Announcing a Segment!

I know that I haven't discussed my little anthology project Stories in a long time. I'm announcing a segment which we will be filming soon; Stand Off: A Prisoner in Exile. It will be the first of the five or six segments that I will be directing of the nine. Abby is toying around with doing a short on a television pilot I wrote about nine years ago. If we do go ahead, I think I might let her do the whole pilot episode to get a reaction out of viewers.

I am also going to be doing another HD master for 2D version of Traumatic Possession 3D: The Tape after not being too pleased with the first round of encoding. One thing that I am going to do with the transfer is window box it slightly and add a border around the sides of the scope image, kind of like how Disney window boxed the Studio Ghibli films on DVD. I'll probably have that ready to go in another week or so.

Went to the dollar theater and caught Man of Steel for the fourth time. Hands down the best film of the year. Probably the best comic book adaption as well. That first twenty minutes of all hell breaking loose on Krypton is one of the strongest openings to a film. How it shows the sacrifices that Jor-El and Lara-El have to make is pretty powerful.

And then, oddly, the dollar theater got Oblivion back for two days and Monday was the last night it was playing. The thing was, it was one of those closed caption screenings for the deaf and hard of hearing, so it has English subtitles on the screen. It's been a while since the dollar theater has played one of those, I think the last one that I can remember was The Change-Up with Ryan Reynolds. However, this print was in horrible condition and laser must have been dirty of something because the subtitles jumped and were blurry as hell as the rest of the print was fine. It wouldn't have been worth it if you were deaf anyhow. But, I thought Oblivion was a pretty good sci-fi thriller.

Also working on a little pet project of remastering a movie which will never see the light of day in terms of getting a legit release. Working with only VHS footage transferred to a DVD is pretty mind numbing. Only trick to cover up the interlacing is to add a layer of grain in Sony Vegas.

Film Festival Problems...

Well, the celluloid portion of my film festival might be in jeopardy as I am having problems finding theaters in my state, Ohio, that are catering to all film formats. It's all digital now, so, where do I go from there? I do have a high definition version of Night of the Living Dead that I downloaded off of the Internet Archive.

What I am thinking is this, since we have to go digital, I will divide up the price and have several other indie filmmakers involved and have them pay a fifth or sixth of the rental cost depending if we screen five or six films. That's the plan so far. I will confirm that Traumatic Possession: The Director's Cut will be screening in the Summer when we do it. Probably screening another film or two and Night of the Living Dead to have possibly half or two-thirds be my material.

Other than that, I am leaving in another two hours to go see Rifftrax Live! Starship Troopers. I am excited to see it. I missed Birdemic last year but caught the screening of Manos! The Hands of Fate. Sorry that I haven't been writing much lately. Relationships take up a lot of time and writing movies takes up even more. Looking forward to showing you some stuff soon.