Michael’s Blog

Tim came over tonight and picked up the Master DVDs for Plan B so production has officially ended on the project. Yeeayyy. It’s always a great feeling to be able to sit back and look at the final product and in this case I think everyone did a great job on it. Congrats to everyone. The screening party is at Tim’s house Saturday, so it will be fun getting together for the Shindig with everybody.

Still waiting to hear back on the location offer. Hopefully we will know more in the next day or two. With Hero looming overhead, and the screening party this weekend for Plan B, I decided to postpone the photoshoot at Vasquez Rocks for the moment. I still want to get up there, but I want to get rockn on the next film. I also want to get some test shots in with the 1Dm4 as well before using it in a production capacity…so we’ll be putting together a video shoot with it really soon also.

I am getting some new tools for the arsenal…some awesome tools actually. lol…

After seeing the new Philip Bloom vids he did at Salton Sea I have to have the Kessler Dolly he was using on it…but then I found they make this amazing Camera Jib and Tripod setup so I am gearing up to purchase those too. That opens up all kinds of cool shots and the whole system is designed to work together. The Dolly actually mounts on the top of the Jib arm so you can set them both up together and be ready to do just about any Dolly / Jib move with a single integrated rig setup. The Jib arm is crazy stable so using the Dolly on it just gives it that much more support..and the results…..smooth like buddaaaaa…lol.

I don’t need the Redrock Lens Adapter setup any longer so its up on Ebay right now…so as soon as those go, Ill be placing the order on these.

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My Shannie baby and I had an excellent day at the San Diego Zoo today. Though we didn’t see Ron Burgundy or the Channel 4 News crew around, we did see some Pandas however. lol…

The Cats were soooo cute…and I had the Mandrill in the photo above that was hamming it up for the camera. We had a lot of fun. When we got to the Panda enclosure we had this big guy climbing high in the trees over the wall. The photo is actually from out side the enclosure looking up over the wall. Pretty cool.

When we got to back to the front of the Zoo, it was late in the afternoon/early evening and they take these McCaws and let them out so they can fly across the park to their home to retire for the evening. they lifted this cage on a truck high in the air and let them out with a crowd standing below. The birds swoop down through the crowd and fly off. I set the 1Dm4 in rapid fire mode and caught the whole thing…it was pretty amazing. Such vibrant colors…

It was a bright hot day in SD today, so we got home and jumped in the pool. I think it’s going to be a pretty mellow relaxing rest of the evening for us…lol… 

Hope ya all had a great weekend.

I spent most of the day re-exporting footage trying to get a decent render, and a large pile of test DVDs later we have a final master burn of the film. It just couldn’t go down easy..lol.

So I’ll be handing off the DVD and Art file to Tim and he’ll be able to make copies. I think I am going to go jump in the Jacuzzi and get ready for a fun day at the Zoo with my Shannie Baby tomorrow. yyeeaaayyy…

This looks bad ass! When I first heard they were going to re-make Clash of the Titans, I was like…uhh..ok. lol…but when I saw the trailer in the theater, It looked awesome.

I watched the original when I was a kid with the old cheesy stop motion graphics a half zillion times. It looks like they were able to give it a totally bad ass over the top re-design, but retaining some of the fun vibe the original had. Sam Worthington is really getting around! lol…but a great choice here.

I cant wait to see it next weekend!

I finished assembling the DVD for Plan B. Put together a quick basic interface and got all the chapters assigned. I don’t have any blank DVDs in the house so I can’t test it in a DVD player, but the Encore preview didn’t show any errors so I’ll be picking up some blanks in the morning and minus any last minute weirdness, we should be finished with it.

Congrats to Tim on completing his first film production….

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Shannie and I met Aja, the charming event manager for what was once the Planet Hollywood Building/Horton Plaza downtown and she showed us around different parts of the building. Though a little different than the concept pages, it obviously has a the basics for being a pretty creepy environment. With the right lighting and some additional props I think this will work out pretty well. We talked about money for renting the location and seemed to be on the same page so she is running it past the owner and hopefully we will have a deal here.

If we can secure the location, we would be ramping up for production pretty quick to meet a late April shooting date.

One thing that kind of works a little better for this location is it’s pitch black during the day in there, so we can get there in the morning and get everything we need to shoot done in a single day instead of using two evenings.

We had the final review session for Plan B so we are pretty much wrapped up for production on the footage itself. I exported the final rendition of the film and scaled it down to SD this morning. I still need to trans-code the blooper reel, assemble the DVD interface but should have a disk finished by this weekend if all goes well.

Shannie and I are going to the Zoo this weekend so we’ll have to see how it all works out.  Either way we are on the tail end now. yeaayy…lol

Last night I did a Color correction pass on Plan B, brought up the levels and desaturated it a bit to give it a more film like quality. I extended the end credits a little and I think that was about it. So now it’s just doing a final review session with all the components in place before putting together the DVD.

Last night I received another E-mail for a possible “Hero” location. This one from a guy who runs a building near Horton Plaza. I think he said it was the old “planet hollywood” building. It has quite a few rooms gutted out, stairways, hall ways, nooks that are pretty rundown and textured…and said other “weird” stuff apparently. lol…so sounds like it might be a match.

I’m going to be checking the place out Friday at Noon…. Crossing fingers.

**** Scratch that….the hunt continues…lol. ****

Apparently there were people that are moving into that location this week so it wasn’t vacated after all. She did relay the info to the current tenants but who knows if they will take me up on the offer so the hunt for the “Hero” location continues.

That’s the way the cookie crumbles sometimes…

Well it looks like we have some people in, so I’m putting together details for heading up to Vasquez Rocks. I was thinking Saturday, April 3rd…or Next Saturday however you want to look at it. I’m going to do a Kirk/Gorn inspired sexy model shoot, and figured after we can shoot some Portfolio stuff for the guys if they are interested.

Either way, it should be fun. It’s an amazing location used for The Lone Ranger, GunSmoke, The Wild Wild West, Star Trek (Kirk Gorn baby!), Battle Star Galactica, The six million dollar man, Buck Rogers in the 25th century, Short Cicuit, MacGyver, The Flintstones, Planet of the apes, Jay and Silent Bob strike back….damn…a lot of history there. Let’s make some of our own. lol..

Outside of that, it was a productive day. I finished the Audio for Plan B. Filled in all the ambient holes, fixed a lot of the things, and built up ambient areas where the takes were inconsistent. I think it sounds pretty even now. Note to self: From now on there should be “quiet on the set” and nobody moves or says anything until 10 seconds of ambient audio is recorded at the beginning of every new angle setup. That would have saved me a huuuugge amount of time instead of trying to pick brief areas between dialog for little room ambient snippets and creating loop-able ambient sequences for them. Something I should have done for ON as well, but that would speed things up quite a bit in post. Things to carry with us on future projects. lol…

Now that Audio is out of the way, I have a color correction pass, add Javier’s finished score and I think we’re ready to start assembling the Plan B DVD.  

In other news I put up an ad on Craigs List for a location for Hero and received an interesting E-mail tonight. A lady with 19 acres in Romona said she had a couple of abandoned buildings on her property from an old 1900 vineyard and is going to take some pics this morning and E-mail them to me. She also has an adobe style house with an old basement as well, so keep your fingers crossed. Might be something interesting for other projects…who knows.

I also got an E-mail from Kathy from the SD film commission today. She said she is talking with CalTran to see if they have some abandoned buildings as well. At any rate, things are moving ahead on that front.

I also recieved news from Red Rock Micro letting me know the camera rig pieces are shipped…which is pretty fast for them. I’m usually waiting a month for them to manufacture the pieces. So that’s great news. Cant wait to get the new rig together.

Rob came over to the homestead tonight and we got to meet in person for the first time. Great guy and looking forward to working with him. He will be playing the lead role for “Hero”. The role though mostly a dark somber tone will require a pretty intense physicality for the altercation scene with Tim and Rob is an actual Navy Seal. I think he’s going to work out great for the role. Shannie took his measurements and I am going to begin designing the outfit for her to put together for him. I want something pretty stylized so it’s going to be a lot of fun working with her on this.

Once we get the outfits together we’re going to do some high end photography pieces to use for promo as well as being able to really define the look of the project….then gearing up for shooting. Rob is checking into this abandoned Air Force outpost I found which coincidentally is an area his Seal team does training exercises near by. Hopefully we can get the location locked down here soon.

Today we got together to check out Javier’s musical score for Plan B and it was great. Thanks Javier for making it out and slamming out the awesome tracks. He’s going to be doing a few small tweaks and will be getting together next week with the final film assembled. I evened out the audio last night and have all the dialog balanced now. All I have to do is feather in Ambient areas that we have a few holes, and fix a few things and the sound design should be finished. All that’s left after that is a color correction pass and we should be able to assemble the DVD by the end of this coming week.

Today I purchased the RedRock Micro components to be able to put together the 1Dmk4 rig. Once I have these, I’ll be able to mount the Follow Focus and Matte-Box on to the rig and we are ready to start shooting again. yyeeayyy…lol.