The Mustachioed Blog Meets Its End

IMDB page coming along

webmaster — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 19:23:07 +0000

My submissions to it are tricking in as they are approved. See here: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1358997/

IMDB and the Peace Corps

webmaster — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 20:59:18 +0000

Bandit has been approved for an IMDB entry… so stay tuned! I’ll link to it when I’ve been notified that it’s up. Also, if things seem slow, it’s because my attention has mostly been diverted: see my Peace Corps Blog.

Work life creeps in…

webmaster — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 09:29:09 +0000

Here’s why I haven’t updated the site/blog recently. This is the project I’m doing at work and if you speak any of these languages you should help me out by participating:

Català Fes-te Sentir (festesentir.com)
Dansk Tag Ordet (tagordet.com)
Norsk Flerstemt (flerstemt.com)
Polski Kasa Mowa (kasamowa.com)
Português Europeu Falar Compensa (falarcompensa.com)
Suomi Puhu Meille (puhumeille.com)

Trailer Technology

webmaster — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 09:26:30 +0000

So the trailer is done, obviously, and posted prominently on the front page. It’s largely unchanged from a few weeks ago, except I tweaked the ending a bit (the clips that play over the music).

I knew that Flash was the way to go for embedding video on the site (I used to just link to WMV files back in the old days, but that was when it was before H264). For the curious, I simply downloaded the JW FLV Player and placed it in a folder on my site, and after that I encoded an H264 file using MeGUI (also had to install Nero stuff for audio) and for older versions of Flash I encoded a Sorenson Spark FLV using Sorenson Squeeze (not free, so I won’t link to it). After I made the files, I just used this wizard to generate the code, and I slapped it on the site. I checked Flash9 in Firefox and Flash7 in IE, so I’m set.

I mention all of this in the off chance that this would be useful to anyone looking to do the same thing. It wasn’t that bad. Of course, most people would just upload to Youtube, but I didn’t want to sign my life away to Google.

CineFile Video

webmaster — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 08:05:59 +0000

My favorite video rental shop is now stocking The Mustachioed Bandit! I saw it on the shelf yesterday when I went in to rent Fido.

This is of course more symbolic than actually significant— a few viewers might rent it eventually, but more than anything I’m excited that once it’s out of New Release, it may well sit on a shelf alongside so many of the obscure films that I was only able to see because Cinefile stocked them. From an Arabic-subbed bootleg of Face to Face to a bad VHS-to-DVD sub of The Big Gundown, the Western section at Cinefile is awesome, and I’m flattered to have my film even in the same store.

The trailer is stuck in limbo until I get my lazy self to finish it… I was in Portugal for 2 weeks (hello, Porto Film Fest application) and I’ve been sleeping far too much since my return.

I did cut together some footage for Caz’s reel since I’ve been back. Caz is of course “George” in the film, and he’s playing the lead in a play I’ll be attending next weekend: The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.

The Trailer (and other methods of coaxing people into watching the movie)

webmaster — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 11:29:44 +0000

I’m cutting a trailer, since if a picture is worth a thousand words, then a moving picture is worth at least 23970 words (per second to boot!), and it’s the best thing I could do for the web site, promotionally. I’m not sure how trailer houses tend to approach it, but what I’m doing is laying it all down by ear, editing the whole thing in Nuendo before I sync picture. I tried a while back starting in Avid, but I quickly get bogged down deciding how to start. The fact of the matter is that if I imagine it as a radio commercial, there’s really not much dialog I can string together that would make much sense in an ad, and that simplifies my choices. It’s interesting trying to convey major plot points without additional exposition or visuals. And I refuse to do my own voiceover. On one hand it’s a relief to note that, despite the complexity of the film’s plot, the words are all there and if you present them in the right order, it actually makes sense in the trailer. On the other hand, it’s a reminder of just how sparsely I wrote the thing, since major plot points are often only mentioned out loud once, and even then in passing. I remember doing this intentionally, since in real life people don’t announce their intentions every time they enter a room, but now that I think about it, maybe they should. If nothing else it would make it easier to cut autobiographical radio trailers.

I’m hoping to wrap this up tomorrow, and then I’ll have to figure out how best to put it on the site.

In other news, I’ve begun getting confirmation from cast, crew, and film fests that DVDs are arriving. I also dropped off some copies today at Cinefile– the local supercool DVD rental spot. I’ve picked up so many obscure westerns there that I would be flattered if they’ll stock mine.

Keoma Vs. Mind-Numbing Web Hosting

webmaster — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 09:10:37 +0000

For Christmas this year I used some Best Buy credit to buy Keoma on DVD (not in BB B&M stores, just online), and I finally got around to watching it. It’s a late-genre surreal eurowestern, and it was great to see it on a projector, having only seen it on my small TV before. This was one of the titles I watched just after we shot The Mustachioed Bandit, so it was too late to be influential, but I did catch “Django Kill, If You Live, Shoot!” in time, and it played no small part in influencing the more surreal tinges of the project. Anyhow, Keoma’s not for everyone, especially with the bizarre narrative score that gets reinvented later in the not-so-great “Mannaja, A Man Called Blade,” but Google it and if you’re not scared away, check it out.

Otherwise I’ve been setting up Gallery2 on banditwestern.com, trying to get it to not look so lame. It’s amazing to me how a program so popular can have such terrible defaults. Anyhow, it’s looking better, and it will probably take a few more days just to upload all the pics I have. This is reminding me what web design makes me so tired… it keeps me up until 6!

The hype machine

webmaster — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 14:06:39 +0000

I want to avoid, in general, turning the blog into a retrospective. The movie is done, and while there’s much to say about it, the blog format itself is more catered to what’s HAPPENING, and not what’s HAPPENED. This leads us to the hype machine. You see, an interesting thing is happening now that I can’t work on the movie any more. The only thing left to do is, well, to get people to WATCH it. This basically means having to create a lot of derivative content. Things like the web site, the blog, the (will I sink this low?) Myspace page. I have nothing against any of these, really, but the idea of having to create all of this to hype a project that is done is exhausting. Did I mention a trailer? A trailer.

There are a few avenues to pursue: film fests, plain ol’ business, guerrilla tactics, and web. I’m focusing on the first one for now, since film fests in general like to be “first,” and they especially seem to hate movies that are already on the Internet. This may be something I will eventually need help with, but for now it’ll just be me mailing the DVDs out. I did one round of submissions almost a year ago, before I leaped into DVD authoring and artwork designing hell, but that was the majors like Sundance, so there’s still a whole middle tier to attack.

I’m trying to find a balance between not giving up at the tail end of the process for the first film (and therefore doing myself an injustice) and being able to have a clean break to the next project.

A little late?

webmaster — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 12:31:05 +0000

How ridiculous is this blog’s title? Really, now.

Regardless, this will be my first experiment in weblogging in managed system, and it seemed like timing it with the DVD launch made sense. We’ll see how this goes…