John Q. Phats Entertainment

Me and my girlfriend have been slowly watching the True Blood series on DVD recently.  The general story is that vampires have come out and admitted that they exist and that there’s this product called True Blood that vampires drink instead of feeding on people.  The main characters are straight out of hicksville USA, so the show sort of has a racial undertone.  There’s people who are for vampire rights and people who are against them.  Here’s what I’m saying though.  I don’t hate the vampires because they’re vampires.  I hate them because they are dicks.  Pretty much every vampire on that show is a gigantic douche.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great show, but I can relate when a character wants to bash a vampire in the face with a shovel.  Of course I’m only like 5 episodes in, so maybe my opinion will change.  I think it’s an awesome show.  I’m somewhat addicted to it. 
About a week ago, I found an old thumb drive that I’ve been looking for.  On it were a bunch of somewhat old scripts.  Some of them were kind of funny.  One of them was really dirty, without really being dirty at all.  The title of it was Foodophile.  Here it is:
EXT. PARK – DAY
DAVID sits down on a park bench with food in hand ready to eat.  He’s holding a box full of chicken wings.
As soon as he sits down VALERIE sits down next to him.  They both look at each other and smile.  VALERIE has a Weinerschnitzle bag. 
DAVID picks up a wing and eats all of the meat off of it.  He looks over and realizes that VALERIE is seductively licking a french fry. 
DAVID stops and starts to slowly stick his finger between the opening of the two bones.
VALERIE pulls a hotdog out of the bag and begins to stroke it as if it were a penis.
DAVID puts the bones to his mouth and starts to lick in between them as if it is a vagina.
VALERIE puts the hotdog in her mouth as if she is giving a blowjob. 
DAVID smiles and continues stimulating the fake chicken clit.
VALERIE grabs a handful of chocolate milk shake and smears it in to her mouth and face.
DAVID stops dead in his tracks.  He stares at her in shock.  He gets up and walks away.

I’m not sure what I think of it.  It’s kind of sick, wrong, and awesome all at the same time.  I had some other stuff on there that I think I wrote when I was drunk or something.  One was about a woman having sex with a blender.  Don’t ask. 
In other news, my web designer added a new add on to the site which filters out spam.  JQP Entertainment- 1, Spammers- 0.  Also, internet at my house is out.  I’ll try to find a computer to update on this weekend, but I make no guarantees.

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.

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.

So, we have a first cut on Nice Guys Finish Last.  It came out pretty good.  It’s 18 minutes long.  Right off the bat, I see a couple things that would shave off like a minute or two.  Either way, I don’t think the festival version will be having any credits in it.  Gabe did a pretty good job on the first cut.  I think there are some other takes that I would like to experiment with.  Apparently Gabe had a tough critic in the room while he was editing last night.  Someone he doesn’t know was saying stuff like “What is this?  Are you guys in high school or something?”  I kind of wish I was there for that.  I say, tear it to shreds, I want to know the people that hate it and why they hate it.  If she could give me 20 specific, valid reasons why it was bad, I would want to hear all of them.  Only way you’re going to get better is if people tell you what you did wrong.  On the plus side, she did say that some stuff was funny.  Gabe said there were scenes where she actually said “OK, that’s funny.”  Anyway, the first cut is a good start.  Apparently I forgot that one of the cameras had a polarizing lense on the front of it.  Some of our outdoor scenes look a little off but that’s ok, we can fix that with some color correction.  I was actually surprised, but Gabe usually stuck with one shot for an entire scene, so it really wasn’t that big of a deal.  It shouldn’t take us too long to correct it.  The colors are fine in doors, it’s just a couple of the outdoor scenes that look a little off.
I wrote a blog yesterday about the book I’m reading, How Not to Make a Short Film.  The author of the book (Roberta Munroe) responded to my blog in a comment.  The Internet, let me tell you.  That’s the second author I’ve had communication with this month.  Sometimes I forget that the little name on the bottom of the book is actually a person. You can check out the comment in my last blog, she had some words of wisdom for aspiring film makers.  It was all good stuff.  I wonder if Kevin Bacon will ever respond to my Bacon Dick blog.  Probably not.  I wonder if he would be pissed?  If I were a celebrity, I would take the Bill Murray approach.  Apparently if someone recognizes him, he does some sort of weird dance followed by a bunch of random acts then says “Nobody will believe you” and then runs off.  I’m sorry, but that is genius.  I want him to adopt me.  I’m 27, but still.
Yesterday, I found an awesome site for royalty free music.  Check it out:
 Inomptech Royalty Free Music
The search feature is great. You can search by musical genre or the mood of the music that you’re looking for.  I was extremely surprised by the amount of quality music that’s on there.

So, I’ve started reading Chuck Palahniuk’s new book, Pygmy.  It’s written from a first person perspective in broken English as if someone is writing a field report.  For example:
“For official record, have no yet violated secure entry host sister vagina.”  Sort of like writing something in a translator in English, translating it to Japanese, and then translating it back to English again.  From what I can tell, the entire book is written this way.  Aside from quotes from other characters in the book and historical figures.  Now, I think Chuck Palahniuk is a genius.  The book Fight Club fundamentally changed my views on society.  His book Rant had probably one of the most clever concepts I’ve ever read.  Choke is my favorite book of all time and a damn good movie.  Pygmy, so far is insanely entertaining to read.  A lot it is sort of like figuring out a puzzle.  I’m constantly asking myself “What the hell is he talking about?”  Three to four sentence later, I figure it out.  I know, it sounds frustrating, but for some reason, it’s not.  After the first couple of pages you start to get the hang of it. 
I’m not really sure what Chuck Palahniuk is trying to accomplish by writing the story in broken English as if it’s a field report.  Maybe it will be revealed at the end of the book.  Maybe he wanted people to really have to think about those little details that readers might pass up.  Either way, it’s entertaining all the same.  It does however, make explaining the book to other people extremely difficult.  When I say “it’s written from the first person perspective in broken English and laid out like a field report”  They look at me like I’m high. 
I’m only 60 pages in and there have already been a couple sections that have made me want to shower afterwards.  But what the hell did I expect from a Chuck Palahniuk book, rainbows and farts? 
Naturally, being in to film making made me try to imagine the book as a movie.  What I thought up, was sort of like an acid trip in fast forward.  Could be fun. 
It might be fun to pick a couple pages and make a scene from it.  Like I said, acid trip in fast forward.  Let me tell you, if someone announced a movie based off of this book, I would line up to watch it at midnight the night it came out.  Partially because I don’t sleep but mainly because it would be something so different.  I would just want to see how they would do it.  I’m pretty sure I’m dreaming though.  Sadly, I don’t think we’ll ever see the glorious acid trip in fast forward that Pygmy could be.

So, we shot some scenes for Nice Guys Finish Last last night.  It feels weird doing things like this.  Normally, I plan and plan and then just shoot the entire short film in one day.  It’s odd for me to break it up like this.  It’s a huge script so I guess I should have expected that.  Shooting anything is such a strange process.  You spend half an hour setting up the lights, 10 minutes testing the boom mic and getting it in the right position, another 10 making sure the camera settings are just right, 10 clearing crap from the background of the scene, and 30 – 40 going over the scene with the actors to make sure they are delivering it how you want it.  So, after about an hour and a half of tooling around with shit, you finally hit record and do 20 takes in roughly 20 minutes.  Then you’re done.  This is an actual quote from last night:
“What?!  What do you mean we’re done?!  We spent an hour and a half setting up all of that shit!”  That’s the way it goes though.  It’s a lot like setting up dominos to fall down.  Or like sex, with a high maintenance chick. 
I used to really feel bad about making everyone wait around while I made adjustments with actors.  Not so much anymore.  First off, recently I’ve been told that most people enjoy watching that process.  It’s interesting to see.  Second of all, it all doesn’t really matter.  You have to get a good scene out of it.  If you don’t get a good scene, you have to either re shoot it or live with it.  Reshooting it means going through that hour and a half long setup process again.  Living with it means putting up with the fact that you could have made something that a lot of people have put a lot of time in to much better.
I’m not really sure how to transition in to this next paragraph, so whatever.  Last night was a lot of fun.  We had a makeup artist.  Like a real makeup artist, not just some girl that’s a friend of mine that I call a makeup artist.  She had a makeup holster.  It was kind of awesome.  I even got you yell “Makeup!” once or twice.  You should have seen how pretty Caine was.  I never really thought about makeup, but it really did make a big difference.  We also had a clapper.  Which will be insanely useful for editing.  I’m using two cameras for this one, so linking up the footage is vital.  The clapper, which I think I will name “Clacky” also looks pretty damn professional.  We are moving in that direction, so it fits.   

P.S. The Censored showing at the Los Angeles United Film Festival is tonight.  Hopefully, I’ll see you guys there.

I wrote two new scripts today.  I should probably write more often.  I’m not sure if these two will ever get made, but it was fun to write them all the same.  Since Easter is coming up, this is going to be a busy weekend for everyone, so we probably won’t have any new content up until sometime late next week.  I think somehow, my 3 daily visitors will survive.  Gabe is building an LED light for our next big project.  I don’t know how he’s doing it.  Part of me doesn’t want to ask.  I hear some of the strangest conversations at work.  Our boss, his name is Jed, is a walking Wikipedia.  Today, Gabe asks him
“Hey Jed, you know where I can buy LED’s?” 
And Jed had a fucking answer for him.  Who knows shit like that?!  It’s inhuman.  I wonder what Jed would say if I asked him
“Hey Jed, did Uwe Boll masturbate last night?”
Probably something like
“Twice, once to a victoria secret ad and once to a picture of his Mom.  He was crying while doing it.” 
I’d believe him too.  Jed is more powerful then that creepy bitch that makes the door creaking noise from The Ring.  But yeah, I want to get started on Nice Guys Finish Last and I would like to shoot one of the scripts I wrote tonight.  The first of the two scripts could be done pretty easialy.  All I would need to shoot it is all my equipement, a fan, and a woman who’s morally bankrupt.  I could tell you what it’s about, but the story is probably funnier this way.
Gabe wants to do some green screen tests.  Apparently it’s easy as hell to do.