Texas is hot

When I first moved here everybody warned me about the heat and I would wave them off, telling them that it's just as hot and just as humid in OKC. What an idiot I was.

Speaking of overheating, my editing room is getting ridiculous. I have little desk fans blowing on my harddrives to keep them cooled down. I have been having some technical problems that I believe is due to overheating, so I'm going to see if this helps out at all. My G5 may be overheating as well because it's been crashing a lot.

So I have the G4 set up with the first section of the movie. When the G5 has a hiccup or needs to reboot, I just slide over to the G4 and keep cutting.

OKC people - I will be there from approximately July 1st - 5th. Let's get together.

3rd draft

I am entering what I like to think of as the third draft of editing this project. My strategy has been something like this

1. 1st Draft - I slapped everything together as we shot it so I could give a cut to John S. for scoring purposes.

2. 2nd Draft - I fine tuned all the scenes and concentrated primarily on making them work as individual units.

3. 3rd Draft - Now I am looking at the movie as a whole piece again and cutting it to make sure the flow is right.

Late Saturday night/early Saturday morning I was feeling a little bit nervous that I had cut the individual scenes too tight. I was afraid I didn't have enough to make the desired 90 minute running time. So I pieced all the scenes together just to see how short I was. Unbelievably, the running time was almost 3 hours. I couldn't believe it. I got a serious sinking feeling. So now I am working at cutting the second draft in half. I am working pretty much around the clock so I have something to decent to show later this week when I go back to okc. But it's very overwhelming.

feedback

Thanks to everybody for the great feedback on the teaser trailer. I kept swearing that I wasn't going to cut any kind of trailer until I was totally finished editing, but I'm glad I changed my mind. In a lot of ways cutting the teaser helped me figure out even more what the movie is really about. Also, all the positive vibes are giving me a lot more energy for this difficult final phase.

I took a break to watch a documentary on the BULLITT DVD that is all about editing. It really has nothing to do with BULLITT at all, so it's kind of strange that this is where it ended up. But it's called THE CUTTING EDGE and if you are interested in filmmaking in general or editing in particular, you should definitely check it out.

In unrelated news, you may have noticed all the photos have disappeared from the blog. They were an unfortunate casualty of my recent server problems. I will try to post new photos to make up for the loss. Here's what I'm working on right now...

Sex Machine Teaser

As promised, here's the SEX MACHINE teaser trailer. I'm still working on getting a better compressed image quality, but I didn't want to keep the regular blog readers waiting.

There are multiple versions, but do me a favor and check out the Large version unless your connection is really crappy. Let it load fully, crank up the sound on your computer and enjoy.

WINDOWS MEDIA PLAYER
SEX MACHINE TEASER (Windows Media, Large 24 MB)
SEX MACHINE TEASER (Windows Media, Medium 17 MB)

QUICKTIME: (WINDOWS: right click to download MAC: Cntrl + Click to download)

SEX MACHINE TEASER (Quicktime Large - 12 MB)

SEX MACHINE TEASER (Quicktime Medium - 6 MB)

SEX MACHINE TEASER (Quicktime Small - 2 MB)


UPDATE: Due to a barrage of e-mails concerning the trailer, we have opened a discussion thread at the ASPHALT PLANET forum if you want to discuss, ask us technical questions, etc.

tuesday

Get ready!

SEX MACHINE teaser trailer hits the web on Tuesday June 21st.

It's pretty cool, too.

frenetic

And now I'm off to Florida for a few days. Next month California. August Chicago. Business with pleasure squeezed in where I can fit it.

Travelling is agonizing for me. But at this stage I guess it must be done. A lot of things are coming together but each exciting opportunity brings with it great demands.

But things are happening...