John Q. Phats Entertainment

Last night I went to the SoCal Film Festival to check out some of the other films.  There was the usual mix of the amazing and not so amazing.  With one “What the hell?” thrown in the mix for good measure.  It seems like whenever you watch 5 or more short films there’s always one that makes you think “What the hell was that even about?”  It’s always a welcomed feeling.  I can respect someone who does something different.  I’m not exaggerating when I say this.  Last night, I probably saw the best short film I’ve ever seen at any film festival.  It was called A New Color.  Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any of the actors or film makers there at the end of the event and I couldn’t find anything about it on the Internet.  The main actor in that, nailed it.  It was probably some of the best acting I’ve seen in a short film.  I don’t want to talk about what it was about in case you can catch it at another film festival, but if you have the opportunity, go and see it.  I really probably should attend more festivals.  I enjoy them.  I spent a good three hours at the SoCal Film Festival last night and I had a great time.  I have to say, so far, I am impressed with what I’ve seen.  There was some really good stuff there.  Cheesy as it may sound, the Huntington Beach Library has an awesome theater in it.  I didn’t really know what to expect, but when I got there, I was really impressed. 
What I’ve come to realize though, is that anyone could probably sneak in to any film festival.  The security isn’t exactly top notch at any of these festivals.  All you would really have to do is show up and say that you got a ticket online.  They would probably say that you weren’t on the list, then you could just say “Well, I bought a ticket…..”  Throw some sad puppy dog eyes at them and my guess is they would probably fold.  If I were running a festival, I know I would.  The more, the merrier, right?
Today, I turn in some more short films and hopefully get some new ones.  I can tell that I’m still trying to find my scale.  What I mean by that is, I’m still trying to figure out the difference between a short film that is absolutely amazing and one that is just good.  On the other side of that is trying to figure out if a short film is an absolute failure or just bad.  My first batch, I think I had a tougher curve, this last batch, I think I lightened up a bit.  I’m asking myself a lot of questions with this now.  Does the specific type of film the festival is looking for factor in to the curve?  How much of an impact on the score does the production value have on it?  How much of an impact does the acting have?  The cinematography?  Do I just go off of straight up entertainment value?  These are all things that I’m figuring out as I go.  I’ll be honest, I’m not all that happy with the scores of my last batch.  I think I was too easy on a lot of films.  It’s all part of the process I think.  I’ll figure it out.
Last night I found another one of my short film pet peeves.  I hate it when short films rip off music from movies.  Unless you’re doing a spoof of that movie, that’s bullshit.  Composers work really hard on those songs and to blatantly rip them off is like an insult to not only them, but to the audience as well.  Am I over reacting?  Probably, but it’s one of my pet peeves. 
So, the festival last night was fun, but I still can’t wait for Friday.  That’s the day that Censored plays in the SoCal Film Festival.  I’m not only excited to see it, but to see some of the other stuff that the festival has to offer.  I was totally impressed last night and I’m honored to be playing with such high caliber films.  Again, you can buy tickets here:
http://www.socalfilmfest.com/tickets.aspx
Censored is playing in Program 10- Off the Beaten Path.
Hope to see you guys there.

I know, I’m sort of beating this in to the ground but it’s very exciting for me.  Again, just a reminder, the SoCal Film Festival is this Friday.  Again, you can buy tickets here:
http://www.socalfilmfest.com/tickets.aspx
Censored is playing on Friday at 7:20PM in Program 10 (Off The Beaten Path).  The address of the place is:
Huntington Beach Central Library and Cultural Center
7111 Talbert Ave.
Huntington Beach, CA 92648
Tickets are $4.00 each.
Hope to see you there.  I should be heading down there tonight actually to check out some of the other short films.  If you see a goofy looking guy wearing grey pants with black pin stripes, that’s me.  Come on over and say hello.  Or tell me to go to hell.  Which ever you prefer.

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.

I finished up Dexter season 3 last night.  I like how every season of that show leaves on an ending note.  Rather then a cliff hanger that you have to wait months and months to figure out what’s going on.  Seasons 1, 2, and 3 could have ended the series and I would have been perfectly happy with it.  I’m glad that it went longer, I’m just saying that the show does a good job of wrapping everything up at the end.  With each season, Dexter seems to come to some sort of realization that seems to sum up all of his experiences.  I really do enjoy how it does that.  Season 1 was phenomenal, season 2 was better, and I think season 3 was the best out of all of them.
I still haven’t done the audio work on Do Nice Guys Finish Last.  I guess it will have to be after my vacation.  I’m going to Minnesota for a while.  I will do it as soon as I get back though. 
I also figured I would take this opportunity to plug the SoCal Film Fest again.  Here is where you can buy tickets:
http://www.socalfilmfest.com/tickets.aspx
Censored is playing on 9/18/2009 at 7:20PM in Program 10.  The festival is being held at the HB Central Library & Cultural Center Theater.  The address to the theater is:
7111 Talbert Ave., Huntington Beach, CA 92648
Hope to see you guys there.

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.

Last night, I made a very bad decision.  I started to paint my ex room mates room.  As always I started with a coat of primer.  So, I’m going around the room and all of a sudden, I get the brilliant idea to paint the inside of the closet.  About 5 seconds in to this endeavor, I realize that I’ve made a horrible mistake.  Somehow, the builder of the house managed to put more corners in that closet then in the entire house.  I think it took me like 2 hours alone, just to primer the closet.  Stupid closet.  For $550 a month, my next room mate could have probably dealt with an unpainted closet. 
Every time I paint, I can’t help but think of the possibilities of turning a room in my house in to a set.  It would just be way too easy.  I have this space available with walls begging to be painted.  I could paint them any color I want.  With low budget film making, you don’t always have that option.  You usually have to deal with the color the wall already is.  I’ve always wanted to do a very art direction esq short film.  Something where every shot has clashing colors or the entire film has a specific range of color.  I actually didn’t even know that they did this, until I read the Grindhouse book.  Robert Rodriguez was talking about the colors that he chose for Planet Terror.  When I watched Planet Terror again, I started to notice it.  I always thought French cinema had great art direction in them.  Every single French film I’ve seen has been very artistic either in story itself, costume design, or background design.  Of course, you mention French cinema and the first thing that comes to most people’s minds is Amélie.  I like Amélie, it’s a great movie, but there is a lot more to French cinema.  Angel-A or  The Diving Bell and the Butterfly are both awesome films.  Ok, I’m done with my French cinema rant.  As I mentioned yesterday, color correction for Do Nice Guys Finish Last is done.  I was either going to work on the audio for it yesterday or paint that room.  I was really hoping to work on the audio but Gabe was busy that night.  I don’t expect the audio to take me that long.  I’m not really looking to do anything fancy.  I want to keep it sort of rough, to fit in with the amateur documentary feel that we are going for.  Things have been crazy lately, but I really want to get to work on my next project.  For my next project I really want to use a rack focus.  I’ve actually thought up scripts that would require the entire thing to be shot with one shot while we rack focus back and fourth between like 3 characters.  That’s either an awesome idea, or a horrible idea.  I haven’t decided yet.  Either the audience would all go “Woooooow” or it would just give them all a massive headache.

Gabe gave me the Do Nice Guys Finish Last color correction version.  It looked really good.  It’s weird to see it in a somewhat polished state.  Next we are going to work on the audio.  I’m still debating how much I want to do to the audio.  Part of me wants to clean it up completely and another part of me wants it to stay sort of rough.  Some aspects of Do Nice Guys Finish Last are polished and other aspects are left rough on purpose.  For example, the camera work was left rough on purpose.  The lighting was set up and polished though.  Mainly because we could do that and get away with it.  It’s one of those things that we can slip past the audience that would make it look a little bit better.  Audio is a big part of this.  I really do want the audience to feel like they are watching a documentary done by a bunch of amateurs.  But how far is too far?  Is keeping the audio somewhat rough forgivable here?  I’m going to have to figure that out tonight.  After the audio, we’ll probably do the transitions and then we’ll be done.  I already put the credits together so all I have to do is tack those on the end when the transitions are done and call it a day.  With credits, Do Nice Guys Finish Last will wind up being just under 16 minutes.  I can live with that.  I think for a 16 minute film, it’s pretty fat free.  I’ve seen short films that are 20 minutes that could have easily been cut down to 10.  I don’t think this is the case with Do Nice Guys Finish Last.  I think it’s 15 minutes, because it needs to be 15 minutes.  We cut a lot out that was in the original script.  Not just to get it under 15 minutes, but because the parts we cut out weren’t necessary.  If you can get the point across in 1 scene, then why show 2?  Or if you can get the point across in a scene that’s 30 seconds long, why would you show a scene that’s 2 minutes long?  Of course, I think this all changes when shooting a movie.  For a short film there is a totally different set of rules.  With a movie, you have time for a set up and you can take your time here and there.  With a short film there almost shouldn’t be a setup.  The characters should already be past the setup and on to the point of the short film by the time it starts.  For example, there’s a scene where Chris calls one of the girls and nervously asks her for a date.  We could have shown him pacing back and fourth nervously while biting his finger nails and starring at his phone, but why?  He makes it blatantly obvious by the tone in his voice that he’s nervous.  It would be taking twice as long to illustrate the same exact point.  As an audience member, I think it’s a little insulting actually.  If we had shown the pacing scene it would sort of be like:
“He’s nervous….  You see how nervous he is?  He’s really nervous.  Look at how he’s pacing, he’s nervous.  Man is he nervous.”
Kind of annoying, isn’t it?  I think, a lot of short films fall in to this trap.  The audience is smarter then you think.  They can figure it out.

Today Gabe might have the color corrected Do Nice Guys Finish Last.  We’ll see what happens.  It will either be today or sometime, early this week.  After color correction we’ll be working on transitions.  I don’t think that will take us too long.  Then we’ll do some slight corrections in audio.  I’m really not too concerned about the audio.  Mainly because I want it to have sort of a rough feeling to it.  Like an inexperienced boom mic operator was just chasing people around not really sure what he was doing.  It fits for this short film and I actually think it sort of adds to it.  As long as I’m aware of it, I think it’s ok.  I’m very excited about being done with Do Nice Guys Finish Last.  I always have a hard time telling everyone to just wait for the edit to be done.  I hate telling people to wait for us to be done editing.  Editing takes a long time and nobody except for me and Gabe sees the progress.  Of course, I can talk about it and post screen shots.  But you can’t really show anyone the short film until it’s done.  It’s a little frustrating, but I’ll live.
I saw Inglorious Bastards yesterday.  I loved that freaking movie.  I thought it was great.  You never quite know what you are going to get with Quentin Tarantino.  That’s what I like though.  His style is always changing and evolving, but his movies always have that Quentin Tarantino feel to them.  If you showed me a 100 unreleased films and one of them were a Quentin Tarantino film, I could probably tell you which one was the Tarantino film without looking at the credits.  Whenever I see a Quentin Tarantino film it remindes me to always make a Carl Keitz film.  Basically, make the short film or movie that I want to make.  What makes a Quentin Tarantino film so good, is that it’s a Quentin Tarantino film.  He always makes the movie that he wants to make.  That’s probably what every film maker should do.

For those of you that went to the movie thing last night in Huntington, you may have not seen me.  I had a bit of an emergency that I had to deal with so I couldn’t make it.  Sorry if you showed up to say hello and I wasn’t there. 
Last night in being a programmer I got to the good stuff.  These are the films that make me look at my work and think to myself “What the hell am I doing?”  Two especially absolutely amazed me.  There is some great stuff out there.  I already knew that, but I always welcome a good reminder.
I’ve been working on my resume to look for work on a film crew.  Of course, me being a graphic designer I have to make it incredibly complicated and fancy.  What actually started as a work project has evolved in to part of my resume.  I’ll post it when I’m done with it for you guys to check out.  It should be quite glorious.  I’ve also been hard at work on the press kit for Do Nice Guys Finish Last.  It’s kind of fun.  Right now I’m just trying to get the information down, when I’m done with that, I’ll make it fancy.  I’m very tempted to design it like it’s a bunch of scrap paper Chris (main character) scribbled his ideas on.  Why not, right?  I think it would work.
The deadline for Sundance is coming up.  I’m probably going to enter Censored.  Will it get in?  Probably not, but what the hell, right?  If I can get Do Nice Guys Finished Last done on time, I’ll enter that as well.  My hopes are, that Do Nice Guys Finish Last is much better then I think it is.  Not that I think it’s bad.  In fact, I love that short film, I just don’t think it’s all that festival appropriate.  Hopefully, I’m wrong, festivals love it, and audiences laugh so hard, their stomachs hurt.  As I’ve figured out though, it’s very easy to become delusional about how funny something you and your friends think something is vs what the public thinks is funny.  Often times, something you and your friends think is funny, isn’t really all that funny to other people.  Many groups of people I’ve met have told me that I could just put a camera on their friends and have comedic gold.  Have you ever told a really funny story, only to have the person you’re telling it to stare at you with a blank stare?  It usually ends with you saying “Well, I guess you had to be there.”  It’s kind of like that.   
I still haven’t seen Inglorious Bastards.  I want to see that movie so badly.  Maybe I’ll check it out tonight.  Right now, I’m going through all of the movies that I should have seen already, but haven’t for some stupid reason.  For example, I just watched The Shining last week.  Jack Nicholson was a creepy looking bastard.  Even in the beginning, when he’s acting all normal, he’s freaky looking.  With age, I think he became less creepy.  In As Good As it Gets he wasn’t all that menacing.  His character was kind of a prick and he sort of looked the part.  Maybe he’s just that amazing of an actor.  His actual demeanor alters his appearance.  Or does he just pick roles that fit his look at the time?  It’s tough to say.  Either way, the guy is an amazing actor and often times, I’ll watch a movie just because he’s in it.  I always thought Keanu Reeves was good at picking his parts.  He’s not an amazing actor, but the roles he picks fit him so well, he can almost pull it off.  For example, The Matrix.  Could you think of anyone, who could have played Neo better then him?  I think he was absolutely perfect for that role and it’s hard to believe that he wasn’t the first choice to play that character.  Think about it?  Lonely computer hacker, limited social skills, finds comfort with computers, not sure of anything really.  He pulled it off.  Same with The Day the Earth Stood Still and The Devils Advocate.  Again, not really an amazing actor, but all of those roles fit him very well.  It works for me. 
I went off on a bit of a tangent there.  I tend to do that.  I could probably spend days talking about movies and once I get going it’s tough to shut me up.  Anyway, sorry again for not showing up at the SoCal Film Fest Movies by the pier thing, I’ll be sure to make it out to the next one.