John Q. Phats Entertainment

I’m still figuring out this whole Twitter thing.  People that are really in to it put “twe” in front of almost everything they say.  For example their Twitter Friends become their “Twepole.”  First off, this is confusing and unnecessary.  Second of all, these people are Twetarted.  I think the whole concept of Twitter is kind of hilarious.  Nobody on the planet really needs to know what someone is doing that much.  Unless of course you’re a celebrity, then I absolutely want to know that you are “walking the dog” or “watching 24″ or “taking a shower.”  Louis C.K. (http://twitter.com/louis_ck) is one of my favorite comedians.  His one and only entry is “Sucking Dicks.”  He made this tweet roughly 3 months ago.  My response a month ago was “Wow, you’ve been sucking dicks for two months? That’s impressive.”  I also follow Kevin Smith on Twitter.  He usually talks about events that he’s attending or stuff that he’s working on.  I read his tweets, the only time I don’t is when he goes absolutely nuts and posts like 100 tweets in 10 minutes.  I’m not even sure how that’s possible, but whatever.  Occasionally, you’ll get something random.  For example today he mentioned how he was excited to get NHL10.  I am not going to lie, I so want to play him.  It’s a little tough to get through to him though.  I imagine since he has like over a million followers he probably got about 100,000 responses to that.  Overall Twitter is amusing.  I’m never really sure what to write though.  I try to keep it kind of general, that way I can let it sit there for like 3 days.  If you want to follow me, my web address is:
http://twitter.com/JohnQPhats
I’m pretty sure I’m going to head to the SoCal Film Festival tonight to watch some more short films.  Say hello if you happen to see me there. 
You can buy tickets here:
http://www.socalfilmfest.com/tickets.aspx
Censored is playing tomorrow at 7:20 in Program 10.

Sorry for not posting for awhile, I’ve had a busy week.  I was on vacation in Minnesota.  I’m back now and there’s a lot to talk about.  We’ll start off with the light stuff.  Me and my girlfriend have been watching a lot of the second season of True Blood.  That show is absolutely awesome.  I hate to say this, because it seems like after Twilight, everyone is jumping on the vampire band wagon, but it makes me want to write a vampire short.  It seems like the hardest part of doing something like that is making it not look cheesy.  Why?  Because not making it look cheesy is either going to cost you money or time.  Possibly both.  I’ve done one suspense based short film and I wasn’t too happy with it.  That’s all right, it was a good learning experience. 
Programming for the festival is going nicely.  My biggest issue with short films is time.  People try and tell a story in 10 minutes that could easily be told in 5.  The longer a short film is, the more obvious it is.  First off, let me tell you, if you’re making a 20+ minute short film it had better be brilliant.  It’s an immediate flag to see a short film that runs over 20 minutes.  The first thought is “This could be really bad.”  Mainly because I would rather sit through a bad 5 minute long short film then a bad 20 minute long short film.  I’m pretty sure I’ve said this before, so I’ll just move on.
NHL 10 comes out soon.  The only reason I mention this is because NHL 09 already consumes a large portion of my life.  I’m not really sure what’s going to happen when NHL 10 comes out.  I may lose a lot of sleep, which means I might miss a lot of work, which means I might get fired, which means I can’t pay my cable bill, which means they would turn off my Internet, which means I wouldn’t be able to post here anymore.  This is the reality of the situation.  Don’t judge me, it’s not my fault, I have an addiction.  If they had a ten step program, I would probably be a prime candidate.  By the way, that reminds me of one of my movie quirks.  I absolutely hate it when you have people playing a video game in a movie and they are button mashing like crazy on the controllers.  Why not just have them play the game with the audio off?  Then record the audio of the game some other time and then insert that audio in editing.  You would think that would be something that directors catch, but I see it all the time.  I’ve shot a couple things with people playing video games and every time I’ve been able to work with the audio and make it look like the actor/actress is actually playing the game.  Or you just record them playing the game with the audio on from the angle you’ll be cutting to that actually shows the game and then use that audio.  It’s really not that difficult. 
Moving on, we should be done with the audio for Do Nice Guys Finish Last possibly tonight.  We’ll see, I may not be able to tonight.  It would be nice to finish it up.  Vacation kind of put a stop to everything.  I really want that done by the end of next week.  As soon as it’s done, I’m going to send it away to 6 festivals.  Might get rejected, might not.  Either way, I’ll keep you guys all updated on what’s going on with that.
There are big things happening with JQP Entertainment itself.  We may have a new name soon.  Which means we would have a new web address.  I would actually probably keep this same design and everything, the only thing that would change would be the web address and logo in the upper left corner.  Actually this web address would probably link to the other one, so really there wouldn’t be that much of a change.  We are changing the way we do things and we all agreed that a new name is necessary.
I’ll probably be mentioning this every post from now until then, but the SoCal Film Festival is very close.  I’ll more then likely be attending every night, either with someone or alone.  It’s so close to me, it seems like a waste not to.  It kicks off Monday, 9/14/2009 but Censored isn’t playing until Friday.  Again, you can buy tickets here:
http://www.socalfilmfest.com/tickets.aspx
There’s just a lot going on with JQP Entertainment right now.  Way more then I can probably mention in this post.  I’ll let you guys know as new things come up.

I watched Postal last night.  First off, I have to say that I’m an incredibly tough person to offend.  Postal, at parts, was offensive to me.  Maybe it was the opening skit based around 9/11 in the beginning, or the full frontal on Dave Foley we got where he actually grabs his johnson to make it move around and then walks in to a bathroom and takes a huge dump.  That part wasn’t so much offensive as it was “O Jesus.”  By the way, I could tell that he wasn’t really taking a dump, that’s how close the camera was.  Maybe it’s just me, but I didn’t think the movie was all that funny.  At parts it seemed like it was offensive, just for the sake of being offensive.  There were some parts I laughed at.  At one point Uwe Boll is in the movie doing an interview and telling the interviewer that his movies are funded with Nazi gold.  I actually thought that was pretty funny.  Uwe Boll sort of poking fun at himself.  I can appreciate that.  Also, Verne Troyer and the glow in the dark dildo was kind of amusing.  On the DVD Uwe Boll included some fights from his event, Raging Boll.
Uwe Boll at one point told his critics that he would box them.  He selected some critics to box and then put some of that footage on the DVD in the extra features section.  Jesus tap dancing H. Christ.  Did he pick the most physically challenged critics he could find?  None of these guys looked athletic in the least bit and none of them knew how to throw a punch.  So, it was pretty much 20 minutes of Uwe Boll punching people while they tried to dance around the ring and not get punched in the face by a large, angry, German man.  I blame Boll for his poor selections of opponents.  But didn’t these guys train at all?  Didn’t they think “I’m going to be in a boxing match, maybe I should take some boxing lessons or something.”  Even if I was told that it was just going to be a light sparring session for charity, I would take some lessons, just so I know what I’m doing to some degree.  Some of them got a couple good punches in, but mostly it was just kind of sad.  Before each fight, some text pops up on screen telling you who Uwe Boll is using as a punching bag.  One of them read “[Name], A 17 year old Internet critic.”  So, pretty much Uwe Boll picked some 17 year old kid posting on IMDB or where ever to punch in the face.  Is that legal?
You know my thoughts on Uwe Boll, I talked about him a bit in my Bad Movies You Have to See article.  He makes the movies he wants to make.  The simple fact is, is that if you don’t like his movies, you don’t have to see them.  Although, I couldn’t tell you what possessed me to watch Postal.  I haven’t been a fan of his movies.  I suppose I was just curious because I heard it was so offensive and I wanted to see some of those boxing matches.  Uwe Boll is just an interesting character.  Almost like Howard Stern.  You remember when he first came out?  A lot of people down right hated him and wanted him taken off the air, but they would listen to his show religiously every single morning.  That’s kind of how Uwe Boll is.  A lot of people want him to stop making movies, but then they go to watch his movies.  It doesn’t really make sense.  Me personally, I don’t hate the guy.  I respect him for doing what he does regardless of all the criticism he gets.  I’m not a huge fan of his movies, but I guess some people are.  Which is cool.  Like I said, he’s just an interesting character.  I think it would be awesome to interview him.

So, I have to do some pick up shots for Do Nice Guys Finish Last.  I hate pick up shots with every fiber of my being.  If pick up shots were a person and I had the last two bullets on earth, I would shoot pick up shots in the face twice.  A pick up shot is after you’ve finished shooting, you find in editing that you have to go back and re shoot something or get some extra footage that you missed.  They suck.  There’s a big buzz when you’re done shooting.  It’s like “Yes!  We’re done!”  When you’re done shooting pick up shots, it’s like “I can’t believe I had to do that bullshit again.”  And most of the time, it’s like 2 shots.  So you set up, go through the motions with the actors, set up the lights, get the cameras ready, and then shoot for 10 minutes.  So, I have to do that for one scene.  We had a little malfunction and pretty much all of the footage from that scene is trashed.  After looking at the dialogue in that scene though, I’ve decided to change it.  It wasn’t really working anyway.  So I suppose this is a chance to make an improvement on a weak point in the script.  I’m running the edits by Gabe to see what he thinks and he’s shot down every single one of my rewrites.  He would make a good producer.  If he could only add “besides, that would be too expensive” at the end of his shoot downs, he would be all set.  It’s tough sometimes not to get defensive when someone tells you something you’ve created sucks.  If I start to feel that, I just say “Hmmmm” and give myself a minute.  Then I ask questions like “Well, why does it suck?  What would make it better?”  It just takes me a minute to remind myself that they are trying to help me and ultimately, this will make my short film better.  No matter how negatively people come at me, I always just try to hear their opinion.  It doesn’t help me to be defensive, however getting their opinion helps me a lot.  Big time companies are way more interested in why their customers left then why their customers stayed.  They want to know what happened, why you left, and how they could have kept you.  Just like I want to know why you hated my short film and what I could have done differently to make you like it.  That way I can take that in to account on my next short film.  I often stray from my original point.  What was I talking about?  O yeah, pick up shot blow and somehow, this is all Chris’s fault……  Stupid Chris.

Is anyone in the market for an older then old Nextel?  Here is a list of the features:
E-Mail: No
Internet: HA HA HA HA HA !
Text Messaging: …..Sort of
Instant Messaging: No
GPS: No
Touch Screen: No
Color Screen: …..Sort of
Buttons: Yes!
Phone: Yes!

You could drop this thing in to a volcano and it would still work.  O yeah, and it might be broken.  It’s not much of a phone, but it is a good conversation piece.  I used to call it the Zach Morris special edition.  That got me laid quite a bit.  Not really, but it could, if you’re good looking.
I’m still in the process of going through what I can part with.  You know it’s getting bad when you’re looking at your refrigerator thinking:
“Really?  How valuable is cold food to my living situation anyway?”
I’ve thought of some other ways to make some money.  I’m thinking about holding a showing for Nice Guys Finish Last when I’m done with it and charging like $10 a ticket.  That seems like a bit much but, I’ve had a lot of friends that have said they would pony up to help me out.  I would also probably show some other short films from some other film makers.  That’s a big maybe though.  I’m not really interested in hosting my own film festival.  So basically, if I know someone and they want to show something, sure, why not?  I’ll be sure to keep you guys updated on the progress of Nice Guys Finish Last and if I decide to have a showing for it.

So, we have a first cut on Nice Guys Finish Last.  It came out pretty good.  It’s 18 minutes long.  Right off the bat, I see a couple things that would shave off like a minute or two.  Either way, I don’t think the festival version will be having any credits in it.  Gabe did a pretty good job on the first cut.  I think there are some other takes that I would like to experiment with.  Apparently Gabe had a tough critic in the room while he was editing last night.  Someone he doesn’t know was saying stuff like “What is this?  Are you guys in high school or something?”  I kind of wish I was there for that.  I say, tear it to shreds, I want to know the people that hate it and why they hate it.  If she could give me 20 specific, valid reasons why it was bad, I would want to hear all of them.  Only way you’re going to get better is if people tell you what you did wrong.  On the plus side, she did say that some stuff was funny.  Gabe said there were scenes where she actually said “OK, that’s funny.”  Anyway, the first cut is a good start.  Apparently I forgot that one of the cameras had a polarizing lense on the front of it.  Some of our outdoor scenes look a little off but that’s ok, we can fix that with some color correction.  I was actually surprised, but Gabe usually stuck with one shot for an entire scene, so it really wasn’t that big of a deal.  It shouldn’t take us too long to correct it.  The colors are fine in doors, it’s just a couple of the outdoor scenes that look a little off.
I wrote a blog yesterday about the book I’m reading, How Not to Make a Short Film.  The author of the book (Roberta Munroe) responded to my blog in a comment.  The Internet, let me tell you.  That’s the second author I’ve had communication with this month.  Sometimes I forget that the little name on the bottom of the book is actually a person. You can check out the comment in my last blog, she had some words of wisdom for aspiring film makers.  It was all good stuff.  I wonder if Kevin Bacon will ever respond to my Bacon Dick blog.  Probably not.  I wonder if he would be pissed?  If I were a celebrity, I would take the Bill Murray approach.  Apparently if someone recognizes him, he does some sort of weird dance followed by a bunch of random acts then says “Nobody will believe you” and then runs off.  I’m sorry, but that is genius.  I want him to adopt me.  I’m 27, but still.
Yesterday, I found an awesome site for royalty free music.  Check it out:
 Inomptech Royalty Free Music
The search feature is great. You can search by musical genre or the mood of the music that you’re looking for.  I was extremely surprised by the amount of quality music that’s on there.

Well, we are up and running.  We are still working out some of the kinks, but here’s what can be expected of the site. 
Keep an eye on this page for updates to the site and what we are currently working on.  I started this site simply to have a place to display short films.  We’re here to entertain as many people as possible.  I won’t only be discussing my short films here though.  I will more then likely point you in the direction of movies and shorts that I find along the way that have inspired me.  So keep and eye out and visit as often as you want.