John Q. Phats Entertainment

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.

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.