So it's the end of November and still no movie. This is the result of three things:

1.) I have had a crushingly busy month at my day job and have not had time to organize the final color correction and extras shoot

2.) The final sound mix that has a crucial boost to the intelligibility of the lyrics has been delayed due to budget among other things

3.) A version with mediocre color correction and a stereo sound mix has been sent to over 20 film festivals

Now, I could release an online private link to donors and friends that has the current sound mix and a few funky color issues. The "festival screener" version, if you will. But I want the first time you see it to be the best it can be.

Rest assured, the Doctor is coming, maybe just in time for Christmas.

Got a quick shout for the "Doctor Glamour" trailer on Director's Notes. I hope to sit down and do an interview with them once the film's out (and if they like it!)Check it out here:http://www.directorsnotes.com/2011/10/04/doctor-glamour-trailer/

A genius scientist contacts another dimension to save the woman he loves, summoning a flamboyant rock & roll superhero.

Coming 2012
Find out more at:
DoctorGlamour.com

Alright, it took me a year to start talking about the next project after "Frank DanCoolo" was finished. This time I'm going to start yammering about my next project a month or two before the "Doctor Glamour" is completed.

Really the catalyst for this was seeing the work Dillon Markey was doing at his stop motion workshop last night. He was working on a dragon puppet. I gotta have me one of those in a project.

So what I hope is next is an action/comedy/high fantasy/space pirate webseries. It needs funding and may never happen if a few key elements don't come together.

It's called

BUCCANEER GALAXY

Across the seven celestial spheres there is no mage more feared, no wizard more reviled, than the ruthless necromancer Lycra Bloodstone! ...Or at least that's how she'd like to be known. Instead, despite her best efforts, Lycra constantly finds herself the subject of good publicity. Killing planets, pirating trade ships, eating pets; nothing works! There are always unintentional positive consequences to her actions.

But now, with news of a scared object unearthed in the farthest reaches of space, she sees her chance to at last gain the notoriety she craves as well as power over life and death itself!Set in a swashbuckling universe of squid ships, cannon balls and powerful sorcery, "Buccaneer Galaxy" will deliver incredible action, insane personalities and a unique blend of old school visual effects.

I hope to have a final draft of the scripts by year's end. It's pretty exciting to work on. I'll be posting updates here on the development and some insight into the influences I'll be drawing upon in the coming weeks.

"Doctor Glamour" has the very best visual effects our modest budget could produce, but they function in a way that's out of step with my original passions. I wanted the organic shapes and wood platforms of the astral sea to be miniatures, composited into a fish tank generated sky.

Budget stopped us from going this direction, so we came up with a very good digital approximation. Unfortunately, I think by going all digital the audience may feel expected to just accept what they are seeing at face value, rather than engaging the movie as artifice.

Movie goers have seen enough computer generated environments to just assume they are to think of the CGI as a real space, rather than, in my case, a purposefully expressionistic representation of a 2-D aesthetic. I ran into this problem with "DanCoolo." The effects were too good and the point too subtle. Even those who did get it had to wait until stop-motion creatures showed up for the idea to take hold.

Granted, the astral sea elements of "Glamour" are so much more aggressive that I think they have a good chance of demanding regard as fantastic artificial confection, rather than a paltry low budget attempt at "Avatar" style "world building." (The phrase used by those who I suppose find "production design" a threat to their passive experience.)

So now, as I'm starting to figure out what's next, the words of "House" director Nobuhiko Obayashi are beginning to be a guiding principle:

"It is more fun when a magician fails."



The ideas, the energy, the FUN of special effects that have finger prints, life and human craftwork on display are something I want to incorporate into my next venture. To reject the desire to be transported to another world and instead have a grand time watching a movie.

For my next project I want effects closer to this:



You can feel the objects in space, the hand of the people that made the images. One reason I like this is that the manipulation of these models and miniatures forces a state of mind similar to that of child playing with toys, smashing his or her wind-up Sphinx into a Hulk action figure.

Though potent in its own way, no visual effect that convinces you something is ACTUALLY happening can possibly carry this particular power. The power to remind you of your own mind's capacity for pure creation, imagination and fantasy.

Before I crank out the first draft of a script, I like to know what lives the characters have lead up until the events of the movie. To do this I type up a character bio that touches on key experiences or background that would form the kind of person the character is supposed to be. These are rough things, meant for personal use, but this time around I decided to share with the actors, so they are a LITTLE more coherent.

Basically they all set up the idea that the universe these people inhabit is some weird space between Lovecraft Country, Jules Verne and Marvel Comics. I threw a lot of touch stone Lovecraft lore, real historical figures and mystic mumbo jumbo into these. They are rather lame attempts to justify an aesthetic experiment that is more about form than narrative fidelity. Still fun to write though!

Gammar police may want to skip these.

Below are the mini-bios I typed up before writing "Doctor Glamour."

Walter Gilman



 Doctor Glamour


The place is Prague, 1840, and an orphaned infant of Bohemia's teeming serf population is left of the doorstep of the ailing Bernard Bolzano. Attached to the babe's basket is a note, containing the odd symbols and incantations of the superstitious underclass. Bolzano knows the words, it's the language of the faerie, a plea to the fae folk for a protective glamour. A world renowned scientist and philosopher, Bolzano is only too aware of the class strife bubbling on the streets of his beloved city. He takes the child in. Thus begins the journey of Jaroslave Gregori Glamour.

Intensely educated from birth by Bolzano, Glamour showed great promise in his first few school years, but his tutelage was cut short by the revolutions of 1848. As chaos enveloped the capital city and the King of Bohemia send his clockwork soldiers to quell the rebellion, Bolzano and the ruling elite became targets for the rioting mob of serfs that swept the streets. In a desperate attempt to save his family, Bolzano carved a swath through the rabble with his lightening gun and managed to reach a caravan headed for Russia. With a liberal bribe, passage was secured for the young Glamour, but his mentor was left behind to be consumed by the mob's flames.

The caravan drove north through Russian territory, until reaching the cold outskirts of Siberia. Here the caravan master introduced Glamour to his family, part of the Saami tribe. With Glamour's scientific and medical foundation in place, and being the only one able to further study the textbooks in his possession,  the tribe found a niche for him as a medicine man. To Glamour's surprise, this was not the only component of his duties. The great old shaman of the tribe was impressed by the boy's manipulations of the material world and decided to make Glamour his apprentice. Vistas of thought were opened for Glamour. Astral projections, bizarre incantations and whisperers of beings old and terrible filled his days leading up to manhood.

On Glamour's 18th birthday, the elders of the tribe met. Industry and the modern world had finally reached their doorstep. A representative from Saint Petersburg arrived in the village to inform them of a factory being built a few miles south. Realizing the need for a link to this modern world, it was decided by the elders that Glamour should go into civilization to learn its ways. With a heavy heart, and a twinge of excitement, Glamour headed out for the Saint Petersburg Technology Institute.

Once enrolled, Glamour caught the eye of the young professor Dimitri Mendeleev. Blown away by Glamour's grasp of theoretical science of quantum synthesis, Mendeleev, barely Glamour's senior, invited him to join various scientific societies within the Russian Aristocracy. But what started off as a productive scientific partnership grew into something more between them and behind the stuffy closed doors of the university, love blossomed.

Their secret relationship did little to distract the two brilliant minds from focusing on research. In 1862, they made a breakthrough that would change dimensional studies forever. By merging quantum theory with Glamour's extensive knowledge of shamanic rituals, the pair successfully opened a physical portal to the collective unconscious. Exhilarated by the success, Glamour insisted that the experiment be replicated for the public. Mendeleev was hesitant, as the small scale of the portal would leave many doubting as to what was on the other side. A compromise was reached and a portal large enough for a man to walk through was created for the press on Oct 15, 1862. In front of the assembly Mendeleev walked in. The portal closed behind him.

Unable to reproduce the experiment without his missing lover's expertise, Glamour was awash in grief. Years were spent in isolation, trying to undo that fateful day through scientific means. Eventually, Glamour accepted Mendeleev death, and left the university back for his tribe. Despondent, he told the shaman of his journey in civilization. With a firm hand on the shoulder of a broken Glamour, the shaman quietly informed him that there was another way. An old way. A forbidden way. Unsheathing the tribe's black, gnarled copy of the Necronomicon, Glamour read over a ritual that would launch him into the astral sea, never to return by his own means. It was there that Glamour vowed that what happened to Mendeleev would never happen to another living soul and as he entered the swirling portal and looked upon the earth for what might of been the last last time, he knew he had a last found his calling, he had become the defender of dreams, rescuer of the lost, DOCTOR GLAMOUR.

I've been encouraged to write publicly about my attitudes towards various schools of critical thought regarding film and entertainment. However, I feel this is counter productive. To define oneself by what one is against or what one wishes to see in others work is to invite and incite conflict, or worse, dismissal.

This has driven my interest away from writing critical evaluations of others work and instead steered it towards pondering, explaining and sharing the critical criteria with which I evaluate my own work.
This, I feel, will do far more to explain my particular attitudes towards the works of others and invite discussion that can truly benefit my future efforts.

It is obvious to me that all people who seek to create must privately have their own method of self evaluation. Whether this is merely a single work or artist that the creative person aspires to, or political, philosophical and sociological concerns. I ascribe to auteur theory. I believe the essential building blocks of my worldview and personality will manifest within my work whether I think about them or not.

It is my choice, then, to actively consider them at all times. This choice forms the basis of my approach to critiquing my own work.

This impulse comes from two places. The first and most important is my knowledge that, as a human being, I rarely live up to my ideals. I am flawed. The impulse to control, shape and test all aspects of a work is to reign in impulse itself. I'm not suggesting that intuition has no place in the creative act, but rather the importance to think critically about the resultant creation of that intuition.

The most obvious reason is to avoid a conversation like the one I had with my wife/producer:

ME: Check out this shot! It came out really well!

JEANETTE: Yeah. That's from Spider-man 3.

ME: FUCK!

I'm not bothered that I stole a shot from another film (more on that later) but rather that I didn't MEAN to. Creative impulse with no critical check.

Likewise, on a more fundamental level, the themes and ideas I express in my work should be an expression of my conscious self, not my base impulses or lizard brain reactions. That means, for every choice I make in a film, be it thematic, moral, or aesthetic (none of which are mutually exclusive) I should have a clear, conscious reason for making that choice. Otherwise I am a train off the tracks. An engine of ideas and visuals with no purpose or consideration to what they might say about me or what effect it may have on my audience.

That brings me to the second factor. A filmmaker like myself makes movies for an audience. This is something for others to see, enjoy and think about. Why did I choose this medium? Film has had a deep, meaningful impact on how I view the world, interpret people's actions and see my place in the universe. This medium can profoundly shape people's minds. That's a real responsibility.

I feel a responsibility to inject my movies with ideas and themes that reflect my own values, my ideals. I can only ensure that this happens by strictly analyzing the possible interpretations of each choice I make. Ultimately, the goal is to create a work where interpretation is open, but my INTENT is clear. A work that people can enjoy and engage honestly.

I want to go into how this dovetails with my choices in content and theory. I've already established I'm a control freak, so russian formalism has an obvious appeal to me. Montage seen as a series of meaningless symbols, combined into phrases of meaning. I can construct clear, purposeful moments and communicate without ambiguity to my audience.

This is coupled with a post modernist style because it seems to me that if a large portion of those individual symbols are pulled from a shared pop culture cinematic language, I can nest citations within each complete thought that formal montage provides, compounding information and meaning.

I don't buy that post modernism is inherently ironic, either. One can create profound truth and meaning from re-contextualizing media.

In "DanCoolo" my purpose was to use this kind of post modern symbolism to send up overly somber and derivative sci-fi aesthetics. Example: 40s Film Archetype Holly Malone, In an aforementioned overly serious film environment, head butts a guy through a wall, leaving a looney tunes style cut out. That's three citations of film language.

The intended result is a clear message that not only are the elements of the film at odds, but the content is there to undermine the associations and expectations that come with the film's art direction. And hopefully that's funny.

Graded by my own criteria, I don't think "DanCoolo" is very successful. The above example relies on rather arcane familiarity with the different citations made, preventing me from directly communicating with the audience.

Part of me wishes "Priest" had come out a year earlier. I apologize for mentioning another movie as a negative example, but "DanCoolo" is ultimately a negative film, as I've mentioned in another post.

Camera design saves it a bit, as the over-the-top goofiness of nearly every camera move and composition hopefully accomplishes for a portion of the audience what the obscure citations do not. At the end of the day, the entertainment component of the movie works for a large amount of people, but the ideas are not clearly communicated in an accessible way.

Where the film does a lot better is in the way gender politics are expressed in the film, which is an important personal issue for me. There are no gender politics in the movie, and androgyny is presented without comment, stemming from my own belief that binary concepts of gender should be irrelevant in our thinking. Except those damn high heels. I HATE that choice. I've got no one to blame but myself. Also, the absurdity of drug regulation is touched upon.

"The Book Dealers" fares slightly better. Basically, the film is intended as a science positive horror story, in which technology defeats a threat unleashed by ancient religion. The eye motif repeated throughout the film is something I'm very happy with, as it doubles as a symbol for both corrupt spirituality and omniscient overseers of western religions.

I hope this cursory overview of my internal critical process helps shed light on some of the decisions I've made with my films.

Frank DanCoolo: Paranormal Drug Dealer on Vimeo.

After reading Short of the Week's informative article about the Internet launch of fellow Toronto After Dark selection, "The Thomas Beale Cipher," I decided to follow a random smattering of their advice and did a casual re-launch of "Frank DanCoolo."

Readers here will know that "DanCoolo" has been up on my personal site now for over a year. It had already gotten the lion share of blog coverage, reviews and links it was going to get in its lifetime. So I set out to see if I could beat this dead horse as a dry run for "Doctor Glamour."

Given the minimal effort I put in and the staleness of the content, I think we did pretty well. Grabbing approx 16 thousand eyeballs and nearly three thousand plays, it was a good send off for a film that even io9.com  mentioned had been around for awhile.

But it also made me realize that I know jack about the Internet. After a few query emails to various blogs I don't even read, I was kind of at a loss. I'm going to need a real strategy for "Doctor Glamour," as I know it will appeal to several Internet niches (steampunks, comic fans, LGBT, vfx nerds, music fans) but I don't know what these people read or where to find them!

At the end of the day I'm encouraged that a lazy Sunday afternoon reaped such large rewards, but also daunted by the sea of far more successful films and Internet manipulators I must compete against next year.

In other news, "Doctor Glamour" post production is going great! I'm extremely short on cash, so figuring out how to pay for the last few steps (everything to do with sound, for instance) will be tricky, but I didn't decide to do this to get rich! Expect a trailer in September!

Post production is rocketing along. Over eight minutes of the movie have been completed in barely over a month since wrap. Turns out things were rocketing along a bit TOO fast though, as I had to put on the breaks and hold a meeting this past Sunday.

Essentially, I asked for a saturation and filter change to one environment that really improved it and so foolishly thought it would work just as well for the rest of the astral sea environments in the film. Well, it didn't. It made them look really gross!

I had work stopped as soon as approval stills were sent to me and worked out what needed to change about the new environments. We've got something that's a vast improvement now, not only over my misguided direction from a few weeks ago, but what was designed initially.

What have a learned? If you are doing green screen, try to test ALL your environments with actual actors in them before locking anything down.

Here's a quick breakdown of how a shot evolves from thumbnail to final.

After months and months of thinking intensely about the particular camera design strategy and specific influences of the film, I sit down and scribble out as quickly as possible every shot in the movie. The end result is this:


These are just quick doodles of the basic character positions and expressions. After I get this raw expression of the film, I do my second draft.

Instead of creating refined 2-D storyboards, I load up the final 3-D environment. I then place my 3-D armatures and camera to fine tune the 2-D tumbnail. This includes camera movement and is cut together to form the "animatic."


Finally, the shot is composited together with the environment. Lighting and color adjustments are made to bring the movie in line with the intended final aesthetic.


There you have it! Multiply that 400+ times and you have a movie!

         So the green screen cut of the movie was locked on Wednesday, which meant delivering my computer to James and Robert Dastoli where they incorporated it into the vaunted Dastoli Digital production pipeline. Given the massive render times required (the shots in the library for instance are taking up to two weeks to render per shot), the extra firepower is a must.

    Other crucial items need to be filmed as well. All of the "Dream Being" footage must be shot, as well the the practical elements of the "Flash Gordon" sky and a bunch of students for the classroom scenes that didn't show up on the day.

    Stop motion animation will have be done for the tentacle elements in the beginning and end of the film as well.

Here are some of the latest shots as they were meant to be seen, in Hi-Def!

Here's a bunch of raw, unprocessed stills straight from the rough cut! See more on our Facebook page!

http://www.facebook.com/media/set/fbx/?set=a.10150165289808994.306110.336251938993&l=22eba25848

Here's some of the pictures posted to facebook by cast and crew over the course of the shoot.

Two years and a day ago, I posted THIS.

Well, this flick was a bit tougher, but here we are, eight days, 89 hours of shoot time, 417 set-ups, and the nastiest sunburn of my life later, "DOCTOR GLAMOUR" has wrapped.

I don't know how to articulate my feelings about the shoot yet. Suffice to say, by day seven, I was nearly moved to tears by the incredible dedication and hard work on dislpay.

When you see this movie in eight months or so, remember that it was shot with only seven pairs of hands.

Crew
John Heppe.
James Dastoli.
Robert Dastoli.
Faith Clapp.
Jeanette Jones.

Crew/Actors
Chris Shields.
John Charles Meyer.
Priscilla McEver.

One day these people got through 104 shots. An action scene that was lip-synced precisely to music playback. Dozens of lighting change ups.Three to four part camera moves with no dedicated assistant camera operators.

I've never had to concentrate harder, or keep straight in my head such massively complicated sequences, especially all why in constant pain. I worked the night shift three of these days and functioned on virtually no sleep through days which sometimes reached the 15 hour mark. All the while spending every dime I'd saved since "DanCoolo" wrapped two years prior.

But when I looked out onto the stage I was shamed by the pure professionalism and seemingly unending endurance of my cast and crew.

Thanks for carrying my ass guys. Next time I'll remember to say "cut" I swear.

And you, gentle viewer, we're going to blow your freaking mind.

Behold! Two dreaded tomes from Lovecraft lore, ready to make their appearance in a cheeky musical comedy!

BEHOLD! The completed techno-glove o' love!

Just received pictures and video of nearly finished versions of the the two big props in the movie, the Techno-Glove o' Love and the Techno-Wand! The glove needs to be dyed a dark brown hue and has a few more mechanical components that need to be added, but it's shaping up great!

Check 'em out!

As the official shoot dates (April 16-25) come ever closer, the final custom props and costumes come rolling in. First is the coat, vest and cravat for Doctor Glamour himself.

Check it out!

We did a new VFX test last week featuring one of the more difficult to visualize ideas in the script; the "dream beings." These creatures are manifestations of fear on the astral plane, and Doctor Glamour kicks their portal-y butts!

Standing in for Doctor Glamour for these tests is producer, Jeanette Jones!

Hit "Go To Video" at the end to get to a Hi-Rez version.






For you Behind the Scenes Fiends: here's the little snippet of animatic we had on set:

Making purchases all this week for props and costumes. Considerably more time and money are being spent in this department than in DanCoolo. Notably, there are several costume changes for our leads and complicated, mechanical props. Like the Techno Glove o' Love itself!

Luckily I found an excellent independent leather worker to create the more complicated pieces.

This was the image that made me hire him:



But he also had stuff like this:





Check out his website and buy something!


Speaking of websites you should buy things from, I'm constantly cruising Clockwork Couture for ideas.

Expect to see outfits like the one from Clockwork Couture below in the film :



Various dresses have been purchased for Eve's many costume changes.




Finally a custom jacket, vest and pants are all being manufactured for Doctor Glamour. Expect costume test pictures in the coming weeks and months!

The length of time between posts recently has been due to the blood sweat and tears I've been pouring into the Storyboards and 3-D animatic for "Doctor Glamour."

We're looking for a few donations to reach our shooting budget goal. Please take a look at our Kickstarter page, as you can get cool swag for cheap!

Thank you!

Casting of the three lead roles is official for "Doctor Glamour." Two old favorites and a newcomer!

John Charles Meyer is Doctor Glamour!
Chris Shields is Walter Gilman!

 Priscilla McEver is Eve Walpurgis!