John Q. Phats Entertainment

Stupid short film refuses to be finished.  Yes, we are still working on it.  No, I haven’t dropped off of the planet and I’m not dead.  We’ve been working on a new name for the company and a new logo.  It’s still in the early stages, but I think it looks pretty sharp.  No, I’m not just saying that because of our little argument over e-mail, Chris, you bastard.  I really do like the way it looks.
I really need to write something.  I want to rent an HD camera and experiment with it.  Even if I shoot something kind of lame, it would be fun to play with HD.  I’ll get right on that.  I’m also searching for a huge couch.  The biggest one I’ve found so far was 11.5 feet long.  That’s a huge fucking couch.  What the hell would you even use that for?  Seriously, think about that.  If you were on one side and another person was on the other, there would be roughly 9 feet between the two of you.  You could play a legitimate game of frisbee at that distance.  That’s about the size that I need though.  How do I get myself in to this shit?  How did I get to the point where I NEED an 11.5 foot couch?  O well, this is what keeps me going.  Keeps my imagination going.  I’m reading A TV Writers Workbook again.  Don’t get me wrong, that book is awesome, but sometimes it makes writing seem like such an intimidating task.  It usually explains its way out of it, but right in the middle of a chapter sometimes I’ll be thinking to myself “Shit!  I have no clue what I’m doing!”  I suppose that’s why you would read the book though.  So you know what to do to write a script. 
Quick list of what’s going on:
1. Still finishing Do Nice Guys Finish Last.
2. Looking for a giant couch.  Anyone know where I can find one?
3. Trying not to go insane.  

P.S. I’ve decided to curse on my blog now.  If Kevin Smith can get away with talking about selling tickets in an alley to pork his wife on Twitter, I can fucking curse.

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.

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.

I watched 2 episodes of Science of the Movies last night.  That show is a big reminder of what I don’t have access to.  One episode was all about different moveable camera mounts.  There was this gigantic camera mount that had 12 points of axis that you could program to do motions over and over again.  It’s basically so you can layer two shots on top of each other.  Since the motion of two shots match perfectly, the two shots together look seamless.  I honestly had no clue that’s how it was done.  All of my split screen shorts were pretty much that, minus the motion.  I didn’t realize it, but I kind of stumbled on the early meathod of special effects.  That’s kind of cool.  I find that I do that a lot actually.  It’s kind of weird.  I don’t know if I hear about it somewhere else and subconsciously make myself feel like I thought of it, or if I really do come up with concepts that just happen to match what’s already out there. 
I am meeting with a script writer today to discuss Project X.  By spreading the word through my contacts, I’ve actually got some people interested.  Now all I need is a roughly $5000, an HD Camera, locations, equipment, skill, and food.  Huh.  Anyway, yeah, I’m going to be focusing on that.  It’s tough to juggle everything though.  Nice Guys Finish Last is almost done.  That’s going to need to go out to festivals and Censored is still going.  By the way, I submitted to something a while back called the SoCal Film Festival.  I really hope I get accepted to that.  That would be awesome.  Mainly because they would be holding it right near my house.  I could probably go to every night of that if I wanted to.  It’s literally a 10 minute drive vs an hour+ drive to the festivals Censored has been accepted to.  I would really like Censored to screen somewhere outside of California.  Don’t ask me why, I just think it would be cool.   Every time you get accepted to a festival they send you these little acceptance things:

Like that guy right there.  I suppose can put those on the DVD’s that I send out to other festivals as sort of a selling point.  Imagine if I get selected for all 4 of the other festivals I entered?  That will be 7 total.  That will look kind of insane.  You also get one if you’ve been nominated for or win an award at a festival.  Strictly Background had like a bajillion acceptance ones and 6 Best Documentary Award winners.  These things are actually called Laurels.  Every festival does them.  At least as far as I can tell, every festival does one.  I think they are kind of official and regal looking.  It’s kind of neat to have these.  Sort of like a digital trophy.  Hopefully when Nice Guys Finish Last is done it gets it’s own collection of them.

EDIT(7/29/2009- 3:32PM) – I just got an acceptance E-mail from the SoCal Film Festival.  That kicks so much ass.  I’ll give you guys all the details in tomorrows post.

I’ve been doing a lot of research for my next project.  It’s a big opportunity, so I want to make sure I get it right.  One thing I know for sure, is that I want to shoot it in HD.  That creates a whole mess of problems.  For starters, I don’t have an HD camera.  Kind of hard to shoot in HD, when I don’t have an HD camera.  Second of all, I’ve never shot in HD before.  I’m not sure how the camera is going to differ and what problems I’m going to run in to.  Third of all, I don’t have the money to rent or buy an HD camera.  Again, does anyone have like $5000 I can “borrow”?  By borrow, I mean have.  I could try what some guy did like a year ago.  He took a bunch of pictures of a cute rabbit and put them up on a web site.  Under the pictures basically said that he needed a certain amount of money and that if people didn’t donate it to him, he was going to kill and eat the rabbit.  I remember one of the lines was “I swear to God, I will eat this cute little rabbit.”  Under all of it was a pay pal link where people could donate.  Shit, I almost donated, because I thought it was hysterical.  He even had a picture of the rabbit in a frying pan.  I think he made like $60,000 or something like that.  All I need is $5000, I mean how hard could it be?  I suppose it’s time to start thinking about what I can sell.  Sigh, goodbye possessions.  I’ll miss you.
Gabe is making good progress on Nice Guys Finish Last.  I would say he’s about 30% through.  Which is pretty good considering that he got the project late last week.  It sounds like he’s putting a lot of thought in to it.  We’ll probably change some stuff around.  That’s just how it goes.  This film making thing is kind of bullshit if you really think about it.  This is my analogy of your chance of making it in this industry:
Lets say there were 1000 cups.  999 of them have ”NO” printed on the bottom of them and 1 has ”YES” printed on it.  Lets say you had to find the one with “YES” on it.  And lets say you happened to pick the one with “YES” on it.  Inside that cup there would be a pebble with a random number from 1-10,000 on it.  So, you take that pebble and put it in a random drawing with another 9,999 pebbles all with different numbers.  In that drawing, they happen to pick your number.  Great, now you get to throw a basketball at 4 nets from full court blind folded.  If you make it in to the correct basket, you get to search the entire world looking for a golden Cheerio.  And it could be anywhere.  Even buried 3000 feet below the Atlantic ocean somewhere.  Somehow though, you find out they cheated and put it on the moon.  So, you go to the moon and get it, when you get back you take that Cheerio and find out that you have to play ring toss with it on a toothpick from 400 yards away.  Through some act of God, it lands on the toothpick and now you get a 2% chance at making it in the industry because come to find out, about a million other people all did the same exact things you did, faster, better, and cheaper. 
Really that’s probably an exaggeration, but you get the idea.  In truth, I love making short films.  Weather I’m shooting them on my cell phone or on a $10 billion dollar camera.  When I say “I want to be a film maker” it doesn’t really make sense, because I already am a film maker.  I’m not making money doing it, but I would do it for the rest of my life, even if I was making minimum wage doing it.  Hell, I do it now, and most of the time, it costs me money.  But I don’t do it for the end result, I just do it because I love it.
I’ll keep making them, as long as someone is watching them.

So, I’m in the home stretch of Nice Guys Finish Last.  We shot some good stuff last night.  I’m starting to get the feeling that a lot of actors and actresses tone things down a bit too low.  Whenever I’ve told actors to go a bit over the top, I get some really good stuff out of it.  Of course, I could just be lucky.  I think I have a pretty good system worked out.  I try to do everything by the script exactly.  When I feel like the actor is comfortable with the dialogue, I make slight adjustments in tone here and there.  Then, if I feel like I need to, I make adjustments in the dialogue.  When I feel like I have what I want, I tell the actor for the last take to go crazy and to do whatever they want.  It’s worked for me so far.
My next project is going to be pretty big and I’m going to need to shoot it in HD.  Does anyone want to let me borrow $5000 for an HD camera?  By “let me borrow” I mean, “let me steal.”  Because, I probably wont be paying you back.  I think it’s a sound investment though.  If I ever get famous you can tell everyone
“Fuck that guy, he stole $5000 from me!” 
Think about it.  If I become the next David Fincher, it would be the same as if someone told you today that David Fincher stole $5000 from them.  It’s a conversation starter.
“Hi, how’s it going?  Did you know that David Fincher stole $5000 from me once?”
I think $5000 for a conversation starter is pretty cheap.  Even if I don’t become famous, you could say something like
“Some asshole who thought he was going to be the next David Fincher stole $5000 from me.  What an asshole that guy was.  Stupid asshole.”
Anyway, give me money. 
In other news, the spammers hit me pretty hard last night.  14 comments in one night.  That’s a new record.  So, if anyone wants cheap Viagra or V1agra, whichever you prefer, I got the hook ups.