Pleasure for the Empire

The fabulous Robin Kurtz.

Here are closeups of Helen in Earthkiller. We’re moving her “look” from a very cool android at the beginning of the movie, to this sort of look, to a natural look by the end of the picture.

I think her lipstick could be more blue. Indeed, why is she so red? These aren’t color-corrected — I bet it’s the fluorescent lights mixed with the incandescents.

More Clonehunter from Pulpmovies.

Colorista II is coming. We use Colorista all the time.

Clonehunter from Quiet Earth (which is one of my favorite names of a website and a movie.)

David Frey hacked a loupe for his DSLR. You should too.

IndieFilmChat (which you might think is about a cat who doesn’t work for the studio system but isn’t) on Clonehunter.

Ooh, David has video up of his loupe hack.

What am I going to do when this blog runs out of space? Right now I’m using 72% of the space Google gives us for images. Do I just go to my own WordPress blog?

Ueber Sci Fi Geek and the Clonehunter Press Release.
And Geek Native too!
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Here’s the word on the mix/edit of Day 2:

“Act 3 is ready for sound.

Act 5 is ready for sound.

Acts 4, 6, 7 and 8 are waiting for a few vfx from me, and David Frey’s exteriors.”

“Ready for sound” means that as far as Maduka is concerned the picture is locked and I can go on and start the dialog edit. Actually, I’m gonna look at the picture and if I make 6 tweaks per act it would be a lot — Maduka’s first edit is always very very close to our final edit.

My distributor is making me work on my birthday. I’m sending out press releases for Clonehunter. Below are the places I sent to before collapsing into a coma.
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Ted Hope rightly complains about how film incentives are set up to keep out the low-budget filmmaker. Especially in NYC, where they’re designed to make you shoot on the (very expensive) sound stages.
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Troll in the Corner
Pulp Movies
Johnny and Angus
Fi-Sci
TwitchFilm
Uberscifigeek
Geeknative
Total Sci Fi Online
Headspectre
Stranded Cosmonaut
Quiet Earth
Shattered Ravings
Ain’t It Cool News
io9
SpoCon
SciFi Signal
Trailer Spy

As we’re working our way toward our second day of shooting Earthkiller, Joe Chapman sends more drawings our way.

OK, so the latest info on Clonehunter is that we officially have a Japanese deal in place. So look for it in… 4? months. That’s my guess based on previous experience.

And we gotta do a better job of getting web-press on our movies. I mean, we’re cool, right? We make science fiction pictures. We’re the smallest micro-studio in New York! Can’t we be one of the cool kids too?

The only brick-and-mortar retailer to pick us up is Hastings. And that, my friends, puts us ahead of almost all the indy movies out there (yup, that’s how scary it is in the real world.)

In that vein we have to put more stuff on the www.clonehuntermovie.com website. And I hate everything web-related. I don’t like CSS. I don’t like Java or Flash. Heck, HTML irritates me. And right now you can way tell that I’m the last one to work on that Clonehunter page because it’s the most rudimentary single-page ever made on the web (or at least since 1995.) So I’ve got to coerce persuade someone else to do it.

The metadata the distributor wants is:
science fiction, independent science fiction, Andrew Bellware, Clones, Pandora Machine, Lifesize Entertainment, blade runner, sci-fi

Furthermore:
“Advice is to put all links, Amazon buy link, rent link, (block on line) Indiefilmkiosk Buy button (not ready yet) right across the top.”

Tag lines:
“THEY WERE GUNS FOR HIRE, BUT WHAT ABOUT THEIR SOULS?”

LIVING FOREVER CAN TAKE LESS TIME THAN YOU THINK

Synopsis:

What happens if the artificial intelligence that enables the wealthy and powerful to live in limitless luxury wants to share in it? Cane and his junior partner, Angela, are hired by Gulliver, a brutal Oligarch, to track down a murderous clone that threatens the stability of Gulliver’s private planet. The more Cane and Angela delve into the case the more corruption and rot they discover, until they come face to face with their own darkest secrets and must decide which side they are on.

Lastly the page needs a cast list, a link to imdb.com, and links to reviews.

All I want is a simple page with frames. Is that too much to ask? (It is, if you’re talking about my web design skillz.)

We did mostly pretty well. It looks great. The script is great and it’s well acted.

One problem is the heat. It’s very hard and exhausting to work in this heat. So I’m trying to figure out how we can shoot as much as we can in my apartment in Jersey City instead of my dad’s metal shop in one-hundred-degree-weather.

Thing two is the transportation. It’s never that great when I have to be transportation captain because it’s always better if I get to set first. The problems when one dang person is late to call in NYC for the drive out is that I’m late to set (if I’m the one driving) and that just sucks because nothing can get done ’till I get there. But the thing is that the drive back is usually kind of fun with everyone in the car.

More than that though, it seems the NJ Turnpike is going to be mightily clogged with construction for the foreseeable future. This can add an hour (or two) to our working day, which is stinkitty poo.

The answer to that problem is that we are going to start to have call at my apartment in Jersey City because that way people can take the PATH, thereby eliminating a huge traffic bottleneck, and we can avoid the Turnpike (eliminating another bottleneck). Hey, we got Dunkin’ Donuts coffee and good bagels in Jersey City!

Third-wise? I’ve never done this before but the production dialog… is lost. Gone. I got distracted just as I went into the very important task of wrapping up all the “deliverables” at the end of the day and… something happened just as I was removing the audio from the sound recorder and I have zero idea where I put the CF card. It may have been picked up by someone thinking they were being helpful. Nobody knows. I’ve turned the place upside down looking for it. Luckily it was just one scene but it’s incredibly frustrating that that happened. At least I saved picture from getting lost.

(The new rule is that nobody but me touches media or batteries when we wrap. And that’s all I got to say about that.

The reversal of this will show Helen looking out over the Philadelphia desert.