Episode 2, “Attack of the Cast” is now online!

You can view this, and Episode, on the new site www.fanfilmtheseries.com.

Finally! It’s Here! Fan Film The Series has finally launched, along with its new website.

The NeoZAZ.com original production is now on-line.

After all the filming, editing, and numerous troubles with… ah, forget all that. Just CLICK HERE.

5 Things I’ve learned never to do again while filming “Fan Film”

1 – I’ll never film in PA during Locust mating season, or whatever season that was that made them make so much damn noise.

2- When the script says “2 AM”, I will not shoot until the sun is down. As much as I can do with After Effects, I can’t make a 6:00 PM sun shining through a window look like a 2 AM moon.

3 – I will never NOT look at the view screen at least 3 times before saying “action”, making sure that I’m actually recording this time.

4 – I will not write the line “I have hit every obstacle you can imagine in FL” in script again, because that seems to have some sort of magical power that ends up making that line true. For the 90% of footage in Fan Film that is in the project, nearly all of it was shot in 48hours. The last 10% that takes place in Florida took 5 months to get done.

5 – I will never cut my hair before a shoot again. I had to have 2 more last minute hair cuts with screen caps in hand for re-shoots. I should have just kept it long. Although, being the heaviest I’ve ever been in my life, and having a goatee, the pony tail would have made me 1 blue shirt away from looking like the “Comic Book Guy” in The Simpsons.

Here’s a sneak peak at one of the DVD special features David’s been working on. It’s the “Inside the Actor’s Studio” parody I posted about a couple months ago. Special thanks again to Steve Bost for helping us out with this.

Get the Flash Player to see this player.

One of the questions that came up while filming an interview with the Fan Film cast was “Where’s Gregg?” As it turns out, he’s made his way on to Japanese television. We can only hope he made it on to a show as good as this:

4 days into the new year, and I’ve still managed to keep to the production schedule I set for myself. This ting may just get done on the deadline for a few key submissions we were hoping to hit early this year.

Here’s some stills for the latest work – no clip this time, sound isn’t done yet. It’s another opener. Episode 3 I think.

Months ago when I first pulled down the footage from our PA shoot, I dabbled breifly in color correction with a couple of the shots I brought back with me.

Now that we’re coming into the home stretch of “Fan Film The Movie” it’s time to pay a little more attention on these details to wrap everything up.

After a little time and focus, I was able to “fix” a couple of shots where we accidentally left the in camera “indoor shot” filter on when we moved outside.

Here’s some quick screen caps of the results (left side before, right side after):

Man, I love After Effects!

I got a big opening scene/ joke done today, and posted the clip on our home site, neozaz.com. Check out the clip here.

If you’ve been wondering on the status of “Fan Film” both the movie and the series, I can sum it up in 4 words “Hurry up and wait”. All the footage is shot, the scenes edited and re-edited, and now I’m on to the movie version edit before I go back the series.

So, the “hurry up and wait” part. Up until now, I’ve been exporting the files with factory preset with no regard to compression, quality, etc. Now that the files final destination are to a DVD for people to actually view, I’m taking a little more time to pick and choose the settings. Furthermore, the file sizes are huge in comparison to the website files, thus – waiting and waiting and waiting for the computer to render the files. So, it’s edit a bit, then wait for render. Edit a bit, then wait for render. Edit a bit, wait for render, lose track of time playing Guitar Hero, back to editing.

That’s the short version. I could go on, but the render wait is nearly over on this file.

I happy to share the final poster for “Fan Film The Movie”.

You’ll probably notice it’s a bit of a departure from the “Star Wars” styles I’ve been working on up until now, long story short I didn’t want all the marketing material to look like “Fan Film” is an actual Star Wars Fan Film. I think this conveys the core elements pretty well: Star Wars, Homemade Movie Making, and low budget.