the space

The marketing machine has officially begun with none other than myspace.com, which at the time of this writing is experiencing a power outage at their data center. On a normal day, when the power is humming, I believe you can access it by just adding /bloodcar to the homepage URL. If that doesn't work, just do a search for blood car and you'll find it eventually.

Its most attractive and effective feature is the NEW trailer. There was an old trailer that was good, but this one is a 100x better. It really makes you want to see the film, sets up the characters and the story in a concise way, and on top of all that, is genuinely funny. Our friend James H., who is a board certified projectionist and a GSU alum, cut the trailer. I don't know how much he editing he currently does, but he certainly has a gift and/or knack for it.

The song from the trailer is none other than UK 'extreme power metal' band DragonForce. I'm not sure which album the song hails from, or even the name of the song for that matter. However, their biography is quite impressive(www.dragonforce.com). They are currently on their most recent 'tour of duty' in which they leave devastated cities in their wake. Devastated by rock that is. Rock that UK metal mag UK Metal Hammer claims is "as metal as f**k." They play the Masquerade on August 11th. Get out of Atlanta while you still can.

Something else on the bloodcar myspace page also must be addressed: the cast photos section just below the tv. I can't speak for any of the other photos, but the one of me is from a little film I did a few years ago called Oreganoise. It was a student film made by a friend of mine Dean S. at UGA. It was a musical and though I did no singing in the film, I played a gay auto mechanic. The film was about a cook who's car breaks down on the way to his restaurant's opening night.

Blutautoupdates

Here are a few tidbits re: blut auto - german for Blood Car.

Picture is locked.
The Sound Mix is in progress. So is color correction; the difference is astonishing.
An eccentric composer is working on the score as I write this.
Adam P. and Alex have been arguing. A lot.
A deadline was set for July 15 for the Telluride Film Festival, which was shortly thereafter switched to August 15, 2006 for Slamdance.

This is the best story though so listen up.

Chris C., the lighting designer for Blood Car, was working on a big-budget film here in Atlanta with a famous actor who plays a doctor on TV. He gave a copy of the the Blut Auto rough cut to one of the producers on this film and that producer like the film quite a bit, laughed even. That producer liked it so much that he/she? pledged a significant dollar amount to the post production process. I won't say how much, but if you're reading left to right like you are right now, then it has four numbers before you reach the first decimal point. Nice work, Chris C.

For the first time in many months, Blood Car feels like it has as much momentum as it had during preproduction. More even. More.

Spell it. A - D - R

Remember that house with the basement with the editing suite near the concrete factory. Well, it's newest amenity is a semi-sound proof booth, complete with two styles of baffling, echo-killing insulation. It's still relatively new, so it is missing way to communicate with the person, or persons, doing the recording. Alex, the director, solved this problem by yelling instructions from the next room; hence, the 'semi' a few sentences back. Jon S. is planning on installing an intercom system.

ADR, if you don't know, stands for additional dialogue recording. You need this when the sound you originally recorded isn't 'fat'. Thin sound is bad, fat sound is good. But not too fat. If it's too fat, it will explode like Thunder from Big Trouble in Little China into a million pieces. Which brings us to our first scene of ADR, where Archie tinkers with his wheatgrass engine, which putters, but fails to really hum. No dialogue here, really, just interjections and exclamations. I'll try to get ahold of them so you can listen, but until then you'll just have to read about them. First was a 'ha-HA'. Now, this wasn't a laugh, but a discovery. It's a variation on 'A-ha', which is quite common in the inventor's argot. Then was "What the?", "Fa"(a truncated obscenity), then a couple moans, sighs and exhales.

I thought this process would be rather complicated, but it doesn't seem to be, at least not for me. I found it quite fun, but then Alex reminded me that we could be doing it completely wrong and have to throw out all of the sound. We're waiting to hear back from the post sound mixer on that one.

Later on we recorded some laughing for a scene in which the car starts on the mixture of human blood and wheatgrass juice for the first time and Archie is ecstatic. Now that I think about it, it was a lot like the 'ha-HA', only turned up to maybe a nine or ten. It was a little strange how I was able to perfectly replicate the 'ha-HA'ing from the previous, unusable audio. And believe it or not, this new stuff is much better. Before, I was a little luke-warm about this particular scene, but since we are having to ADR the entire scene, it's improved tremendously.

I also heard some striking words from director Alex today regarding a rather infamous drawing that is featured in the film. The drawing depicts an act of love in a...well, grisly manner. He said, "I don't know if that's going to stay in the movie." I'll admit it's raunchy, but Blood Car should have teeth and that drawing is one of the canines.

If you're wondering if we've changed any, we haven't. Alex still looks the same and so do I, except I have new eyeglasses.