My favorite movie of 2007...

...just might be The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters. It's definitely top three.

Check out the Film Threat review.

Chop chop.

Finally got off my arse and started "serious" editing on Interplanetary. At the moment, I'm working on Scene 55, featuring Mr. Kyle Holman...



"Editing" so far (I've only been working on it for an hour or so) has consisted of synchronizing audio to picture. Trap's been kind enough to go through the production audio for me and chop it up into individual takes. I think this is going to be a big time-saver for me, and I think all the various computer files involved in editing Interplanetary are going to end up much more organzied than those from Hide and Creep. Not that anything could be much less organized than the Hide and Creep edit...

"Other Worlds Than These" episode 001.

001: The Treatment.

The Treatment is one of many free podcasts available from National Public Radio. If you're not familiar with podcasts, the Wikipedia Podcast page will get you up to speed.

On the surface, The Treatment is just another 30-minute movie-centric interview show. But host Elvis Mitchell is a great interviewer. He knows enough about movies to ask interesting and pertinent questions to the guest of the week, whether it's a director, writer, actor, producer, or composer. And, as there is only one guest per show, Mitchell has time to ask the questions most interviewers don't get around to.

I've heard so many good Treatment interviews, it's hard to say where you should start. This one with director Danny Boyle (Sunshine, Trainspotting) is excellent. And here's a good chat with Incredibles and Ratatouille mastermind Brad Bird.

Plenty more interviews, along with subscription (don't forge -- it's free) information, are available on The Treatment page at www.kcrw.com.

"Things..." episode 001.

001: Back up early, back up often.

Contrary to popular belief, film is not dead. At this point, I'm thinking it might outlive videotape. Even though I like to shoot on film, my footage gets turned into computer data soon after the negative is developed. In the past, this meant dealing with videotape. But we've gone tapeless for Interplanetary, and it's great. Instead of dealing with high-end hardware, expensive videotape cassettes, and long tape-to-computer transfer times, I just plug up a disk drive to my editing machine and copy files.

Tape does have a reliability advantage -- unlike a hard disk, a videocassette won't crash. But USB and FireWire disk drives are so inexpensive these days, why not just back up everything twice? It's kind of like a poor man's RAID.

For Interplanetary, I purchased two USB LaCie drives from OnSale.com. I paid less than $120 for each 500 GB drive. Assuming we don't go too crazy with our shooting, I should be able to back up all the raw video files for the flick twice -- once on each drive.

I hear that hard disks are more likely to die if they sit unused for long periods of time. Even if you have redundant backup drives, it's probably a good idea to spin 'em up every month or two.

New regular (?) features.

I recently read an article by some indie filmmakers in one of those indie filmmaking magazines. These guys' movie played Sundance '07, got some good reviews, and is getting a theatrical release later this year. I figured, "These guys have lived the dream. Given a few magazine pages, they'll impart some wisdom on the unwashed masses."

So what did I learn from their article? Dude, making movies is hard. It's not for those with weak wills, knees, or brains. But, if you can somehow make it through 'til that premiere screening, it is a totally extreme thrill.

Thanks for that insight, fellas.

In the spirit of providing actual useful information, I'm going to start writing a couple of weekly features (or featurettes, at least) for the ol' blog. On Tuesdays, I'll deliver a new edition of "Things They Might Have Failed To Mention In Film School," or "Things..." for short. "Things..." will cover the stuff I've learned about filmmaking that never seems to get covered in filmmaking books, magazines, or internet articles.

But filmmaking books, magazines, and internet articles aren't all bad. I'll try to point you toward the good ones on Thursdays in "Other Worlds Than These."

If you're interested in the nuts and bolts of filmmaking, I hope you'll find these new blog bits... well, useful, like I said earlier. If you just read the Interplanetary blog to see when the Interplanetary movie will be out on DVD (or if the whole production will just crash and burn at some point), don't worry -- I'll find some time to keep writing about that stuff, too.

Housekeeping.

Hope everyone had a good Labor Day. I've been cleaning up the disk drives on my "work" computer, an Apple Mac G4. Assuming I can free up enough space, I'll have no more excuses -- it'll be time to get serious about editing Interplanetary.

Last day at Atrox revisited.

A few more shots from our last day at Atrox, courtesy of George Smyly...







We're talking to the folks at DeSoto Caverns about shooting there at the end of September. More on that as it develops.