| | | | KillHer World Premiere Screamfest 2022 TCL Chinese 6 - Hollywood
Ok, I suppose before I plug my new film, I have some explaining to do. Mainly, where have I been the last 9 months?!
The easy explanation is I took an unintentional sabbatical from No Budget Film School. The longer, more complicated story involves COVID, work, and personal life spilling over into professional life.
Quickly, with COVID slowly (and stubbornly) moving into the background, film production really picked up over the last year, and I found myself working on back-to-back-to-back projects. I didn't produce any of these projects, but I have been very involved in both production and post for all of them. For the last several years, I have been partnering with a line producer friend of mine named Liam Finn on multiple feature films (and one TV series), with budgets ranging from $250k to over $1.5 million. Usually, I am the production accountant during production (and often the DIT), and then I become the post production supervisor. In effect, Liam is the production manager during production, and I am the production manager in post. I am currently in post on three feature films right now--more about one of them in a sec...
While I don't want to bore you with my personal life, it's a big reason I haven't been teaching any classes this year or doing any of my Zoom programs, like No Budget Confidential. I have spent most of my non-working time in North Carolina helping care for my nearly-93 year old mother. The travel back and forth makes it difficult to schedule programs.
BUT, as these film projects wind down, I do hope to ramp up more No Budget Film School activities. I have some great ideas for No Budget Confidential and a new class I'd like to teach, so let's see what 2023 brings. |
| | Ok, now regarding those film projects, I started working on one of them last September and a year later, we're world premiering the film--cheekily called KillHer--at LA's largest and oldest genre festival, Screamfest Horror Film Festival. I can't reveal the budget to you yet, but it was very low. Not necessarily "no budget" or "micro-budget," but we certainly applied a lot of micro-budget techniques. For what we were trying to pull off, we had a tiny crew, shot a short (12 day) schedule, and mostly shot in one location, though it doesn't feel like that when you watch it. As is typical with these kinds of projects, we had a pitifully small post budget. And in this department particularly, I am incredibly proud of what we pulled off. We had over 100 VFX shots and nearly 450 post effects shots overall; over an hour of score written for the movie; and over 20 licensed songs (using Artlist, and paying only $200 total for those). And being a horror film, the sound design is quite involved.
I think the production values speak for themselves, and the performances, camera work, and production design are all punching way above their weight.
I invite all of you who live in Los Angeles to come down to our world premiere this Thursday at the Chinese Theater 6 in Hollywood. The screening is at 9:30pm and most of our cast and crew will be in attendance, so you'll get to ask any of them questions during the Q&A or after the show. And if you want to know what we spent, find me in the lobby and I'll be happy to share budget info, on the DL.
And if you're a fan of horror and are looking to get into that Halloween spirit, this will be a great opportunity. The film is a lot of fun--it's funny, campy, gory and clever. The cast really goes for it and our tiny crew and exceptionally creative director--Robyn August--really gave it their all. I'm so excited to be finally sharing this little film with a big audience, (we're in the 450 seat theater over there).
Here's a little, bitty taste... |
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For more information, including a synopsis, and to purchase tickets to the screening, click the button below:
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I hope some of you can make it. I'll probably write more about how we did some of the stuff we did on this film in a later mailing. Some great lessons here. And I look forward to getting back into the No Budget Film School way soon. I've been observing so many changes right now--in production, in post production, and in distribution. So much to pass along to all of you. I hope this has been a productive (and safe) year for you all!
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