‎$6 Film School: read the production details, and then watch Terrence Malick‘s “Days of Heaven.”

Notice where the light is coming from in the different shots… what time they must have shot which scenes… it’s sort of crazy.

I may have contacted Woody Harrelson using a small metal cube (actually a cuboctahedron) created with psychic energy.  We’ll see!

We’ve just wrapped principal photography on I WORK FOR NEMESIS! I’m very excited and relieved.

Thanks to every agent and operative in NEMESIS! Future generations of the Free World thank you.

Scary Cow, the film collective I belong to, now has a page with all the open acting roles.

Yowza! Merry Christmas!

Still hard at work on I WORK FOR NEMESIS, which now has a Facebook page. Two locations remain!

In other news, I got a shout-out from RAOUL HERNANDEZ in his fun (thought-provoking?) article Vinyl Ashes – Your remains at 45 rpm?. Whee!

Preproduction is gaining steam for I WORK FOR NEMESIS and I’m very excited about our actors and our production team. Website to come soon.

UPDATE: copies now available for sale at The Retina Burn shop.

I know this has nothing to do with I WORK FOR NEMESIS or Devious, Inc., but I had to share this:

A few years ago (2002?) I made this “accessible” cube puzzle by simply gluing/drilling an existing cube. The goal was to get an intuitive sense of “where the cubes went” when a face was turned – by holding the back and viewing the front, the cubist can sense all faces at all times. This makes the design ideal for puzzling in the dark (which I did) but also as an enhancement for the visually-impaired without sacrificing usability for the sighted.

Additionally, many “blind” people are not entirely blind, so any bright color differences would help them visually distinguish any two faces. To this end, I removed the red face, replacing it with black, because in dim light it looks too much like orange. Arguably I could have done the same with yellow vs white, or green vs blue, but the textures were different enough it wasn’t necessary.

Note that if I had used a simple braille solution with the labeller, the result is quite unusable – a single turn and a given braille character is read as a different letter, if it isn’t already sideways. And reading braille backwards on the reverse of a cube… tricky.

Each face has a unique color, shape, and texture, with the each face’s modification material chosen for ease of recognition relative to the other faces.

Since then, the cube modification scene has blossomed, with puzzle designers like Tony Fisher and M. Oskar van Deventer using resin casting and 3d printing to make shapes not even based on the original 3×3 Rubik’s cube.

• We’re ramping up on a secret project called I WORK FOR NEMESIS!
• Devious, Inc., a Hella Fresh production, is being submitted to film festivals – wish us luck!

The award-winning “Cult Fiction,” directed by DC Kasundra, is available for viewing online.

I lit this film with Stan Ng, and it looks pretty good, if I say so myself! Tom K was the DP.

Watch for my 1-second “background artist” cameo!

Cult Fiction from Dead Set Films on Vimeo.

March and April have been busy months!

We began March with finishing Principal Photography for Episode 2 of The Templetons, shot all on HD in a studio against a professional chroma screen.  Work continues on that to get the effects done, as Writer/Cartoonist Matt Voss draws all the backgrounds.  The Templetons Episode 2 was shot by Tom Krymkowski and will be screened / released sometime in Fall 2009.

April projects in production:

• Postproduction continues on Hella Fresh’s production Devious, Inc. (which incidentally was also shot by Tom Krymkowski)
• Matt Voss and I did a quick stint on Michael Schrecker’s music video for local band Fingermonsters (moving animated backgrounds)
• In association with Scary Cow Productions, I’m lighting Digant’s Kasundra’s hysterical new “cult movie,” which this time is literally about a cult… shot by Tom Krymkowski. Hmm, is there a trend here?
• We’re in “effects trials” preproduction for my personal project, a horror-themed short film. On camera is… uh… Tom Krymkowski. What is the deal with this guy?

Maybe I should get Tom to work on the Finger Monsters video!