Winner, Best Feature: Garden of Hedon

Great news! We went to the Philadelphia Terror Film Festival and triumphed!

GOH took home 4 awards, Best Actor(Richard Cutting), Best Supporting Actor(Manuel Poblete), Best Screenplay and Best Feature!

The Best Feature, for me at least, is the big one. We beat Nailbiter, which has been sweeping festivals all over the place. I had a feeling we might fall victim to them also, but we won!

We had a great time, met some other cool filmmakers, and brought home some awards! (well, only the paper so far--there was a snafu with the plaques and they're shipping them to everybody)

So when can you see GOH? Still working on that! Stay tuned.

Great News!

Garden of Hedon will be playing at the Terror Film Festival in Philly on October 20th! In addition we've been nominated for 10 awards!

Best Feature Film
Best Director
Best Feature Script
Best Director of Photography
Best Actor: Richard Cutting
Best Actress: Danielle Lozeau
Best Supporting Actor: Manuel Poblete, John C Bailey, Carl Stevens, Andrew Ely
Best Supporting Actress: Leanna Chamish and Judith Furlow
Best Sound Design
Best Score

You can find more info at:
http://terrorfilmfestival.net/_wsn/page6.html

Hope to see you there! 

The State Of Things

So, I've been quiet of late. Here's your update!

I've done another pass on GOH and think it's about finished. The final running time is 1hr57 minutes.  Am pretty happy with it. There's still some things I wish I could change, but they're pretty much all a function of our super-low budget.

Have imported all of the Making Of footage and am prepping to create the supplement. Have to interview the main people, or at least some of them. Gotta figure out exactly what I have footage of for them to talk about.

People ask about distribution, and it's up in the air. I haven't even sent it to my producer's rep yet because of another option I'm mulling over. You may hear about it soon if I decide to go forward with it.

Night of the Living Podcast did a short blurb/review of the flick, which I've edited for the best possible context. You can hear the edit below, or head to www.notlp.com for the actual episode.

PREMIERE!

So we had the premiere on Thursday, April 26th--if you didn't come, what's the matter with you? :)

Other than a small snafu where the theater wanted us to start promptly at 7:15, it went well. The picture looked great, everybody seemed to have a good time, and we had a great turnout. Thanks to everybody who came out, and I only wish I had more time to talk to each and every person...

We got interviewed by Click On This, a local show, and when they put up that footage I'll post the link. Here's some pictures from the premiere!

Tickets. Half sold out.

Just saying. If you were thinking about waiting to buy them the night of the premiere, I wouldn't hold your breath. :)

BUY YOUR TICKET HERE

Das Ist?

Here it is, the trailer for GOH...

Hi Def Version is HERE

Low def streams below. 


Garden of Hedon Trailer

The Actual GOH diary, Day 4

Couple of notes: First, this is not a spoiler, as Lauren's character isn't established before her scene.

Second, this entire part became a deleted scene that you can see online right here. It all takes place before the main events in the movie, so I feel okay putting it up.


Also I apologize but I seem to curse an awful lot in my diary...

Day 4(11/10/2010): Holy Shit, we made a day

First scene where Lauren Lakis gets dragged through a room is like a Jebadiah reunion. Jessy Danner, Danielle, and Lauren. Runs late. It's only five fuckin’ shots.

My wife is in the background cooking lasagna for the cast/crew in the shots. It’s not out of place, so I figured we’d just leave her there like she’s someone at the House.

We move to Lauren Lakis' suicide in the bathtub. Ziegler does the blood. We’ve got like 100 candles, and we have to make sure Lauren doesn’t get near one and, you know, catch on fire.

Looks good, runs long. Fuck. Dinner’s ready while we shoot, so we’re having people eat in shifts. The critical people don’t get a shift until we’re done the scene(me, Zig, Jared and Lauren are the criticals in this case).


This sucks, because I know how good my wife's lasagna is.

We keep falling behind, we push through. Supposed to end at 2am. We actually end at 7am but we DID make it(short of a couple of shots). We would have finished if the Red didn’t keep shutting down. Not sure why. Hopefully won’t be a problem tomorrow.

Even though we were behind, everyone wanted to take a shot at throwing the badge on the floor and having it land perfectly in front of the camera. No one could get it perfect, but we got close.

Lot of innuendo flying around.

Also of note, we had a featured extra role we had not cast. We simply could not find a girl who resembled Danielle(kind of waifish) and who looked younger than she is.

Well, a boyfriend/girlfriend came out tonight to be extras and the girl looked perfect. We pulled her aside--her name's Lauren-- and said, "Hey, you want an upgrade?"

It was a little dicey because the scene we needed her for later involved her wearing a very small bathing suit(we needed her to appear naked without actually BEING naked), and since we'd just met her we didn't want to come off like we wanted her to star in a porn.

She was all for it though. We took a pic of her for a prop we needed(the pic below), and made sure she could show up for the other scene where she's featured.

Then we still used her as a regular extra by having her kiss her boyfriend in the background so you couldn't see her face. A stroke of luck that night.

Lauren Russell plays Owen's daughter

The actual GOH diary, Day 3

Day 3 (11/9/2010): Will this Agony never end?

These are frame captures from the wide shots of night 3

Featuring  Leanna Chamish, Kimberly Kerr, Rodger Schultz, Robert Haag, Mitch Klein and Richard Cutting.  

------------------------------------------------

Okay, how do I say this? We fell behind again.


I’m not sure how it fuckin’ gets out of hand. Really, I don’t. We were set to shoot 4 scenes in the foyer. Sure, there’s a little complicated stuff but it’s less than three fuckin’ pages. Somehow it takes us like six hours to do that...


One hot, big busted extra showed up and lightened the spirits momentarily.


The fuckin’ Red doesn’t help. It keeps resetting itself. It’s bulky and heavy.


We move up to shoot the wine room and we’re already way behind. Fall more behind. I try to streamline, but it’s ugly and I’m guessing on shots(revising the shooting script while people are asking me questions, telling me how much time we have—this is not fun filmmaking), so I bet I missed some. I gotta hope I can digitally push in on some shots(I’ve been told you can do it on the Red quite easily, but we’ll see).


We got one shot I liked. Rest is pretty much dogshit, but we had some really nice looking extras/cast tonight. No nudity yet though.


To top it off we got out a little late, and the Cloisters staffers are starting to get annoyed(rightfully so)—and then I get out and one of the extras, a college buddy of mine, has a dead truck. We spend a half hour(at 6am) trying to make it go. No dice.


It almost comes to me driving them the 45 minutes home—luckily we get Noah to do it. I tell him to come in late the next day so he can get some sleep.


I got enough shit to do. I have to stop this derailing train, and fast...I think we’ve got 6 pickup scenes now in 3 days...

The actual GOH diary, Day 2

Hey, if you like reading raw, brutally-honest diaries then you might like the new "Bounty" blog I've begun recently! Check it out if you like reading about misery in filmmaking!

Day 2(11/8/10): If you thought Day One was bad...

At the Cloister’s Castle.


Knew it was gonna be a bad day when I couldn’t remember Jared(the D.P.’s) name when I opened my phone to call him. I mean, I’ve only worked with him on two films...but my brain ain’t firing.


Should have been pretty easy. Showed up early. There’s an extra there already who got called too early. Also a guy named Habib who’s coming out to help a couple of nights.


We set up—the rooms we were shooting in were right next to each other, so it should have been easy.


But we fell behind. Not massively, but by about an hour.


An internet bud and horror host Rob Dimension drives all the way up from New Jersey to be a featured extra, and brings a friend, which is cool. Getting extras can be a problem(and HAS in the past for me)...


Wrangling them is okay, but a couple of them leave after like two hours. So we don’t have many to choose from. Then we get a call mid-shoot that Lauren Lakis, the actress playing one of the roles in the next scenes, was in a car accident. Car totalled.


They say she’s fine and is willing to come out. Not sure whether that will be okay, but it works out. We shoot the stair sequence and then another sequence with her character and she's great.


We’re like 3 hours behind now though.


Quick break and we move to setup outside and everything goes BAD. The Red camera stops connecting to the hard drive. Jared can’t make it work. Calls the guy who owns it—he didn’t include the firmware update. We try to download it—we get it after like an hour, because they only have dial-up internet at the Castle.


We install it but it’s a different build than we already recorded, so we can’t record to that hard drive unless we erase what we shot. So we can only shoot on CF cards, of which we have 2 four gig cards—8 total minutes of film.


By this time it’s like 3:30am—we need to be out of there at 5am(per the Castle's rules). Luckily we can leave shit there. We try to shoot some outside stuff but we can’t tell focus that well and the Red keeps shutting off—it’s a disaster. We finally just call it at 4:45am after getting some dogshit.


Jared freaks. He’s yelling. Calls the douche who owns it and tries to find another Red.


I’m beat. Demoralized. Get home, back up some stills, back in bed by 7am.