New year for new adventures!

Well what can I say, 2010 was by far one of the most difficult years of my entire life as a human being as well as a struggling filmmaker. The amount of horrific ups and downs I had gone through although tough, were not tough enough to stop or kill me! 2011 is a brand new year for success and it is definitely one that I will remember forever as I push forward in bringing Bong Of The Dead to the light.

Now that the film is officially complete I am in the tail end of some final technical stages in which I will be creating DVD menus, art work and more art work for promoting Bong. I have already began my festival submission phase and have been sending Bong off to some of the worlds top notch film festivals in hopes of getting accepted to one. While the festivals look over what I have accomplished in the last 2 years I will take the waiting time and get educated on distribution negotiation tactics.

With the new year it looks like Germany is still interested in Bong of the dead and my potential partners there are willing to work with me to get Bong to their markets. I will also be touching base with a Hong Kong distributor as well as China in hopes of getting Bong to Asia in the new year. The following week after that I will be at a couple local meetings with other production houses who may help with Canadian and US distribution offers. All of this mumbo jumbo about distribution is exciting and scary as hell at the same time! This is the moment where a filmmaker can either be made or be slayed!

For those that dont know, a distributor can be your best friend or your worst nightmare depending on who and which contract you sign. I am trying my best to make all the right choices to ensure a successful end for Bong after the last two years of painstakingly creating it in post. I will be hiring an Entertainment lawyer in the next week as well as shopping around for a foreign sales agent who will help me get the most out of my almost 3 years of hard work. I will also be looking at hiring a publicist who will also help with my PR and campaign for promoting Bong even further. These are very exciting times and I am thrilled to finally be at this moment in time. 2011 will be my year and I will make my mark on this earth and finally achieve the goals I have set forth to achieve. By reaching one goal I will be setting out to achieve a hundred more for that to me is the purpose of life, love and passion for what I do.

All the best to everyone in the New Year and I hope you too achieve all the goals and dreams you have set out top achieve!

Peace out!

NOV 11TH, A DAY TO REMEMBER!!!

What I am about to write in the next few seconds has nothing to do about fallen soldiers or anything remotely close to Remembrance day. Last night Nov. 10th I managed to finalize the film poster for Bong Of The Dead and managed to upload it for the world to see on Facebook and here. I was so happy to finally be three weeks away from releasing my film which I have spent 2 solid years of my life on! I have sacrificed friendships, time and love from family just to stay in the dark and plug away at my dreams one single frame at a time. I have always feared that something was going to happen to the film before I got a chance to show it to the world but never thought it would actually happen.

This morning November 11tht Remembrance day I woke up and turned on my MAC just to stare at a desk top which is only showing me 3 out of 4 of my internal drives! To my surprise I was faced with my worse nightmare and what I am about to say is 100 % true and not fabricated as hype. I have 4 drives named Macintosh HD, Media2, Media3 and Media4. Macintosh HD is my main drive that runs the whole machine but Media 2,3 and 4 are the ones dedicated to Bong. Media 2 is the most important drive because it has everything that Bong is made of from posters, to behind the scenes pictures to all the data files understood by Final Cut, After Effects etc! 2 years of my hard work and life exist on Media 2 but the drive itself no longer exists! Yes that’s right…3 weeks away from distributing the movie and I have lost the movie! I repeat “I HAVE LOST THE MOVIE” , or my fucking MAC has lost it I should say! Or the drive being 2 years old has decided to fucking die right before I release the movie! After having a heart attack on the spot I phoned Apple and was lead into a dead end after 2 hours then I managed to take the drive to work and have my Computer techs mess with it and they were not successful. Finally I was referred to someone who does data recovery for a way less price than the usual 2-3000 dollars! I of course being a broke film maker as is, cant even afford 30 bucks let alone 3000 dollars! Having been left with no choice I managed to drop off the drive to the specialist and left him to his work. Not even 5 minutes after dropping off the drive, I get pulled over by some arrogant asshole cop with a small penis and balding hair who decides he wants to give me a ticket for no seat belt even though I told him I just pulled out of the drive way which was one and a half blocks away and was looking for a gas station in a panic because I was also in Tim buck 2 with no fuel! Of course I am already panicked given the fact that 2 years of my life has just been wiped off the face of the earth! The cop smiles with an “I dont give a shit look” on his ugly mug and hands me a fucking ticket for 165$ and tells me its not the end of the world! Well actually you balding fucking prick! It is the end of the world as I know it because I not only cant afford the recovery of my drive but I have no money for your stupid fucking ticket either!

However the ticket is the least of my worries a this moment as I am still waiting for the specialist to call me with a status update. Words cant express the place I am in mentally at this moment! I do have back ups but they are not like the original and will require even further work to fix and reassemble. I cant keep doing this shit because its killing me just trying! I have no update as of now but I will keep you posted!

This is a day I definitely will not forget.

The road to completion is a constant uphill grind

Its hard enough trying to do a film on your own in post with no crew but then throw in all the digital errors and glitches that come along every other day and its enough to want to hang yourself with your computer cord! I have had to endure so many silly glitches even though I spent $ 5000 on the latest and greatest Mac Pro Quad core in hopes of being able to breeze through my editing. The fact is no matter how much you spend you will always have to spend more! The computer does not like the codec, the video card does not like the filter, the Camera codec does not like the video card and on and on and on! For every problem you have to spend countless days without sleep trying to figure out why? why? why?!! I am a huge fan of MACs and have been for over 15 years but I must admit the new intel chips have taken them to a new low! I have never had so many crashes and stupid little glitches in my life. It sometimes feel like Im editing on a PC with the amount of problems I face on a daily basis.

NOW….all that BS aside I am still grinding and I refuse to be beat by a bunch of 0′s and 1′s! This film will get completed the way I want it to and on time! I just have to keep my sanity and hope I dont have a heart attack every time I turn on the mac. Im trying to get the film off to a submission for a film festival in the next couple of days and hope I can without any more trouble.

Another beautiful day and all is well!

I may have come across a bit negative in my last post so I want to make up for it in this one. As frustrating as the process of doing an entire film on your own is, it is still worth every second especially when the results speak for themselves. I’m plugging away on the last of the CGI shots this week and will move onto the final stages of color correction on the locked edit. Once I’ve completed those two main components it will be time to round up the actors for some ADR. For those that are not familiar with the term “ADR”, it is the process in which you have to redo some of the dialogue of your film in a studio environment because your sound guy was so stoned during the filming that he actually recorded static at times instead of audio. Thanks sound guy! Luckily I now have one of the best sound designers that the Vancouver industry has ever seen and we will be working together closely to make the ADR as best as we can. I’m trying to make a few festival deadlines so the pressure is on to have this beast done and released asap. Theres nothing more satisfying then having your film come together after all the countless hours of work that’s been put into it.
Thanks for staying in tune!

Bong is finaly done!

Its is almost 6 AM PST and I have just finished the official picture edit of BOTD! I actually finished it at 3AM on Jan 9th. This means that the hard part is now out of my way and its time to do the fun stuff like sound design, Vis FX as well as a few other touches and tweaks such as color correction and so on. Its been a long year of grinding and I must say it has finally paid off because now that I can watch the film from start to finish and its a great feeling. I will now spend the next couple of months filling in the blanks and polishing the movie for final delivery. I will keep everyone posted as always. Thanks!

Still trying to deliver!

Well its January 2nd and I had promised to have my first Blog done before today with a cool behind the scenes video look! Continue reading ‘Still trying to deliver!’

New Bong of the Dead Zombie Blog

Hello and welcome to the new Bong of the Dead Zombie Blog!

We will keep you updated about the movie and all the latest happenings through the use of this new blog. You can register an account on the Zombie Blog and take part in discussions or just leave a simple comment on anything you read here.

Look for video clips, a ton of photos, movie updates and so much more.