like flies…
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It seems a little less than nice on my part to entitle this post “Like flies” but I always try to find the humor in death I think it is like a defense mechanism… but wow… two children of very famous people/actors have committed suicide recently. This has always been a subject that is very close and personal to me because I have battled with depression most of the adult life (despite having a wonderful childhood).
Many years ago now I had to take doctor prescribed medication to fight my acne and this stuff had some serious side effects - the full list of which I will not go into but the most serious of which was the potential for severe depression perhaps resulting in death - or however they phrased it. Anyway after I had been taking it for a while - perhaps after I had completed my treatment I don’t really remember but I found out that supposedly actor Jonathan Brandis had been taking the same stuff and it had probably led to his death by suicide.
He was only a year of two older than me and because of the way movies work he was the same age as me whenever I saw him in a new movie. I liked him a lot and he showed up in a lot of the stuff I watched anyway, it was very sad when I found out what had happened and I felt depressed then because I just always felt that… if only I could have talked to him, maybe I could have helped. I do not know what it is like to be a celebrity - even with thousands of fans… did he still feel alone? Maybe if he had had someone to talk to. (Not that I don’t think that he did I am sure he was surrounded by a loving family)
Anyway I am reminded of that feeling recently, Both Andrew Koenig (son of Star Trek actor Walter Koenig) and Brian Blosil (son of Marie Osmond) both committed suicide recently and whilst I may not have known anything about Brian Blosil - I did know a little about Andrew Koenig. Death - Particularly Death by suicide (a preventable death) is always sad.
The one “funny” thing I find in this recent news is that Andrew Koenig played “The Joker” in probably the best Batman fan film currently out there; Batman: Dead End. Both Heath Ledger and Andrew Koenig who both played the Joker, both died prematurely.
Ok I think I am at the end of my maudlin little rant. All of this is very sad and my thoughts are with the families of the deceased. sigh.
Barry @ February 28, 2010
Some progress
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Not much but some.
I have tried several times to get in touch with Nic Sveen about the couple of quick re-shoots I want to try and do with him but I am having trouble getting ahold of him… I am not giving up, I am going to try again in a few minutes in fact - but I would feel a lot better if i had gotten that stuff out of the way…
Anyway… I got a hold of Lizzie Webster and she is up for getting together and re-doing the cast commentary, so that is exciting… I just need to get a hold of NIC.
About the only real actual progress I have made since my last post is that I have worked on the Menu backgrounds and some transitions and lay outs and stuff… It isn’t finished by a long shot but it is something.
Sigh… February is almost over already yikes. Less then 6 months to go!
Barry @ February 23, 2010
Rough Roadkill DVD designs…
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Ok so things here as per usual have been busy but I have managed to find the time to rough up some cover designs for the final Roadkill DVD.
The exact list of extras isn’t set, I have barely started work on any of them but the final product shouldn’t be too different from that seen here. Click on each one to bring up a larger image and drop me an e-mail and let me know what you think, which one do you like the most and why, or just anything that you like or dislike about any of them.
Ok Back to grind stone…
Barry @ February 7, 2010
Learning from our mistakes
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Ok so things didn’t go exactly as planned with the Headcast. I don’t really know what to say about it.
It was hard for me being under the Alginate and plaster and not being able to help. My wife and our friend Will both did a great job of helping me, they did everything that they were supposed to but ultimately it isn’t something that they have done before (not that I have either) and this isn’t what they want to do - not like I do. I wish that there was someone else here locally that had some experience doing it.
My friend Scott lives too far away and he is the only person I know who has done it before. We are discussing doing it again but we will have to see.
I guess I should talk about the headcast itself… there are parts of it that aren’t too bad but the there are
parts that are quite frankly horrendous. It looks like a deformed bald gimp version of me. Malformed. The jacket mother mold leaked like a sieve and in an effort to stop the leaks I pushed clay along the seem and ended up somehow pushing in one of the ears, I didn’t have any superglue so I couldn’t secure the Alginate to the jacket and it ended up slipping here and there, the Ultracal didn’t mix right at (user error?) and went from water to solid while I was patching leaks. sigh. In short about everything that could go wrong did go wrong.
My head is killing me and I need to get to sleep. I am going to go and brush my teeth in a minute but it wont wash the bitter taste of defeat out.
Barry @ February 2, 2010
A Big Day
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What’s so big you might ask?
Well, later today if the weather stays nice I plan to get my head and shoulders life-cast. I have never had it done before but it is something that I am very much looking forward to, even if I am a little nervous about it. I am a firm believer in the idea that if you want to do this (for a living) you have to have had it done yourself… how can you know what it is like if you haven’t experienced it yourself?
I think that we have everything in place… it’s almost 7:30 in the a.m. I have about 3 or 4 hours until my friend Will gets here and we will be sitting down and going over everything and then around lunchtime we’ll do it and by this time tonight I should have an Ultracal bust of my head!
From there it might take a few weeks but we will make a negative mother mold of it into which I can pour some latex and make a dummy head for finishing the FX shots of Roadkill.
Speaking of that here is an update on our progress with the DVD… I have a mostly finished Cover laid out, I just need to tinker with it a little bit I think… I may do a different design so that I have a couple to choose from and Richard Cabrera who acted in the film and is a film maker and graphic artist in his own right has offered to take a crack at it too. So we shall see how that goes.
I ended up capturing about 60gig of footage for the behind the scenes videos and bloopers ect. I am going to be trying to put as many extras on the disc as I can, but I think I will wait to reveal exactly what until a little closer to the time.
Let’s see, what else? I have started putting together the blooper/gag reel, it should end up somewhere in the 8 to 10 minute range which is good. I was worried that I wouldn’t have enough footage because everyone was very professional and remembered their lines pretty well and even when they did flub a line they didn’t break character… luckily there where a few times when we had to let the camera roll and people goofed off a bit. I think that that is a drawback of making movies the way I do on such a small scale in such short time frames, on “normal” sets there are a lot more people standing around and they shoot for months so they have a lot longer time to get to know each other and joke around.
Sigh. ok I have wasted enough time here, I’ll be back, probably in February at this point and I will hopefully have pictures… which reminds me I need to put up pictures of the fangs I have made too.
as always… wish me luck!
Barry @ January 31, 2010
Things are going…
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… how are things going?
I think that things are going ok, I may not have gotten as much done as I would like but I have made bounds in my preparation work and today I hope to officially make the first step forward on the Roadkill DVD. I have started prepping my desk, tidying up paperwork and such, making room and I later today I am going to start collecting footage for some behind the scenes stuff and bloopers.
As well as cleaning and tidying I have been trying to spend some quality time with Alice, ok she still sleeps a lot but we’ve been cuddling and we had a long talk this morning about the alphabet and some words that each letter stood for.
What else…? Well I have gathered together everything I need to do my head cast, I just need to pluck up the courage and get some friends over to actually do it. If I were just looking at doing one for the Roadkill shots that I need then I could just do one on someone else - rather then having it done to me but because I also want to try some other things, and because I firmly believe that if you are going to do it on other people you should have experienced it yourself - I am going to get it done on me. Soon. If the weather hadn’t turned so bad the last few days I would have done it this weekend, but it is cold and wet and I want to do it outside just in case.
Sigh. Anyway Alice is awake and demanding my attention… so, I shall return in a few days when I have some real news.
Barry @ January 21, 2010
The end of one year and the start of another
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Well that was 2009…
An interesting year with ups and downs. We welcomed a new addition to our family, released our first DVD and I finally got to start exploring my dream of making practical special effects. Along the way I had to quit my day job, nothing happened with my immigration application… one of our cars broke but I was able to fix it on my own. I wrote the first draft of a novel.
What will this next year bring? Who is to say? I won’t repeat myself a whole bunch just in case anyone does actually read this but 6 or 7 months from now I want to have Roadkill finished on DVD, the novel finished and at least a proof copy in my hands… if the editing and re-drafting goes well enough we may submit it to publishers and they may have a problem with it being available already somewhere else… so we’ll see. The special edition of Babysitter would be cool but not a must, that is more for my own piece of mind at this point.
I may or may not go back to school too… I couldn’t get into ANY classes this coming semester we left it too late, but perhaps next time.
No matter what happens with those and other things we have planned this next year will be a year of growth. That is my resolution, we will strive to make good choices about money - keep things paid and perhaps get things paid off. Strengthening our financial footing will allow us to expand the business and take on the larger projects we want to tackle.
Whatever the future brings I stake a claim now that 2010 will be our year. And I hope that it will be a good year too for anyone ready this.
Peace people, until next time.
Barry @ January 1, 2010
Finishing things
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One of the biggest problems I have always had is finishing things. Sometimes I find myself not able to finish something at all and sometimes it can just be a matter of not finishing them to my own satisfaction.
I can’t remember if I said this last year or the year before but my new years resolution was to finish things more. I guess I have accomplished that. I have a DVD available for sale and yesterday I finished the first draft of my first complete novel. Only time will tell if I can re-draft it sufficiently to make it into a publishable manuscript.
Ok so I still haven’t finished Roadkill… I haven’t started the final preparations to complete it yet but I will soon. It will be a challenge with a new baby but I will give it my all very soon. I will painstaking sit down and watch every tape for bloopers and interesting behind the scenes footage to make up for the lost tape 
and I will work on a bloody neck stump and I will try to get together with Nic Sveen to re-shoot his one scene and I will Finish Roadkill to the best of my ability. And I will do it soon.
Now in the mean time I do have other things to do, drawing mainly at this point but other stuff too… I just typed up the start of a hand written fan film script that I want to finish.
Sigh we’ll see.
Barry @ December 14, 2009
December
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For anyone reading this who knows us, you know that December is a busy time for us. Angela’s birthday is in a few days and then Christmas obviously. Then you have life’s constant contributions to the mix. This year fate decided to throw a wrench into the workings of our car’s engine by blowing a hose in the cooling system.
Luckily we were parked in our driveway when it happened and we were able to just trade spaces with our old piece of crap car that they didn’t even want as a trade in for the new one. It runs ok (if a little loud) and has been doing a great job of filling in, one small bit of good luck which is unusual for us.
In other news I am almost finished with the first draft of my novel, when I leave here I am going to have a couple of hours to get a little work done on it hopefully.
Things with the Babysitter are going well, it has been available for about a month and we have sold 2 copies, even if one of them was to a friend [thank you Yakov ;)] I have also finally had the money to order crew copies which should be here this week and I will be mailing and handing them out just in time for Christmas! Ok so it will be more of a present to myself then the people but whatever 
Things have been going slow everywhere else - I definitely won’t be finishing Roadkill by the end of the year as hoped but because of the way things have worked out with Babysitter I have High hopes for Roadkill early in the new year. I am going to try and film the last two scenes that I want to get but while I am waiting I want to get the packaging design started (I need to finalize the content so I know what extras to put on the packaging!) then I can start going through all the tapes for the first time in years so that I can get all of the outtakes and stuff together. Scott is still looking for the missing tape of Behind the Scenes footage but there is a possibility that it is lost so I can not hold up production waiting for that.
sigh. ok That’s it for now - ’til next time.
Barry @ December 9, 2009
NaNoWriMo is over!
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Ok so It is now the 3rd of December,
It has been a couple of days since it ended but I have been busy with life. here is a quick update on just about everything.
My lawyer finally returned my call and the news is… that there is no news.
I completed NaNoWriMo, I am officially a Winner! I still have to finish the story itself which I hope to do this weekend, but technically you do not have to finish the story to win.
Today I discovered that we have officially made our first sale! That’s right I have sold ONE DVD! hopefully it is a genuine sale and not just a “Pity Buy” by a friend, but either way I don’t care, i sold a DVD!
Also it is cheaper then I thought to buy copies of my own DVD so I am hopefully going to be buying the crew’s copies soon and getting them out as Christmas gifts to them.
I don’t know if I already put this in another post but we also got “The Babysitter” listed in IMDB.com! Yay us, now it is an official listing for everyone’s IMDB accounts.
Things are looking a little bit up but I am trying not to get too happy because that is when things usually start to fall apart… so we shall see.
ok people, ’til next time.
Barry @ December 4, 2009