3.25.2009

Raising the bar

Today John is riding around in a car with the cinematographer from Donnie Darko! It’s quite surreal, but the professional cinematographer, Steven Poster, called John to see if he wanted to help with the location scouting for Steven’s new documentary. John and Steven met on the film shoot of a movie called The Box starring Cameron Diaz.

Last week, the bar on this movie was raised quite a bit. The flood of responses from sound designers and composers is still going! We received over 120 responses from people such as an Academy Award winner for sound who worked on The Dark Night and every Harry Potter, someone who worked on post production sound for Atonement and The Duchess, a composer who was featured in Rolling Stone in November 2008 as an artist to watch, a composer who contributed to the World Trade Center score, etc.

It’s phenomenal and unexpected to have selection of who to work with!

About 5 or 6 composers are sending originally produced music our way. They are using the materials on the site and the pre-selected songs for the script as a reference for the music style. Some composers sent original compositions with their initial inquiry!

People from all over the world are interested in helping on this project for free. Website traffic has skyrocketed – beating the old traffic by 6 times! Over 1,200 people have visited the site since last week.

A couple industry investors contacted me this week too. We aren’t able to work together on it for various reasons, but the word is getting around to the right people.

We have a very strong candidate for the sound position. He has an altercation on April 13th that will determine his availability for the shoot, so keep your fingers crossed! I will give more information when things are confirmed. Already, he has done (and continues to do) extensive, quality research, and we e-mail back and forth daily as if this was his only full-time job.

We have a new crew member! Christie Paquay is a friend from high school. She is a talented writer, an English fan, and an obsessive movie fan. She has already taken the dive into the project to play catch-up, and she will start writing letters to celebrities very soon.

Casting’s underway. Fenix and Hannah are taking the campaign one state at a time. Fenix has contacted every school in Maine thus far (and we have already received responses). Tricialee unfortunately had to discontinue her work on the movie. We sent out notices to a few Birmingham high schools to ask for help from students in casting.

We sent out postings for a Public Relations position, and we received our first response this morning.

This weekend I went on a shoot with a couple professors from school (who work in the professional film circuit). They are shooting a short film for the festival approach, and one of my professors promised to show me the ropes of how he does professional sound if I came out. He has worked on Star Wars and many other top-notch productions. The shoot was a long one, but totally worth it. He gave us a comprehensive sound equipment list that fits in our budget and a few contacts who sell audio equipment and would be willing to give us a discount.

John and I are buckling down to start finalizing equipment decisions to make the purchases in a few weeks. We have made a few final lens selections and are working on finding the right filters for the project.

Yesterday I was phone interviewed by a journalist responsible for covering our story for Kogod’s new website.


The final casting flyer

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Dude that is incredible! Congratulations! Sounds like everything is starting to work out nicely.