• We now have a phone number! Go to http://2243themovie.com & find the Call Me widget. More info in a video later. #fb #

Alex gets jumped by a surprise guest.

This is about 45 minutes of makeup prep sped up to fill a touch less than 6 minutes. Why was Mike Wilson getting made up like that? Oh… we can’t really tell you that, but let us guarantee you that it’s really cool.

We really appreciate thoughts, comments, feelings, etc, so please drop us a line on what you think. Leave a comment below.

The past two weeks, we have failed to post an after action video.  We apologize.  Turns out this “making a movie” thing is actually pretty tiring.  So, here is what’s been going on:

We had a great past couple of weeks.  Due to the schedules of our actors and crew, we’ve had to juggle around the schedule and boy, oh boy, juggle we did.  Turns out, though, that our schedule is much more flexible and doable than we thought.  The result of this is that we are about a day and a half ahead of schedule.  Not a lot, but still pretty dang good.

This last weekend (April 11 & 12) we did a lot.  Saturday, we decided to really take advantage of the good weather and knocked out 17 pages of script in that single day.  For those of you who don’t know, that’s pretty unheard of.  That was about three days of work we had originally planned, but with the crappy weather we’ve been getting lately, we just went whole hog and it paid off.

Sunday, we attempted to preempt the rain, so we canceled and had a day off.  It was nice, but the rain we were expected didn’t come until AFTER we were schedule to wrap.  Oh well, we can’t win ‘em all.

That’s not to say that everything has been going peachy.  We did have a couple of problems that we powered through on Saturday.  I won’t bring you down with the details, but let’s just say that a green-screen needs a lot of set up time and can cause tempers to fray a bit.  However, despite the creative/procedural differences, we just laid aside our problems, worked together, and rocked a 17 page day.  No matter what, that is a good day.

Over the past weeks, we’ve had a lot of support from you, the fan base!  In fact, we have raised almost $80 from just donations alone.  That may sound like a lot, but don’t let that dissuade you from clicking that Donate! button.  Every donation comes with a personal Thank You video from all the Cast and Crew and if you donate more than $10, we will make sure to ship you a copy of the movie when we have finished.  It’s a pretty sweet deal.

In lieu of actual posts, video or otherwise, we have been posting many promo and behind the scenes videos.  This has been very well received and are really humbled by the responses we’ve gotten from our videos.  Many of the behind the scenes stuff can be seen by clicking the Videos button up at the top of this page. The promo videos pretty much all live on the Facebook Fan Page.

The Fan Page has been an amazing tool to communicate with all of you.  At the time of writing, we have 231 fans.  No wonder Facebook is our second largest source of traffic to this site.  Behind only direct, typing in the address, traffic.  This really shows us that we have a lot really great people excited about our project and we can’t wait to let you guys see our vision!

I think at over 500 words, it’s about time to stop.  That should pretty much cover all of our news up to this point, anyway.  Remember: We LOVE comments, so please, leave a comment, an @ reply on Twitter, a comment on the Facebook Fan Page, anything.  YOU are the reason we have the ability to leave comments and we LOVE to interact with our community!

Sorry for the long dry spell.  The 0:22:43 trio were out on Spring Break, giving ourselves some much deserved time away from the project.  Now, we’re back and ready to take this head on and Hustle!  The link is a little something from me… the content is not approved by Jerry or Allie (yet).

There is a lot to talk about, but some I can’t just yet. First, we have secured a microphone.  It’s a small thing, we realize, but also very HUGE for the fact that we have so little money right now.  I could go into all the nitty gritty technical details of the microphone, but I won’t.  Mostly because we have a couple of surprises planned for you guys in the coming week.  Also, one of those surprises might be a bit shameless… just to warn you.

We are very close to final stages of preproduction, which is good considering production starts this weekend on March 28.  The final and no doubt awesome read through will happen on Wednesday at 5pm in the James C Kirkpatrick Library Room 2305.  Same room as the auditions and the first read through.  This second run through should be a lot better than the first and a bit more lively.  I know most of you weren’t there, but I’m thinking of ways to possibly change that for this second time around.  Keep an eye on the site!

That should cover most of what has happened and will happen.  The next few posts should be a bit more visually interesting. I promise.

PS: Tell your friends and family about that Donate button! See?  I told you we can be shameless.

{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.

There were some issues with the site constantly posting to twitter. Then a post being made from the twitter posts, and then a vicious circle gets started.

I hope I’ve fixed the cause, so there shouldn’t be any more posts that list a previous post as a twitter. Sorry for the inconvenience. There always seem to be bugs that need ironing.

• What We Twittered on 2009-02-26 ~ http://tinyurl.com/ajfvxh #
• Casting Call! ~ http://tinyurl.com/dbzud7 #
• Success! Or Really Close To It. ~ http://tinyurl.com/bkaok7 #
• Casting Call! ~ http://tinyurl.com/dbzud7 #

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 are going to talk to Lori Stone’s 11am class and John Smead’s 2pm class for more recruitment. This is hustle at its best! #
• We got a lot of new subscribers and a lot of interest in both cast and crew positions from the classes we talked to! #