In our third (out of four) articles detailing the process of independent film making, I sat down once again with Jennifer Clary to discuss post-production on her first feature length film, The Silent Thief.
After Mike Flanagan's masterful release of Absentia--which won best feature film at LA's 2011 Shriekfest and was distributed by Phase 4 films earlier this year--his Oculus franchise was picked up by Trevor Macy and Marc D. Evans of Intrepid Pictures for the major Feature treatment. (The original Oculus short is a cult classic that was made for $1500, garnered a 9.5 from MFM when it came out, and used a single room, a single actor, and a cowled mirror to strike fear in the heart of viewers everywhere.) Intrepid is a production company that seems to be taking a page from the origins of New Line and focusing on films that have very targeted audiences. While they're most recently known for producing James McTeigue's (V for Vendetta) film, Raven, starring John Cusack, they've also produced or presented such varied works as The Cold Light of Day, Crush, and Balls of Fury.
Everybody has dreams. The big question for me was why so few people ever fulfill them. This is really what the Luella project is about, defying the trend to actually fulfill our dream of making a feature film.
It all started on a dull day in early November 2011. It was the first time in over a decade my friend Ben Nash and I had seen each other. We had been close friends in primary school, but, as is often the way, had lost touch through the years. By some quirk of fate, we found we had both become aspiring young filmmakers. Clearly, we were meant to work together as by the end of that first meeting we had penned, or rather typed, the first draft of what would become the short film Luella.
One of the personalities I got a chance to know is just launched DarkestGoth Magazine editor, GV Pasclato. Recently, he and his team started working on a new way of using Kickstarter in the form of the mira nocta Bluegrass Goth Festival. I personally hadn't thought of using Kickstarter for an event, but had to admit it had lots of possibilities for Independent filmmakers who might want to do their own film festival or a multi-faceted exploration of a few film series with cult followings.
I liked what their ideas were enough that I was even willing to speak on camera to some of their readers, who have a lot of similarities to our filmmaking audience, and even to agree to show the Day 419 film with a Q&A if their event is funded.
With that said, here's a brief interview that GV was kind enough to give me about what they're doing:
This past week, I had a chance to check out some pretty incredible new features from Adobe’s new CS6 release along with Flash reviewer Mike Muwanguzi and Photoshop reviewer, Nate Eckelbarger.
While I’ve had a chance to receive training from Adobe on their new products for a number of years now, this is the first time the training has happened when we weren’t under a Non-Disclosure Agreement. Normally, a select group of press representatives is invited to explore the new software at either Adobe’s headquarters in San Jose or at a special event in NYC 6-8 weeks before the release of the new software. In the past, this time barrier between exposure and ability to share has resulted in a loss of overall excitement as even the most cutting edge improvements become simply accepted shortly after exposure! Since the NDA usually lasts until they start releasing the actual software, the fact that the software launched the Friday before the training in San Jose meant that the NDA had expired by this past Tuesday when we began.