Saw an article in this month's Moviemaker Magazine where under the guidance of the new festival director, John Cooper, Sundance is creating a new competition category called Next for films with budgets of under $500K. This is great because in recent years, it has become apparent that bigger films with multi-million dollar budgets were dominating the festival so it strayed far from its roots where new filmmakers with low budget films can get seen. This new category is refreshing and hopefully returns Sundance closer to its roots. It will be interesting to see what this year's first slate of under $500K budget films will do in the future. I am rooting for them and wish that category was around 2 years ago.

        

I was watching this film called Staten Island and there was a scene where you had a whole bunch of trees that had big red ribbons wrapped around them. The ribbons were there because these were trees marked to be cut down by loggers. In any event, brought back memories of when I was doing location scouting for Scalp. I had gone to Ghost Lake and I wanted to walk deep into the woods to check for spots to shoot. So being a total novice at hiking or doing anything in the woods, what I did was bring along bright orange ribbon which I would tie around trees to make the path back visible as I walked deep into the woods. I actually did walk pretty deep into the woods and realized there was really no advantage to shooting deeper into the woods other than it being a lot quieter. Also to have the cast and crew walk that miuch deeper would not be great because of time and the fact that we were further from the cars. The funny thing is that while I was able to find my way back using the ribbons, it was not as easy because the ribbon I used was thin and also as the light changed, the orange ribbon blended a bit more with the trees. In hindsight, it was stupid to wander in the woods by myself because if anything happens being alone is not smart. But it was fun. Ghost Lake turned out to be a great location.

        

Happy New Year to everyone. 2009 was an awesome year  and I am defintely looking forward to 2010. Main goal is get Scalp seen by as broad as audience as possible so more to come. As a horror fan, I saw two trailers for films that I am looking forward to seeing. One is Legion and the other is The Wolfman.  

        

With the success of Paranormal Activity, which cost $30K to make, Paramount has announced that they will devote $1MM in their budget for films that will have a budget of around $100K. Will get that slate in place by end of 2010.  That's great news because nobody on the studio side is paying any attention to this segment given that bigger is the trend this days. To give perspective, the budget for Avatar is over $350 million so $1 million is a rounding error but still nice to hear that. Hope everyone has a great Christmas.

Paul  

        

Thanks to everyone who brought the DVD and I really appreciate all the positive feedback on the free filmmaking book also that comes with the DVD. That book was written to be a hands on manual on how to make a film so I am glad you liked it. I did get one comment asking why didn't I do more special effects, explosions even and since she wore cape, maybe even flying. The answer is that those things really didn't fit the story I was telling. I think a lot of times, people overload on special effects just to dazzle but they forgot about a good story. One thing I will say is that as I write the sequel, there will be more special effects and there will be flying. How? and Why? When the time comes, you will see. In any event the air is crisp, the holidays is in the air and everything feels great except that the Giants suck after a strong start.   

        

Seregon O’Dassey is one of the eleven actresses in my other film Life of an Actress and saw some cool news about her being a modern day vampire. She is on a series on Comcast’s Paranormal channel and that is getting buzz given her profile in Time Out New York about her being a modern day vampire. So check out the below links. We did cover Seregon at a Gothic Vampire  gathering at Club Lazarus and she is covered in Episode Two which will be part of the segments that will be shown for free in Nov & December so check back on www.lifeofanactress.com    http://newyork.timeout.com/articles/halloween/79588/interview-with-a-real-vampire

http://blog.zap2it.com/frominsidethebox/2009/10/seregon-odassey-claims-to-be-real-life-vampire.html

Cool stuff

        

Hope you like the re-designed website. After two years, decided it was time to update the site and also put some of the press we got in order. I learned how to do websites just recently and did this so hopefully not too crude. 

So I also launched the DVD for another film I made called Life of an Actress. It is feature/doc about the lives of actresses and you can check it out at www.lifeofanactress.com  . Beyond the DVD, there is also a special online segment to that coming in late November.

Back to the horror front, saw a cool and unique film called Blood. It is about a Japanese girl/woman who is actually a vampire and is hunting somebody. Good film because unique in many ways combining a couple of different types of action. So worth checking out.

Also I found a great link about Ghost Lake, which is where we shot a major portion of the film so check that out under the Cast Tab. Paranormal activity and legends abound there.   

        

Happy to say that Scalp is available on DVD now. On the home page of this site, you will see the DVD Box image and if you click on that,  you will get info on how to buy the DVD. This Special Edition DVD also includes a FREE PDF copy of a book called "Two Day Film Class" which is a book  I used to teach a two day intensive film class that covers everything from how to write a script to how to schedule a shoot day. So a good value because you can watch a film and then read up on how to make a film. Please spread the word. It has been a long journey from making the film to premiering the film in NY, getting the NY Post Review and other articles to finally releasing on DVD. Just in time for Halloween too. Thanks    

        

Went to a film conference and heard something cool. They are releasing a feature film on cell phones. The film has stars and was shot  with this in mind. Here is the link   http://www.babelgum.com/rage  .  It really is a great example of knowing well in advance what you are going to do with your film. Given that they knew it would be seen on a cell phone, they shot it with full color backgrounds and the actors are really like a series of monologues. By doing it this way, they were able to also get a bunch of stars to do it because no actor needed to shot for more than two days. Finally they are showing it as 7 episodes of around 12 mins each i am guesing because the average attention span of watching something on the web is only 4 mins (no precedent on cell phones). We live in a new world on how to get films seen. that is good

        

Unfortunately I just recently found out that Scalp will not be premiering overseas at the Bram Stoker Film Festival. I was told that the local authorities in Whitby required the festival to pay licensing fees to all the filmmakers. Given that they could not bear the cost of that, the festival had to then apply for special waivers for each of the films and I was told that Scalp was 1 of 18 film that didn't get a waiver. It is unclear what qualifies a film for getting a waiver or not. What sucks here is that all the filmmakers don't care about getting paid a licensing fee so this is purely a local bureaucractic red tape thing that is stopping us from showing. What also hurts us that we only wanted to premiere internationally in one meaningful international festival so when The Bram Stoker Festival invited us, we accepted and did not apply for any other festivals internationally. As a matter of fact we declined pursuing two other good invites and now it is too late to pursue them because their slate is finalized. Tough enough to get your film out there without this kind of red tape tossed out there last minute. Did some googling and found this article    http://www.whitbygazette.co.uk/stories-with-comment/Whitby-film-festivals-face-axe.5402183.jp     which provides a little more detail  and it also appears that there was a rating issue.  Anyway red tape sucks.

On a brighter note, I showed a clip and spoke at the Science Fiction Assoc of Bergen County last night and had a geat time. It is always great to field lots of questions from a group of people who are knowledgeable about horror and science fiction and who are real film fans. The Q&A lasted over 2 hours. I would recommend this group to anybody who is into science fiction and horror. If you are interested, just email me and I will give you their contact info.  

Summer is officially over and fall is here. Nothing beats fall in NY