KGB Productions

Found this picture the other day, and it is of me dressed as the killer in some Super-8 short I was making at the time. I had been very influenced by films like "Halloween", "Friday the 13th", and a whole slew of low budget horror films to numerous to mention. I was always filming something, and trying to coax people to star in my films. You see the technical was never a problem with me. It was getting the people to work on the films that was hard. Usually they were my friends & family, but a lot of the time I had to do a lot of filling in. I can even remember getting my mom to run the camera for a quick shot of me dressed as the killer, or as a victim. It's ironic that that still is a problem. As you know if you've been reading this blog I do try and pay my actors and crew when I can, but it's hard to do so now even though expenses for DV filmmaking aren't as much as they would be if I was shooting on film. When I went to film school I was excit...

So how did I go about scoring the film with music? Well I enlisted an old time friend by the name of Peter J. Gorritz who lives in LosAngeles California. Peter and I go way back, and we had talked about the score when I was in LA for a visit. The above photo is of me when I did my commentary to Peter for the music. I literally videotaped the film from the flatbed editor, and talked into a microphone as the film was being played on the editor. On one channel I had the films dialogue and on the other channel I had my voice telling Peter what I thought the music should be like, or when it should comes in and out. Basically it was for queuing music in and out of the film. As for the musical style Peter and I had talked about that over the phone and through emails. I recommended several films, and he recommended several composer's style, and in essence that's how the counteract evolved. As Peter scored the film he would send me two discs. One with the music synch to the picture as a...

Okay I've made a film, and done several short films now what? Work that's what. It's rather difficult to balance filmmaking and life in general. Since making a film can tax your resources both in the physical realm as well as the emotional realm it can be difficult to produce a good piece of work. A support mechanism is needed to help people like yourself to create interesting films, but in today's culture that is so hard to do or develop for that matter. I have been a member of a crew and felt worthless, and hated every minute of it, and on the other hand I've been in a work environment where everyone is working for the project because they believe in it, and enjoyed every second of it. These are two extremes, and there seems to be no middle ground. I guess one needs to keep plugging along, and take from each project something they can use later. Filmmaking is a group effort, but in that group are one or two individuals who move the project forward. It is these p...

I started editing as soon as I got my film back from the lab, but before I could get creative I had to first begin the mundane chores of logging shots, and syncing up the footage. This is time consuming, and sometimes can be quite tedious. But it was something that had to be done. I should have also gotten my film and mag track coded after I sync up the footage. Coding is when numbers are printed on your workprint & magnetic track so that after you cut the slate from the picture you can sync up your footage by matching the numbers from the film to the mag track. I didn't and so I sometime had to sync by eye, and later found out in some shots that I was off synch by a frame or two. If this was done in video I be dead, but since I was doing it in film the out of synch footage didn't look that bad. Of course when editing on my Moviola Flatbed editor I oly saw a small image on the view screen. To get a better sense of how in synch you are one should see it projected. You...

As a student in filmmaking I had some contempt for older filmmakers. The a rrogance of youth prevented me from appreciating artists that had come first. It was only in my second year in college that I discovered the French New Wave, and I feel in love. I began devouring all things that covered that period, which also lead me to learning other American directors such as Ford, Hawks, and Chaplin. The history of cinema is not that old, but yet all that we do toady is based on things that other filmmakers did. Such filmmakers as Keaton, Chaplin, Eisenstein, and Griffith were pioneers in filmmaking. They discovered the language of the cinema. What is this language of cinema you ask? Well like any other subject filmmaking has rules that seem to have been grounded in the narrative. The way we tell a story can be done in several ways, and in the cinema different shots, and angles can be used to convey a different emotions. The early filmmakers found out this by trial and error. After all Ediso...

So what was the budget? How much did this all cost. The answer which every producer should give should be an honest one, and that answer is "under a million". I can even say that it was well under 100k. Are you interested now? The biggest expense was filmstock which ran me around 3 to 4K, and then processing and sound transfer to a magnetic track, which ran an additional 7k. After that I was my own editor, and the expenses dropped. Food, transportation, and housing also ate a lot of my budget. I could have easily halved the budget for the last three items if I one, hired local actors, two gotten catering from fast food places, and three didn't supply any transportation for actors. Some actors had commitments like auditions to go to, so a car was provided. Three actors shared one car. It did work out, and the actors were all satisfied and relaxed. They did not feel like cattle, and it showed, so supplying transportation to the actors was a good thing. I used the rental age...

I'll try and deal with how I became involved in my film, and how long this obsession has been raging on. i had always wanted to do a feature. There were several times where I thought I was going to actually make it happen, but always the plans fell through. SO I decided to put the burden on "myself" alone. The old saying: "if you want something done right, do it yourself" actually has a lot of truth in it. I had written my screenplay two years earlier before production began. In that time I was consumed by how I would get the film off the ground by myself. I used Final Draft for my screenwriting program, nad I used movie magic for my scheduling software. Movie Magic allowed me to import my screenplay from Final draft, and create my schedule for shooting the film. I figured that it would take me 12 to 14 days to shoot the film since my film was limited in location, and in actors. I should have found someone to help me, but I could not since I had no firm date on ...

Okay so what is my definition of a filmmaker? I've worked on numerous productions, and been on staff at various production houses & ad agencies, and the one thing that separates professionals from the wanna-be's is that they have the technical know how to put together a film no matter what the format is. Film, video, DV, or any other format a true professional filmmaker KNOWS the process of production from pre to post. That's not to say that you need to know ALL, but it sure does help when you're up against a deadline, and you have questions on how the production process flows. I found out everything there is to know about filmmaking during my thesis film in "Production 40.3" in college. The film was a short 5 minute piece called "Freedom". It was about someone running form someone and trying to reach freedom from across the fence. I learned later while reading "Skywalking" that George Lucas did a film called "Freheit" which i...

It started around when I was eight years old. I had been interested in photography since I was six or seven. I took pictures of my GI-Joe's in various states of action. I was also a voracious comic book reader. Fantastic Four, Sergeant Fury, The Avengers, Dr. Strange, and more all fascinated me and entertained me for hours. I even for a short time drew my own comic books with stories I created myself. Then after my grandmother died I inherited her Super-8 camera, which was a simple point and shoot type of camera. I read about stop-motion photography, and studied films that contained stop-motion. Such films as Mighty Joe Young, King Kong, and the Sinbad pictures all had stop motion in them. I tried to emulate that with my cheap camera by shooting in short bursts. The results weren't what I wanted, but they showed promise. I eventually acquired a camera which could do single frame shooting, and suddenly my world opened up. I would read Special effects magazines, and I even s...

Okay. Why am I here? I've decided that I want to blog more about film, and film-making, and it's here that I want to do it from. Blogging isn't too new to me, but I decided to try blogging about film and hopefully meet other people through here with the same interests. Actors, filmmakers, musicians, painters, and photographers are all welcome here. I'll tell you what I'm up to, what films I've seen and anything that is film oriented. At least that's the plan for now. So let's see how it goes. Please bare with me as I get my profile up. Another grand experiment begins. Catch you later!