John Q. Phats Entertainment

You know you’re done editing when you feel like if you watch your short film one more time, you might have a mental break down.  It’s mainly just frustrating because we are so close to being done with Do Nice Guys Finish Last.  I made my notes on the 5th cut last night and I was seriously considering telling Gabe to just start on color correction when he was done making the edits.  But, I can’t do that.  You know why?  Because when it’s done, there will be one tiny thing that irritates me that could have been fixed in 2 seconds if I had known it was there.  However if I do look at the draft before we get in to color correction, nothing will be wrong with it and it will be fine.  That’s just how it goes. 
So, about a week ago, a friend of mine is telling me about her good friend that shot a documentary on 5 of these cameras.  She didn’t know what they were called, but she told me they were the newest and best digital cameras out there.  So I said
“Ask you’re friend if I can borrow it for like a week or so.”
She laughed and I laughed but then I said
“I’m serious.”
So, she did and from what she told me he laughed, said no, but admired me for asking.  Works for me.  It was worth a shot, right?  Imagine if he had said yes?  I would have had access to a really awesome camera.  For free.  It never hurts to ask.  You would be surprised at what you could get for free by just asking.  Not that I’m a greedy beggar or anything, but when you’re making films anything you can get for free, you probably should. 
District 9 comes out tomorrow.  I’ve really wanted to see this movie ever since I saw the previews.  It looks a little bit like Cloverfield, which I thought was pretty good.  District 9 looks awesome.  I love these sort of creepy sci fi pictures.  I’m not sure what really draws me to them.  I’m not a sci fi or horror film buff, but for some reason this sort of combination is usually something I really enjoy.  I’m probably going to check it out this Sunday.  I’ll let you guys know how it is.
In a totally unrelated topic, Tropic Thunder was an awesome movie.  I have been quoting that movie all week and laughing just thinking about it.  Tom Cruise was hands down the most entertaining I have ever seen him in any movie he’s ever done.  Every single time his character was on screen I laughed my ass off.
“Now I want you to take a step back… and literally FUCK YOUR OWN FACE!”
Robert Downey Jr. kills it in that movie too.  The
“I’m a lead farmer mother fucker!”
line always cracks me up.  Maybe because it’s just so damn cliche action movie.

Watching some of my old short films last night I’ve realized how far everyone involved in all of this has come.  Acting has gotten better, camera work has gotten better, lighting has gotten way better, editing has gotten better, and sound has definitely gotten much better.  I’m not really sure how we all got here.  I think we were all just committed to making a better product.  It was pretty much a process of refining.  We would try something else and if that didn’t work out, we would figure out a different way of doing.  For example, in The Train Wreck, the sound is horrible.  That’s because it was our first time using the boom mic.  We thought we would be smart and hold the boom mic low and aim it up rather then high and aim it down.  What we didn’t realize is that the boom mic would pick up EVERYTHING that went on with the actors feet.  You can hear every single footstep the actors took in that short film.  It’s really annoying.  The next innovation in sound actually happened on Do Nice Guys Finish Last.  In the last short film that we did Gabe complained that it had the sound quality of a porno.  So, we looked up some information on the Internet regarding sound for short films and found some pretty good stuff.  We spent probably about 15 minutes before each scene finding not only the right position for the boom mic but the right settings for the camera to match that.  I have to say that Do Nice Guys Finish Last is probably the best sounding thing we’ve done so far.  Which may be sad, but whatever, we’re getting there.  I guess my point is, is that…  I’m not really sure what my point is.  I guess I’m just writing.
I just got the new cut of Do Nice Guys Finish Last from Gabe.  I can’t wait to see it.  I think we are extremely close to a final cut.  Probably just a few changes here and there and we’ll be done.  Then, we can start doing color correction.  Which in all honestly, sucks.  Color correction is one of those things that you have to do, but really don’t want to.  Like returning your ex girlfriends DVD’s or going to a funeral.  It’s just lame.  Can’t modern technology take care of this for us yet?  Can’t you have two shots and click on a box that says “I want these two thingies to look like they are the same color”?  I mean, do we really have to spend hours fidgeting with some stupid little knobs to get it to do that?  We have satellites that can read a license plate from space, but we can’t do that?  Really?  It’s total bullshit, it really is.  I’m actually just trying to be funny.  Color correction really isn’t that bad.  It’s just kind of tedious.  For some reason, Gabe is actually excited about it.  Maybe he’s just tired of my nit picky editing notes.  The last one was pretty bad.  I think there was a portion where I cut like .5 of a second off of a shot.  I’m pretty sure when I’m coming up with stuff like that, we are pretty damn close to a final cut.

Sorry for the lack of posting this weekend.  The Internet at my house went down again.  I should be getting draft number 5 of Do Nice Guys Finish Last from Gabe tomorrow.  I’m really looking forward to being done with it.  I want to start sending it to festivals already.  I have several friends and family members who bug me about seeing it almost every day.  I’m still not going to rush it though.  We’ll be done with it when me and Gabe both agree that it’s done.  In the mean time, we have been working our asses off on it.  I really believe in getting what I want out of a short film.  Just never saying “it’s good enough.”  If something doesn’t look or sound how I want it to, I’ll re shoot it.  I believe that if you’re a film maker, you should always make the film that you want to make.  Screw what the critics say, screw what other people say, you’re making this short film, make it however you want.  If you do that, it doesn’t matter if other people like it or not.  You made the film that you wanted to make and that’s that.  Of course, other people liking it is a nice added bonus.  I always wanted Do Nice Guys Finish Last to be something that’s funny because it’s true.  That’s part of the reason I made it a mockumentary, to sort of bring people back to the fact that it’s based on a realistic principal.  Plus it was a damn good time filming it.  It’s kind of cool, there’s so much you can get away with in a mockumentary.  A boom mic enters the shot?  O well, that happens in documentaries all the time.  An actor stumbles over their lines?  O well, people stumble over their words sometimes in reality, it happens.  The scene is too dark?  O well, sometimes rooms are dark.  It’s not that it’s an easy out, it’s just that there’s so much room to play.  All of this in Do Nice Guys Finish Last if it does make it in is intentional.  We wanted portions to have a little bit of boom mic in them just to cement the fact that the characters know that there are cameras and everything there.  It’s kind of weird placing these imperfections here and there, but it’s kind of fun at the same time.
I’ll keep you guys updated on the progress of it.  Right now, it’s looking pretty good.  We’ll probably have a final cut around next week.  Then we get in to the exciting world of color correction….. Yay.

Last night, on the way home, 3 ideas for short films came to me.  I told myself that I would write them out after I was done working out.  I finished working out and out of habit I turned on NHL 09 for Playstation3.  Midway through it’s start up, I realized that I wasn’t supposed to be playing NHL 09 and that I was supposed to be writing out some scripts.  I convinced myself to play just one game, which usually turns in to roughly 5 games.  I am so addicted to NHL 09, it’s not even funny.  Seriously, I’ve been playing that game for a year and I can’t stop.  NHL 10 comes out in 2 months and then it will all start all over again.  So, I start to play and I’m playing goalie mode and I’m not joking you, the computer scored like 4 goals on me in the time span of 1 real life minute.  Which is like 20 seconds in game time.  If you were in my kitchen at the time you would have heard:
“damn it………son of a bitch………SHIT!……….MOTHER FU- Screw this!”
 With that, I turned off the system and went upstairs and started writing.
I got a lot more out of writing those scripts then I would have gotten from playing NHL 09 for 4 hours.  I immediately sent one script to Chris and he really liked it.  It seriously is, the perfect short film for festivals.  It would run about a minute long, it’s funny, it’s quick, it’s clever, and it’s PG-13.  The best part is, is that I could probably shoot it in one day and edit it the next.  It’s a really simplistic and clever concept.  Maybe it will be something that I can pull off in between Do Nice Guys Finish Last and Project X.  I got the ball rolling on Project X.  Which needed to be done.  I looked at all of the information I had and just put it all together and sort of wrote out an outline.  Then I E-Mailed that to the script writer.  I’m excited to see how it comes out.  Also, I just got the new cut from Gabe, of Do Nice Guys Finish Last.  Needless to say, I’m glad that I suck at NHL 09 and that the computer saw it fit to destroy me.

First off, I would like to apologize in advance for this one.  I went on sort of a Harry Potter binge this weekend and watched all five movies over the course of two days and my brain is a little scrambled.  I can’t believe that after five movies, Ron still hasn’t made a move on that Herminy (did I spell that right?  Don’t really care.) chick.  Christ man, what do you need, a written invitation?!  Also, there’s clearly not enough drug use for this to be a movie about a bunch of kids.  Although, I’m convinced that, the divination teacher has got to be on something.  I wonder if there’s a deleted scene where she’s smoking out Dumbledore?  In all seriousness though, for what they are, those movies are amazing.  They are all really well done.  Pretty much every aspect of those movies is at the very least, great.  Anyway, sorry again.
In my last post I talked about an old short film that I did titled The Wake Up.  It really got me thinking about my first short film, Firework De La Muerte.  What a pile of crap that short film was.  It was roughly an eight page script with the same joke told four times.  Really, the joke wasn’t funny the first time and it sure wasn’t funny the 4th time.  For that one we shot in a department store which shall remain nameless, without asking anyone.  We just sort of got somebody with a red shirt and went with it.  That was gorilla film making to the extreme.  To be honest, nobody really cared.  If I was an employee making minimum wage, I don’t think I would really care either.  I think the worst part about Firework De La Muerte is that when it was done, I thought it was great.  But then when other people watched it, they didn’t laugh.  At first I was in denial.  Like there was something wrong with everyone else.  Finally, I realized that it really did just suck something awful.  It was kind of a slap to the face.  But it was necessary.  I remember the first time I watched it, without my head up my ass.  I just sat there watching it in absolute shock at how bad it really was.  After watching it, I actually said out loud.
“O my God……  That sucked.”
There is no place to see Firework De La Muearte, nobody will ever see it.  It belongs in the depths of a hard drive, where nobody will ever find it.  I think I might of actually deleted it off of my external hard drive.  I do still have the prop firework though, made of cardboard, that egg crate stuff you put on a mattress, and duct tape.  The prop was actually kind of glorious, I have to say.  It was a giant somewhat rocket shape covered in duct tape.
While Firework De La Muearte is an awful short film, it really was something that I needed to do, to get where I am.  Now, Censored is playing in festivals all over the place, I’m close to finishing Do Nice Guys Finish Last, and I have a lot of big and exciting projects on the horizon.  This sort of leads in to my next topic.  I finished up fancy new laurels for Censored:
      

Technically, the SoCal Film festival hasn’t happened yet, but we have been selected.

Do Nice Guys Finish Last is a mockumentary.  We really wanted it to have that documentary feel.  Thus why there is no tripod in any of these shots.  I usually hate it when short films don’t use a tripod, but in this case, I think it calls for it.  These are some out takes from a scene we had to re shoot.  We had so much fun on this shoot.  We all have a laugh when someone messes up.  There’s also just some messing around.  When we have the shots we want sometimes I’ll just tell the actors to do whatever and have a good time.  This is the result.

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.

Ever since I figured out that you can make two shots look like one, I’ve had sort of a hard on about the idea.  This short actually consists of 4 shots total.  This is just something we thought up on the spot.  I like stories that don’t really have an explanation because they don’t need one.  This is the shoot where God damn Chris moved the beer and made us shoot the entire thing all over again.  Bastard.  It actually wasn’t that bad.  Everyone knew what to do at this point, so all the shots went extremely fast.  We shot a little extra where Caine is screaming at Chris about moving the beer while doing an impression of Christian Bale yelling at that DP on the set of the new Terminator flick.  I might post that a little bit later.