John Q. Phats Entertainment

Recently, I’ve been writing a movie script. That’s actually one of the reasons I haven’t been posting. It was kind of exciting because someone from some big time movie studio got a hold of it and actually read it. Although not that exciting. Allow me to explain. In my experience, leads like this never really pan out. First off, it could be anybody at the studio. It could be the janitor or someone in billing who is in just as good of a position as you are to actually get your movie made. Second of all, big deal, doesn’t mean your script is any good. I’ll read anything you put in front of me if I’m bored enough. Third of all, if they are someone whose capable of doing something with your script, it’s still a thousand to one. You’re an unknown writer with no background. They are either desperate or bored.
Enough of that happiness. They did actually read it and they were someone in a good position. Their words of advice: It’s too long and the funny parts aren’t that funny. Ouch. But not really. They were right. So, I started editing, which turned in to nitpicking to a degree that was unhealthy. I’m not exaggerating, I’ve read this script at least 400 times. So, this is it. I’m done editing it. I sent it off to some friends and told them that this is the furthest I can take it. Any other edits have to come from discussions or pointers from them. I’m not editing this thing any more. It does free me up for a project though. While I have other movie script ideas, I’m going to do a short film. And since I’ve neglected my website so much recently, it will be something for my website.
In closing, lesson learned. Sometimes you just have to walk away from a script. Especially if you’re as OCD as me.

I didn’t really do much of anything film making wise last night so I suppose there’s not much to talk about.  I watched the first three episodes of True Blood, Season 2.  I like when the in-show time between seasons is like 2 minutes and miraculously all of the main character either have new hair cuts or have dropped like 20 pounds of fat.  Vampire Bill went from being normal to somewhat in shape in a mater of hours.  It’s especially obvious when you go straight from season 1 right on to season 2.  Don’t get me wrong, I love that show, but I thought that was really funny.  Me and my girlfriend were up pretty late last night because we couldn’t stop watching that show.  That show is the king of the cliff hanger.  At the end of every episode, you just think to yourself “Just one more.”  That show is getting more and more graphic in both the sex scenes and the kill scenes.  Last night the main vampire character, Vampire Bill, bit his girlfriends neck and then sloppily made out with her, dripping blood everywhere.  All on her face, in her mouth, and all over the bed.  He did this, while he was having sex with her.  His girlfriend was in to it too.  I actually said “Jesus” out loud.  The tone was a mixture of “what the hell?” and “that’s awesome.”
The name of this whole film making thing is changing from John Q. Phats Entertainment to JQP Entertainment.  First off the name is way too long.  I tell them the name of the company and they look at me blankly and say “What?”  It’s too hard to remember.  Second of all, I’m tired of people thinking that my name is John.  People will write me E-Mails reffering to me as John.  Which I don’t really get.  I suppose I get the logic and I mainly blame myself for having a dumb ass company name, but still.  Besides, my e-mail address is my real name followed by jqpentertainment.com.  I imagine if the company name is JQP, people won’t refer to me as JQP.  Part of me wants to change the name completely, but that would really suck.  Although, in all honesty, I can probably come up with something better.

The search for a mascot continues.  Current discussions focused around what exactly the mascot would mean and why I was doing this.  We also discussed squirrels and mice as possible mascots.  Wow, that all sounds so official.  I suppose this is part of me taking a break after finishing filming for Do Nice Guys Finish Last.  I usually do that.  I wish I didn’t have to, but it does make everything more exciting when I start on my next project.  I have been writing here and there, but I haven’t really worked on anything major.  I really want to shoot in HD next.  I keep telling myself that once I get an HD camera that shoots 24 FPS I’ll be good from then on.  I know that’s not the case though.  As I have said in previous posts, I’ll always be chasing some new billion dollar thing that does something better then my current equipment.  I like to consider myself a budget friendly film maker.  I usually make what I have work.  That doesn’t really come out of ingenuity though, it’s more of a necessity.  Like when we built the jib arm for Red Hood.  I could have rented one for $2500, but I didn’t have that kind of budget.  So, I built one for just over $100.  It worked and now I have a jib arm.  Building stuff is always a cheap way out.  Plus, it’s kind of interesting to see what Gabe can come up with.  Or some random guy who posts blue prints on the Internet.  We built a steady cam off of the Internet.  We called it the Raminator.  It worked pretty good.  It’s kind of heavy and weird, but that’s kind of the point.  It’s supposed to add weight to the camera at a lower point to help stabilize it.  It worked for what we wanted to use it for.  Back to my original point, the mascot.  The mascot has to do with changing the name of the company.  Also, I want something kind of fun to put at the end of the credits that people will remember.  That’s pretty much it.  I really thought that there was more to it then that, but I guess not. 
Gabe tells me that the color correction for Do Nice Guys Finish Last is tedious, but he’s making progress.  Once the color correction is done the transitions will be a snap.  The credits are all ready to go.  So, we’re not too far off.  There’s not that much color correction to be done.  For a lot of the scenes, Gabe stuck with one camera.  It just flowed better that way. 
I watched a bunch more of the first season of True Blood last night.  Awesome series, but I stand by my belief that vampires are dicks.  I also got Dexter Season 3 on DVD earlier this week.  I’ve only watched the first episode, but holy shit that show is awesome.  I can’t stand watching shows on TV, I have to wait for them on DVD.  I think it’s the cliff hangers that really aggravate me.  There have been a couple times in True Blood, where if I wasn’t able to go to the next episode immediately, I would have lost my freaking mind.  Same with Dexter, although Dexter usually has a pretty good ending to each episode that leaves you satisfied.  Heroes plays the cliff hanger game a lot.  The worst by though is Lost.  I watched season 1 on DVD and decided to watch season 2 on television.  Every single episode I watched ended with me yelling “Jesus Christ!  What the fuck?!”  I only watched like 4 of them before I finally gave up and just waited for the DVD’s.  The thing with Lost is, is that they show you a preview the week before and you’re excited to see this one thing in the preview, then you watch it, and of course, that one thing is at the end of the episode.  But then that’s all it is.  There’s no explanation of it.  It just sort of happens.  Then you have to wait for an entire week to see every ones reaction to that one thing, which is what you wanted to see last week.  Season 5 comes out in December and I’ve been keeping up with it.  I love that show, I think it’s great, but screw those writers.

So, a couple things are happening.  First of all the name of the company, John Q. Phats Entertainment is changing to JQP Entertainment.  I might shorten it even more to JQP Ent.  The main reason for this, is that John Q. Phats Entertainment is too hard for people to remember.  People ask me what the name of my film making company is, I tell them, and they say “…..What?  How do you spell that?  What does that mean?”  I imagine 5 seconds after they walk away from me, they completely forget the name of the company.  Where as JQP Entertainment, is easy enough to remember.  All you have to remember is three letters and then “Entertainment.”  JQPEntertainment is also the web address.  So that works out better for us too.  With our new name comes a new logo.  Looking at other film making companies, they all have these insanely complex logos.  MGM for example.  It’s an actual picture of a lion.  Or the View Askew logo.  It’s an animated drawing of Jay and Silent Bob.  Even Universal has a pretty intense logo for their opening credits.  It’s a rather detailed world.  So, I want something like that.  Something cool and sort of like a mascot.  At first I had thought of a lion.  I have sort of a fetish for simplistic logos, so I came up with this:

I think that lion has a big nose and I thought I needed to step away from that simplistic thing.  Besides that, it’s looks very stupid.  So, I had Chris draw me a lion.  Here’s what he came up with:

His is much better then mine.  Chris can draw.  I’m completely useless at drawing without a computer.  That’s beside the point.  Now we’re thinking that a lion is probably a bad idea because a lot of other companies already use lions.  I don’t know, what do you guys think?  Here were some of the animals I thought might work:
lion, beaver (tee hee), penguin, badger, racoon, giraffe, or gopher.  Any other ideas, anyone?
It’s true, it has nothing to do with the name of the company, but what the hell does a lion have to do with MGM?  Who knows, maybe we’ll come up with something else.  Chris says he has some ideas.  I like the idea of the mascot having a head that’s way too big for it’s body.  My animals are all kind of fluffy.  Maybe we need something tougher.  Like a wolf or a polar bear or something.  I don’t know, we’ll figure it out.  This was all brought on by Do Nice Guys Finish Last.  I want to do the Press Kit, but I need a new logo to put on the front of it to represent JQP Entertainment.  I’ll keep you guys updated.

So, I’m now on Twitter.  I finally gave in.  I was looking for some actors and directors to follow but as soon as you try to think up that stuff, you draw a complete blank.  Normally I could name a string of them non stop for for 2 hours straight, but now, not so much.  I found Al Pacino.  I thought it was funny that Al Pacino tweets.  That’s just hysterical to me.
I made all these fancy new laurels on my lunch break at work that I wanted to post, but I left my thumb drive at work with Gabe.  I’ll post them on Monday.  I decided to make some myself just to standardize them and make them look good.  Right now, I probably should post some of that out take footage that I promised you all like 4 days ago, but instead I’m tweeting my ass off.  I’ll try to post it today, which means that it will show up tomorrow.  My video hosting site, Vimeo, takes a bit process videos.  Vimeo is a great idea.  Videos posted on it look clear as hell, there’s no stupid advertising watermark on your videos, and they give a certain amount of space per week.  It’s an interesting way of doing it and I think they do it so they can plan for the future and buy more space only if needed.  Here’s my thoughts.  Lets say they have 10 members and every week they give each one a gig of space.  Well, they know that every week, they have to have at least 10 gigs available.  Makes sense right?
Anyway, my Twitter URL is:
http://twitter.com/JohnQPhats
I have an app on my phone to work with it so I should be updating it while I’m on set.  It might be interesting.  I promise nothing though.

I’ve been seeing a steady increase in traffic on my site.  That’s kind of exciting.  I was thinking about trying to get some interviews with directors, producers, and possibly an actor.  It really is true that sometimes all you have to do is ask.  Worst they can say is “Fuck off cock lick.”  Wow, that’s pretty harsh.  That actually kind of stings.  There it goes, it just passed, see, I’m fine.  In reality, I would probably get some sort of legal jargon back that translated in to “No, you’re stupid, stop bothering me.”  I think if I can handle a rejection letter from a film festival, I can handle a rejection letter from a famous person.
Have you ever been in a situation where you’re in some sort of a contest and everyone around you is winning awards except for you?  And your thinking (or saying) “What the hell is wrong with these people?!  My stuff is way better then this!”  Then something truly crappy wins and you’re completely outraged?  Hate to tell you, but it’s not because everyone else is crazy, it’s because whatever you entered in to the contest sucked.  I am actually totally guilty of this.  I entered a 24 hour film festival a while back that chose not to show my short in the final screening.  Me and the three people involved were totally outraged.  Looking back at it now though, it wasn’t because the judges were biased, or because the other teams cheated, or because I knocked up one of the judges daughters, it was because my short film sucked.  It was shot on a shitty little standard def camera with no boom mic.  It had two actors in it that had never acted before (myself being one of them).  The third actor was good, but really, how good can you be when you have all of that bad working against you?  When I finally owned up to the fact that my short film sucked, I could learn from it.  I could sit back and figure out what I had done wrong.  Which was far more valuable and got me much further in my development as a film maker.  Best advice I can give you is to go out there and fail.  Fail and learn from it.

You may have noticed that the web site was down for a bit.  Sorry about that.  When I realized that the site was displaying a bunch of code I immediately called my web designer, Alyssa.  Then I asked Jed to see if he could fix it, because he knows everything.  I’m pretty sure my hosting company spilled a cup of coffee on a server or something, because we didn’t do shit.  Alyssa figured it out, and we’re back up and running now.  Yay!  We’ve been working on Nice Guys Finish Last a lot.  The aftermath of the film festival is settling in.  Where am I after the film festival?  Right back where I was before the film festival.  Like I figured.  So, right back to it I suppose.  After Nice Guys Finish Last, I’ll be writing a series called Dead Girl.  I’ll still stay active with posting, but you won’t hear much about me working on short films.  We might shoot a pilot for the series, but one thing that I need is focus.  This weekend we should be shooting some stuff for Nice Guys Finish Last.  Not the big bad ass restaurant scene, but some other scenes.

Well, Alyssa made the new shorts section live yesterday.  Like I said in the previous post, you might not be able to tell the difference, but it makes it so that I can post videos whenever I want.  Rather then having to bug Alyssa, I can do it all on my own now. 
With the new shorts section came two new short films.  Censored & A John Q. Phats Introduction.  Coming soon, should be something I’ve code named Dimensions and possibly the Red Hood short.  I’m not sure if I want to post Red Hood or not.  I’ll probably argue with myself for a bit about it and then end up posting it anyway.  Might as well I suppose.  I don’t know, we’ll see.

Big things happening with the web site this Monday.  While it won’t be noticeable, the Shorts section is getting an overhaul.  From now on, I’ll be able to add short films to the web site whenever I want.  Rather then having to bug Alyssa, burn her a CD, and then have her add it, I can just upload it to Vimeo, hack the Gibson, and post the video to my web site.    With the updated page will come two new short films and hopefully a steady flow of stuff from here on out.  I’ll keep you all updated.

No, that’s not a new short film I’m working on.  Vimeo is a video hosting sight that’s better than Youtube (in my opinion).  The embed looks better and the full screen looks better.  You can see its use right now on Bad Girlfriend and Not Walter in the Shorts section.  Alyssa finished the web site and it looked great but the difficult side of said “I want them to be able to go full screen.”  So, she found a solution.  Vimeo.  I actually kind of despise Youtube and have taken all the videos on my web site off of my Youtube account.  Vimeo is great so far.  The only probelm is, is that Vimeo gives you a certain amount of space that you’re allowed to use per week.  It resets every Sunday at midnight to 500 MB.  So, I haven’t been able to add all of my videos just yet.  I’m working on it though.  It will probably be another week or so.  Once I get them all up, all the videos should be able to go full screen. 
Have I mentioned that I love this web site?  I’m not sure if anyone reads it, but screw that, I get my two cents in.
I saw The Watchmen yesterday and I’ll probably see it again at some point.  It was amazing.  I think my favorite thing about a Zack Snyder movie is that he’s not afraid to go a little nuts with the stylization.  Like in 300 it’s the same for The Watchmen.  Crazy stylization.  I love it.  It’s something different.