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.

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.