"Dead Week" - A film by Kyle Stebbins (and company)

Update from Monster Land

Last month we received a call from the organizers of the Louisville Fright Night film festival inviting us to submit O2. Apparently the programmer of the festival is close friends with one of the industry guests who attended the Cinespace screening last month. Since Fright Night has a sci-fi category he thought they should include O2 even though the deadline had passed for submissions. With entry fee and deadline waived we shot them a screener. This morning we got word that the crowd loved it and we won. Pretty cool.

We also heard from Rounder Records who advised that they are very close to finalizing their strategy for the release of the Vienna Teng music video we did. They said they are ecstatic with how it turned out and they want to discuss having us shoot a video for the album Vienna is in the studio recording now.

This coming weekend we will be shooting an insanely ambitious project on the set where the Afghanistan scenes for IRON MAN were filmed. As you might imagine, things are hectic here with finalizing pre-production. However, all is on track so far. We will be shooting with two RED rigs manned respectively by our good friends Geoff Reisner and Matty Garret. It promises to be a hell of a ride.
 
Congrats on the win at Fright Night Mark! Looking forward to what you all come up with for the next Vienna Teng project.

Insanely ambitious... sweet.
 
Mark Johnson said:
This coming weekend we will be shooting an insanely ambitious project on the set where the Afghanistan scenes for IRON MAN were filmed. As you might imagine, things are hectic here with finalizing pre-production. However, all is on track so far. We will be shooting with two RED rigs manned respectively by our good friends Geoff Reisner and Matty Garret. It promises to be a hell of a ride.
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Can't wait for some updates on that! :beer:
 
blindbuzta said:
How does one get 6000 hits on their thread?
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With Mark on the thread, there are bound to be thousands upon thousands of views...now do the majority of them have anything to do with the titled film thread...highly doubtful, but they're getting peoples attention.

Rogan
 
Dustin R. Rogan said:
With Mark on the thread, there are bound to be thousands upon thousands of views...now do the majority of them have anything to do with the titled film thread...highly doubtful, but they're getting peoples attention.

Rogan
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Consider me to be like the trained chicken with a leash of yarn on his leg staked outside of the Quik Mart, doing a little jig while a double amputee plays "Oh Susanna" on the harmonica. ... It makes no sense and has no relevance, but you did stop and buy that corn dog, didn't you?
 
Mark Johnson said:
Consider me to be like the trained chicken with a leash of yarn on his leg staked outside of the Quik Mart, doing a little jig while a double amputee plays "Oh Susanna" on the harmonica. ... It makes no sense and has no relevance, but you did stop and buy that corn dog, didn't you?
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HAHA reminds me when Luis and Tim took Gary MattinSTL and myself to Santa Monica Peir we saw a guy with a radio and a puppet dancin around. It was horrible, but we couldn't look away! LOL

btw kudos on the projects Mark and boys! Things are lookin up for you guys and in huge ways!

Rogan
 
Mark Johnson said:
Consider me to be like the trained chicken with a leash of yarn on his leg staked outside of the Quik Mart, doing a little jig while a double amputee plays "Oh Susanna" on the harmonica. ... It makes no sense and has no relevance, but you did stop and buy that corn dog, didn't you?
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:beer:

Alex Jeffery is back in town. We're assembling tonight to work on Dead Week.

A lot of behind-the-scenes stuff has been taking place and I haven't had time to discuss it all with you. Look for it soon.

Dead Week is really starting to shape up. I'm getting excited.

--

Mark, haven't had a chance yet to congratulate you with all your advancements and new gigs. So... CONGRATULATIONS, buddy! It's incredible to look back and see how far you and your team have come. From sneaking bottles into the hot tub at Palm Valley, to shooting your projects on the same set as Robert Downey Jr. movies. A real sincere pat on the back from the midwest, big guy.

We're cheering for you back here.
 
Woah, Dude! Awesome location. Congratulations guys.

Man, I should send you my TwilightFest script and have you shoot it there for me ... would be a perfect location :)

Good luck on the shoot, wish I could get away and come help out. Would be cool to see you guys in action. Keep us up to date as you are able to
 
Congrats, Mark!! Looks like you guys are doin' big things. I'm not surprised though - your work is always good, especially O2.

BTW - Hope all is going well with your project, Kyle.
 
Kyle Stebbins said:
\

Last night we finished the script.
Minor edits and revisions to come.

:)

-stebbs
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Wicked! When the hell are we gonna start shooting this thing? I'm gonna be back in town Thursday from my vacation and ready to rock! Speaking of rock we still need a Homer-Stebbs jam session. Fo Sho.
 
Yo Kyle! Script is done? Fantastic! What's the shooting daze for this thing?

Last night we had our final pre-production meeting at Monster Shack West. Tim and Luis ran the show from the monster chairs:
ProductionMeeting01.jpg


This is our first film with true stunts so you can imagine how pumped we are. Here's Bobby King, our stunt coordinator. What a pleasure to work with such a pro:
ProductionMeeting02.jpg


It's been quite a learning experience for us to put this little shoot together. It's been an eye-opener for sure. Much as Adam has reported in his Corrado Thread, we have found out that shooting in L.A. with pyro effects is an expensive proposition indeed. We only have one day with pyro but Film LA insists on adding a $400 "notification charge" and a $104 "L.A. County Fire Review." Even though we're shooting at an established movie ranch in the middle of hundreds of acres with no neighbors within earshot, we get dinged $400 for Film LA to send out notices to adjoining landowners. Moreover, this set has productions with pyro every single week of the year. Presumably, they are raking in $400 each time just to send out postcards to the same landowners week after week.

And how about $104 for a "fire review?" Our effects guy has to pull the effect permit from the fire department and discuss the shoot with the fire marshal who we have to pay a ridiculous amount of money to on top of all of this. So, Film LA is charging $104 basically for e-mailing or faxing a copy of the permit to the fire department without doing anything. Then we find we need to have a water truck present for the whole shoot. Our effects supervisor warned us that some fire marshals get really pissy and will hold you up if you have too small of a truck. We learned that the largest supplier of water trucks will totally rape you with high hourly charges and, luckily, we got hooked up with a smaller company that is giving us their big truck for the whole day at a cheap flat rate.

We upgraded our production insurance and got a really good rate for an annual policy from InsuranceWest. Our policy lets us print an unlimited number of our own insurance certificates adding necessary parties. Under our former policy we had to pay $25 for each additional named insured. Moreover, we now can do stunts and use pyro effects whenever we want by paying $500 extra to temporarily suspend the normal exclusion. It's difficult to find insurers willing to underwrite pyro effects and you have to be careful because many of those who do will still severely limit you with all sorts of fine print (such as no squibbs, limitation of powder loads etc.)

This all really makes me appreciate how valuable a good line producer must be if you are doing a large shoot. There are so many ways to screw up or to get raped with charges. It's nice to have a forum like this where people can share experiences and learn from each other.
 
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