2/20-09

It’s been a while since I posted anything here…

So, what’s new? Well, I just finished the fifth feature. It’s just a first draft again. I know I know. I need to go back and actually rewrite some of them. I HATE rewriting though. I really do! Anyway, this time it was a collaborative work together with a friend from Simply Scripts. That helped a lot. We seemed to work pretty well together and I wouldn’t mind doing it again. This one is titled Generation Gap. It’s about a woman who’s 40, married to a man who’s 60 and she has an affair with their gardener who’s 20 something. I think it turned out pretty good. It’s a drama with some comedy tossed in. Lots of sex too… Don’t know where that came from! We tried to get this script to be used in the script club at SS, but some people balked at the idea because it wasn’t quite finished yet when I suggested it. I wonder how they would have reacted had they known it only took us twelve days!!!

We are still trying to get funding for the reality show and the three documentaries. Had another meeting with a financier yesterday. I hate begging for money… My knees are raw!

That’s it for now. I’ll try to update more often. Promise!

12/7-08

Been a bit busy lately. Trying to finish up the feature based on Daddy’s Home. I haven’t decided yet if the title should be the same or if I should use Dead Life… I’m hoping to finish it soon and maybe then it can be used in the Script Club. I know it would be torn to shreds, but that’s good. I need all the help I can get and honest people are VERY important. I want this one to be produced in -09!

On the good/fun news, James at Simply Scripts used my comedy short Covert Careers for his class assignment in film school. I enjoyed it. It’s always fun to see something you wrote as film. I think he did a good job although I think if it was my film I might have done a couple of things differently. That’s just me though and probably because as the writer I visioned it a little different in certain areas. Over all though, I think he captured the tone I had in mind pretty good. Here’s the film… I also put it on the video blog page.

Regarding my other workings with film production, we now have an official company with a tax id #. And in January we will have our first pitch party.

I think that’s about all I feel like typing tonight. Just got home from an Air Force dining out. A formal dinner with 355 people. It lasted for four hours…

cya soon.

11/29-08

Been a while since last time… Anything new going on? Sure there are some news. Some good even, but due to the recent global financial meltdown, things might change…

We have decided that our next project will be the documentary about a mission to bring back soldiers that went down with their B-24s during a raid in Romania in WWII. The media is already there. Hundreds and hundreds of hours of footage. One man spent almost twenty years of his life assembling all of this. It’s impressive, it really is. All we need to do is find funds (about 140K) to finish this project. We will have a “pitch party” in January to get the funds needed. It’s sort of exciting even though it’s only to finish what others have almost completed already.

Next news is my own writing… very depressing. I’m stuck on the feature length of Daddy’s Home aka Dead Life. People are waiting for the script since we have decided it will be our first feature film. I don’t know if I can do it though. My confidence is as low as ever at the moment and I’m thinking I’ll forever be stuck writing 5 pagers. I showed By The Grace of Evil to a friend of mine today… The verdict was “horrible and sick”. Other comments that made me doubt myself was things like “write more cinematically and more economically”. I thought I was… So, right now, I don’t feel like writing anything. Maybe even hang up the keyboard for good… You can read the comments at the script page, under screenplays/features.

Check out the Movie Scripts page. I’ve added a few I’ve read lately… Maybe I’ll comment on them shortly.

cya

11/16-08

The Commercial for the Doritos Super Bowl contest is done and has been uploaded to the Doritos site. I can not post it online until after January 6th, but here’s a link to it. Doritos commercial.
We had a lot of fun doing it and as hard to believe as it might sound, it took eleven people and five days to pull it off. It’s only 30 seconds!!

Sex Doll has been received well at Simply Scripts and at least one person wants to shoot that one. I’m also waiting for the results over at Done Deal for their writing excersise competition. I entered it there.

The feature version of Daddy’s Home has been slow going lately. Mostly because I’ve been busy with the Doritos commercial. I will try to get back to that this week though.

Added a couple of more scripts to the “movie scripts” page. Will probably get a couple of more iScripts too. Not of Better Days though since Steven does not want any more of them done until he re-writes them and removes all BC references in them.

Be back soon…

11/9-08

We shot our Doritos Superbowl commercial today… I had a lot of fun and also learned more than I have in a long time. One of the first things I realized is that I know nothing about lighting. Pardon my English, but that part is a real bitch! Shadows everywhere and they were VERY hard to get rid of. A lot of the times we were not able to get rid of them… oh well!

I know we will not have a shot at the 25K, but it’s okay with me. Honestly, I had LOADS of fun and learned more in one day than I have in a very long time. Now we need to do stuff like this on a regular basis so we can learn and get better.

On the writing front… The feature version of “Daddy’s Home” is slow going. I’ve just been too busy lately to concentrate on that. I will start back a little tomorrow…. or maybe not. Just remembered I have to write something for the SS Killer Game writing excersise. Can you believe I was killed??

Sex Doll seem to be doing okay. Lots of downloads and the comments at Simply Scripts is mostly favorable.

I’ll be back tomorrow to tidy this up.

Love ya all!

10/28-08

Finally settling down after four days in Miami Beach. I went to the Film and Media conference. It was an interesting week. Started out with a stop at Neiman-Marcus in Orlando. The two ladies I went with had some shopping to pick up… All I can say about that was that it was interesting.
After that we got back on the road to Miami. There was a tropical storm hitting the area at the time and the wind was kicking up at near 30mi/hr. It was raining too. You want to see three women get in a foul mood real quick? Put them out in hot wet wind and watch their hair go “wild” and you’ll see their mood turn sour in a hurry.

Anyway, the conference itself was interesting. Sat in on a few seminars. Some were very good and useful, but there was also a lot of bullshit going on. The screenwriting seminar could have been done by several of my writer friends and been just as good if not better.

The best thing for us was the pitching sessions. Learned a lot there. It was a bit humbling, but I welcomed it. Criticism is good in my book. Now we need to know what we can and should improve on.

Another VERY valuable seminar was one about business plans with Louise Levinson. Extremely informative and we made a great contact there.

I was taken out to dinner on my birthday too. Shula’s steakhouse. The tab was $420 for three people. I almost had a heartattack. Especially with the economy the way it is at the moment. It was great though and I enjoyed it. I did not eat steak of course.

All in all it was a great trip and it was nice to get out of town for a few days even though I gained five pounds.

On the writing end, I have two people producing Daddy’s Home. One is an animator and the other one is based in LA. I made people read that short in Miami and we decided to turn it into a feature… funding for a low budget film is available. So the pressure is on. I told them I could have a first draft in a month.

I entered a short The Curse of Chief Keigh-Tugh-Gua to the OWC at Simply Scripts. I’m not sure how it went really. Some people seemed to like it while others did not.

cya soon!

10/20-08

Most of the scripts for the Simply Script One Week Challenge has been posted…. except for mine and Jordan’s. We also happen to be part of the Friday Night Drunken Writer’s Group… hmmm.

My entry was “THE CURSE OF CHIEF KEIGH-TUGH-GUA”. It’s 50% true btw. Anyway, will fix the links to it tomorrow.

cya…

10/12-08

We had another meeting today. A very productive one I might add.

We have made reservations to go down to the Miami media event at the Alexander hotel from Oct 24-26. We’ve got a two bedroom suite and I really look forward to it. It also happens to be during my birthday so I have a feeling there might be some partying!! Haha!!

We have an open house event planned at our suite to push our “projects”. I’m sure I will be totally sober, haha!

Also posted the short Daddy Is Home at SS and it’s been received well. I have an iScript available on the same page as the script too. Don at Simply Scripts said he will post a link to the mp3 on the home page today or maybe tomorrow. That should really get the downloads going. A lot more people than you might think like to listen rather than read.

We touched on the Doritos commercial today too. Unfortunately everyone else has another huge event coming up in the next couple of weeks so they seem to have a hard time focusing. I’m hoping however that we will get at least one commercial done before the deadline….

Anyway, I’ll keep you posted. Bbs,
pia

10/08-08

The meeting for today was canceled as all parties besides me have a huge event coming up on the 18th. We did have a good productive meeting this past Monday however. We had a conference call meeting with a Hollywood entertainment attorney (Jay Shanker) and we were adviced to form a parent company in order to separate ourselves from liability and such. Then each project will have an LLC formed specifically for that project and will be hired to produce the project for the parent company. This is all very confusing to me. I hate law and money stuff. I’m soooo lost in that regard.

The Doritos commercial with the race horse had to be scrapped due to the property we were going to use is for sale and they have people looking at it and don’t want us to fuck anything up. We did however like two of Shelton’s ideas for commercials. Mike wrote two scripts for us in just one evening. They are both good, but we might only have time to do one. If that’s the case, we’ll go for the Genie one! Haha. We all liked it.

Added another short here. The title is Daddy Is Home. You can check it out under screenplays/shorts. I should have an iScript for it in a couple of days. I’m submitting this one to SS even though it got a really negative review by Phil…

Cya soon,

Pia

10/02-08

Lots of things going on here. Tons and tons of meetings regarding the reality show and the av doc, but the reality show takes up most of the time since it’s time sensitive. We have also decided to give the Doritos Super Bowl contest a try. We have one idea for it that we are currently planning. It’s a little bit on the elaborate side, but I think we can pull it off. It involves a race horse at a race track, some FX and … Doritos. We have six weeks to do this. Also asked Mike Shelton if he’d be interested in thinking up some ideas for a second or maybe even third commercial for it. You can enter up to ten so why not? Here’s one that I think was the winner last year. Very good, but also simple.