Newsy News

Some big news… My friend, neighbor, and ex-babysitter, Amanda Leesburg started and runs a very successful Public Relations company in Atlanta. I contacted her to see if she could help find someone to help with casting and with PR… she offered to help on the project immediately!

She represented Jane Fonda last year, and is responsible for Animal Planet, Jeff Corwin, some Nike accounts, and helped cast the TV show, America’s Got Talent. She is extremely friendly and connected, and she offered to post the casting call around the internet, talk with her friends in the industry, hold casting sessions for us (announced through radio) in Atlanta and in Birminhgam. She is also very connected in the celebrity circuit and is going to help attract celebrities to the project. After discussing the possibility of working with celebrities, she said it was highly probable that we could get some people on board!

The script is now registered with the Writer’s Guild of America!

Fenix is hard at work on casting. We finalized audition plans, script excerpts, and the casting form. We should be getting some audition tapes in very soon. We gathered a list of about 20 websites and e-mail list-serves to post our casting call on, and that should also increase responses.

Christie and I are still working on drafting letters for celebrities. We had two versions and sent out for votes on which angle people liked better. She took the feedback and is working on a new version.

Friends are still sending e-mails out to help with the casting.

The puzzles are in! Our first 25 puzzles have been delivered for packaging prep, and they look great. Will is almost done with the packaging, and they will be ready to send out as soon as the letters, addresses, and customized websites are in place.

Southwest airlines should get back by the end of the week with their decision on helping with the project.

I talked to the Birmingham film commissioner this week on the phone. He finished the script, liked it, and wants to help see it through. He walked me through a list of about 15 questions I made up. He cleared a lot of things up and is working on the project to help us out in securing locations and making production run smoothly.

John and I honing in our equipment decisions, and we have contacted several professionals to get their feedback and guidance on the project.

We have a comprehensive sound equipment list created by our prospective sound designer, James Lunsford. He has been an enormous help on the project! He came up with an equipment list spreadsheet and got quotes from about four different places. Our budget for sound is $3,000, and his product list came in at $2,994. He’s awesome. We sent out his product list to another place in the DC area for a second opinion.

Also, my former sound professor/friend/sound consultant, Greg Smith is selling his extra-long boom pole (usually sells for about $600) to us for $100!