Fangoria 2008 (0)

Posted on 28 April, 2008 in News Blurbs

Well, we have returned from the Fangoria Weekend of Horrors in Los Angeles. This was our second year exhibiting at the show and the first year it was held at the LA Convention center.

I’m having some mixed reviews about the whole experience. Luckily the positives outweigh the negatives, but the negatives were huge and psychologically damaging.

Let’s start with the negatives… Everything was looking cool heading up to the convention, we put in our order for a table early, picked a cool spot, and we thought everythign was cool. Four days before the show we get an email from Creation Entertainment, who run organize the show, that they had previously been mistaken on the type of seller permit we needed for the show - and that we had to get a new type of permit or we couldn’t sell anything. Four days before the show? Since when have you known any major city to just - poof - issue a permit of any kind. We were terrified that we had spent all this money to get ready for this convention and at the last minute we had to get a new permit. WTF? So, Kristen and I sprinted into action, handling the paperwork, faxing it in, calling the City of Los Angeles… it was a pretty fucking stressful situation around here for a few days before the show. On Thursday, Los Angeles finally issued our permit and we heard that there had been a large number of others sprinting to get their permits issued also.

The other cluster fuck about this show was in part due to Creation Entertainment and GES, the union that runs setting up the convention hall. Creation Entertainment issues each vendor two wristbands - but GES only issues you one table and one chair. Additional chairs are $97 per day, per chair. Again, WTF? On top of that, even though electricity was included in every other vendor event I have attended, they wanted another $105 to set up our electricity? Fuck them. We didn’t pay it.

On to the positive about the show… our Hotel was nice, just right up the block from the Convention Center. We had a nice large room that was close to the elevators - this was especially good because we gound just hop into the elevator, go down a few floors and get off at the restaraunt and bar area.

The show went well over all. I personally don’t think. besides all the hype, that there were alot of customers at the show. Now, this could have been because it was in a larger venue and much more spread out, but we had a booth in a good place and I didn’t see that much foot traffic. It will be interesting to see how many fans showed up and how many vendors bailed because of the screw up over the permits and fees.

We had the lovely Caroline Pierce at our booth for the entire weekend and even Dr. Phobia made a few appearances as well. It was pretty funny because this was a horror convention, yet there were a number of people who were absolutely terrified of Dr. Phobia.

When it was all over we had seen old fans and made some new ones. We had seen old friends and made some new ones and we had made some good networking connections in the horror community. If anything, this little convention lets us practice for Comic-Con which is a little less than 3 months away. Whoo Hoo!

Tags: Conventions

Redress - Script Update (0)

Posted on 29 March, 2008 in Redress

Wow - 2008 is flying by fast. On that note, the month of April is here! I wanted to start filming bits and pieces of Redress this month, however the script is not done yet. My writing partner Kreg and I have been diligently meeting and writing and the story is much more focused than it was a month ago. There is far more character development - in fact, I’m very sure the story could stand by itself even if we removed all of the horror elements. We’re getting close - not just close enough to film yet. The nice thing about being a small studio is that nobody breathes down our back - the bad thing is that budgets are small, so sometimes day jobs and errands get in the way of a good writing session

Once the cameras finally start rolling I plan to send out a press release and hopefully have a trailer ready in time for Comic-Con.

On other fronts, I have been busy designing our new company shirts and promo items for the Fangoria Weekend of Horrors in Los Angeles at the end of April. I think our table is in a great place this year, it’s on an end over by some of the bigger booths, so traffic should be kind to us - I hope…

Tags: Pre-production, Screenplay, Script, Writing

Locations and Bugs and Trailers - OH MY! (0)

Posted on 1 March, 2008 in Redress

While Kreg and I are busy wrapping up the script for Redress, I have been scouting locations in my free time and beginning to gather a number of the props that will be needed for the shoot. This film has a number of locations in it which will be a definite challenge when it comes to filming, but I know we need them. I have found a wicked looking park which you find a picture of in the teaser poster that is floating around and we have our psychologist office all lined up also.

In other news, we will be using a number of live animals in this film as well - not anything like lions, tiger and bears (Oh My!), but more like real maggots, worms and crows (Fuck Yeah). I don’t want to say too much about how we plan to use these little critters, as they refer to some ultra awesome twists in the plot, but I’ll give you a hint. As we all know, dead things are eaten by a variety of bugs, worms and other animals when they die. Maggots love to devour dead flesh and how many times have you seen a crow picking at some flattened animal on the side of the road? It’s not anything too major, other than the fact most people have told be they don’t want to be anywhere near me when I’m filming the scene with 10,000 maggots. Did I just say 10,000 maggots? Oh, no the corpse - errrr…. the cat is out of the bag now. Look out, I smell something terrible crawling this way.

As the Fangoria show rapidly approaches, I find myself getting ramped up for the event. I have been designing new stickers, we have a cool-new vending machine we will be using to give away DVDs and I have started creating the trailer for Redress. All I have is some music, text and b-roll stuff for now, but by the end of March I’ll have the full-blown thing.

Oh, I’ve got to go. My test video is done rendering

Tags: Location Scouting, Pre-production, Props

REDRESS is becoming a Feature Film! (0)

Posted on 10 February, 2008 in News Blurbs, Redress

It is finally official and now I want to start hyping the news: Redress is becoming a feature length film!

As I had more time to sit and think about the story I passed it around to a few people for review. One of my friends has some ideas to add and the project pretty much exploded from there. We are still hashing out the script at this moment, but since I had already done a lot of preproduction on the film in its short form, the project is on the launch pad waiting for its tanks to get filled. Most of the cast and crew are placed; we just have a few more roles to fill once the story if flushed out some more.

The goal for now is to start filming around Mid April. I will be releasing a press release later in the month. We will have a teaser ready for the Los Angeles Fangoria Week of Horrors in late April. We hill have the film wrapped by the time Comic-Con rolls around in July.

Stay Tuned… our website is going to get busy again

Tags: Development, Pre-production, Screenplay, Script, Writing

New Projects (0)

Posted on 4 February, 2008 in News Blurbs

Well, 2007 is long gone and we are now well into 2008. I have been busy putting the finishing touches on the screenplay for Bedbugs from Hell, reworking the screenplay for Redress and starting on some new projects.

Our biggest and most ambitous project is very top secret right now, but I have to mumble about it here at least. We are going to produce a weekly video podcast starting in April that has nothing to do with horror what-so-ever. The main focus of this podcast is comedy and satire. I’m not sure if the project will bear the “Steel Web Studios” logo or not.

In other worlds, I am also working on a screenplay with RAMCO Productions for a western tentatively entitled “Crackwood”. Most of this has been in development for a while now, but things are finally starting to get transferred to paper and hopefully to film.

Tags: Pre-production, Projects