We're Wrapped. No Fake.

This is the final shot we rolled last week. It was a nice change of pace, Brad and I just sat for two hours as the sun set. Usually we're running around, doing ten things at once, and worrying about eleven. We'll update everyone soon on our release information so don't forget about us.

We've learned a lot about filmmaking and about distribution. Once everything is finally pushed out we'll open the topic up and give what will hopefully be useful information for anyone hoping to follow a similar path.

Finishing the Movie

We spent the last weekend taking some extra B-Roll for the film… I know what you’re thinking it’s been over a year and we still aren’t done with it. Well we just want it to be as good as it can be when you guys actually do get to see it.

Friday we picked up all the gear including the camera checkout from Panavision, which took the majority of the day.



We drove to Palo Alto from LA on Saturday morning with my car jammed with gear. For such a simple shoot we didn’t think it would be necessary to get a grip truck… turns out it would have been nice but we made do without.



We mostly needed static shots of empty hallways/classroom/lockers/etc so we spent most of our time at a local high school shooting late into the night. It was pretty cool because we got to really focus on setting things up simply for pretty shots without having to deal with actors, sound, or coverage. As the director I didn’t really have to do much. Mostly I just sat around and assisted Rachel (our DP) with whatever she needed.

Saturday during the day we took some more daytime B-Roll all around Palo Alto. The Law family was kind enough to let me fly in their little Cesna plane to try for aerial shots of Palo Alto. A BIG thanks to Mr. Law and Uncle Ron!



I’ve heard that aerial photography out of a little plane doesn’t work so well because of vibration and poor angles of view. But once we got up in the air everything seemed to work perfectly. I was jammed in the backseat with the camera handheld looking out the passenger side window. We were able to get the window fully open so that it wouldn’t obscure our shots. I could lean out the window a little and tilt the camera down to get about 45 degrees and then Ron (the expert pilot) could tilt the plane a little more and we could get around 60-70 degrees which is pretty close to 90 degrees (ie looking straight down).



Rachel didn’t really want to start shooting day B-Roll till the sun got low enough so that the lighting didn’t look toppy - so we sat around until 5ish and then drove around PA until dark, picking up random pretty shots here and there.

All and all a pretty cool weekend.

We’ve got one final re-shoot to do and then, I promise we’ll be done and releasing. Things are in the works… thanks for staying interested!

-Brad

UCLA Screening

We had an advanced screening on the UCLA campus that was so full people were sitting on the floor. It went very well, and Brad, Ben, and Justin showed up during it so we all decided to do a little Q/A afterwards. I hope everyone enjoyed it, it was definitely fun for us because it was one of our better audiences.

We haven't made any 35mm prints of the film yet so we had to project digitally, which usually makes us nervous if the facility doesn't have top of the line cinema projector. UCLA of course did not, so before the screening we picked up the next best thing, a 1080P HD projector and hdmi DVD player from our favorite rental house, Circuit City. It was a damn good projector though and the picture looked better than some of the professional screening rooms we've been to.

Below is a picture of us on stage, with some shutter lag going on for some reason.

AFM Panel

SAGINDIE hosted a hosted a seminar at AFM (American Film Market) for the topic of "Do it yourself" filmmaking, and invited us to speak on the panel. The audience asked some pretty interesting questions and overall we had an itelligent discussion about how to make a low budget independent film and work with SAGINDIE. It would have been very educational if we had attended something like this right before going into production and I hope the people that came found it to be worth their time.

Vote for Cody's Film

Cody Foltz was the boom operator on PALO ALTO, and he just sent us a link to his team's entry in Apple's Insomnia Film Festival. If you want to check it out and vote, click the banner:



From what I can gather, each team had 24 hours to submit a 3 minute film that made use of certain elements (characters, dialogue, locations, etc) that Apple posted at minute one.

15 movies worth a look at AFF

We were included in Austin360.com's list of 15 movies to check out at AFF this year! Check out the complete list here.

PALO ALTO Update

We are excited to announce we will be screening at the Austin Film Festival!

Friday, October 12 at 9:15pm.
Alamo Drafthouse Lake Creek
13729 Research Blvd. Austin, TX 78750.

This is a very cool festival, and it's right next to UT so we'll hopefully get a young crowd to come out. For more info visit the Austin Film Festival Website. For those of you reading this ON the Austin Film Festival website, our full production blog can be found here, where you'll find stories from throughout the making of PALO ALTO.

Austin marks our first public screening since Tribeca. We'll hopefully play festivals and college campuses over the next few months, ultimately leading up to a major Bay Area premiere in the Spring. We're all anxious to screen in our hometown, but want to make sure we have all our distribution plans firmed up first. Thanks for staying tuned to the project.

-Daniel Engelhardt