John Q. Phats Entertainment

Yesterday, I sent Do Nice Guys Finish Last for it’s first festival submission.  It’s done.  It’s almost kind of hard to believe.  I’ve been working on this thing for so long and there have been so many mishaps.  Including one final one.  When Gabe burned it on to a DVD and I watched it, the credit music was missing.  When I told him the music was missing, he decided to add it right there and re export it.  I had emailed him the music about a week ago but I guess he hadn’t listened to it.  So, he decides to give it a listen before bringing it in to Premier.  Twenty minutes after he listened to it, he was still laughing at what a horrible selection I had made music wise.  He even brought over a friend of ours to laugh with him.  I couldn’t help but laugh myself.  He said the music reminded him of that song from the Legend of Zelda.  Yeah, I picked some shitty music for the credits.  It was royalty free though.  Here’s the thing, I am completely tone deaf.  I can’t tell the difference between a tuned guitar and my dick.  Seriously, it’s that bad.  Once when I was younger, I thought it would be a good idea to tighten all the little knobs on the end of my Dad’s guitar.  He laughed hysterically at how bad it sounded and I seriously, couldn’t tell the difference.  The five copies I have right now don’t have any music to go with the credits.  It’s probably better that way.  I should just stay away from musical selection all together.  The festival I sent it out to makes it IMDB appropriate.  I’m looking forward to that.  Now I’ll have two films under my filmography on IMDB.  I’ve thought about making like 10 short films, entering them all in IMDB qualifying festivals, and just submitting all of them.  That way, I can trick people in to thinking I’m a big shot.  Those short films would be incredibly stupid, but whatever.  I would probably get lazy really early and the titles would look something like this:
The Living Room
Dogs and Pillows
Walls
Chris Punches Himself in the Face
Chris Punches Himself in the Face II
Chris Punches Himself in the Face III
Chris Punches Himself in the Face IV
Chris Punches Himself in the Face V
Chris Punches Himself in the Face VI
Chris Punches Himself in the Face VII
You get the idea.  Anyway, DNGFL is DONE!  Thank God.  If it absolutely fails on the festival attempts I’ll be posting it here very soon.  I’ll let you guys know how it’s doing.

Censored is back up in the shorts section.  Along with its fancy new laurels.  I think the Censored festival run is over.  It had a good run.  I would have really liked for it to screen out of the country.  Of course, I didn’t really submit to any festivals in other countries.  But I at least would have like to get it out of state.  That’s all right.  Maybe Do Nice Guys Finish Last will break the California borders.  We’ll see.
Being a programmer for a film festival, I have a whole new outlook on how to submit.  When submitting Censored I made one mistake, which actually is forgivable.  I showed the name of my company before the film started.  The blunt truth is that when watching short films as a programmer, I don’t really care what the name of the company who made it is.  I’ve never heard of this company and there’s a 99.999999% chance that I’m going to forget it 3 seconds in to the film.  I read a lot of books on how to submit to a film festival and I was happy to realize that I got everything else right.  My festival ID # was always clearly displayed on the both the DVD and the DVD case.  Along with the run time of the short film, the DVD region, the name of the film, and my name.  Also, my film didn’t have a DVD menu with only one option.  You put it in to the DVD player and it starts.  After programming I can also see why I got some rejection letters.  It’s good to see the other side of everything and it gives me an opportunity to correct some of the mistakes I’ve made.  After all this programming, it’s become even more apparent that it’s all about the story.  If the story sucks, the short film sucks.  You can have Oscar winning actors and jaw dropping cinematography, but if the story is some rehash of an idea that’s been done a million times or it’s just a shitty story, I’m unimpressed and so are other people.  This next bit is a little random.  Please, for the love of God, don’t start your horror short film with the killer or crazy person or whatever making a montage of pictures they’ve taken of their next victim or their victims.  In fact, avoid the making of the picture montage scene all together.  It’s been done about a gajillion times and it’s sort of lost it’s shock value at this point.  I’m sure you can come up with something much better anyway.

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.

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.

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.

So, I’m doing programming for a film festival.  I’ve only watched like 5 films or so and I’m already getting another perspective on this process.  First off, I now completely understand  why every book I read said to make things as simple as possible for the programmers.  You want them to be able to see your tracking number on the DVD.  You want them to be able to put the DVD in a DVD player and boom, the film plays without them having to take any extra action.  They don’t give a crap that you have a fancy DVD menu and they don’t care about the name of your production company.  If they have to take any particular extra effort to see your short film, you’ve already put a bad taste in their mouth about your film and they are more likely to recommend a rejection.  I’ve read all about this, but now it’s even more apparent.  Of course, I’m pretty obsessive, before I sent Censored to any film festivals; I read about 4 books on how to do it. 
Speaking of books, I just finished How Not to Make a Short Film by Robert Marie Munroe.  It’s a very slick and handy little book.  Especially the end which has a pretty extensive list of film maker resources.  Some of her favorites film festivals, production websites, and even a section for film making blogs.  It pretty much has it all covered.  It was a good read.  I’m kind of wondering what I should read next.  Probably a book about either sound design or cinematography.  I’ve read a couple books on cinematography, but it’s an interesting topic.  I really should probably tinker with my camera more.  Just to see what kind of interesting shots I can get. 
So, I have a new goal.  I want to enter Do Nice Guys Finish Last in Sundance.  Will it get in?  Probably not, but who knows, I could get lucky.  Worse thing they can do is send me a rejection letter.  Most rejection letters are pretty soft.  Like:
“We regret to inform you that your film was not selected for our festival.  But we encourage you to enter it in other festivals and keep making films because everything is relative and blah blah blah.”
It’s actually kind of nice.  What if you got one that was really harsh one day?  Like:
“I could sit here and drone on about how you should enter this in to other film festivals, but I won’t.  I’m actually the programmer and I’m writing you this specially to tell you to please not make any more short films.  This was so bad, I seriously considered shooting myself 2 minutes in, so I wouldn’t have to live through another waking moment of this boring and horrible excuse for a short film.  I’m serious, I loaded the gun.  If I pounded on a keyboard with my forehead for 20 minutes straight, the jargon that followed probably would have produced a better script then this bile.  What I have just watched was by far the stupidest thing I have ever seen.  I am now dumber after watching your short film.  If this world were just, you would be killed in some sort of horrific camera accident.  I used to like film, I really did, but your film was so bad, I’m afraid I’ll have flash backs and tremors if I ever watch another film again.  Like shell shock from soldiers coming back from Vietnam.  I hate you.  Please kill yourself.”
That would probably never happen.  If it did, I might cry.  That makes me really glad that they do the things the way that they do. 
Tonight, I’ll be down near the Huntington Beach Pier for the SoCal Film Festival Movies by the Pier event.  If you’re in the area, stop by and say hello.

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 should really probably do a press kit for Do Nice Guys Finish Last.  That term used to scare the crap out of me, until I actually saw a completed press kit for another short film.  All it really was, was a PDF with some information about the short film.  It talks about the cast and crew in it and has a detailed synopsis of the storyline.  That’s it.  It’s a very intimidating term though.  Press kit.  When I first heard that term I thought to myself “What the hell is that?”  Also the term “kit” implies that there are several aspects to it.  Like a First Aid KIT.  Usually it contains band aids, cotton balls, rubbing alcohol, ect…  So basically what my mind probably did was say “What the hell is a press kit?  O crap, I bet there’s a lot to that.  A lot of crap that I don’t know how to do.  Damn it.”  As if film making weren’t filled with enough tasks that you don’t know how to do.  For my first short film, I didn’t know my ass from my elbow.  You should have seen me trying to transfer footage from my camera to my computer.  It was kind of like watching a monkey try to figure out a rubix cube.  Now I’m dealing with all this Press Kit jazz.  It actually shouldn’t be that difficult.  I do work as a graphic designer after all and I do have a degree in it.  I’m starting to realize that when you’re done with a short film, you’re not actually done, done with it.  After editing is done, you start with a whole mess of other issues.  Not really issues, just jobs and tasks.  Organizing photo shoots, designing stuff, and distribution.  I always assumed that you just kept making films and releasing them.  But with the way things go, it seems like a lot of film makers make one or two short films and just ride it till they get a break.  I feel like I could enter Censored in 3000 other film festivals if I really wanted to.  I don’t really want to do that, I want to make new stuff.  I’ll be sure to take my time on Do Nice Guys Finish Last and do a press kit.  When I finish it, I’ll post it here for you guys to check out and then all 5 or 6 of you can tell me what you think.
P.S. If you’re curious about what a press kit is, I found a pretty good sample here.

We’re done cutting Do Nice Guys Finish Last.  Now it’s on to working out all of the little kinks.  Color correction, audio adjustments, and transitions.  It feel like an accomplishment to have cut it.  It’s come a long way.  From 18 minutes to just under 15.  Me and Chris talked about it this weekend and we’re not expecting it to get in to any festivals.  I think we established that from the beginning though.  It doesn’t make it a bad short film.  I think it’s a great short film.  I should say, it’s going to be a great short film.  There’s still a lot to work on.  I still am very surprised by how much you can get away with in the mockumentary format.  You don’t need a tripod, it doesn’t matter if there are mistakes here and there, and actors can stumble over their lines and get away with it.  It’s a fun format, but I think I’m going to be moving on to the next thing now.  I don’t see another mockumentary in my near future.  Although, it has changed my opinion on hand held camera work.  Even though we didn’t use a tripod we still got some really nice cinematography.  Maybe I’ll open up and use it in my next short film.  My main problem with it was that in short films it became a “style.”  I’ve heard film makers asked why they went hand held on their entire short film and they would say “That’s just my style.”  No, that isn’t you’re style.  %90 of the time it’s because they were either too lazy or low on cash to use a tripod.  I’m totally cool with both of those excuses.  But to cover it up with this rouse of “That’s just my style” is pretty lame.  Call it what it is.  I know low budget films don’t have access to fancy dollies or equipment.  But there are ways around that.  I feel like I’ve put cameras on everything.  Wheel chairs, roller blades, office chairs, at least 3 different home made dollys, carts, ect…  Whatever works.  Am I total hypocrite for shooting Do Nice Guys Finish Last all in hand held?  Probably, but that was my style, so piss off.  In actuality, I wanted to shoot all in hand held, I chose to shoot all in hand held, and I left my very awesome tripod at home on purpose.  Do Nice Guys Finish Last is a mockumentary, which means that it’s essentially a fake documentary.  In this case, I felt like hand held was necessary.  I really tried to think of how an amateur documentary film maker would film something like this and that’s why I chose to go all hand held.  Basically, I was trying to mimic the style of someone who didn’t know what they were doing.  Which actually was a lot of fun.  Kind of like when we built the murder chair for Red Hood.  That was a blast.  We built the entire thing out of wooden pallets.  What was awesome about it was that we got to put our selves in the place of how the main character would build something like this.  It was a total hack and slash job.  When something wasn’t holding we either attached another piece of wood to it with about 6 screws or we just tore it off and started again.  We figured the main character wasn’t a carpenter and she didn’t need it to look pretty.  It was purely functional.  I actually have a picture of it:

It’s not pretty, but it’s functional.  You can sit in it, it will support your weight, but it’s absolutely not comfortable.  This was a chair that the main character used to torture people in, so none of that really mattered.
I kind of strayed from my original point, but whatever.  My point is that sometimes bad camera work or shady craftsmanship is called for in a film.  As long as the audience knows it’s intentional.  With hand held, it’s very difficult to make it look like it was necessary and very easy to make it look like you as a film maker were just lazy.  That’s not to say that I haven’t seen films that were well done all in hand held.  I just feel like that “style” is extremely over used because it’s an easy out.
I saw two movies this week.  District 9 and Ponyo.  I’ll start off with Ponyo.  Ponyo is an anime movie by Studio Ghibli.  A guy named Hayao Miyazaki did Ponyo and he has somewhat of a cult following.  In fact Studio Ghibli itself has somewhat of a cult following.  I went in to the theater not knowing anything about the movie.  All I knew is that my girlfriend really wanted to see it.  I’ve only seen one other anime by Hayao Miyazaki and that was My Neighbor Totoro.  My Neighbor Totoro was an acid trip.  Much like Ponyo, only Ponyo seemed to be catered more for children.  I suppose My Neighbor Totoro was for kids too, but for some reason it seemed darker.  I’m not even going to begin to try and explain the story line to Ponyo.  You probably wouldn’t believe me anyway, if I did.  It’s just one of those things you have to see.  I thought it was great.  If I was a parent, I would roll up a joint, smoke it in the mini van on the way to the theater, buy three packages of milk duds in the lobby, and go away to the land of Ponyo for 4+ hours.  The movie is only 2 hours long but I would be sitting in the theater after the credits rolled either asleep or absolutely out of my freaking mind based on what I had just seen.  It’s probably a good thing I’m not a parent.  Awesome visuals in Ponyo and a story line that made me say out loud “Who the hell thinks of that?”  It’s incredibly imaginative and unique.  But you don’t need to be high to enjoy it.  I enjoyed it and I wasn’t high at all.  If I was high though it probably would have been a life changing experience.  Just know what you’re getting in to.  It’s an anime catered towards children, that’s an acid trip.
District 9 was absolutely awesome.  I loved that freaking movie.  I am totally going to see that in theaters again.  I’m a sucker for the horror sci fi genre, so maybe I can’t give the same opinion as the everyday movie watcher, but I thought it was great.  I was entertained throughout that entire movie.  The actors were all phenomenal in it, the cinematography was great, the special effects were awesome, the story line had me hooked from the very beginning, and the characters development throughout the story was amazing.  If you’re in to this sort of movie, go see it, it’s awesome.