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

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

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.

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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.

Despite Murphy’s law of sound (if there is such a thing) we managed to finally put the last of “Fan Film” filming in the can today.

The biggest challenge, which all-in-all is not any big deal, was the sound elements from the area that seemed to want to pop up at the wrong time when we moved the filming outside.

Here are the highlights:
Airplanes overhead – I live too close the airport
Sea Gulls – Yes, sea gulls – in landlocked central Florida
My neighbor’s pool alarm that beeped every thirty seconds – in the end, we said the hell with it and just let it be part of the ambience.

So that’s it – Fan Film is a wrap. Finally!

Along with all the thanks I still extend to this day to Chris Irons, Dave Fox, Karen Hunsworth, John Coulter, Sunday Coulter, Gregg Hansen and David Smith, I’d like to also thank the friends that lent me their time this weekend to get the last of the filming done; Julie Koran, Adam Zeek, John Reynolds and of course my  incredibly patient wife, Khrysti.

The editing is really gonna flow now, footage should be coming in burst of the next couple of weeks. Until then, here are some screen caps from today’s filming:

Well, here’s the announcement everyone probably expected:

The release date for “Fan Film The Series” has been pushed back for Dec 19th to Jan 2nd 2009.

There’s a handful of reason for this, but I’ll spare everyone the boring details. The main thing to relay is that a big reason for this move is to free up more time to final edit the Film Festival version the best it can possibly be done in time for the Sunscreen Film Festival submission dead line of Dec 31st.

And, really, no other reason other than time factors – everything is coming out great. Everything is coming out better than expected. We’re not tinkering with any kind of creative edits to hide/fix/re-arrange anything. Basically, we have a great series coming up and the editing is taking longer than planned to showcase this great thing we have in its best possible light.