Fasten your seat belts…

Posted on October 31, 2010 at 11:58 pm by admin

Hello everyone…and welcome to the new home of Quick Shop!  After talking with a web developer at my work who runs his own site, I talked myself into setting up a WordPress blog, hosted on GoDaddy with my own domain name.  WordPress is nice in that it’s easy to administer, they have lots of cool templates and you can basically turn a blog into a decent looking web site.

Besides the new web site I’ve got lots of updates, so fasten your seat belts…

COUNTER MAN…Found!
So I finally have found my COUNTER MAN.  Aimee’s friend Tom Dwyer has officially joined the cast as the COUNTER MAN.

Tom Dwyer

Tom has a long resume of acting work and I’m pleased to have him on board.  Welcome to the cast Tom!

BEARDED MAN…Found!
I’d also like to announce that I also found our killer…and it’s none other than Mr. John Cronk.  You may remember John Cronk from such films as Black Belt Bandits and his break-out role in One-Day Seminar as Jay Cronkle, the Stop-n-Go convenient store manager.  John will be answering the door and letting our poor, unsuspecting Hunter into a completely worse situation.  Welcome to the cast John!

New Shoot Date for Andre Farms
We’ve moved the shoot date at Andre Farms from Saturday, November 13th to Saturday, November 20th.  This will give us more time to do rehearsals and get everyone acclimated to the location.  It also makes my wife happy as her birthday is the 13th 🙂

Movie Poster 2.1
I haven’t had a chance to meet with my poster artist yet, but hopefully it will be soon.  In the meantime, I’ve updated the poster I made to reflect the recent cast additions:

Have Voice. Will Travel.
I have asked Jeannie Stith to do some of the voice overs in the movie, in particular the woman who calls Aimee in the opening scene.  Jeannie is a professional voice-over artist who I’m sure you’ve heard on TV, the radio or even your cell phone.  I’m glad that Jeannie is still able to help me out with this project….thanks Jeannie!

So that’s about it for now.  This is certainly going to be a busy month…I’m looking forward to working with you all!

Posted in Quick Shop News | 2 Comments

Quick Shop Production Notes

Posted on October 21, 2010 at 12:54 am by MoviesByMartin

Things are finally getting busy with production of Quick Shop. If all goes as currently planned, principal photography will be done by the end of November, at which point I’ll get a rough cut going and then we can start the scoring process. Again, if everything goes as planned, I could have a film festival submittable short by February or March 2011. This is almost exactly two years after I started submitting One-Day Seminar to film festivals…where does the time go?

So anyway, here’s some quick recaps of what’s been going on lately:

Movie Poster 2.0
So I updated the movie poster somewhat as you can see below. I figured I’d use a cool font to compensate for my lack of artistic skills. Luckily I’ve got a co-worker whose wife is a Photoshop wiz. She’s agreed to help me out with designing a decent looking poster, so hopefully we can get something new created in the near future…stay tuned.


Rehearsals
So I’ve actually had two rehearsals so far (that’s two more than I had for One-Day Seminar). Back on September 28th I had Rob and Chris come over to shoot some test footage in my car in preparation for their truck scenes. Below is a screen cap from that session, I thought the footage came out pretty decent:

Then just a couple of days ago Aimee came over to shoot some test footage of her untimely demise in the bedroom. Here’s a screen cap of her hiding in the closet:


So these rehearsals have gone really well. I was able to try certain things out to see what works and what doesn’t. This will be vitally important when we go to shoot the actual scenes.


IndieGoGo

I setup a page on IndieGoGo a while ago for Quick Shop, attempting to fund raise $500. Someone just donated $5 to me yesterday, for their usage of my EZLeaves application. I only ended up getting $4.55, as IndieGoGo apparently takes a 9% commission on every donation. Oh well…I guess it’s a start 🙂


Our award-winning screenwriter

The screenwriter for Quick Shop, John Leary, just had a script called Heaven Sent that he co-wrote place 3rd in the 2010 Jacksonville Film Festival. Congratulations and great job John!

So I guess that’s about it for now. Hopefully soon I will have some good news about filling that last role of COUNTER MAN. Stay tuned…
Posted in Quick Shop News | Comments Off on Quick Shop Production Notes

Quick Shop Movie Poster 1.0

Posted on September 24, 2010 at 3:07 am by MoviesByMartin
So again, I never claimed I was an artist, but I cobbled together a movie poster for Quick Shop last night. It’s not much, but it’s a start…I’ve got some mad Photoshop skillz, eh?

So this is 1.0…it’s not pretty, but it gets the point across and it does have the tag lines I thought up a while ago. Sometime it’s the little stuff like this that gets me motivated…I’ve already made it my wallpaper on my work computer 🙂 Enjoy…
Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on Quick Shop Movie Poster 1.0

Test Lab: Shooting in the dark woods and the new shotgun microphone

Posted on September 20, 2010 at 2:30 am by MoviesByMartin
So last night I headed up to my Dad’s place in the outskirts of Palmerton, Pennsylvania with my trusted friend John Cronk. I was planning on shooting the very last scene of the movie here, using my Dad’s woods and front porch. Once I broke out the camera, I realized just how dark it was out there. Here’s a quick video of John jogging to the front porch, so you can see for yourself…

So this is exactly why I do test runs…just to make sure everything is going to work when it comes to the real shoot. And I think I’ve decided that I’ll need to slightly modify that last scene. I don’t think it matters where I shoot it…if it’s at night, my camera (Canon XL1s) is going to have a hard time picking up anything in the dark. So I think what I’ll do is ax the scenes of Hunter running through the woods, and replace it with a shot of him running into the woods behind Andrew Farms, followed by a shot of him emerging from the woods near someone’s lit front porch. My time and budget does not allow for such mobile shots…I’m much better at the static shot 🙂

I suppose I could still shoot this scene on my Dad’s front porch, but if I can find someone’s house that’s closer to mine to shoot it at, I think I will. In the next couple of weeks I’d like to head down to Andre Farms and shoot some test footage there, to make sure all the scenes I had in mind will actually work.

I also finally received my 7″ HDTV in the mail that I’m planning on mounting to my camera as an external monitor. I have a guy at work who specializes in making things work the way they weren’t designed to, so I’m going to ask him for some help to build me a makeshift mount that can go on the camera’s hotshoe.

I also got my $25 Chinese shotgun microphone, which I just got done testing. My initial attempt gave me very disappointing results in that the volume of my voice was way too low. Then after fiddling with the menus on the camera, I figured out I had the Audio 1 input set to “Line” instead of “Mic”, and after switching it to “Mic”, the microphone worked fantastically! This is going to be such a cost saver as renting the mic, cables, mixer and XLR adapter would have cost me $65 a weekend. Now for about $34 ($25 for the mic and $9 for a 1/4 headphone to 2 RCA adapter), I’ve got a fairly comparable setup.  Sweet!
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment