Trailer!

Hey team -- here's the trailer -- I think it came out pretty good. Only did fourteen versions. The first was about seven minutes, to which one kind reviewer said, 'isn't this just a short movie?'. Thank you. 

Well, check it out. Let me know what you think if you feel like it. Full thing coming September 2014.

Smooth sailing, right?

Spent the weekend in Denver, where I got the pleasure of interviewing Misun Oh and Jon Pinnow. Misun, as many of you know, was married to JP for a number of years, and Jon was a kindred spirit from John's first run at Denver in the early 90's.

One of the things that's been really amazing about doing this project is meeting all these people in John's orbit. I've yet to meet someone who wasn't kind, gracious, and really really interesting.

Jon Pinnow, for example, started up a newsprint zine in Denver in the early 90's called 'Newshole'. When asked why, he seemed surprised at the question. Why wouldn't you start a newspaper?

Anyway, we're sailing along pretty well. I'm easing into my 'up at 5/530 to edit' routine, and am -- as we speak -- exporting the 4.5 minute trailer for the film. I'm going to run it by a few amigos to get some feedback, and then toss that bad boy up. Honestly, watching it, I got pretty excited about seeing this movie! I suppose that's a good sign.

Pants Crapping

John got in touch a while back because some folks want to screen Root Hog or Die in Minneapolis at a real theater, and they're asking for a '50-minute edit' to make sure it'll be up to snuff. Crapped pants #1.

#2 was when Kelly Froh (whose comics I love) got in touch about screening it at the Short Run Festival in Seattle in November. This was fine -- THEN SHE ASKED FOR A POSTER. That's when everything hit home, hard.

Anyway, I have to get back to actually editing, but here are two posters I made yesterday. I'd love some feedback!

Gonna make, gonna make it, gonna make it......

I'm still pouring through tape -- and there are three more interviews I need to conduct -- but I'm getting there. As of yesterday, I'm up to 50+ minutes of basically edited content for the movie, most of which is John P., and I have about three hours of non-John P. interviews edited down.

Chatting with Crystal about it last night, I made the claim that if, given a full weekend, I could come out of it with a 70-90 minute movie that would be pretty good.

My plan from here is to:

- finish the interviews - it'd be tempting to skip them, but I need to interview John's second wife, Misun Oh, John's artistic blood brother Patrick Porter, and Felt Pilotes bandmate Doug Miducki, so not insignificant content there. This will require a trip to Denver and a trip to Albany, NY. Fun!

- finish editing - by June 30, I want to have ~200 minutes of usable good film. If you're keeping track, I'm currently at 230, but I need to add to that pile (the interviews mentioned above), plus I haven't really touched on any of John's illness', which I need to do -- I presume that'll be 20 minutes or so. This means that by the end of June I need to get up around 350 minutes, and whittle it back to 200.

- final editing and sequencing - this is taking those 200 minutes and cutting them down to 70-100. This is July. In July, I also need to finish editing the bonus materials.

- August will be spent doing the final mastering to make sure everything looks good, the sound is as good as can be, and then producing this in whatever way it's going to be produced -- do people still use DVDs?

Then we premier at SPX, and move into a fall tour. Exciting!