Monday, August 29, 2005

A quick catch up

I've been so busy.

First there was the build up to the ReelFast competiton. I managed to get a business man to sponsor my team to the tune of $1200.
We did something that no one else had ever done - made a film entirely with still photos - about 2000 of them. It was utterly exhausting. I got 2 hours sleep during the production weekend, most of my team got at least slightly sunstroke and several could hardly move as their backs seized... we made a film where the main characters were TV sets. Moving TV sets for 12 hours in the blistering sun is totally fucking masochistic.
The results were short of our intentions. We intend to go back and improve the film in the next few weeks, but for now it's mediocre, especially when viewed beside the OTHER team that decided to do stop-motion (not the first time that a 'first' in ReelFast has been synchronic with another - last year THREE teams shot underwater footage). The other team used action figures and repeated a LOT of frames (all of ours were unique) - in the context of the competition it was far more successful, but I don't think they have a film anyone is going to care about now that it's all over. We could, once the editing is re-done. We shot a good little film, we just didn't have the time left to put it together nicely.

Immediately following the ReelFast production weekend was the Launch of my new company PROVOST PICTURES. I won't get into a lot of detail - it's all on that site, and reiteration would be a waste of time - if you really wat the details see the accompanying blog. Actually that took up a lot of prep time before ReelFast too. We had the launch, then dealt with the press for a week and finished up by sitting on tenter-pegs over the auction results. The auction was disappointing financially, but a total success publicity-wise. We didn't make money in the end, but we gained a good start for a profile for free - I don't think Mr. Trump would fire us. We worked our asses off and I'm not sure we could have done too much more without simply throwing money away.

The auction ended last Friday. Last Wednesday I started rehearsing for the Fringe Festival. I'm doing an authorized version of the book Cosmic Banditos. Long story short - which I will likely expand upon later - we left rehearsals too late. We're struggling and it's a major pain in the ass. I'm a bit pissed off as I was trying to avoid this since Christmas, but here we are.

Anyhow, I've got to go learn a massive amount of lines...