filmmaking

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It’s 2:53 a.m. in the morning and I’m up making tea and working on a new website and some other stuff at this way late hour. Thought I’d make a post to chronicle the past few days developments…

Ever since Friday night a wazoo-load of e-mails and phone calls have been coming in from good folks who caught my school board commercial on E! Television’s The Soup. I’m still a bit overwhelmed by the attention the ad seems to have gained lately, now over a year since it ran (for only a week and a half on WGSR Star 39 in Reidsville). One neat thing that has happened because of it is that I’ve been hearing from a lot of people that I’ve somehow lost contact with over the years. I honestly had no idea that The Soup was so popular! I’d heard of it before but until now ...

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This is great news, because it really shows how far Chinqua-Penn Plantation has come in just the past year. The historic manor near Reidsville was once among the most opulent and celebrated houses in America, until it had to close down several years ago because of lack of funding. Then last year Calvin and Lisa Phelps bought the place and immediately started turning things around. This past weekend they even had Gatsby Days (a celebration of the 1920s) again at Chinqua-Penn.

Now there’s this: film production company A Five Picture Deal out of Atlanta is going to start shooting Mandie and the Secret Tunnel at Chinqua-Penn next week!

It stars Dean Jones! Who played whats-his-name in Disney’s “Herbie” movies!

Look! Press release!

October 2, 2007

For immediate release –

Chinqua Penn Plantation, located at 2138 Wentworth Street in Reidsville, N.C., is pleased to announce it will be the site of

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Rory McIlvain, a filmmaker in California, sent me word tonight about My Show Planet, a YouTube-ish site for Christian independent filmmakers and musicians to showcase their work. The site is still in its very early stages, but I think it shows quite a lot of promise. Here’s wishing Rory all the best in this new endeavor and I’ll definitely be visiting on a regular basis (and will try to contribute something too :-)....

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It’s been awhile since anything’s been reported here regarding KWerky Productions, the filmmaking outfit started by “Weird” Ed and me. Unfortunately events during most of the past year really took away from a lot of productive time and energy. Now that all of that is over with, it’s time to turn our attention to more creative efforts.

It’s funny: for over a year now I’ve been involved in fighting one battle after another. The thing with Viacom/YouTube was just the most recent of those. With all of them having been fought (and amazingly enough won for the most part) I’m finally looking forward to struggling for things I want to do, not necessarily because I have to do them…

Keys, our feature-length project, is still on. Obviously we weren’t able to film it in the timeframe that I was hoping for. Oddly enough that may have helped things ...

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I’m not watching Fox’s On The Lot anymore, even though I made a film to enter into the competition. It’s not out of “sour grapes” or anything: when the show premiered I was eager and excited about its potential, and I was glad for whoever it was that made it all the way to the Hollywood round even when I didn’t.

And then the show… failed to meet my expectations. Worse than that: it became readily apparent in the first episode that the art and skill of film-making would not be what this show would be about. Before the first installment was up, I was already wondering how much of a chance my entry had, considering that the attitude I conveyed in my intro video wasn’t the combative/aggressive that the On The Lot producers seemed intent on having from the show’s cast. More time and effort was spent on ...

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Most of this weekend was spent in Raleigh. I left Reidsville at about 4 p.m. on Friday afternoon and reached my friend Chad‘s place a little after 6. For the past five weeks I’ve been studying my brains out for the Praxis exam: that’s the big series of tests given to prospective teachers. It was actually two exams that I took on Saturday: one that morning for content knowledge, and the second later that afternoon on teaching methods. And, I think that I did pretty well on them! The first was over a hundred multiple-choice questions that you had to use a number-2 pencil to fill in those little bubbles for your answers, but the second was stuff you had to think about and write out. Basically that exam provided two knowledge areas that you had to make lesson plans out of. Even though that was the harder of ...

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Just one more post before I really absolutely do take a self-imposed sabbatical from blogging for the next few days: it was first mentioned last week that the first commercial from my school board campaign – the “zany” Star Wars-inspired ad – will be screened this weekend at the first-ever Pixelodeon Independent Video Festival at the American Film Institute… in Hollywood! So if you’re in Los Angeles for the next few days, I guess you can stop by and watch the Death Star blow up a schoolhouse.

Hey, it helped get me almost forty-seven hundred votes, didn’t it?? 🙂...

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That’s it. Hollywood is officially a depleted sow. The field has been plowed and planted so many times that nothing fresh is growing in it. It’s dead, Jim.

Find out about it here, in a story primarily about another remake (of Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill).

Incidentally, I watched last year’s remake of The Omen a few days ago on HBO. That was another classic movie that never warranted a remake, at all. The same is true for Conan the Barbarian (can you believe a few weeks ago was the 25th anniversary of it’s premiere?).

In my opinion, Conan the Barbarian is about as perfect a movie as you can find. So many great elements all working together in that film… The soundtrack by Basil Poledouris is easily one of the most listened-to things on my MP3 player whenever I’m driving (I love all the tracks but ...

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Next weekend, on June 9th and 10th, the American Film Institute in Los Angeles will be hosting the Pixelodeon 2007 Annual Independent Video Festival. Over 300 independently-produced videos and short films will be shown. Well, guess what: the “Star Wars”-themed first commercial from my school board campaign has been given the honor of being one of them! It really amazes me that all these months later, it’s still seems to be rather popular. I just made it because (a) the idea was too good not to do and (b) with 16 candidates running, I really did have to try to stand out a little. But lo and behold, it’s something that became bona-fide viral… which I never expected to happen. And now it’s being shown at the AFI!

Pixelodeon 2007 sounds like it’s going to be a lot of fun! I won’t be there unfortunately (there’s a teaching exam that ...

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