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!