Theatrical?! How'd that happen?

Three and a half years after premiering at the Austin Film Festival, Stomp! Shout! Scream! is in THEATERS now, April 10-17 2009. These theaters:

Nova Cinemas
Commerce, Georgia
Sun: 12:40, 3:00, 5:25, 7:40, 9:40
Mon-Thu: 5:25, 7:40, 9:40

Georgetown 14 Cinemas
Indianapolis, Indiana
1:10, 3:15, 5:20, 7:25, 9:30

Studio 10 Cinemas
Shelbyville, Indiana
1:10, 3:50, 7:00

Nova 10
Des Moines, Iowa
Sun-Mon: 1:15, 3:15, 5:15, 7:40
Tue-Thu: 5:15, 7:40

Nova 6 Theatres
Moline, Illinois
Sun: 12:45, 2:50, 5:00, 7:30, 9:30
Mon-Thu: 5:00, 7:30, 9:30

Theatres of Georgetown
Georgetown, Kentucky
Sun: 1:15, 3:15, 5:15, 7:15, 9:15
Mon-Thu: 5:15, 7:15, 9:15

Portsmouth Cinemas
Portsmouth, Ohio
1:35, 4:00, 7:20, 9:45

Branson Meadows Theatres
Branson, Missouri
Sun-Thu: 1:55, 4:30, 7:25

The Amp
Oxford, Mississippi
Sun: 1:35, 4:20, 7:25, 10:00
Mon-Thu: 4:20, 7:25, 10:00

So how did THAT happen? I am a glutton (or a fool or just OCD) for submitting my film to film festivals (112 submission, 37 screenings). One of them was the B-Movie Celebration in Franklin, IN. SSS showed there in August, 2007 where I met the organizer, Bill Dever. Bill has set up a distribution company, Monogram Releasing, and a franchise, B Movie Nation, to put movies in theaters. In January, 2009, he invited SSS to be part of the series. Other films are indie horror and 80's style gore flicks. most notibly Troma's Poltrygeist, directed by Lloyd Kaufman. SSS adds another flavor to the series-- shot on 35 mm, a throwback to the '60s rather than the '80s, and rather innocent comparatively. The deal Monogram offered was a good one (no money upfront, but a good % of gross ticket sales) and the cost of delivering SSS for theatrical was minimal. Minimal because this would be a digital theatrical run. I delivered SSS as a hi-def quicktime on a hard drive. The film would be distributed on blu-ray DVD and projected digitally. The initial theatrial run would be in two small theater chains, Nova Cinemas and Republic Theares. More theater chains would be added as success dictates.

With a this scale distribution (read: the tiniest of tiny) there would be no money for advertising or press agents. Generating a ticket-buying audience would have to be done on the internet and via word of mouth. With appologies to my facebook friends, I've been beating the drum of "SSS in theaters! April 10, 2009!!" for the last 3 weeks. Other tasks: updaing www.stompshoutcream.com; starting to twitter; creating a youtube channel; cut n pasting 5 years worth of my on-line 'journal' to this blog; sending out press-kits to every media outlet in the small towns in this theatrical run... There's more, but it's a blur. I was hoping to generate some PR interest and roll that into making a personal appearance in one of the markets (Louisville, KY was supposed to have 3 screens in the general area). Surely "Adult Swim Producer here to promote indie monster-beach-party flick" is a headline somewhere.

But... I got no bites, so I rounded up cast/crew/family/firends to gather at the 9:40 screening in Commerce, GA, about an hour north of Atlanta where I and most of the cast/crew/family/friends live.



I drove out to the Nova Cinemas for the 5:45 screening on Friday, where 2 patrons sat in the back of the small 85-seat theater. The projection was at the wrong aspect ratio (4:3 instead of 16:9, so everyone was streched tall and skinny). The folks at Nova were very kind and we figured out the propper settings on the projector in just a few minutes. I peaked my head into the 7:40 screening... dead empty. State-wide tornado warnings were serious enough that the few cast/crew/family/friends that were still up for coming had to abort the road trip. By the time 9:40 rolled around..I bought the only 4 tickets sold for me, Travis Young (Hector, the mechanic love-interest in the film) and our dates. We enjoyed the screening nonetheless, adding our own live commentary throughout.

On Saturday, I found out that a couple of the theaters originally scheduled to screen SSS were NOT screening it due to technical difficulties with their digital projection or conflicts with Monogram, including 2 of the 3 theaters around Louisville. I'm certainly glad I didn't make the trip up there. Bill also said that those theaters may still have a SSS run later and that other theater chains and indie theaters are interested in the film.

Making a 60's beach party monster movie does have an evergreen effect. It will never get dated. It's timeless. Like Citizen Kane. Or Night of the Lepus.

Scoring, Animated credits

As I mentioned in my last journal, these entries may be few and far between while Stomp! Shout! Scream! makes the last few steps toward the finish line of post production. I didn’t realize it’d be 6 weeks before I’d have anything to talk about.
The film’s score is almost done. Composer John Cerreta has done great work. We’ve met maybe 6 times and at least once a meeting, I giggle to the point of out-and-out laughter. Not because what he’s done is goofy, clown-ish music, but because it’s so perfect for what we’re aiming at.

The animated opening credit sequence is progressing well also. Designer Evan Miga at Racial Axis has done a great job story boarding the sequence. I saw the first rough movements of the animated band playing last week. Animator Todd Redner is using the original footage we shot for the scene as reference to wonderful effect. I can’t thank everyone at Radical enough for the added production value this will give the final film. It’s really going to look great.

Here’s the remaining schedule: another 2-3 weeks to finish the score, 4-5 weeks to complete the animation, Cinefilm Atlanta will re-transfer all the original 35mm film to Hi-Definition tape, the edit will be conformed on HD (more on this later), a day or two of HD tape-to-tape color correction at Cinefilm, and finally I’ll start to mix the sound. As I’ve said before, these last steps are the ones that really make this film so much more than the sum of it’s parts.

finishing the edit

Four months after finishing principle photography on Stomp! Shout! Scream!, I can see the light at the end of the post production tunnel. There’s a fine-tuned rough cut, completed and delivered to soundtrack composer John Ceretta, a long-time Atlanta musician who’s compositions for the Center for Puppetry Arts’ productions have won him tremendous accolades. John has about 6 weeks to deliver his music and at that point I’ll “lock the picture.” That is, I’ll stop messing with it and call it essentially done. Another exciting prospect in the works is having the opening titles animated at Radical Axis, the company that animates Adult Swim shows. Radical Axis principals Scott Fry and Craig Hartin have been great supporters of this project since the beginning and I’m trilled that we’ll be able to work together.

One major goal I had for the film was to be able to show it in theaters, but generally films with small budgets can’t afford to get a negative cut and strike prints. I'm still trying to work out the details, but it looks like I’ll be able to transfer my 35mm negative to High Definition video tape, enabling the final film to be seen big and beautiful. More and more film festivals and theaters are using HD video projectors to show low budget films, and television has developed a voracious appetite for anything HD. These are excellent prospects for getting Stomp! Shout! Scream! seen by as many people as possible.

The next 2 months will be spent putting the final polishes on the film and, like most of the film making process, it’s pretty tedious and not at all glamorous (and, therefore, these journals may not be as frequent). I hope to have a finished film in May, start submitting to film festivals in June, and premiering in the fall. That sure seems like a long ways away, but I’ve been working on this project since January 2003 and it’s no time to get impatient. The time and effort spent over the next few months is some of the most important in the production of this film. A film like this-- a beach party rock and roll monster movie-- has a built-in audience, but also a limited audience. By putting in that extra bit of energy into the fine-tuning of this film, by polishing this thing until it’s the best looking, best sounding beach party monster movie it can be, I can hopefully push Stomp! Shout! Scream! beyond it’s built-in limitations.

Day 10 Recap

DAY TEN (Friday, October 15)
Locations: Beach, Anna Maria Island, Florida

Nine days into our beach party rock and roll monster movie and finally we get a full day of beach shooting. In fact, the last two days of production are going to be shot right outside of our production office/beach house. That’s the beauty of exterior location shooting (beach, forest, desert), just turn the camera around and you have a whole “new” location. According to Reagan’s script supervisor reports, here’s what we have left to shoot: about thirty pages of script; 34 scenes, approximate 42 minutes of screen time; two more long, long days. The only encouraging thing is that the majority of the beach scenes are walk ‘n’ talk (a favorite of the no budget film, if you haven’t noticed by now), which require little or no coverage. I’ve planned for simple dolly tracking shots that follow along with our actors, no coverage, no cutaways. The actors just do the scene from start to finish one, two, maybe three times and we move on to the next set up. Hopefully the dialog will be interesting enough and the location visual enough that it won’t matter if it’s not the most dynamic in the world.

Biggest potential problem with beach shooting: sand in the equipment. Compounding factor: a stiff, constant wind blowing along the beach all day. The good work of our camera crew keeps anything from going wrong and we have no problems with scratched film or the camera breaking down.







We shoot one of my favorite setups of the whole film Friday afternoon. It’s scene #30, where the police officers and scientist John Patterson examine the mysterious debris for the first time. We set up a fairly square wide shot with the 4 actors standing in a line on the far side of the debris. As John pokes around in the debris, the camera dollies in toward the actors, settling along the side of the debris, ending in a medium profile of John with the policemen reacting right into the camera. When I first saw the film transfer of this scene, I exclaimed, “It’s a real movie! It looks just like a real movie!” The combination of talented actors, good costumes, a camera department that can execute a smooth dolly move (on the cheapest of dolly track in loose sand), a beautiful location and perfect weather makes for a breath-taking shot. Maybe for the average viewer, it just looks like any other movie, but for me, just getting to that ‘just like any other movie’ quality is quite an accomplishment.

Another fun sequence is the scene where Deputy Frank meets his demise at the hands of the Skunk Ape. Just one week before shooting, the actor cast for Frank had to leave the production. The character has just two scenes, but due to the nature of film scheduling, those scenes have to be shot Tuesday and Friday while we’re in Florida. That means a lot of sitting around for an actor that’s killed off on page 10 of the script. At Evan’s encouragement, I cast Assistant Director Alex Orr in the role after one brief phone conversation. [Alex went on to Direct the awesome film Blood Car a couple years after this.] For anyone who has been on a film set, you know how appropriate it is to have a death scene for the AD. His job is to be the bad guy, to yell at the cast and crew, to keep the entire production on schedule. While Alex is incredible at his job-- he’s kept the production moving without any conflicts or breakdowns-- it’s inevitable that he’s going to get on people’s nerves. For his death scene, the script calls for him to walk up to the debris, hear a noise, peer into the debris, drop his flashlight, and get pulled into the debris with a scream. For the last shot, I want a POV shot from inside the debris. Art Director Lisa Yeiser simply makes a wreath of seaweed and palm fronds to put in front of the camera which we set on the ground tilted up. Ned is nowhere to be found, so Lisa dons the gorilla gloves and crouches just out of frame. Alex leans in (cue creepy music)… the hairy hand slowly reaches up… he screams… and cut to the next scene. It’s too early in the film to reveal the Skunk Ape entirely, so keeping him mysterious will hopefully maintain some kind of tension. That is... until the audience sees the $99 gorilla costume. All in all, Friday is one of our best days shooting. We get all the shots we planned and nobody had to say up all night.

editing, Day 8 Recap

To update the post-production status, I’m about 70% through my first edit. I’m happy with it, but I’m trying to not judge the quality of things at this point. I’m just trying to get the scenes to cut together any way that works. It’s enjoyable-- lots of things make me laugh and exclaim, “I love this!”-- but I’m starting to feel the pressure of getting something done. My biggest concern right now is how am I going to get a film print that looks great and doesn’t cost more than the production itself. I was hoping the new Sony HDV format that comes out next month would be the Rosetta Stone of my post process. The deck is reasonably inexpensive and I thought I could cut the negative, do a color-correction film transfer to the Sony HDV, finish titles & credits myself in Final Cut, then strike a film print from the HDV master. Turns out the Sony HDV format isn’t going to work-- not enough resolution, not the right input/output capabilities, just not right.

I can still go this route, I just need to find film transfer & color correction to a real High Definition format. And find someone who can insert my titles and credits to that HD master. All this will be very expensive, but having a 35mm film print and an HD master opens up a lot of doors that a simple, standard-definition video finish does not.

This is all too much big picture stuff to worry about right now. I need to finish the editing of the film first, see how good it is and go from there.

Here’s another daily recap from the shoot.
DAY EIGHT (Wednesday, October 13)
Locations: Sarasota Jungle Gardens, Sarasota, Florida; Coquina Beach, Bradenton, Florida; Beach House Motel, St. Petersburg, Florida

This is the start of the longest two days of the entire shoot. Crew Call for me, Evan (DP), Bill (Camera Operator), Arma (producer), Claire and Travis is 9:00 AM for the drive to Sarasota Jungle Gardens. We’re shooting scenes of Theodora and Hector frolicking for the ‘love montage’.


Sarasota Jungle Gardens is an old-school Florida attraction, straight out of the ‘60s with talking bird shows, Tiki statues everywhere and flamingos that eat out of your hand. The location and the weather are perfect, absolutely gorgeous . They even let us use their golf cart to lug our camera & tripod around. We get 4 or 5 shots and head to Coquina Beach to meet the full crew for lunch and pickup one scene with the Ford Fairlane that we missed the day before. We shoot two takes of dialog and a couple of drive-bys, then pack up about 2:00 pm to start the one hour drive to St. Pete to shoot our motel interiors.

Unfortunately, our cube truck (with all our props and film) couldn’t follow the production directions because of weight or height or something and got lost, then got stuck in Tampa rush-hour traffic. The whole crew is on location, ready to shoot, and we don’t have any film. Everyone wanders up to the ‘Dairy Barn’ to get ice cream and sits around. I work on shots lists for the next couple of days. It’s quite frustrating, but not a bad break for a crew that’s been running pretty hard for a couple of days. After a 3 & 1/2 hour wait, we get our first shot at the motel at 7:07 pm. We shoot our interior daytime scenes first, using lights to cheat the Florida sunshine. Most of the scenes are dialog heavy with a little blocking to keep things interesting. We have two night exteriors that we save to the end of the day. I have to cut two scenes and we wrap at 2:45 AM. Nobody gets back to their rooms until after 4:00 AM.



Just to make things interesting, Gaffer John Swindall, who is driving me, Evan and Bill home, gets pulled over for speeding 50 yards from our beach house. Amazingly, the local police office lets him go without a ticket and offers to be an extra in the movie. I pass out the instant I make it to my room. That’s a good thing because we have another 9:00 AM call on Thursday to shoot Mary Kraft’s last scene before she has to drive back to Atlanta (see journal # 8). I guess if you don’t have at least one 20 hour day on your no-budget indie feature, you’re just not doing it right.

Day 6 Recap

DAY SIX (Sunday, October 10)
Location: Stockbridge Citgo / the garage

This is our last day of shooting in Atlanta before we relocate the cast and crew to Bradenton, Florida. Scenes for today include the band’s practice at the garage, scientist John Patterson’s emotional moment when he and the Skunk Ape lock eyes, and several pickups from the previous 2 days at the garage.
One scene we’ll do today is where Sheriff Brag and Deputy Bob spot the Skunk Ape leaving the garage and chase him from the garage. There’s a couple of lines of dialog right before they spot him. It’s Bob filling time with his opinions on luncheon meat, “I don’t like baloney. Now fried baloney…that’s OK. Hey, that looks like a Skunk Ape.” The combination of the dialog (overhead verbatim at a Taco Bell some 10 years ago) and actor Chris Hines' perfectly deadpan delivery makes it one of my favorite moments in the movie.

The most involved shot is where we have to kill one of the leading characters.




The script calls for the Skunk Ape to pick him up over his head and ‘break him in half’. I wrote that, but I have no earthly idea how we’re going to sell it. While Skunk Ape actor Ned Hastings is ‘the largest mammal I know’ (his words), he still can’t pickup a full grown man and military press him over his head. After much debate, we put the camera on the ground, tilted almost straight up at the back of Ned’s shoulder while he sits on an apple box. He grips the actor around the collar while burly key grip John Stephens hunch over just out of frame with black fabric draped over him. Our to-be-killed actor lays across John’s back and all Ned has to do is movie his arm up on cue. John will do the heavy lifting with his back and legs. It’s into the twelfth hour on set for the cast and crew, but everyone is gathered around to watch. We do 3 takes and get what we need. I call for two more because we’re having too much fun.

Here’s some statistics from the script supervisor’s reports after half of our shooting schedule: 321 slates, 160 setups, 38 completed scenes (of 102), almost 40 pages (of 96) completed, and roughly 33 minutes, 19 seconds of monster movie in the can (of an estimated 95:30).

Data provided by extraordinary script supervisor Reagan Brandon. I’ve had to omit only one scene from our schedule, which is covered in another scene with a quick line of dialog. While we have the majority of our work ahead of us, we’ve had an enormously successful first week of shooting.

Day 5 recap

Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll be editing the film as much as I can, so instead of detailing that, I’ll be catching up on the daily recaps.

DAY FIVE (Saturday, October 9)
Location: Stockbridge Citgo / the garage
Today is the day we shoot all of our dialog scenes at the garage. I have shot lists for each scene, but on location those often get drastically changed. Looking at the script for a particular scene, I plan for an establishing wide shot, close ups for certain lines and dolly moves to get the characters from one side of the garage to the other, etc. When we get to the garage and start blocking with actors, we invariable start running up against limited amounts of film and time. What I usually end up with is an establishing shot that dollies into a 2 shot for dialog and maybe a cutaway or reverse angle. Maybe. The fewer shots, the fewer setups, the faster we can move. For the really long dialog scenes, we dolly along with the actors in the classic walk ‘n’ talk, then have them stop walking when we run out of track. It’s these times where I have to find the critical elements of a scene and accent those and drop everything else. And I won’t know how successful I was until the whole film is put together. All an indie director can do is get the best crew and the best actors they can find and hope it works, hope that they made the right compromises.




The most complicated scene for the day is where Theodora meets Hector. Actor Travis Young was cast as Hector exactly one week ago, but I’m not worried about the actor’s performances. They’ve worked together before and they rehearse on-set incessantly up to the time we shoot. In this scene, Hector is toying with Theodora, only doling out information bit by bit to extend their interaction. She eventually get pissed and is about to storm out, when he starts singing one of her songs, the theme song of the movie. He just keeps singing, rather poorly, and smiling at her until she is charmed. Travis and Claire’s performance is great. I can really feel Theodora’s frustration and Travis has great eyes that really can charm anyone. We start the scene with Hector under the hood of the band’s station wagon. He doesn't come out until several lines into their dialog and crosses the garage. The camera and Theodora follow him and we end with an over-the-shoulder (OTS) shot looking at Hector. Theodora gets angry and turns to exit, right toward the camera, and stops in a close-up (CU). We’ve just covered 90% of the scene in one shot/one setup: the establishing WS, dolly to the OTS, and Claire walks into a CU for her emotional reaction. Our coverage is a Hector CU from the same camera position as the OTS and the reverse angle over Hector’s shoulder of Theodora’s dialog. The biggest hurdle is that the weather had changed and the reverse angle looking at Claire has dark, cloudy skies in the background. The grips put up a big silk on a metal frame to tone down the clouds and I hope we can color correct it to match the rest of the scenes later. We get all of our angles and move on to the next scene, next set up.



One of those setups includes Ned Hastings (out of his Skunk Ape costume) and Dana Snyder (voice of Master Shake on Aqua Teen Hunger Force) as two customers driving a classic car in the establishing shot of the Garage. I think Dana’s only line is “Thanks, we wouldn’t miss the party.” Being the consummate profession, he and I discusses at length his character’s back story and motivation, but the fact that everything that comes out of his mouth makes me laugh, I’m not too worried about it.

Post Production starts, Nov. 7, 2004

Sometimes I am a do-it-yourself-er and sometimes I’m not. If it’s household repairs that requite a big chunk of my time and effort… not so much. I’d rather get a professional to do it right and just write the check. When it comes to editing however, I’m a firm believer in “if you want it done right, do it yourself.” So, I spent just about every waking minute last Halloween weekend at the office loading my film transfer tapes and audio tapes into Final Cut Pro.

Now’s a good time to go completely dorky on technical specs on editing Stomp! Shout! Scream! We shot short end 35mm film (Kodak 5245, 52…I don’t really know), which was developed and transferred to recycled Digibeta tape by Cinefilm, Atlanta (a perk of working for Turner Broadcasting is you can easily find slightly used tape stock waiting to be dumped). Of course, the ultimate objective is to have a film print that can be shown in theaters, but that requires a negative cut or a digital intermediate--- both very expensive propositions. I’m going to start the editing process with that plan in mind, but I can always switch to a video finish using the film transfers I already have. The determining factor there being… money.

Cinefilm provided me with Flex files, which are databases that track the film’s edge numbers and their relationship to the timecode on the film transfer tapes. I’ve never used Cinema Tools (Apple’s film database software), so I spent the last two weeks reading the help file and everything I can find on-line about this process. First, I imported the flex files into Cinema Tools and then exported a batch digitize list for Final Cut Pro. The batch capture worked perfectly, all my clips loaded in a scant 10-hour Saturday. At Cartoon Network, we use the Black Magic Decklink Pro video cards which can digitize 29.97 frames-per-second NTSC video into 23.98 fps QT movies, eliminating the need to use Cinema Tools’ reverse telecine function. I loaded the film with the Black Magic’s 10-bit uncompressed codec, but I’ll be editing on a DV–based Final Cut Pro system in my basement, so I used Final Cut’s media manager to export all my footage into DV. Cinema Tools reconnected all the digitized clips to the database, so I think I’m ready to start cutting and the computer will keep track of the timecode/edge numbers in the background.


And then there’s the footage itself. Thanks to the expertise and very hard work of cinematographer Evan Lieberman, Gaffer John Swindall and all the rest of the crew, the film looks absolutely BEAUTIFUL. It was always our intention to make a fun, beach party, b-movie, horror film, but do it with an acute attention to craft-- believable characters, a good story, professional actors working with real emotions and a professional film crew making beautiful pictures. From the very start, Evan and I wanted to make the film like those '60s Frankie & Annette Beach Party movies. From the look of the film transfers, we’ve definitely succeed in the crafting of beautiful images.

Now preparing audio for edit is a whole other process. Sound mixer Aaron Siegel and boom operators Zeke and Thomas did excellent work in less than optimal conditions. Extra special thanks goes to Mike Filosa and Adam Jones who supplied the extensive audio equipment. Aaron delivered time-coded DAT tapes which sound excellent. We tried to use a smart slate (an electronic version of the traditional film clapper with rolling timecode numbers), but it was a less than perfect model and we ended up using the ‘old-fashion’ slate methods most of the time. Often during shooting, just trying to reset the camera frame and focus to actually read the timecode numbers on the slate was too difficult for our sprinter’s pace of film making. All totaled, I have about 8 hours of film transfer and about 9 hours of audio. Next I sit in front of my computer and sync the two together. I don’t know how long that’s going to take. Traditionally, syncing is considered film maker’s drudgery, but I plan to relish every minute. I am working on a beach party rock and roll monster movie of my own creation.

I’ve heard film makers say that making a bad movie is just as hard as making a good one and it’s impossible to know if your film is good or bad while your in the middle of it. I can certainly understand that statement now more than ever. I’m just going to keep plowing through until it’s done, doing everything I can to make it the best I can.

Here’s another recap of the shoot:
DAY THREE (Wednesday, October 6)
Location: Fabric Warehouse / The Doctor’s Office

Special thanks goes to Matt Hyman, assistant to Art Director Lisa Yeiser, who found and secured our Doctor’s office and the police station interior locations—some spare offices at a fabric manufacturer’s warehouse. These are two of the four interiors for the entire production and the art ‘department’ (Lisa, Matt, and Scott Dupree) did wonderful work. For the Doctor’s office scenes, we took an empty, white-wall business office and dressed it up to be our exam room. Lisa dug up fantastic set dressing, but some of the props came from an old doctor’s house call bag my mom found at an antique store several years ago. We used an existing waiting room to be the doctor’s business office, which was very nicely dressed to begin with (as in, it hadn’t changed a bit since the early '60s). Running a little behind schedule while shooting our exam room scenes, we decided to switch the set dressing, rather than flip all the lights to the other side of the room. In theory, we just had to turn the exam table around, flip our characters positions and put new props behind them. But when you’re dealing with camera placement, character eye-lines and crossing the 180-degree line… everything gets complicated. I think we did everything right, but I won’t really know until I start cutting those shots right next to each other. It’s another example of just trusting the crew to do the right thing.