Hello everyone this is Jerry, long time no talk. I haven’t posted a text comment on here in a while, but I’m just sitting here so I thought I would let everyone know what we have been up to the last week or so. First things first all the footage is captured in the computer and backed up on multiple hard drives to avoid any loss. Last thing we want is a hard drive to crash and lose our movie, that would suck. After 40 hours of logging footage and organizing we got to work on editng. Last Saturday and Sunday we pulled an edit fest and went to work (until 5am sunday morning). Going into this weekend we have a rough cut of about 15 minutes of footage. We are really liking the way things are cutting together, it is a good thing to think about editing when you are shooting it keeps things a little simpler in the editing room.

Now comes a new week, we are hard at work trying to get promotional things together. We need to print business cards as well as design shirts. We will be finishing up these things hopefully this weekend and we still are looking for our new logo, (for more info on that the post is to the right of where we are now.) T-shirts are a big thing we are trying to get in the works, so if anyone knows a screenprinter in the Kansas City/Warrensburg area that would be willing to work us a good deal please use the contact us and let us know.

Next on the agenda is PR. We have been looking at different avenues to get more people to know about the film. We are working with some public relations people to get a press release ready so we can send it off to newspapers and radio stations. We have contacts at the Ottawa Herald in Ottawa,Ks (thats where I graduated high school) also the cummulus radio stations in KC. We would like to get more outlets to send the release to so if you know anyone in the radio, tv, internet, or paper world that would be interested in giving us a little plug please contact us as well.

Little fun fact: We have had over 2500 viewers to this website since we launched mid-february. Thats good stuff.

Back to business. I went to The Offspring concert in Kansas City last weekend, it was awesome. While I was there I conducted some business which seem like I do everywhere I go now. I met a man from Family Video which is a movie rental place similar to Blockbuster. I was talking to him and he started talking about the possibility of getting 0:22:43 into a movie rental store. How awesome would that be, our movie available for rent. I will be contacting him today to find out more details and keep you fine people up to date. As of now I think that is what is in the works. We are still trying to meet the deadline of July 21st for Fright Night Film Fest in Louisville, KY, and we will be sending some of the rough cut to our composer Thom Proctor .

Also I know we say this all the time as we are still looking for donations. We have multiple things to still purchase to finish this film up. With your donation of $20 or more you will get a signed copy of the DVD, so think of your donation as reserving a copy of the film. If you dont have the means to donate at the moment please keep spreading the word, and become our fan or follow us on twitter by clicking the icons to the side which are links to the different places. Also you can still embed a video from our videos page on your social network site of choice and you will get a special thanks once we see it up and live. Once again thanks for everything from everyone thus far and we will be talking to you soon.

More photos and video will be up throughout the weekend so make sure to check back.

-Jerry-

Principal photography is a wrap for 0:22:43. Listen to what is to come for the film.

{seesmic_video:{“url_thumbnail”:{“value”:”http://t.seesmic.com/thumbnail/HHlTeEz864_th1.jpg”}”title”:{“value”:”Good Times and Bad ”}”videoUri”:{“value”:”http://www.seesmic.com/video/OUaEy28LjH”}}}
Sorry for the hands. I’ll learn to control myself.

We had a great, productive day! Sunday, March 8 marked the day we finalized our casting selections and added a little surprise to the whole project! The cast will be informed tomorrow and we hope to have a read-through of the script on Thursday.

Most importantly, we added a Donate button!  Generally speaking, we don’t like to beg for money, but we offer you the ability to donate via PayPal, if you so wish.  We have a huge list of equipment we would like to get before we start shooting and having a little extra cash to feed cast and crew is always appreciated.

We have seen a drastic increase in traffic since launching the site on January 31, 2009. We have had over a thousand page views and 241 unique visitors. A lot of that thanks goes to you, for coming to the site and reading what we have here. We are also pleased to see that a good portion of you are coming back to the site, even when there are only about a dozen actually subscribed.

This is amazing.  The amount of support has been overwhelming and humbling.  Thank you.

There have been a couple small changes to the site.  The “Casting Call” post was “stickied.”  Meaning it will stay in the number one spot until the auditions are over.  This is make sure that for everyone who wants to see the info, it will be there to be seen.

Also, we have taken the liberty to have the site create a daily post that just lists our Twitter posts for that day.  It’s pretty cool, because Twitter is a great tool for posting quick updates and pictures of our process.  Now, if you aren’t on Twitter, you can still see what we’ve been up to between these blog posts.

The actual pre-production process is going very well.  We are VERY close to finishing the final drafts of the script.  We just have to hammer out a couple pages of dialog, get our actors, get a read-through done, and boom, we can start on principle photography.  There’s still a lot of work, but a ton of fun left to have.

Saturdays and Sundays in April will be our primary shooting days.  We may have a couple of Friday shooting days if our schedules can handle it, but that will be primarily up to what our actors can swing.

Recruitment has gone very well, as I’m sure many of you know.  We went to several classes on UCM campus and gave our five minute (or so) spiel about the movie and what/who we’re looking for.  It was a pretty great experience because we saw many upon many heads and ears perk up at the mention of the opportunity to act or crew in a movie being made around Warrensburg, MO.  Your excitement is very much our excitement.  This movie would be VERY difficult to make if we didn’t have people like you behind us, supporting this crazy project we started.

We greatly appreciate subscribers and comments.  We know there are a LOT of you that visit the site every day and most of you stay here at least a couple minutes.  Maybe we’ll start doing little contests here and there.  Maybe we post video updates rather than text.  Give your thoughts.  Get those fingers typing and leave a comment or seven.  We really want to hear from you and get your feedback.

We have added the pictures from our first round of location scouting.  What we found, blew us away and we decided to use the location for the movie.

To see what we found, just check and click the Stills page up there above this post.  The pictures were taken by Jerry White and myself, with Allison Pullum’s drool-inducing Canon EOS 5D Mark II.  She also used her awesome photography skills to make them look good.  Check out her work.

UPDATE (Feb. 22, 2009): There is still some work to be done on the gallery.  It uses SimpleViewer and was constructed with Lightroom.  We just need to figure out how to get a link back to the site embedded inside the viewer.  Shouldn’t be too difficult, but for now, just stick with your back button.

Jerry informed me that there have been many of you having issues subscribing by email to 2243themovie.com.

I, personally, haven’t been able to recreate this problem, but I would like to try to fix it for those of you having issues.

I just tested the subscription service a few minutes ago and it appears to be working, but if you are getting an error message, take a screen capture or copy and paste it into an email to anthony@2243themovie.com.  Also include as much information about your computer as you can.  Things like operating system (Windows XP, Vista, Mac OSX, etc.), the browser you’re using (Internet Explorer, Firefox, etc.), all that stuff.

I will try to figure out what is going on and I will post this same message on the site.