News
January 2015
Screenings and Distribution
Horror Hotel - Coma Girl
Premiere screening of Coma Girl is January 29th at Get Connected at 8:30pm. Logline: romance gets creepy and people get hurt when two men are in love with a comatose patient (played by Amber Seidel): her husband (Neil Ramsay) and her nursing home night watchman (yours truly). This is my second episode on the Horror Hotel web series and it has a great precident: my first episode, Invader, was a web series selection at Raindance. Great turnout of cast and crew. I really liked Ricky's edit and Al's poster
Attack of the Morningside Monster
So cool to see handsome DVDs finally ship on January 20th, the anniversary of the Morningside Monster premiere. During 2014 it screened at many film festivals, picked up a few wins, and even got listed in Horror Society’s Top 10 of 2014. I happily provided some of the monster fodder.
blackhat "blackhats"
Three years since I got the IMDb credit for "blackhats" and the wait for a premiere just got longer. The new wrinkle is Hollywood's eponymous "blackhat" release this month. Same subject, same genre, even the same color palette in the trailer graphics and use of a lower-case initial letter on the title. Still, a cotemporaneous indie release could leverage the other movie's ad spending and opportunities for compare-contrast press.
Alas, still no update on the indie and the Hollywood release bombed (only $4MM opening weekend for $70MM budget). Rotten Tomatos says "thematically timely but dramatically inert." To get distance from that stink, I'm afraid the indie now has a burden to re-brand.
Post Production
Mr. Lockjaw - Pilot
So the puppet got the last word in Mr Lockjaw; I spent several hours behind a microphone this month recording all the puppet's lines ...and getting a sore throat for the effort. We also shot the opening title sequence, lots of foley work, and made great progress on the rough-cut. Oh, and the guy doing the score has given us some friggin' delightful music. Screening of a rough-cut coming soon. In the meantime, there’s a new promo that reminds me of an old Max Headroom network hack.
Bad Blood The Movie
Teaser below for Bad Blood, a sci-fi horror / creature feature now in post but quiet for me over the holidays. Next month I'll be doing some pickups for about 1½ pages that didn't make it into the principal photography schedule. In the meantime, I'm tickled that a bunch of my chemistry glassware made it into laboratory set decoration.
Events
Atlanta Film Society - Eat, Drink, & B*Indie
Indie networking, meets every 3rd Tuesday of the month at Manuel's Tavern. Open Mic night Jan 20th, with pitches and introductions at 7:30. I'm going to try to interest someone in casting me for a good-guy (or at least non-murderous) role with a comic teaser.
Georgia Tech College of Computing
Reception on the 23rd marked the 50th aniversary of computer science at Georgia Tech, and the 25th aniversary of the College of Computing. So strange to think it's been over 20 years since I got my CS Masters there; I couldn't even recall my minor when I first asked! It was user interface design, by the way, although they called it "Human Factors" back then. Neat to chat with the current dean and with the currator of their history of mobile computing exhibit, where the reception was held.
The exhibit collects many significant mobile devices, from old clunkers to latest Google Glass, almost all of didn't exist when I was in school, and then groups by the key tech problems they addressed -- battery life, heat dissapation, computing power, input devices, output devices, etc. It goes on tour again this year.
