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 11 Recap

DAY ELEVEN (Saturday, October 16)
Locations: Beach, Anna Maria Island, Florida

Our final day of shooting and we have something like 14 pages of script to cover. The long days and nights are starting to wear on the crew. That first day of summer camp attitude is long gone and folks are generally all business. Mostly the attitude is let’s just get this done. Maybe that’s just me, but I’m as ready to wrap this up as anybody. A person can be in charge of everything for only so long.

On set today is my grandmother, Theodora Viola, namesake of the lead character and the fictional band in the movie.

She made a hat out of plastic vines especially for her visit to the set, so she could hide from the Skunk Ape. “Nana” to me, she has invested in the film and has been my greatest supporter in the world. I sent her a script and a picture of the actors we’d cast and she read the script over and over with the pictures of the actors. She was thrilled to meet the cast and everyone on set was immediately charmed by her. There’s a short scene in the film where Deputy Bob has to clear some old folks from the beach, which was the perfect spot for Nana’s cameo appearance. For her scene, she’s sitting in a beach chair with a transistor radio up to her ear and yelling, “What?! What?!” while Bob repeats his lines about the beach being closed. She’s really great in her role and it turns into one of my favorite moments in the film. Later she says that this was the best day of her life.






Early in pre-production, one flaw in the script was brought to my attention. My beach party rock and roll monster movie has no actual beach party in it-- the climatic party takes place at Hector’s garage. All those Frankie and Annette beach party movies were supposedly full of innocent fun, but they still had plenty of scantily clad girls dancing on the beach. It wasn’t appropriate to ask our lead actresses to don bikini and we needed to increase the “jiggle factor’ for potential marketing’s sake. The solution that Evan and I came up with was to change the scene where Bob tries to clear retirees off the beach-- add dancing bikini girls instead of old folks. It wasn’t until noon on our last day of shooting that we actually got our dancing beach girls. They are the baby-sitting friend’s of friend’s of my mom. We had to remove the belly rings and cover up a tattoo or two, but otherwise they were perfect, complete with period bikinis. We shot the dancing scene and got loads of promo pics with them and Ned Hastings in the Skunk Ape outfit. Not surprisingly, this scene also created our largest crowd of on-lookers. In the end, we shot the Deputy Bob scene with both Nana and dancing girls. Both will be in the final film.

Day 9 Recap

DAY NINE (Thursday, October 14)
Locations: Beach, Anna Maria Island, Florida; ‘Spanish Fort’, Egmont Key State park, Florida

After getting to bed about 4:00 AM the night before, Thursday starts at a hazy and blurry 9:00 AM to shoot one quick scene of Carol (Mary Kraft) and Jody (Cynthia Evans) discovering a Skunk Ape victim in the surf. It’s a minimalist crew call-- me, Evan as DP, Bill Burton operating the camera, Art Department-ers Lisa and Scott creating the dead body, and the sounds guys-- all of us working on no sleep.


We don’t have an Assistant Director or Assistant Camera, so we forget to grab the slate. I stand in front of the actresses and clap my hands at the start of each take, hoping I can sync this later. Our deadline is 11:00 AM since Mary has to be back in Atlanta by 7:30 PM to be on stage at Dad’s Garage Theater. Our goal is three shots: the actresses walk ‘n’ talk down the beach and we pan with ‘em and let them exit frame; the actresses then walk into a medium shot and react to the bloody, mangled body; and lastly the dead body cutaway. We get two takes of the walk ‘n’ talk and three of the MS with reactions and Mary is gone (see journal 8 for the rest of that adventure). The reaction shot is priceless, the classic shock and shuttering of seeing something horrific, one of those things that makes me giggle despite myself. Our Production Assistant Juston Rindlesbach grabs some quick shots of Cynthia and Mary on the beach rehearsing their reactions and they are the best production still of the shoot. Thank you Juston for these and all the great stills in this journal.

The majority of the rest of our day is spent traveling to and from our most beautiful location, The Battery at Egmont Key State park, an island out in the middle of Tampa Bay.




To get there we have to drive to St. Pete, then catch a chartered boat-- over 2 hours travel time each way. Like the rest of our week, we have perfect weather and shoot some beautiful, dramatic film. Arma buys water shoes for the crew since we have to pull the big pontoon boat onto the shore to get to the battery. The local ranger generously lets us use his 4-wheeler to cart our production gear. We have a hard out of 11:00 PM, so we hustle through our shots list, but get everything we planned to shoot and load up the boat. Since we couldn’t bring a catering spread out to Egmont Key, we treat the crew to the only open restaurant we can find at 1:30 AM, Waffle House.

End of first week of shooting, 10/10/04

At the end of our first week of shooting, I can say, with out a doubt, this is the hardest thing I've ever done. I've been editing for 15 years and I do things a certain way. I get all my source materials right in front of me, figure out what the limits are to whatever I'm doing, and start making decisions based on all the parameters. Directing an indie feature film gives you plenty of limiting factors, but you also have endless options at the same time. I'm essentially trying to edit the film in my head, on set, on the fly. After a couple of hours of this, my brain in mush. Luckily I have people like Evan Lieberman, the D.P., Alex Orr, the Assistant Director, and Reagan Brandon, script supervisor, to help me out. They, along with a very talented, very hard working crew, are helping make a real feature film. We have shot almost every shot we've planned to shoot, which by all accounts is remarkable for an indie film, or any film. I have plenty of stories, but it's very late and I'm very tired. Here's pictures from our first week.

pre-production 9/12/04

September 12, 2004
In two weeks, I will be on a feature film set, directing real actors, calling the shots to a real 35mm film crew, and making it all up as I go along. I’ve really never been on a film set. I’m an editor who has made a couple of shorts, been to several film festivals, but really, honestly, I’m more comfortable in a dark room with zeros and ones than out in the bright sunlight with grips, gaffers, best boys, AD’s or PA’s. Actual production has always been a necessary evil to get to post production for me. Maybe that’s how I ended up working in animation where it’s all post production (I edit and produce Aqua Teen Hunger Force for Adult Swim in my day job). I’m as ready as I’ll ever be to leap into my first feature film. Here’s how I got exactly here.

In the fall of 2002, I had my first good idea for Stomp! Shout! Scream!. I’d been watching every ‘60s beach party movie I could find, along with trying (unsuccessfully) to start my own garage rock band (we learned "Louie Louie" and played it over and over). In every one of those movies, Annette would get angry at Frankie and walk the beach singing a lonesome lament. My friends in the Atlanta all-girl rock band Catfight! had written a song several years ago about a girl who has a summer romance that leaves her with more than a broken heart. The song was the perfect marriage of 1960s nostalgia and twisted humor. Place that song into a beach party movie and not only did I have a terrific movie moment-- the kind that makes you giggle and snort with the joy of film making-- I also had a great back story for my main character. In January 2003, I started writing early Saturday mornings, fueled by gallons of black tea.

Certain ideas started to come together: Set the film in 1966 and have it revolve around an all-girl garage rock band. Try to get Catfight! to write the songs for the band in the film to perform. Make it a monster movie because 1) that’s what I know and B) the plot and humor of the actual beach party movies are downright awful. Use the legend of the Florida Skunk Ape (the Everglades' version of Bigfoot). Add a scientist, a Latino mechanic love interest and an insecure Sheriff. After 4 months, I had 60 pages. After 9 months and lots of advice from film making and script writing friends, I had close to 90 pages.

I contacted Arma Benoit, a friend who produces commercials and music videos and who had been involved with the making of my monster movie short films, The Monster Trilogy. She committed to the project in the first minute of our phone call. After she read my script, she admitted that she would do the project based on our friendship regardless of the quality of the script. Turns out, she loved the script and said that we could really have something great on our hands. She said the if I can raise $100,000, we could shoot this on film with a professional cast and crew. Arma’s enthusiasm provided a great boost of confidence that was waning after almost a year of work on the script.

I immediately started researching the financing and marketing of indie genre films. I read all I could about creating a business plan and finding investors. Eventually, the plan was to find 20 people who would invest $5,000 each. At Thanksgiving of 2003 with a 30-page business plan in hand, I pitched my immediate and extended family. I received lots of encouragement, but no actual checks. In February of 2004, I had my first investor meeting with friends of my parents and got my first financial commitment for $5,000. My mom, dad and grandmother soon followed with investment commitments. Over the next 6 months, I solicited advice from anyone that would listen, while working overtime on every project available at Cartoon Network, saving as much of my own money as I could for the film. By August, I miraculously had my entire budget in place. Stomp! Shout! Scream! would be produced this fall.

Jennifer Leavey, Catfight!’s singer and songwriter, was also very enthusiastic about the script and being a part of the film. In March 2004, Jennifer, Katy Graves, and Susanne Gibboney recorded 4 amazing garage rock anthems for fictional band ‘The Violas’ to perform in the movie. Rob Gal, at his Snack ‘n’ Shack Studios, added his recording expertise and Farfisa organ playing to the proceedings.

Arma introduced me to Evan Lieberman, indie film director, cinematographer, PhD of Film Studies and lecturer at Emory University. We immediately clicked and a partnership formed from a love of B-movies, garage rock, and a dedication to well-crafted independent films. Evan lead me to Amy Barratt, a film maker who has worked with virtually every theater group in Atlanta. Amy joined our production team as Casting Director and lead us to the casting of an amazing group of local talent. The actresses who have been cast as the band are currently learning their instruments and the Catfight! songs. There was a considerable amount of debate over weather we should start casting before we had our financing in place. The chicken-and-egg question was: Can you get investments without a cast in place or can you get a cast of sought-after theater actors to commit without financing (or a shooting schedule) in place. We chose to cast first and willed ourselves into production no matter what finances I came up with. So far, so good.

Arma, Evan and I just returned from a weekend in Bradenton & St. Petersburg, Florida finding beaches, motels and an old fort to use as locations. More locations around Atlanta are being scouted. Costumes, props, and someone to make our Skunk Ape costume are in the works. Principal Photography starts October 4. I'll keep posting these reports as we go through production and post.