Flyboys, Road Trips, and Monkeys

It's about 3 hours or so before I hit the road for Worcester, MA to attend the Rock & Shock Horror Show which should be quite a time. We're screening EFFECTS at the show, and star Joe Pilato will be in attendance to introduce it. Not to mention, Pittsburgh legend, George Romero will be there too. Good times lie ahead methinks.

Three conventions in three weeks. The Fangoria show in NJ went great. Met John Harrison and spent some great time hanging out with him and talking. Also bumped into filmmaker Mick Garris (THE STAND) twice on two separate days on the same stretch of 42nd st near Times Square. I'm sure he thinks I'm a stalker now, but what can you do.

Last weekend was the Cinema Wasteland show, my personal favorite show to attend. This year brought back the cast & crew of DAWN OF THE DEAD and it was one of the best Cinema Wastelands I've been to yet. Spent most of my time at the Synapse Films table and helping out the lovely Gaylen Ross (Fran from DOTD) with her table.

One very positive note...my documentary work for BASKET CASE 2 has officially begun. One great thing about attending these conventions is the chance to interview folks who just might figure into a project you are planning. This time, DAWN OF THE DEAD cast member David Emge was my subject, as he also played a small role in BASKET CASE 2 as Half Moon one of a group of freaks that figure prominently in the movie.

I had brought my camera and gear with me in the event that David said yes, and thankfully he agreed to sit down for me on Sunday morning in my hotel room.

I've now had the opportunity to shoot several interviews in the comfort of various hotel rooms, and I can tell you that while there are some advantages to having the ease and accessibility to the room for prepartion sakes, there are truly some limitations which make it a challenge every time.

The primary issue with any hotel room when it comes to shooting an on-camera interview is...room. There never seems to be enough square footage to set everything up properly, and if you are hoping for a depth of field in your shot...forget it.

Unless you are lucky enough to book a suite with enough room to move furniture around, you gotta make do with whatcha got. And at the Holiday Inn Select in Strongsville, Ohio, I didn't have much to work with. Basically a 7x10 living space next to the bed in front of the window. That's it. I cleared out the little chair and endtable, and set about my task.

I had this conceit a while back while thinking of BASKET CASE 2, that every interview I do for it should have a big wicker basket somewhere in the background. If you've seen the movies you know what the basket is all about...deformed twin brother and all that. So fortunately at the nearby Target, a large wicker basket was available and $80 later it was all mine.

Then a trip to JoAnn Fabrics...a store which I try to avoid usually. With all the fabric bolts thrown about in haphazard fashion, the place tends to remind of a Morrocan street market and I can never get in and out of there in any reasonable amount of time.

Sure enough, with the welcome help of my friend Don May from Synapse, we scored some nice black fabric and a cool swatch of cloth with a reflective red pattern in it that I hoped would catch the light just right.

Now this was all on Saturday...and I set aside two hours to take care of it. Of course I didn't have any clamps, rods, poles, C-Stands, or any kind of metal apparatus to hang the fabric with. I'm still a fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants organization here and I haven't quite got all the mechanical hoo-hahs I'd like at this point.

So to take care of business, I had the old standy...black duct tape. Soon enough I had a tapestry of black and red hanging about the back of the hotel room with a wicker basket placed just right off to the side. I even added a little green light to the inside of the basket to give it a little goofy feel.

Somehow this whole setup managed to stay up and together for the next 12 hours, and when David arrived Sunday morning, I managed to get him in and out in about 40 minutes. We even talked about his bit role in the sexy soft-core flick THE BOOBY HATCH which was made by the Pittsburgh Mafia...ergo John Russo, Russ Streiner, and Rudy Ricci. I'll probably end up doing a little piece for Synapse's upcoming DVD release of that film as well. Amazing how things work out sometimes.

David was a real pleasure, and I can't thank him enough for what ended up being (in my opinion) my best looking interview to date. You tell me...

Oh well. I gotta run, but look for more BASKET CASE 2 updates in the near future. As it turns out that wicker basket is perfect for hauling around all my video crap. So if you see a guy carrying an abnormally large dark brown wicker basket around for no apparent reason...it might be me.

Talk to you when I get back...if I get back...this month is gonna kill me!

Oh, and there are no monkeys to speak about...I just threw that in the blog title for shits and giggles...I'm weird like that.

Rock 'n' Roll Nightmares

Well the next project has begun...a little sooner than I expected, but rarely do things go as planned these days.

Synapse Films will be bringing the metal/rock/horror opus ROCK N' ROLL NIGHTMARE to DVD in 2006. A new hi-def transfer has already been completed, and there will be extra features on the disc, including commentary with star/writer/rock legend Jon Mikl Thor and director John Fasano, as well as....well therein lies a tale.

In discussions for possible bonus materials for this release, the idea of shooting a new interview with Jon Mikl Thor came up, as he was due to pass through the Detroit area on a leg of his current tour. Thor was eager enough to do the interview and also threw out the idea of shooting some of the live performance itself for a possible new music video of the song "We Live To Rock" from the movie.

Well, after some communications back and forth (not easy when you are a man on a cross-country tour), Thor agreed to do the interview at the I-Rock Bar & Nightclub in Detroit last night, Saturday, August 13th. His show wasn't until late in the evening, but we decided to hook up around 7 PM at the club during setup and before any crowd activity began.

Now ideally, what I really needed was about 45 minutes before the scheduled meeting time to scope out the prime shooting location in the club, set up the camera, lights, etc. With an atmosphere like a nightclub, there would be plenty of possible options as far as backgrounds for the interview, but with the noise of sound checks, gear boxes being unloaded, and the general bar mayhem, it would make things challenging in other ways. My hope was to arrive around 6 P.M. and be ready to go upon Thor's arrival.

That was my hope. Along for the ride on this journey was Synapse co-owner Jerry Chandler, who tried to warn me on the way down to the club that these bar owners rarely get there before they have to, and tend not to be the most accomodating folks on the face of the Earth. I tried to remain optimistic, but as we arrived at the I-Rock around 6:05, there was no one around. The place was barren. And it wasn't exactly the safest neighborhood I've ever been in either. Jerry and I ended up driving around for about an hour, killing time until we just settled on waiting it out in the empty parking lot of the club, praying someone would eventually show up.

Sure enough, it wouldn't be until 7:30 when we would gain access to the place, and by then the band crews were already unloading their gear and in short the place was active as all hell. Thor and Co. arrived shortly before we entered the bar, and for the next 15 minutes, it was panic time for me.

My hope had been to set up the interview using the bare stage as a backdrop, but that was squashed immediately as the side door near the stage was wide open and the unloading of equipment was just too calamitous. I eventually settled on a smaller corner back near the bar (which wasn't open yet) which allowed for a little more privacy, and the blue 'n' red neon lights adorning the bar itself made for a nice colorful arrangement that wouldn't distract too much from Mr. Thor.

Of course, time was rapidly running out to do the interview. Soon the band would be doing soundchecks and the drums and guitars would be thumping loudly and tuning up. We had about 45 minutes to get this done, and that would include my set up time!

Somehow I got the camera positioned, a floodlight readied and the mic hooked up as Jon Mikl Thor positioned himself on a bar stool for his interview. Jerry Chandler had the task of asking the prepared questions I had typed out and I would just ride the camera for the duration.

It must be said first that Thor was wonderful. A truly nice and warm gentleman with a gregarious spirit and a real pleasure to be around. For our entire time at the club, he made Jerry and myself feel like a part of the band, and I have to say it was a real treat. I've never been much for rock shows or concerts but this was a terrific experience overall.

The interview went very well. Thor had fun playing to the camera and going back down memory lane with the movie and his career. There were a few interruptions with some of the sound checks and whatnot but nothing catastrophic. My only wish for the interview is that I had had more time to tinker with the lighting. With the few minutes I had, it was either do it fast or not at all. In the end though, the footage looked very nice. I use a Panasonic DVX-100A and shot the interview in 24p so it adds a nice warm feeling to the whole shebangabang. Even with the hasty lighting, the deep shadows and intimate surroundings I think complemented Thor well. Here's a snapshot from the footage to give you an idea of what to expect in the finished piece.

Around 8 P.M. the interview was over and Jerry and I ducked out for some pizza at Pasquale's Restaurant which was about a half-hour drive from the bar. If you've ever had pizza there you'll know why we would go that distance for the meal. Thor was due back on stage around 11 PM, and "We Live To Rock" would be the third song in his set. I wasn't at all sure how I was gonna pull this off.

I've never done anything like a music video before, or even taped a musical performance. In order to get enough coverage, you really need a multi-camera shoot. One for the stage, one to shoot the band from the crowd, and then another to capture crowd reaction and everything else that might be needed. Or the other option is for the band to perform the song more than once, so a single-camera shoot can take each of those perspectives one at a time.

Of course, I have one camera and one chance to get the song. Now Thor and his bandmates were more than accomodating and told me I had free acccess to the stage during the show and that I could do whatever I needed to get the best angles.

Jerry and I arrived back at the I-Rock around 11 p.m. and we hung out with the band backstage in the green room. Or actually it was more like a gray room with no ventilation and an odor that verified the club's multi-year history with sweaty rock and rap performers. Truly it was the smell of music...and glorious it was in a way.

Around midnight, Thor was on. I decided to go out and tape the first two songs from various angles, which would allow me to get more comfortable with the stage as well as pick up bits and pieces that could be used as cutaways for the video. This was a largely successful idea, and I have a feeling I should have enough to cut something together with. Then "We Live To Rock" was upon me, and before I knew it the song was over and I had managed to capture it from the stage and with the crowd and back again on the stage. By and large I got some pretty good coverage, and I was thrilled with the lighting and the general atmosphere that got captured while I was onstage. This camera is terrific in odd lighting situations, and it got the all the vibrant stage lights and smoke with a great deal of clarity. Here's one moment from the song that turned out pretty nice I think...

After the show, Jerry and I exchanged goodbyes with Thor and the band as well as the refreshingly non-difficult manager of the I-Rock club who was very genial and helpful during our time there. Thor, as I write this, is getting ready to perform in Madison, Wisconsin before heading south on his grand tour of America. I certainly wish him and his band the best, and if you have a chance to see him, I cannot recommend it enough. Check out his tour schedule at www.ThorCentral.com

So, now I have the footage and in the next few weeks I will start putting stuff together. Although taping the interview and performances was a rushed process, the editing will not be as the DVD isn't due until next year.

In the meantime, I've got some other projects looming, including one I'm really looking forward to...but this blog entry has gone on long enough so I'll save that for next time.

Thanks for reading, and rock on!

"Nailed" Shut!

Well it's done. NAILED has wrapped...at last.

After the grueling multi-interview fest that was AFTEREFFECTS, I figured NAILED, with its single interview format, would be a nice little job with little or no real roadblocks or problems.

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

Believe me, when you are a producer or editor, you gain an immediate sympathy for anyone who ventures into this profession and can somehow manage to not only keep their sanity but actually turn out decent work. The time pressures, the technical demands, and most importantly the creative decisionmaking can be overbearing to a large degree most of the time.

With NAILED, I was in an awkward situation. The interview in question was with writer/director Terry Lofton. It was originally filmed for the director's own limited edition DVD of NAIL GUN MASSACRE which was released late last year before Synapse acquired the rights to do an official special edition release which is due in October.

The footage was shot by Loyd Cryer of Dallas, Texas and was filmed on location in Seagoville, Texas in the general store where a couple of the film's scenes were shot. The footage was then edited into a 25 minute piece which appears on the aforementioned LE DVD from Lofton.

This is the same footage that was sent to me to create my own featurette, since the distributors wanted something new to promote this upcoming remastered DVD with. Understandable, but a little problematic. Was I to take the existing featurette (which wasn't bad at all, to be honest) and just remaster and tinker with it a little bit, or should I start from scratch? As good as the interview was, there were many questions I would have asked that weren't, and I felt that I might not have what I needed to do the piece.

It was this debate that held me up on this project for a while. Briefly I seriously entertained travelling down to Texas to re-film Terry Lofton therefore avoiding this issue altogether, but personal and budgetary restrictions put a kibosh on that plan.

So in the end, I decided to simply re-trace the steps of the original featurette and essentially remaster the whole thing from scratch. All the film clips used in the first featurette were off an older master, so I would be able to use the new HD 16x9 master to replace those old clips with brand spankin' new ones. Speaking of 16x9, I decided to reformat all the interview clips for the widescreen format, since the film was going to be presented that way for the first time.

This is a tricky proposition since anytime you blow-up or otherwise mess with exisiting 4x3 video and try to adapt it to new anamorphic 16x9 dimensions, you run the risk of creating a seriously softened or grainier image along with the potential for reduced definition and an overall lackluster presentation. Fortunately the interview footage survived the transition very well with just a hint of softness on the edges.

What also helped is that the interview originally had very intense and colorful lighting which for reasons unknown to me, was leeched out of the featurette on the LE DVD. Although at times the hues on the footage were a bit much, I ended up keeping the rich colors at the original intensity which helped brighten up the proceedings immensely.

Here's a comparison to help illustrate what I am talking about.



Fortunately for the purposes of the 16x9 conversion, the interview had been largely framed in the camera with a great deal of headroom or space at the bottom of the frame which allowed me to repurpose all the shots in widescreen without sacrificing any compositional integrity. Ooh that's a pompous phrase isn't it?....Compositional integrity...man I'm high-falutin aints I?

I have to give props to Cryer and his cameraman for the interview. The various questions were all good and they seemed to get a lot out of Terry Lofton, who comes off as a very genial and good-natured guy. Hopefully they'll like the new featurette. I ended up dramatically altering the structure and the editing of the piece as I went along, so it doesn't bear much resemblance to what came before. Some bits I left out, and I added back in about 3 minutes of footage that went unused before. I ended up shooting a cool title sequence in my basement for it, which involved eight boxes of nails...but I'll let you find out more about that when the DVD hits this Fall.

Ironically after all was said and done, NAILED is almost exactly the same length as the previous featurette, but contains about 4 minutes more of Terry Lofton's interview than the other one? Just goes to show you how inexact a science editing can be sometimes. Personal styles and preferences can radically change the content at any given stage. In a way, I wish the old featurette could be included so people could see two different shots at the same material, but I think NAILED will satisfy. I'm happy with it.

I also put together an expanded section of outtakes that runs longer than the previous DVDs selection. Since the outtakes' original audio tracks are long gone, I ended up cutting together some unused comments from Terry's interview into sort of a makeshift commentary for the outtakes. Turned out pretty good actually.

Well NAIL GUN MASSACRE has now officially left my radar....on to other stuff. I'm getting ready to start posting clips of the various Red Shirt projects on the website. In case you haven't noticed yet, the Our Projects and About Us sections of the site are finally finished.

There is a major new documentary project on the horizon, but I can't talk about it yet. Hopefully for the next update.

Thanks for reading, and I appreciate that you keep coming by to read this crap!

The after-effects of "After-Effects"

After several months of planning, organization, and several weeks of intense work, the documentary, AFTEREFFECTS has been completed and screened for the producers of the film, EFFECTS, which is obviously the subject of my documentary.

I have never had a project this size before, nothing even close. With 11 interviews totaling nearly 5 hours along with movie clips, photos, etc, this was beyond anything I had ever approached before. It was maddening, challenging, frustrating, and at times I felt like I was banging my head against a brick wall that I could find a way to scale. But then if I just took a break and came back to it, I would discover that the wall had a door in it the whole time that I just wasn't ready to see yet.

The final hours of editing on this one were among the most insane of my life. I had had little or no sleep for the last 4 or 5 days of this week. I would nap, edit, eat, edit, edit, edit, eat, nap, not nap, edit...etc. But at last on Tuesday morning...the final pieces came together and what I had hoped would be enough for a 35-40 minute documentary ended up being enough for an entire hour. I could have made it longer with little effort, but this is the running time that works the best.

In a state that I can only describe as sheer exhaustion, I managed to dub off a few copies on VHS and overnighted them to the producing/directing/editing team of EFFECTS comprised of John Harrison, Dusty Nelson, and Pasquale Buba. Most of my conversations concerning this documentary were with John, who had beyond helpful in my efforts to complete this documentary. I have had one conversation with Dusty Nelson, which was extremely pleasant, and up until yesterday I had never spoken with Pat Buba.

Yesterday brought some of the happiest news I can remember in a long while. Pat, and his wife Zilla, loved the doc, and I was treated to a wonderful conversation with Pat where he and I basically talked shop for a while. He treated me as a filmmaker, and not some wannabe halfwit who was flying by the seat of his pants on a project he wasn't exactly prepared for at times. I can only say that he was a class act in every sense and that his kind words about my work made my head swell to a rather obscene degree...but oh well... :)

Today, John Harrison told me that he, Dusty and Pat had watched the doc at Pat's house last night together, and that everyone was now in the "loved it" camp. Then just an hour ago, Pat's wife Zilla Clinton called me to offer her kind words and thanks, which was extremely kind of her. The people who came up from those glory days of filmmaking in Pittsburgh back in the late 60s to early 1980s are just about the classiest bunch of folks you could ever hope to meet. To say I'm proud to have done this story right is understating the matter. My only goal in this was to give the best representation possible of the time and place that EFFECTS was made, and I think I did OK. As long as those three gentleman are happy with it, then I'm happy.

I don't know what fortune has in store for me yet, but I can't help but feel blessed that John, Dusty and Pat, as well as my good friend Don May Jr. at Synapse Films took a chance on me with this film, and I'm glad I didn't let them down.

Now...onto the next project, which I should have more details on next week.

whew...whattttttttttta week!

Michael Felsher
mfelsher@redshirtpictures.com

And so the Shirt grew a size...

Hello to all out there in whateverland...

Red Shirt Pictures has taken the next big step in its evolution. Up until now it was a clever name to make me feel a little more important and a way to give myself a business identity of some sort.

Well now it is my business full time. What exactly does that entail? Well, at this point I can't say entirely but look for a full website update in the next week that will update all my crap and also give you a full look into what Red Shirt Pictures will be doing for the forseeable future.

But first, AFTER EFFECTS is due for completion. See the previous blog post for some info on this project. I have to have it done this week and I think I finally licked a crucial editing issue that had been plaguing me for the past two weeks. I'll elaborate on that more once I get the final cut off to the producers for review. It's a fascinating process, and I'm always learning more every day.

Just got back from assisting on a video interview with director George Romero in Toronto for the upcoming DVD release of two early films from his career, SEASON OF THE WITCH and THERE'S ALWAYS VANILLA. George is in the maelstrom right now with his new film LAND OF THE DEAD due to open in several weeks. Reshoots, editing, scoring, prepping for a Cannes Film Festival preview...hell I'm getting tired just writing all that. The fact that he took time out of his schedule, which has had him literally operating 24/7 for weeks now, is a testament to his dedication and overall coolness. The DVD is due to be released in October.

As I mentioned before, Red Shirt Pictures is now my full-time operation. I have been, for the last five years, a proud employee of Anchor Bay Entertainment, one of the leading independent DVD distributors out there for cult, horror and theatrical flicks. A few weeks ago, an opportunity to take the step to be on my own came up and I had to give it a shot. I'm 31 and I figured if I am gonna fall flat on my face, might as well do it now. I'm still working on projects for Anchor Bay as well as discussing opportunities with other companies as well, which is actually kind of exciting. None of this would have been possible without the support and experience I've received from everyone at Anchor Bay...so keep buying the DVDs, even if its the 345th version of EVIL DEAD. ...it'll be worth it anyway!

Well that's enough for now...gotta busy day tomorrow. I will check in later in the week (for the two of you who are reading this blog...if that many.)

Take care!

Michael Felsher
mfelsher@redshirtpictures.com