OK, I’ve been doing a really crappy job of posting once a week. Part of that is lack of inspiration, but a bulk is because of health issues. I’m suffering from… got no idea, really. Heart is find, lungs are fine, blood is fine. Last week tested if my nerves were fine (should find out in a few days) and, if not rejected by my insurance company, I’ll find out if I have sleep apnea in a week. Not that any of the doctors I’ve seen think any of these things have been potential problems, but because nothing they’ve tested as shown as positive.
Except for Epstein Barr Virus. Even more fun? My being positive to EBV is diagnostically meaningless, since 90% of the population are positive. And, in any case, there’s not a damn thing that can be done anyway. So I’m run down, have no energy (like going to the bathroom can wear me out and sometimes I need to take a nap from watching the TV), my thinking is often cloudy and muddled, which all serves to curtail any initiative to do, well, much of anything.
Despite this, some things have happened in the periods where I wasn’t too wiped out to do anything. Sledgehammer has finished principle photography and the scenes John has cut together look amazing.
Inspired by a Reddit writing prompt, in January I’m going to begin principle photography for a 5-7 minute short – with exactly one actor – and a provocative title:
Title: Fuck Retirement
Logline: A retired contract killer is targeted for assassination by his young peers.
Blurb:
For retired contract killer Gator, the greatest game just turned out not to be that great. Sure, hunting humans was a lot more interesting than moose, boar or even bear – they can hunt back – but professionalism ensured his prey never really had a chance.
Ambivalent about retirement anyway, Gator’s life regains meaning when someone targets him for assassination. Dealing with a string of professional killers will make life a little more interesting. For a while, at least.
Getting old sucks, but experience counts for something. At what point will youth and enthusiasm counter old age and treachery?
At the constant nagging of John (which he is now denying), I’ve begun the process to formulate Lily’s Party into a 20-25 minute short that maybe, just maybe, can lead to interest in funding a feature-length version. I’m leaning toward filming late May or early June, but have to get the boss to sign off on the budget first (all ‘deferred’ pay to the actors – which basically translates to no pay – so budget is mostly insurance, then food and gas money).
Based on her concept, I wrote a short (originally intended to be a horror, but morphed into a psychological thriller (at least I hope)) I expect to direct and edit as a reel builder for Ruby Garnet, an actress featured in John’s flick.
Treasure Hunt was supposedly short listed for best picture, but didn’t win. Sadly, they’re so disorganized that even on their Facebook page it’s really difficult to find any information (I don’t FB, so got this second hand). (Oh look, they finally updated their home page (though not any subsidiary pages).) After some consideration and consultation, I’ve decided that adding their laurels to the flick’s IMDB page is just not worth the effort. I did, by the way, learn how to get rid of those painfully blue skies from the day-for-night filming we did. Still need to optimize the sound. I finally found one piece of software that would let me make a properly formatted DVD (but not Bluray), though it’s quite crude. I need to get the energy to muck with it long enough to find out if I can at least make it work for my intended purposes (basically, I want to put the trailer and outtakes on the disk menu – how hard should that be? (evidently really hard)), as I still owe my crowd funders disks (sorry, but I don’t think I’ll be able to get the Bluray’s to work) and posters (I have them printed, just need to mail them).
I’m still seriously considering re-imagining my dominatrix movies into a miniseries, but haven’t done much more than write the opening for the third. I’m also seriously thinking of novelizing the series, which is absurd, in a way, since the whole concept started as a novel in the first place (but fizzled). As if I don’t already have enough things to waste my time on, a novel editing friend and I have been discussing the notion of starting a book publishing company some time in the next few years and the whole idea behind RedDom in the first place was to have a novel easier to market than my first.
Domestique is still in the editing stage. The editor sent me a rough cut a while ago (heck, maybe a month now) and I had some… issues with it. We discussed them and he’s at work on a new cut. I hope to see something before the end of the year, but it’s not like he doesn’t have a regular job and a life either, so it may be a bit. I did finally manage to get the rough footage (all in 4K ‘log’ mode). Had to get a new hard drive, mine doesn’t have the space, then format it to work on his Windows machine, then, of course, feel good enough to carry out the musical hard drives to get it to him then pick it up. Haven’t loaded any into my editor yet. Haven’t got past the activation energy to fix the log mode with the appropriate ‘lut’ (I barely understand what I just wrote) or working with the greenscreen, particularly after having seen the artifacts that the editor had in his initial rough cut. I’m trying really hard to not think I just wasted $5K…
So, there you go. TMI about why I’ve been DOA. I’d like to say I can get back to less irregularly posting, but until/if the doctors find something fixable or I learn how to get by if this is the new normal, it may be just whenever I have the right combination of time and energy.
