Avatar and Christian Movies

Saw Avatar last night in 3d it was amazing. I was constantly suprised
by how real everything seemed and the 3d was not gimicky at all really
helped immerse you in the story. I can't wait to see it again.

One of the most amazing things about the movie is the fact that James
Cameron is able to make you cheer for the aliens and relate better to
them then you do the humans. Too ofton we get visually amazing movies
like this bur the characters are lacking do much that you don't care
the characters so it doesn't matter what the film looks like.

As I thought about this I began to realize that if James Cameron can
get us to care and root for these aliens that are so different from
ourselves why can't we Christians seem to make films that show people
how much Jesus cares about us.

The passion was a great film and probably brought a lot of people to
The lord but it did this through shock value not story. We Christians
need to stop making films for christians and start making films that
can reach non christians and help spread the light of Christ.

We to ofton try to tell the audience exactly what we want them to hear
when we make a film, and that does nothing but turn people off.

The best films make people think about their message without shoving
it down there throat. We are at war and we need to stop letting only
Hollywood spread it's views through film. To long we have let then
have full control of the film industry. Film is a powerful tool and
we need to start using it to spread the message of Christ.

Well this was a little ranty sorry about that. I will try to post
again soon. I know it has Been a while but we will have news of
vestige soon.

Well hey everyone it has been quite a while since I posted anything
(about a month) and I have been really busy working on vestige amongst
other things. You can ask my wife I have been in front of the computer
working on stuff almost every night and I can't believe how much is
still left to be done.

Anyways the movie should be completly finished by no later than the
middle of next month and hopefully sooner than that. Also shot a short
last night with my brother and a friend for the youth group at my
church hopefully that turned out all right will start editing that
today. That is at most a two day project though and wad pretty easy to
shoot so we will see.

Well I will try to update the website this weeken and put the short
there as soon as it is finished. Promises to be another busy weekend
followed by another busy week. I will again try to update more often
for the few that actually read this.

Oh and gonna go see district 9 today and then going to meet with a
film scoring guy after that so seems like it is going to be a pretty
exciting day can't wait.

The Website Number Two

I am slowly getting the website built now. Have all the pages left but one with at least the look we want. None of them are perfect at this point but we are slowly getting there. We have three podcasts up on Itunes now and should have 3.5 soon. I accidently left the end off of the last one because the call got dropped on skype. I plan to add an intro and outro hopefully tommorow and then put it up as a partial episode. We should also be recording a new podcast later this week seems like we have a ton to talk about and may even have a guest speaker or two.

Getting really close to finishing the movie, decided to make a few changes to the plot and were a few things happen just have to nail those down and shoot a few extra shots if we have too. Thats all for today keep checking back for more info.

The Website

We have another busy week ahead of us, we have a meeting Monday with someone who might be doing our foley fx. We also need to schedule the casting date for our next film “Worth Dying For.” For this film we are going to try and get the christian band “Worth Dying For.” Well thats all for today keep checking back for more information. As soon as we have the Casting date for the next movie I will post it on here. Check out our “Vestige page for some new stuff and a teaser Trailer. Until next time.

Jared and I Met with Jason today from Jadanica Productions. He is going to be the Director of Photography on our next film. It seems that he is going to be great to work with and I can't wait to get started on "Worth Dying For." If you need a videographer check out his web site jadanicaproductions.com he does great work.

Jared preached tonight at Calvary Assembly of God in Merced Ca. He also showed the first two minutes of the movie and everyone seemed to like it. We still have a few more tweeks to make and some more ADR to record but the movie is coming along nicely and if we can get the foley fx done we will be really close to being able to wrap up the post production.

Its been a while!

Well it has been a while since I posted anything and we have been really busy. I now have a trailer for our movie posted on my facebook page and hopefully we will have on up on the website pretty soon. We also have our second episode of the real cast up on Itunes. We are in the final stages sound editing, color correction, and effects for the movie and it should be done really soon.

We have also started on the pre-production for our next film and may already have the location for our major scenes in the movie. We have also had several people that are interested in joining us on our next movie so it is really becoming exciting. We will be casting for the next movie in the next few months so I will post on here when that will be, we will have an ad in our church buliten and probably one on craigslist as well.
Jared is starting to get the dvd ready so we can have a bunch of those made to sell, and we are really working on getting our website up and running.

Well that is really all of my news right now I will try to post more often now. So look for another post with in a couple of days.

3d Animation

Hello again and welcome back. This is Michael from Film Real Studios. This week I finished a rough cut of the movie and have sent some stuff off to our sound department and our vfx department. So they are going to get working heavily into that. We also shot all of the pick ups we needed so my next step is going to be all of the ADR (Automatic Dialogue Replacement.) I also will be running through the movie about a hundred times so I can tighten all of the shots. So everything flows well.

In the interim though Adam, Jared, and myself have talked about doing a sort of R and D project. We decided with this project we wouldn't limit ourselves on any concept or Idea so we are going to go full out. It is basically meant to push us too our limits and beyond. So one of the primary things we are going to do i learn to do some 3d animation. So we decided that we would all go ahead and learn Houdini.

I am really the only one in the group who has no experience with any type of 3d animation or 2d computer animation for that matter. Jared and I have at least started taking some online classes from 3dbuzz.com. For me though I find it hard to just sit and watch a class online with out really being able to follow along and do what he is doing myself. So I often get bored and will go and mess around with the program on my own. So I watch enough of the tutorials to get a some what basic understanding of the program. I finally got bored though and decided to strike off on my own to see what I could do. Well I have done this before with other programs and I have to say most of the time It either took me forever to figure out what to do or any thing I tried to do was basically a disaster.

Surprisingly this time seems to be different within a couple of hours of messing around I have some pretty good results. I am going to try and get back into the tutorials some more so I can really get into the program and see what I can churn out then. So far it is really fun and I am having problems not spending to much time in the program really working at it. So hopefully I will begin to post better and better pics of what I have done.

This week we watched another horror flick "Friday the 13th" the first one. I have to say wow this was cheesy and not scary at all. I don't think there was a single point were I was in any way scared, though the mom of Jason was very creepy although I do find it laughable that she supposedly overpowered all these young kids or had the strength to kill them all in one blow, but what ever. It was at least a very good example of the time period. So we will move onto bigger and better things.

Oh and one other thing we have finally gotten our podcast on Itunes you can find it by searching for "RealCast" Until next time, this is Michael Carpenter.

Thats a Wrap well maybe

Welcome back, this is now my third blog and hopefully I am getting progressively better at this but honestly who knows. Well this last weekend we got a lot more shooting done, and the two scenes we shot were probably our two most difficult things to shoot. Unfortunatly though we are going to have to almost entirely reshoot one of the scenes because the framing was bad. Not all was lost though we have a much better jumping off point when we go back to reshoot. Other than the aformentioned reshoot we really only have one scene left to shoot and we aren't going to do that for at least a couple of weeks.

Now begins the post production process, I know we technically aren't finished with production since we haven't filmed all the planned scense but we now are primarily working on post and the few shots we need will be shot with pickups.

I am now heavily into editing and it is going fairly well, but I am beginning to see the limitations of having only one camera to shoot wiht. Unfortunalty in many situations I don't have exactly what is needed to tie two shots together so those will be the primary make up of our pickups. I am slowely begining to see the movie take shape and it is pretty exciting. Jared is now getting into the effects and color correction process and I have sent the first scene to our foley artist Adam so he can get to work now. We seem to be quickly approaching the completion of our first short as a company and hopefully by the end of April we will be begining the touring process or at least have a good idea of when it will start.

As all of this is going on we have also begun the early stages of preproduction on our next film and if I can say this one has even more potential than the film we are working on. I am definitly excited about what we can do with the next movie. It is going to be sort of a Christian horror film and should be pretty amazing. Also our website www.filmrealstudios.org is currently undergoing some updates. We have just added the first episode of our podcast which is titled the "Real Cast" which you can download from our website and hopefully soon will be able to download via Itunes.

This last week my wife (Wendy) had a great idea. While we at Film Real Studios all love movies especially my wife and I, by no means have we seen everything there is to see. So we decided that we wanted to watch as many movies as we can and use what we learn from them to help make us better movie makers. We have split them up by genre and we are currently watching horror films because that is our next project. This week we watched "Silence of the Lambs" and the "Descent." Now I have never seen either of these movies but I ws the only one. My wife had seen the first but not being a horror fan hadn't seen any recent movies like the Descent.

Silence of the Lambs has obviously had a pretty big impact and is a fairly well known film. Watching it almost 20 years after it was filmed certainly detracted from my experience. You can definetly tell the era it was filmed in. There was a lot of interesting things done in that film though and a lot of interesting camera angles. I don't think it would have been even close to what it is without Anthony Hopkins and Lector. Over all the acting was great and the movie was very suspensful.

The Descent was definitly not a great movie in my opinion but had some beautiful shots thrown into the movie. The biggest detractor at least for me was the main antagonist was a creature that to me resembled Gollum from "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy. Now I guess you could argue the similar curcimstances can and do lead to similar results, but to me seeing gollum attack these characters over and over again just took me out of the film. I two main characters figurative descent into madness quite interesting, but thought that a lot of there story was just thrown in so that the final character that survives would have a reason to kill the other one. The beginning of the movie in my opinion really didnt belong in the film it served no real purpose. I also hated the classic run for your life horror scene in the hospital it really had no purpose other than to try to inject horror elements into the movie 20 minutes before the horror really began.

This is Michael Carpenter from Film Real Studios and that's all for today thanks for reading and check back in a week or so for my next blog.

Guns, Podcasts, and Acting

Hello and welcome to my second blog ever. This is Michael from film real studios. I hope you enjoyed the last blog and that you will enjoy this one as well. Since the last blog we have had two additional shoot days, We had our friend Adam come up from Fresno to help us out. Our plan had been to get two or three volunteers from a local church to be basically soldiers/scavengers, and we had budgeted money too feed them and possibly provide gas money if they traveled from far away. So when he decided to come up and since he was also willing to take one of the small parts I decided that rather than have to ask someone else that we don't really know to do the second part that I would go ahead and do it.

I had originally decided that I would no longer be in front of the Camera at all because I wanted to focus on the production of the film, and I am not confident in my acting ability, I did used to be in drama as a youth in church and we did win some awards as that drama team, but I still didn't want to be in the position of having to direct and act. Anyways to save money and time I decided it would be easier if I was the second so we went out and shot with Adam.

The shoot went really well I have to say, especially since I figured this would be one of our toughest few shooting days. The biggest problem I foresaw was that since Adam and I were both soldier type characters we would be carrying Gun's during the entire time we are on camera. Some of this time we are walking around my apartment complex, and I could just imagine someone thinking we were walking around with real guns and calling the police. Now none of the guns we were carrying around were real (they were all of the air soft variety) they looked very real and even had the requisite orange tips removed. So we were very careful about keeping the guns out of site for as long as possible. We even spent well over an hour practicing a particularly complex shot before we went back to shoot it. All ended up going well with the shoot and we only have a few more scenes left to film. So hopefully we will be getting this completed by the end of April and begin our tour of Churches this summer.

I also participated in my first podcast this week (with Adam Jared and myself) it is going to be a regular podcast that will be posted on our website: www.filmrealstudios.org, I also hope to get in on Itunes as soon as possible. The first one isn't up yet but should be there in the next couple of days. One of the segments I look forward to recording is what we are calling the Random topic of the Day. Basically this is going to be either a topic that has been recently discussed by us (the podcasters) or a topic sent in by the listeners. We will soon establish and email that can be used for the podcast itself but until then if you have any suggestions for the Random topic you can email us at filmrealstudios@gmail.com. Also if you are interested check out the other Film Real Studios blog at www.filmrealstudios.blogspot.com.

Well thats all for today and until next time thank you for reading.

Procrastination

Well this is my first post and I am posting it from my iPhone so
pardon any errors. Well let me start by telling you a little about
myself and what I intend to do with this blog. Well I am currently co
owner of a start up film studio named Film Real Studios.
Our goal is to elevate the Christian film genre so it is no longer
looked down upon by the masses. It seems to be a lofty goal and I am
sure it has been tried before but hopefully our unique backgrounds
will enable us to achieve our goal. I have grown u loving movies. I
often quote my favorite movies in everyday conversation. In fact my
wife and I will often randomly quote a movie then force the other to
guess said movie and if unable guess will proceed to mock them for
their ignorance. Well back to the blog. My intentions for this blog
are to discuss the varied aspects of the film making process but being
a fan of many things including but not limited to: NASCAR movies,
fantasy or scifi novels and various TV shows, I'm sure that from time
to time I will invariably comment on those things.

Well as I'm sure you noticed this blog is titled procrastination. So
on to the topic of this post. Well as my wife will undoubtedly confirm
I tend to procrastinate. I am currently editing the portion of the
short film we have already shot. Well all week I fave been telling
myself I need to sit down and get some editing done but my older son
is off visiting my aunt so my wife and I have had the chance to get
caught up on the various shoes we don't watch when he is awake or at
least in the living room. These aren't terrible shows mind you but
things like heroes and csi which are just to violent to watch with my
three year old son. On top of that my wifes laptop is not functioning,
she is our administrator, is using my pc to research all the things we
will need to start the tour of our short film once it is completed.
So there was another excuse to not edit. Well last night it was crunch
time I needed to have as much editing done as possible so I could show
it today before we went out to shoot. So I sat down to edit at around
5 and ended up spending till 9:30 editing. I realize now that I
should have just stopped there and gone to bed, u see I work at 4:30
am, but I wanted to be able you show it on my tv. So I decided I would
export it and then burn it to a dvd after all exporting was only going
to take 20mins and how long could it take to burn a simple DVD. Well
once I decide to do something it takes a lot to derail me. So right
before the video finished exporting the program crashes. Well it is
about 10 by now and I convince myself to have one more go at it. So I
export it for the second time and at about 10:30 it finishes
successfully. Well onto the simple DVD burning process or do I
thought. My stupid dvd r drive refused to recognize my dvdr. Well to
prevent an already long blog from becoming longer I will cut this
short and say I ended up spending the next hour trouble shooting my
dvdr drive. I never got it fixed and ended up just going to bed in frustration. Thats all for today. Until next time thank you for reading.