John Q. Phats Entertainment

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.

So, a couple things are happening.  First of all the name of the company, John Q. Phats Entertainment is changing to JQP Entertainment.  I might shorten it even more to JQP Ent.  The main reason for this, is that John Q. Phats Entertainment is too hard for people to remember.  People ask me what the name of my film making company is, I tell them, and they say “…..What?  How do you spell that?  What does that mean?”  I imagine 5 seconds after they walk away from me, they completely forget the name of the company.  Where as JQP Entertainment, is easy enough to remember.  All you have to remember is three letters and then “Entertainment.”  JQPEntertainment is also the web address.  So that works out better for us too.  With our new name comes a new logo.  Looking at other film making companies, they all have these insanely complex logos.  MGM for example.  It’s an actual picture of a lion.  Or the View Askew logo.  It’s an animated drawing of Jay and Silent Bob.  Even Universal has a pretty intense logo for their opening credits.  It’s a rather detailed world.  So, I want something like that.  Something cool and sort of like a mascot.  At first I had thought of a lion.  I have sort of a fetish for simplistic logos, so I came up with this:

I think that lion has a big nose and I thought I needed to step away from that simplistic thing.  Besides that, it’s looks very stupid.  So, I had Chris draw me a lion.  Here’s what he came up with:

His is much better then mine.  Chris can draw.  I’m completely useless at drawing without a computer.  That’s beside the point.  Now we’re thinking that a lion is probably a bad idea because a lot of other companies already use lions.  I don’t know, what do you guys think?  Here were some of the animals I thought might work:
lion, beaver (tee hee), penguin, badger, racoon, giraffe, or gopher.  Any other ideas, anyone?
It’s true, it has nothing to do with the name of the company, but what the hell does a lion have to do with MGM?  Who knows, maybe we’ll come up with something else.  Chris says he has some ideas.  I like the idea of the mascot having a head that’s way too big for it’s body.  My animals are all kind of fluffy.  Maybe we need something tougher.  Like a wolf or a polar bear or something.  I don’t know, we’ll figure it out.  This was all brought on by Do Nice Guys Finish Last.  I want to do the Press Kit, but I need a new logo to put on the front of it to represent JQP Entertainment.  I’ll keep you guys updated.