John Q. Phats Entertainment

Censored is back up in the shorts section.  Along with its fancy new laurels.  I think the Censored festival run is over.  It had a good run.  I would have really liked for it to screen out of the country.  Of course, I didn’t really submit to any festivals in other countries.  But I at least would have like to get it out of state.  That’s all right.  Maybe Do Nice Guys Finish Last will break the California borders.  We’ll see.
Being a programmer for a film festival, I have a whole new outlook on how to submit.  When submitting Censored I made one mistake, which actually is forgivable.  I showed the name of my company before the film started.  The blunt truth is that when watching short films as a programmer, I don’t really care what the name of the company who made it is.  I’ve never heard of this company and there’s a 99.999999% chance that I’m going to forget it 3 seconds in to the film.  I read a lot of books on how to submit to a film festival and I was happy to realize that I got everything else right.  My festival ID # was always clearly displayed on the both the DVD and the DVD case.  Along with the run time of the short film, the DVD region, the name of the film, and my name.  Also, my film didn’t have a DVD menu with only one option.  You put it in to the DVD player and it starts.  After programming I can also see why I got some rejection letters.  It’s good to see the other side of everything and it gives me an opportunity to correct some of the mistakes I’ve made.  After all this programming, it’s become even more apparent that it’s all about the story.  If the story sucks, the short film sucks.  You can have Oscar winning actors and jaw dropping cinematography, but if the story is some rehash of an idea that’s been done a million times or it’s just a shitty story, I’m unimpressed and so are other people.  This next bit is a little random.  Please, for the love of God, don’t start your horror short film with the killer or crazy person or whatever making a montage of pictures they’ve taken of their next victim or their victims.  In fact, avoid the making of the picture montage scene all together.  It’s been done about a gajillion times and it’s sort of lost it’s shock value at this point.  I’m sure you can come up with something much better anyway.

I think we are done with Do Nice Guys Finish Last.  Finally, right?  I say “think” because we may still have a little bit more work to do on it.  I’m still not sure though.  I tried to stick with that amateur film maker style and make the transitions simplistic.  They were simplistic, yet thought out.  I really liked it.  That short film has sort of grown on me.  I wasn’t really all that crazy about it when we had the first couple of edits, but I think it’s a funny short film.  I think I can get it in at least 1 festival. 
I’m reading a new book, A TV Writer’s Workbook by Ellen Sandler.  I haven’t really read that much of it, but I have to say, it’s extremely entertaining thus far.  I probably shouldn’t have expected anything less from an experienced writer.  She has all these great stories about her experience in the industry.  I’m going to do the exercises in the book.  I have a really hard time writing sometimes.  Plus I haven’t read a single book on it, so this works. 
I watched the first episode of Dexter, season 4 last night.  I wish I could have caught it on Sunday when it first aired.  That first episode was awesome.  That part where they altered the intro was great.  
Censored will be available in the Shorts section for viewing soon.  I figure it’s done with its festival run, so we can post it now.

Dexter, season 4 starts on Sunday.  Rather then buy the DVD’s (Which I will probably do anyway) I think I’ll just watch the show this season like a normal person.  See, most people like the waiting and being left on a cliff hanger.  I absolutely hate it.  That’s why I usually wait for the DVD’s.  It just works out better for me.  That way, when an episode ends on a cliffhanger, I can just hit “Next Episode” on the DVD menu and be fine.  I’m very tempted to read the Dexter books, but I love that show way too much.  I’m afraid it might give something away.  I’ll read them when the show is over.  I’ve said this before, but Jennifer Carpenter is amazing on that show.  There’s an actress that has what seems to be an unlimited amount of potential.  The only movie I’ve seen with her has been The Exorcism of Emily Rose.  She was amazing in that.  I’ll probably watch her other stuff one of these days.  Apparently she has a movie coming out in 2011 called The Factory that takes place in Buffalo New York.  That’s kind of awesome.  I have somewhat of a connection to Buffalo New York.  First off the Buffalo Sabres are from there and my Dad grew up there.  While I’m a Ducks fan at heart, I certainly wouldn’t mind the Sabres winning the cup.  My Dad is a die hard Sabres fan.  If it ever came down to the Sabres vs the Ducks for the Stanley Cup, it would be a brutal couple of weeks for my family.  We would have to go to the games of course.  Which would mean traveling between Buffalo and Anaheim.  The games would be very tense.  We have gone to two regular season games where it’s been Buffalo vs Anaheim, once in Buffalo and once in Anaheim.  Both times the Ducks slaughtered the Sabres.  I was a little torn honestly.  On one hand my Dad was being somewhat destroyed, but on the other, the Ducks were winning.  The first goal, I did my usual stand up and cheer.  At around the third it just started to get sad, so I reserved myself to just clapping from my seat, shrugging, and saying “Sorry Dad.”  There were a couple smart ass comments from my Dad.  But they were all in good fun.  “So when are they going to do the flying v?” was something that was all in good fun.  I don’t want to know what would be said if we were in the Stanley Cup Final.  The Emilio Estevez cracks and The Mighty Ducks movie comments would probably turn in to “You’re a fucking disgrace to this family and you were adopted!”  I wouldn’t be surprised if a fist fight broke out.  I’ve got a slight reach advantage, so I could probably keep him at bay with some quick jabs, but my Dad was in the Coast Guard.  I bet he could probably grind me out till the later rounds and then move in for the kill.  You know, that isn’t a bad idea for a script.  A father and son have to deal with their respective teams going to the Stanley Cup.  I should look in to that.  There really aren’t enough hockey movies out there.  What the hell was I talking about?  Jennifer Carpenter?  How did I get on a fist fight with my Dad and hockey?  Anyway, Dexter season 4 is going to be awesome, Jennifer Carpenter is awesome, Ducks are awesome, and The Sabres are awesome. 
I should be doing the transitions with Gabe on Do Nice Guys Finish Last this weekend.  Probably Sunday.

Sorry about not posting yesterday, I was in a Benadryl induced haze.  It’s actually kind of fun being in that state of mind at work, makes the day fly by.  Some stuff to talk about, not much but a little.  The whole healing of my leg thing isn’t really going so great.  I thought I would be able to make it to the SoCal Film Festival last night, but my leg was killing me, so I decided to stay home.  I’ll probably have to stay home tonight too.  Sorry for everyone that looked for me on Tuesday.  As punishment, I’ll tell you the story of how I actually injured my leg.  It really does a good job of highlighting my stupidity.  On Saturday, I decided for the first time in over two years to drink.  This wasn’t really a planned out endeavor.  They were playing beer pong and it looked like fun.  So, I lost at beer pong.  Since I haven’t drank in over 2 years, I had the tolerance of an 11 year old girl.  I ended up getting trashed.  Apparently I stepped on my friends girlfriends face and somehow ended up on the roof of the house I was drinking at.  I wouldn’t have believed them if they hadn’t shown me pictures of both.  I also left a message that a lot of people laughed at on a co workers cell phone.  I actually found that kind if hilarious myself.  At one point, I get the brilliant idea to give a friend of mine a piggy back ride. 
“I’m drunk!  I can do anything! :flex:”
So, he gets on my back, he’s much bigger then me, which isn’t saying much, I weigh like 155.  So, then I get the idea that I’m going to run with him on my back.  I get up to a good speed and then I’m laying on the ground.  That’s how I hurt my leg.  I tore a muscle in my hip region so now I look really funny when I walk.  This wouldn’t suck so much if every 5 seconds someone at work didn’t say “O my God!  What happened to your leg?!”
I’ve been just saying “It’s a long story.  I hurt my leg.”  
They keep bugging me for details.  Maybe I should just make something up that makes them uncomfortable so they won’t ask for details.  Maybe:
“Vibrator malfunction”
would work.  It’s simple, could work.  Anyway, on with the show.
Do Nice Guys Finish Last is so close to being done.  The file is huge.  It’s like 25 gigs.  After Effects really added all of that.  I think it’s all the filters and effects we used for color correction.  Either way, we can deal with it.  We are so close to being done.  All we need is transitions and that’s it.  I already finished the credits.  Everything is all set.  It’s frustrating to be this close.  I still want to submit to Sundance. 
Every once in awhile YouTube has something of value to offer.  Not always, in fact almost never.  Most of it is some emo kid sitting in front of a web cam talking about Kanye West or Brittney Spears.  I found this great channel that has all sort so of film making tips and tricks.
http://www.youtube.com/user/videomaker
I’m actually kind of amazed that these are free.  Seriously, if these were available on DVD, I would probably buy them.  No bullshit, just straight up “You want to do this?  Here’s how you do it.”
I also found:
http://www.youtube.com/user/Mr360Games
Nothing really film maker wise, but I’m impressed with the video quality of his stuff.  For video game footage, that’s awesome.  Most of the time, especially on YouTube, it’s just a camcorder propped up in front of a television.  Lame.  This is actually high quality stuff.
I’ve also never mentioned this before, but being such a hockey fan this is probably my favorite web site:
http://www.battleofcali.com/
All those writers are hilarious.  They should write a hockey based script.  Seriously, they really seem to have a good grip on hockey culture.  I could see them writting something like the original Slapshot.  Vulgar as hell, but entertaining and awesome.

I worked on the audio of Do Nice Guys Finish Last last night.  Audio editing has always been sort of intimidating to me, but really, it’s not that bad.  I learned a cool little trick last night that Gabe taught me that made it much easier.  Whenever you want to raise the levels of a certain segment of audio, rather then actually adjusting it’s volume, just duplicate the portion of audio you want louder and match it up with its counterpart on another track.  If you have two tracks with the same audio, it’s twice as loud as it would be with only one track and it doesn’t distort.  I never would have thought of that.  That’s what I did last night.  I went through the audio and just made sure that it was all at a some what consistent level.  I was able to finish it all up.  I’ll probably go through it again to make some slight adjustments here and there though.
Up next is putting in the transitions.  I’m still not sure what direction I want to go with that.  I’m going to read up on transitions this weekend.  There are definitely things that need to be thought about when it comes to transitions in Do Nice Guys Finish Last.  There is one scene where the camera angle stays consistent, but there’s a cut and a lot of time passes in the story.  We need to have a transition that illustrates that.  Me and Gabe will be looking in to it. 
When I got home I played NHL 09 and absolutely got my ass kicked online.  Sometimes, people are just better then you at stuff.  You know, it’s easy to get a big head when playing against the computer for 3 months straight.  It did give me an idea for a short.  Mainly because it was comical how badly I was getting beaten and Caine is itching to do something.  It’s not that I don’t want to shoot anything, it’s just that I’ve been busy with other projects.  I also, really want to shoot in HD.  Maybe I’ll rent a camera next weekend or something just to play around with it. 
Again, I’m going to mention this:
The SoCal Film Festival is next week.  Censored is playing next Friday.  This will probably finish up it’s festival run.  I want to start sending out Do Nice Guys Finish Last.  I’m not sure if it will get accepted, but I hope that I’m underestimating it.  Gabe said he watched it again the other night and after giving it a rest said he actually thought it was really good.  When editing something, you watch it at least 100 times, it’s very easy to get bored of it.  I really think we are close to being done with it though.  Anyway, you can buy tickets to the Censored screening here:
http://www.socalfilmfest.com/tickets.aspx
Censored is playing in Program 10.  Be sure to buy a ticket for that program if you want to go.

Last night, I made a very bad decision.  I started to paint my ex room mates room.  As always I started with a coat of primer.  So, I’m going around the room and all of a sudden, I get the brilliant idea to paint the inside of the closet.  About 5 seconds in to this endeavor, I realize that I’ve made a horrible mistake.  Somehow, the builder of the house managed to put more corners in that closet then in the entire house.  I think it took me like 2 hours alone, just to primer the closet.  Stupid closet.  For $550 a month, my next room mate could have probably dealt with an unpainted closet. 
Every time I paint, I can’t help but think of the possibilities of turning a room in my house in to a set.  It would just be way too easy.  I have this space available with walls begging to be painted.  I could paint them any color I want.  With low budget film making, you don’t always have that option.  You usually have to deal with the color the wall already is.  I’ve always wanted to do a very art direction esq short film.  Something where every shot has clashing colors or the entire film has a specific range of color.  I actually didn’t even know that they did this, until I read the Grindhouse book.  Robert Rodriguez was talking about the colors that he chose for Planet Terror.  When I watched Planet Terror again, I started to notice it.  I always thought French cinema had great art direction in them.  Every single French film I’ve seen has been very artistic either in story itself, costume design, or background design.  Of course, you mention French cinema and the first thing that comes to most people’s minds is Amélie.  I like Amélie, it’s a great movie, but there is a lot more to French cinema.  Angel-A or  The Diving Bell and the Butterfly are both awesome films.  Ok, I’m done with my French cinema rant.  As I mentioned yesterday, color correction for Do Nice Guys Finish Last is done.  I was either going to work on the audio for it yesterday or paint that room.  I was really hoping to work on the audio but Gabe was busy that night.  I don’t expect the audio to take me that long.  I’m not really looking to do anything fancy.  I want to keep it sort of rough, to fit in with the amateur documentary feel that we are going for.  Things have been crazy lately, but I really want to get to work on my next project.  For my next project I really want to use a rack focus.  I’ve actually thought up scripts that would require the entire thing to be shot with one shot while we rack focus back and fourth between like 3 characters.  That’s either an awesome idea, or a horrible idea.  I haven’t decided yet.  Either the audience would all go “Woooooow” or it would just give them all a massive headache.

Gabe gave me the Do Nice Guys Finish Last color correction version.  It looked really good.  It’s weird to see it in a somewhat polished state.  Next we are going to work on the audio.  I’m still debating how much I want to do to the audio.  Part of me wants to clean it up completely and another part of me wants it to stay sort of rough.  Some aspects of Do Nice Guys Finish Last are polished and other aspects are left rough on purpose.  For example, the camera work was left rough on purpose.  The lighting was set up and polished though.  Mainly because we could do that and get away with it.  It’s one of those things that we can slip past the audience that would make it look a little bit better.  Audio is a big part of this.  I really do want the audience to feel like they are watching a documentary done by a bunch of amateurs.  But how far is too far?  Is keeping the audio somewhat rough forgivable here?  I’m going to have to figure that out tonight.  After the audio, we’ll probably do the transitions and then we’ll be done.  I already put the credits together so all I have to do is tack those on the end when the transitions are done and call it a day.  With credits, Do Nice Guys Finish Last will wind up being just under 16 minutes.  I can live with that.  I think for a 16 minute film, it’s pretty fat free.  I’ve seen short films that are 20 minutes that could have easily been cut down to 10.  I don’t think this is the case with Do Nice Guys Finish Last.  I think it’s 15 minutes, because it needs to be 15 minutes.  We cut a lot out that was in the original script.  Not just to get it under 15 minutes, but because the parts we cut out weren’t necessary.  If you can get the point across in 1 scene, then why show 2?  Or if you can get the point across in a scene that’s 30 seconds long, why would you show a scene that’s 2 minutes long?  Of course, I think this all changes when shooting a movie.  For a short film there is a totally different set of rules.  With a movie, you have time for a set up and you can take your time here and there.  With a short film there almost shouldn’t be a setup.  The characters should already be past the setup and on to the point of the short film by the time it starts.  For example, there’s a scene where Chris calls one of the girls and nervously asks her for a date.  We could have shown him pacing back and fourth nervously while biting his finger nails and starring at his phone, but why?  He makes it blatantly obvious by the tone in his voice that he’s nervous.  It would be taking twice as long to illustrate the same exact point.  As an audience member, I think it’s a little insulting actually.  If we had shown the pacing scene it would sort of be like:
“He’s nervous….  You see how nervous he is?  He’s really nervous.  Look at how he’s pacing, he’s nervous.  Man is he nervous.”
Kind of annoying, isn’t it?  I think, a lot of short films fall in to this trap.  The audience is smarter then you think.  They can figure it out.

Today Gabe might have the color corrected Do Nice Guys Finish Last.  We’ll see what happens.  It will either be today or sometime, early this week.  After color correction we’ll be working on transitions.  I don’t think that will take us too long.  Then we’ll do some slight corrections in audio.  I’m really not too concerned about the audio.  Mainly because I want it to have sort of a rough feeling to it.  Like an inexperienced boom mic operator was just chasing people around not really sure what he was doing.  It fits for this short film and I actually think it sort of adds to it.  As long as I’m aware of it, I think it’s ok.  I’m very excited about being done with Do Nice Guys Finish Last.  I always have a hard time telling everyone to just wait for the edit to be done.  I hate telling people to wait for us to be done editing.  Editing takes a long time and nobody except for me and Gabe sees the progress.  Of course, I can talk about it and post screen shots.  But you can’t really show anyone the short film until it’s done.  It’s a little frustrating, but I’ll live.
I saw Inglorious Bastards yesterday.  I loved that freaking movie.  I thought it was great.  You never quite know what you are going to get with Quentin Tarantino.  That’s what I like though.  His style is always changing and evolving, but his movies always have that Quentin Tarantino feel to them.  If you showed me a 100 unreleased films and one of them were a Quentin Tarantino film, I could probably tell you which one was the Tarantino film without looking at the credits.  Whenever I see a Quentin Tarantino film it remindes me to always make a Carl Keitz film.  Basically, make the short film or movie that I want to make.  What makes a Quentin Tarantino film so good, is that it’s a Quentin Tarantino film.  He always makes the movie that he wants to make.  That’s probably what every film maker should do.

For those of you that went to the movie thing last night in Huntington, you may have not seen me.  I had a bit of an emergency that I had to deal with so I couldn’t make it.  Sorry if you showed up to say hello and I wasn’t there. 
Last night in being a programmer I got to the good stuff.  These are the films that make me look at my work and think to myself “What the hell am I doing?”  Two especially absolutely amazed me.  There is some great stuff out there.  I already knew that, but I always welcome a good reminder.
I’ve been working on my resume to look for work on a film crew.  Of course, me being a graphic designer I have to make it incredibly complicated and fancy.  What actually started as a work project has evolved in to part of my resume.  I’ll post it when I’m done with it for you guys to check out.  It should be quite glorious.  I’ve also been hard at work on the press kit for Do Nice Guys Finish Last.  It’s kind of fun.  Right now I’m just trying to get the information down, when I’m done with that, I’ll make it fancy.  I’m very tempted to design it like it’s a bunch of scrap paper Chris (main character) scribbled his ideas on.  Why not, right?  I think it would work.
The deadline for Sundance is coming up.  I’m probably going to enter Censored.  Will it get in?  Probably not, but what the hell, right?  If I can get Do Nice Guys Finished Last done on time, I’ll enter that as well.  My hopes are, that Do Nice Guys Finish Last is much better then I think it is.  Not that I think it’s bad.  In fact, I love that short film, I just don’t think it’s all that festival appropriate.  Hopefully, I’m wrong, festivals love it, and audiences laugh so hard, their stomachs hurt.  As I’ve figured out though, it’s very easy to become delusional about how funny something you and your friends think something is vs what the public thinks is funny.  Often times, something you and your friends think is funny, isn’t really all that funny to other people.  Many groups of people I’ve met have told me that I could just put a camera on their friends and have comedic gold.  Have you ever told a really funny story, only to have the person you’re telling it to stare at you with a blank stare?  It usually ends with you saying “Well, I guess you had to be there.”  It’s kind of like that.   
I still haven’t seen Inglorious Bastards.  I want to see that movie so badly.  Maybe I’ll check it out tonight.  Right now, I’m going through all of the movies that I should have seen already, but haven’t for some stupid reason.  For example, I just watched The Shining last week.  Jack Nicholson was a creepy looking bastard.  Even in the beginning, when he’s acting all normal, he’s freaky looking.  With age, I think he became less creepy.  In As Good As it Gets he wasn’t all that menacing.  His character was kind of a prick and he sort of looked the part.  Maybe he’s just that amazing of an actor.  His actual demeanor alters his appearance.  Or does he just pick roles that fit his look at the time?  It’s tough to say.  Either way, the guy is an amazing actor and often times, I’ll watch a movie just because he’s in it.  I always thought Keanu Reeves was good at picking his parts.  He’s not an amazing actor, but the roles he picks fit him so well, he can almost pull it off.  For example, The Matrix.  Could you think of anyone, who could have played Neo better then him?  I think he was absolutely perfect for that role and it’s hard to believe that he wasn’t the first choice to play that character.  Think about it?  Lonely computer hacker, limited social skills, finds comfort with computers, not sure of anything really.  He pulled it off.  Same with The Day the Earth Stood Still and The Devils Advocate.  Again, not really an amazing actor, but all of those roles fit him very well.  It works for me. 
I went off on a bit of a tangent there.  I tend to do that.  I could probably spend days talking about movies and once I get going it’s tough to shut me up.  Anyway, sorry again for not showing up at the SoCal Film Fest Movies by the pier thing, I’ll be sure to make it out to the next one.

So, I’m doing programming for a film festival.  I’ve only watched like 5 films or so and I’m already getting another perspective on this process.  First off, I now completely understand  why every book I read said to make things as simple as possible for the programmers.  You want them to be able to see your tracking number on the DVD.  You want them to be able to put the DVD in a DVD player and boom, the film plays without them having to take any extra action.  They don’t give a crap that you have a fancy DVD menu and they don’t care about the name of your production company.  If they have to take any particular extra effort to see your short film, you’ve already put a bad taste in their mouth about your film and they are more likely to recommend a rejection.  I’ve read all about this, but now it’s even more apparent.  Of course, I’m pretty obsessive, before I sent Censored to any film festivals; I read about 4 books on how to do it. 
Speaking of books, I just finished How Not to Make a Short Film by Robert Marie Munroe.  It’s a very slick and handy little book.  Especially the end which has a pretty extensive list of film maker resources.  Some of her favorites film festivals, production websites, and even a section for film making blogs.  It pretty much has it all covered.  It was a good read.  I’m kind of wondering what I should read next.  Probably a book about either sound design or cinematography.  I’ve read a couple books on cinematography, but it’s an interesting topic.  I really should probably tinker with my camera more.  Just to see what kind of interesting shots I can get. 
So, I have a new goal.  I want to enter Do Nice Guys Finish Last in Sundance.  Will it get in?  Probably not, but who knows, I could get lucky.  Worse thing they can do is send me a rejection letter.  Most rejection letters are pretty soft.  Like:
“We regret to inform you that your film was not selected for our festival.  But we encourage you to enter it in other festivals and keep making films because everything is relative and blah blah blah.”
It’s actually kind of nice.  What if you got one that was really harsh one day?  Like:
“I could sit here and drone on about how you should enter this in to other film festivals, but I won’t.  I’m actually the programmer and I’m writing you this specially to tell you to please not make any more short films.  This was so bad, I seriously considered shooting myself 2 minutes in, so I wouldn’t have to live through another waking moment of this boring and horrible excuse for a short film.  I’m serious, I loaded the gun.  If I pounded on a keyboard with my forehead for 20 minutes straight, the jargon that followed probably would have produced a better script then this bile.  What I have just watched was by far the stupidest thing I have ever seen.  I am now dumber after watching your short film.  If this world were just, you would be killed in some sort of horrific camera accident.  I used to like film, I really did, but your film was so bad, I’m afraid I’ll have flash backs and tremors if I ever watch another film again.  Like shell shock from soldiers coming back from Vietnam.  I hate you.  Please kill yourself.”
That would probably never happen.  If it did, I might cry.  That makes me really glad that they do the things the way that they do. 
Tonight, I’ll be down near the Huntington Beach Pier for the SoCal Film Festival Movies by the Pier event.  If you’re in the area, stop by and say hello.