcer" and "Wife of the Bad Guy." But at least one of the rejection letters for each was encouraging: "Wedding Enforcer" comments said "A committed ensemble. And full of funny bits." The "Wife of the Bad Guy" comments said, "A clever premise. Now we know where the real power lies." So they got both of them! That's really all that I wanted and it looks like I accomplished it. So things are looking up, even if neither one has been accepted by a festival.

More "Storage Space" Progress

I just bought a videocamera off eBay that I'll use for the "Storage Space" shoot. It's a Sony VX2000 that the seller reportedly just got checked out by Sony.

I've also been continuing with the storyboards. I'm up to over 100 thus far. (I was home sick from work today and used the time on storyboards. I got over fifty done today.)

Still got to work on overall planning of locations, crew, etc. This is going to be a lot more complex than anything I've done to date.

"Storage Space" Status

I've been working on the storyboards and the breakdowns for the Storage Space project. While I'm not the world's greatest artist, these storyboards really help me to visualize what we'll need to shoot in order to tell the strange stories that take place at the "We Stor 4 U" facility. I'm up to the 20th board. Lots more sketches to go.

As I do the breakdowns, I'm getting a handle on how many characters and locations are really going to be involved with this (and I'm only 13 scenes in!) This will not be a small undertaking, lemme tell ya!

"Storage Space" Script Update

I finished the second draft of the "Fair Trade" segment on Saturday. Did some clarification and a little better exposition so that it makes sense. I pared down some of the talky dialogue and made the whole thing flow better. It's got action, sex, crashed UFO's, Men in Black, cool scientists, torture, and a trio of great heroes. That segment is now running 52 pages.

I just finished the second draft of the "Hero" segment a few minutes ago. The segment now features a couple of murders, various elements of mayhem, toxic waste, heroic luchadores, attacking rebels, alien technologies, and a kid in peril. All in 25 pages!

So now the complete 2nd draft is done! The whole script is coming in at 93 pages.

Now comes the fun part: Figuring out how to get it produced!

Storage Space Update

I just finished writing the second draft of "No Place Like Home" - the first segment of the feature film Storage Space. I think it works both on its own and as part of the feature.

"No Place Like Home" is about a sad sack of a guy who loses his job, his marriage, and his home and ends up living in his storage unit - and the strange things that happen there.

"No Place Like Home" is a monster story. Segment 2, entitled "Free Trade," is a science fiction story about alien devices and the people who get hold of them. "Hero," the third segment, is about a young boy who runs afoul of a vicious street gang and what happens when they pursue him into the storage facility.

I'm just starting on the re-write of "Free Trade." It's the longest of the three segments at 43 pages. It'll also be the toughest to film because it has more actors, locations, costumes, special effects, props, etc. So I may end up shooting the first and third segments first and then diving into Segment 2.

Wish me luck!

Wedding Enforcer Music

I just received the four new, original tunes for The Wedding Enforcer from our intrepid composer, George VanWagner. They sound very good: fun and funky. I'll upload them into Final Cut tomorrow. I'm looking forward to experiencing the movie with the new music.

In other news, one of the actors from that movie requested a letter of recommendation from me: she's applying to the Lee Strasberg Institute for acting. I hope she gets in. Here's a photo of her (Idalia Enriquez) from our day of shooting the wedding scenes in Lakewood.

Storage Space Script First Draft

I've just printed out the first draft script for Storage Space: 66 pages. It'll need some re-work, fleshing-out (typical features are 90 pages or more), re-formating, and cleanup, but there's something distinctly satisfying in being able to say, "I just wrote a script for a feature film." Ya know!

The News in Mid-March

- Just picked up a used Sony VX2100 videocamera on eBay. Should arrive in the next few days. Assuming that its in good shape (I've had good luck with most of the equipment I've bought off eBay), I should be able to make some really nice looking images. Now for a script to shoot!
- I've made some good progress on the story outline for the segment "Hero" for the feature film Storage Space that I'm writing. It's coming along pretty well.
- As far as the status of Wedding Enforcer and Wife of the Bad Guy, I've received a few rejection notifications and on a few the notification deadlines have passed without my receiving an acceptance notice. So thus far we're batting zero on acceptances. Ah well. A bit of a downer, but ya pays your money and takes your chances.
- We just finished watching the DVD for Nun of That, a silly bad, fun action comedy that's chock full of gags, action, violence, sex, and bad kung fu. Ya gotta love any movie where Jesus, Ghandi, and Moses are "Sister Mary Wrath's" combat advisers.

Latest News

Spent the weekend at a local convention and had some interesting discussions with a couple of people regarding post-production, some plotting ideas on one of the feature films I'm working on (entitled Storage Space.)

Also just got an email back from one of the film festivals. They decided against screening one of my films. Ah well. Have to expect some of that on the first movies I've put into the festival circuilt.

Still have some ideas and I'm getting stoked to get writing again!

More Festival News

Of the 17 festivals to which I've submitted The Wedding Enforcer, I've been told that 16 have received it and are considering it. The last one, Cannes, hasn't yet responded.

For Wife of the Bad Guy, I've received 12 confirmations out of the 16 submissions. Haven't heard on the rest.

I should hear whether they'll accept either of them starting next week and continuing for the next several months.

Cross your fingers!

Peppering the Festivals from Coast to Coast

Three more festival submissions for each movie since the last posting:
- Charlotte, NC
- Ft. Worth, TX (the "Fearless Film Festival")
- Another in H'wood ("Dances with Films")

So the states that we have covered include:
- California
- Nevada
- Washington
- Texas
- North Carolina
- Illinois
- Utah
- New York
- Massachusetts
- Pennsylvania
- Colorado
- Florida
- Arkansas

and the foreign festivals cover Canada and France

So I think I'll take a pause in submissions for a time to let my bank account recover.

(Lessee, thirty two festival submissions, average submission fee: $35, cost of postage for each: $2.50, DVD/Case/envelope/label costs each: $3. Total cost: about $1300.)

I'm thinking of getting a new camcorder and 'puter for editing. Any suggestions?

More Festival Submissions

The Wedding Enforcer is going out to the Little Rock Film Festival and the Chicago Short Film Fest, while Wife of the Bad Guy is headed to the Fear No Film Festival in Utah and the Delta International Film & Video Festival in Massachusetts. We'll see how they do.

In the meantime, here's a production still from Wedding Enforcer: Our bride, Cathy (Allison Volk) and the Groom's Ex, Sheila (Idalia Enriquez). The groom clearly shows good taste!

"Wife of the Bad Guy" and "Wedding Enforcer" on IMDB

Thanks to being under consideration by a couple of festivals, now both Wife of the Bad Guy and The Wedding Enforcer have their own title pages on IMDB! Right now the Wife site is just a title page with no content. (The Without a Box folks haven't transferred all of the credits info yet.) The Wedding Enforcer page is live and has about half the credits. (I had to upload the rest of the credits this evening.)


So take a look here for Wife of the Bad Guy
and here for The Wedding Enforcer!

From the Mini-Premiere

Sharon King and Curt Steindler
Originally uploaded by PDR Films

As promised here are the photos from the mini-premiere of "The Wedding Enforcer" and "Wife of the Bad Guy" held in January 2010 at Delzanos by the Sea in Redondo Beach. Our cover photo show Wedding Enforcer Sharon King as she enters with husband Curt Steindler.
The rest of the photos are here!

Wife of the Bad Guy

I just got word that Wife of the Bad Guy is under consideration by the Indie Spirit and Newport Beach festivals. As a result, it qualifies for its own IMDB title page! I'll be populating that once the IMDB people tell me its live.

And while we're on the subject, here's a photo of Lisa Pettett as our title character

The Latest and Greatest

I've been somewhat remiss in updating the blog lately. That's because I've been VERY busy promoting both Wife of the Bad Guy and The Wedding Enforcer.

It's film festival time, ladies and gentlemen. So I've been burning the midnight (1 am, 2 am, 5 am!) oil putting together the festival packages for both of these short films. That's meant burning lots of DVD's, creating labels and applying them to said DVD's, creating press packages, filling out submission forms, stuffing envelopes, and going out in the middle of the night to ensure that the submissions get postmarked before their deadlines.

Thus far The Wedding Enforcer has been submitted to the following festivals:
Toronto Independent
Palm Springs Shortfest
Newport Beach
Hollywood Cinema
Visionfest (New York City)
Riverside
L.A. Comedy Fest

and Wife of the Bad Guy has gone out to:
Toronto Independent
Newport Beach
Hollywood Cinema
Indie Spirit (Colorado)
Seattle True Independent Film Festival
Claremont 5
Palm Beach (Florida)

I'm putting together the mailing packages to submit both of them to the Cannes and Los Angeles film festivals.

Thus far I've gotten receipt/consideration confirmations from the Newport Beach and L.A. Comedy festivals. And, because its under consideration at a festival, I've been notified by the people at IMDB that The Wedding Enforcer qualifies for its own IMDB title page!!!! The IMDB people tell me that it'll be a couple of weeks before they've put everything in place for me to start uploading material to the site. But this is pretty cool!

Post Mini-Premiere Day

I'm still recovering a bit from last night's mini-premiere activities. (There's still a bunch of stuff in the car to be unloaded.) I'm burning DVD's of Wife of the Bad Guy right now. (This time with the CORRECT spelling of the lead actress' last name! D'Oh!) I've got a bunch of DVD's to send to actors & crew and then off to the festival circuit.

Tonight's Mini-Premiere

We had the mini-premiere for both The Wedding Enforcer and Wife of the Bad Guy tonight. Had a great turnout and everyone seemed to enjoy both movies. Some came from as far away as Tehachapi and Fontana in the rain. Food was good at Delzanos by the Sea (tenderloin pork and grilled salmon - mmmmm good!) Great support from the restaurant and its staff.

I'd been most worried about Wife of the Bad Guy since no one had seen the final version except me. I was up until 6:30 am this morning editing and I was afraid that I might have missed some stuff. The movie came out pretty well and everyone liked the results.

They also seem to have appreciated the extra work that we put in to pull this off and make sure that people were introduced and engaged with everyone else. (Doncha just hate parties where you don't know anyone there and you don't know how to introduce yourself?!?!?!)

Several photos of people on the Red Carpet to follow
So it was a VERY good day!

Two Projects at Once

I've been burning copies of The Wedding Enforcer for the people who worked on the project. We're having a "mini-premiere" this Sunday at a restaurant in Redondo Beach where we filmed the kitchen scenes. I still have another 10 DVD's to make and have to get more disk labels for 'em.

In other news, I've made some good progress on the re-edit of Wife of the Bad Guy. Got the first four minutes or so in rough cut form. I plan to show it at the mini-premiere as well. Just gotta finish the rest of it!

More Progress

Re: Wedding Enforcer - I'm burning DVD's now for next week's "mini-Premiere". Still have to get confirmations from a number of people.

Re: Wife of the Bad Guy - All of the footage and audio are uploaded into the Mac. I've started editing and its looking pretty good. Seems to be going easier than earlier edits.

More "Wife of the Bad Guy" Progress

I uploaded another hour of footage tonight, mostly the "wife"'s scenes and some nighttime outdoors shots of cars, digging, etc. Its looking good. (The fact that I've seen this footage from the previous edits so many times makes this easy, though time consuming.) It IS eating up a lot of hard disk space and I'm going to have to be careful about that.

Just one more tape to upload and then I'll start putting it together.

In other news, the preparations for the "Wedding Enforcer" mini-premiere continue. Three more confirmations. I'll have to start burning DVD's this weekend. Should be fun!

Progress on Next Short Film - "Wife of the Bad Guy"

Over the summer, I'd wasted a couple of months editing together the short "Wife of the Bad Guy," which we'd shot about a year ago. I say "wasted" because there was a problem with the editing software and I could never get the sound and image to properly synch up.

So after months of frustration, I switched gears over to editing my OTHER movie, "The Wedding Enforcer." I got that one looking and sounding pretty good and its ready to go to the festival circuit. So I've now pretty much wrapped up "Wedding Enforcer" work and have gone back to "Bad Guy."

I spent two frustrating nights transfering the video files from the PC laptop over to the Mac, only to discover that the frame size from the laptop files was only about 1/4th what it should have been.

So I've been forced to go back to the original DV tapes and directly transfer them into the Mac. I've got footage from two of the four tapes uploaded into the Mac and its looking pretty good. I'll spend the next couple of nights uploading the rest of the footage and will actually edit the movie this weekend. With any luck, I'll have a rough cut ready to show to people at the "Mini-Premiere" of "Wedding Enforcer" on January 17th.

Wish me luck!