The trailer for my sophomore feature film, the psychological horror thriller DARK OF WINTER.
Tag Archives: feature
THE GREY
The wife and I watched Joe Carnahan’s film The Grey tonight.
Nicely done. Of his films that I’ve seen (which is all of them save his first) I like it second best, just behind Narc.
Brutal movie. Good cast. Man vs man vs nature vs himself. Gorgeous scenery.
Sometimes you need to take a break from your own projects and see what the others are doing.
I’m glad I did…
You blew it…
…capeche?
So, we made our new film as part of an unofficial challenge (that has seemingly gone by the wayside) wherein a filmmaker has two weeks from the first day of shooting to get a feature film (60 minutes +) to a fine cut (they left additional time in for color correcting).
I wanted to make a follow up to my debut film The Quiet Arrangement (still available on DVD!) and this seemed like the perfect way to do so. It’s a challenge, you know, so why not challenge myself as a filmmaker.
One of the original participants and creators of the 2wkFilm Challenge is Lucas McNelly, who has spent the last year traveling around the country helping other indie filmmakers on their projects and blogging about it, so I contacted him and asked if he wanted to make this film his final stop, since he was coming back to Pittsburgh anyway. He said it was cool and we set a start date: Thursday, February 23, 2012.
So, on Thursday, we would start shooting, and from that point I would have two weeks to finish the film; shoot it, cut it, done.
I just hit ENTER to render the final film out at 12:30 am, March 9, 2012. Thirty minutes past the deadline.
Vegas goes to work like Vegas should.
Shit. Really?
Yup.
Does it matter? Only to me, I guess. I still have a sophomore feature film (71 minutes!) and I got to work with some amazing actors that I’ve never worked with before. Of course, it also helped that the two real stars of the film, Kyle Jason (our lead) and Maura Snyder (our Producer and my lovely wife) gave it their all and made the entire experience as easy as a two week feature film project could be.
Lucas never showed (I still don’t know what happened there and I just found out that his A YEAR WITHOUT RENT project ended on February 18th, so what the hell?!) so I have to blog about this myself. I’ve been trying to get posts up, but when you’re under the gun, the last thing you want to do is post some shit about being under the gun.
Oh, well…it was well worth it.
Now all we need is for an audience to take the crazy journey that is Dark of Winter.
Come along, if you will…
So…
…Feb 28th wasn’t the last day of principle photography. It was scheduled to be, but, things change, so…
We wrapped on Wednesday, the 29th. Kyle Jason flew home the next day. Nothing like getting down to the wire, right?
The editing has commenced. Rough assembly is almost finished. Not bad for a feature. That’s the beauty of doing longer takes. Easier to edit…
Slackin’ on posting…
…but not on the shoot.
Busy day today. 13 scenes. Yeah, man…13.
I’m not even sure how many setups.
A lot…
More tomorrow. Almost done shooting…
Have gun, will travel...
hwicfilm 