Blog
Featured
Our dreams came true: we were an official selection for Austin Film Festival - our hometown festival, our first love, our comfort zone. We could not have been more thrilled to screen at AFF as our Texas Premiere.
After completing the movie with just a week or two to spare, we premiered our little movie at Method Fest International Film Festival on March 22, 2019, at 4:30 pm at Laemmle’s Ahrya Fine Arts Theatre in Beverly Hills. We precede the official opening night film, Stockholm, starring Ethan Hawke. Read all about all of these Austinites taking the trip to LA in this Hollywood Reporter article!
2018 comes to a close tomorrow and it's hard to wrap our heads around how much progress has been made on this project in just 12 short months. Thanks, specifically to your generosity, this is what we accomplished this year:
We're happy to let y'all know that we are slowly, but surely, making progress on post-production. We are a very very small 5 person team at this point (Will painting + Duncan animating, doing vfx and animations + Charlie coloring + Tim mixing sound + me standing over all of their shoulders asking if they're done yet) and it turns out, the last steps are the most intricate and take the longest. So, patience, my friends (I'm saying this to myself too).
WE ARE ALL SMILES BECAUSE WE ARE OFFICIALLY PICTURE-LOCKED!
What does that mean? Well, to be honest, we're calling this "picture lock lite" because all of the elements are in place, but Duncan and his brother still have some animating to do for a couple of scenes and *then* we'll see what picture will really look like, so we're far enough along to move forward with other post-production teammates but not *100%* finished.
Things are truckin' along in post-production and so much is happening that I'm just gonna bullet it out for you in order of how things have happened since we last spoke.
Since February, Duncan has been locked away in our office editing like a maniac. And now, we officially have our first rough cut!
It's been a whirlwind three weeks and we officially have principal photography wrapped!
This last week saw some exciting locations here in central Texas. We saw everything from an exotic private swimming hole, to Austin's own Lake Travis, to a beautiful evergreen canyon and everything in between.
I’m tired, I’m cold, and I’m anxious.
I’ve been on set for weeks, it snowed last Thursday more than it ever has in Central Texas, and we’ve got a ton of work to do on this movie.
The past two weeks have been a whirlwind of emotions. There have been the highest of highs: when a person we had never met personally who we connected with through Seed and Spark donated $500 to our campaign... and another person $100... and countless other people countless other amounts. At one point I received an email from someone I reached out to on Seed and Spark who said simply, "So brilliant." That was uplifting.
We're over a week into our campaign and I'm trying to find the right words to describe how it feels. Exhilarating. Stressful. Unbelievable. Exhausting. Honestly, the range of emotions is insane. But no matter what emotions I feel, I can tell you one thing for sure: It is completely and totally worth it.
People keep asking me how I'm doing, if I'm relieved now that the campaign is launched, how excited I am, etc. I keep smiling and nodding and saying all the right things like "OMG yeah this is so exciting!" or "Well, now that the campaign is launched I'm feeling better!" But, as I sat down to write this blog, knowing that I meant to write about the Hometown Heroes portion of this campaign (I'll get to that in a minute) is I'm so tired.
When we first brainstormed what kind of a movie we wanted to make for our first feature we knew we had to come up with something that we could make within our means. We don’t have a lot of cash to make a movie so it needed to be made on the cheap. After a bit of thinking we came to the conclusion that one of the easiest way to cut the budget is to make a movie with as few people as possible. This sort of raised the question, “how can we make a movie with as few people as possible?” Shortly after a lightbulb went off and we had a premise, “what if we make a movie where everyone in the world disappears except for one person?” Bam!
Our lives have been a whirlwind since October 16th. We found out that we were finalists in the Seed & Spark Hometown Heroes Rally. That meant that we got to pitch the movie to the Duplass Brothers. We were told we had to submit a 30 second (NOT A MILISECOND LONGER) pitch video, up to 3 examples of previous work and either the first 20 pages of our script or a 10 page treatment. Now that the competition is over, we can share those things with you: