Editing

After a few weeks of being buried in a script for the current project, I'm back to editing Grande Con Carne while I wait for client notes. It's a long script, so I'm not expecting anything from them until at least tomorrow, which means, that I should be able to finish up Episode 8 today. I may wait until Monday to post it though as Fridays tend to be right before Saturdays and I'm pretty sure most people are not at work on Saturdays and what's the point of wasting time by watching interweb videos if you're not a work?

I'll wait for my audience.

Casting again - or why it's important to show up.

The last week has been particularly brutal on my sinuses. It tends to happen when the weather changes, which it did last week, from kind of cold and muggy (down here at the beach) to really hot and dry. Now I love the hot and dry - I really do, but it takes my inner cavities a little while to get used to it, which makes it hard to sleep and - well - live. The tragedy is that I don't think this weather is supposed to stick around, which means I'm going to go through all this again.

Now - on to the regularly scheduled blog post(which may not be as witty and erudite as previous entries due to the sinus medication cloud my brain is currently swimming around in).

My partner, Steve, and I did some casting on Friday, with our always wonderful casting director, Mark Sikes. It wasn't for GCC, but for the actual paying gig. It was fun and we saw a lot of good people. But it was interesting. Generally with the freebie stuff we've been doing you don't see a whole lot of actors but you kind of know that up front. Yesterday, with a paying gig to offer, we saw quite a lot of people, yet it was still pretty surprising that there were quite a few no-shows. In a business where 50% of the job is just showing up - a heck of a lot of people didn't show up.

And there was another phenomenon that I thought was quite interesting. As this project is an informational, "how-to" video, we had some voiceover work as part of the sides, being that voiceover work is going to be a substantial part of the production process. I can NOT BEGIN to tell you how many actors walked into that audition and asked if we were going to do the voiceover. And then, when we said, yes, in fact we do want you to run through the all the material we took time to assemble and photocopy and get out to you, at least half of them hadn't prepared it and wound up reading it cold (and given that it was somewhat complex and technical, tended to stumble and bumble through it - one guy actually jut gave up in the middle and walked out).

Let me just tell you, in case there are any actors among the three of you out there reading this, that if a producer/director/casting director actually takes the time to include some dialogue (even, and let me make this perfectly clear, even if it is only just YOU speaking) in a set of sides and then sends it out to you there's a better than even chance we didn't do it just so you would have something extra to wrap fish with once the audition was over.

I mean, I'm just saying...

Time off to work

Sorry the posting here and of new episodes (of which there are two awaiting my digital razor blade) has been slow but it turns out I had to take a little time off to work for some actual money. You see, although Grande Con Carne has all the appearances of a multi-national, festival-favorite, box-office blockbuster, the fact is that remains a labor of love. And as such requires, from time to time, the occasional break to actually go ahead and prostitute my talents on cash infusing endeavors.

This particular project is actually kind of fun. It's an industrial but an interesting one for the boy in me. We get to play with cars. More on it later.

Rapid clothes-free sorties...

As an off topic, little bit of fun, I'm posting this: (At least, I think it might be a little bit of fun provided you have sufficient bug spray and aren't working anywhere near anything thorny or poison ivy. Yeesh)

Get ready for the Fourth Annual World Naked Gardening Day (WNGD)! People across the globe are encouraged, on Saturday, May 3, 2008 to tend their portion of the world's garden clothed as nature intended.

Gardening has a timeless quality, and anyone can do it: young and old, singles or groups, the fit and infirm, urban and rural. An elderly lady in a Manhattan apartment can plant new annuals in her window box. Families can rake leaves in their back yard. Freehikers can pull invasive weeds along their favorite stretch of trail. More daring groups can make rapid clothes-free sorties into public parks to do community-friendly stealth cleanups.

Click here for more

YouTube

Well, we're up on YouTube.

I had kind of resisted posting on YouTube for two reasons, one - is I think it's essentially a freakshow with the best and the brightest falling behind the weirdest, scariest and sickest. The second reason is that the codec YouTube uses to compresses the videos sucks donkey balls.

But - YouTube recently added a function whereby the viewer can click a little link at the bottom right hand corner of the frame and watch the video in higher definition. It's still a freakshow, but it's a freakshow with a monstrously big audience. Heck, even the music videos I did, which have a limited following to begin with have gotten two thousand clicks each.

So - for all my loyal readers, here's the LINK.