I've finally had the chance to import some pictures from the TCK premier. Here are a few moments from the TCK after party:

Bryan, Brian McGuire, and PJ Raval.

Statesman film critic Chris Garcia and documentary filmmaker Margaret Brown.

Karen Skloss, good friend, filmmaker, and actress. She played a small part in TCK.

A somewhat shocked Tom Willett, co-writer of TCK.

Our agent, Brant Rose and his wife Toochis.

Bjorn Billhardt, CEO of Enspire Learning, a fast-growing online education company that I and many other filmmakers in the Austin community have worked with.

Austin Movie Show hosts Leila and Jegar!

Actor/Writer/Comedian and Enspire Learning employee Shannon McCormick and me doing my best impersonation of Judah Friedlander.

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I have a temporary new blog spot over at IndieWire for the duration of SXSW. They want to get my views/rants during the fest. So look over there for my entries over the next week or so.

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Just finished doing our KGSR morning radio spot. Now I'm headed over to the sound mix. Things have just been insane, and insanely busy. We will literally be working on the film up to the last minute before the screening. But the sound mix is going really well and things are slowly but surely falling into place. Our score is 99% finished, our picture is color-corrected and it looks beautiful, our sound is great, and the publicity machine is in full swing. Now if we could only get our *#&$*ing *%#$ to &$*@!

I recently heard an interesting piece of wisdom: rarely do you reach 100%. In any artistic endeavor you aim for your vision, you set the bar high, etc. And if you get 80% or even 70% there, you're doing great. 100% is your career high. That takes time, experience, resources, and luck. I'm keeping that in mind as we race to the finish line.

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Well, folks, I'm back at Matchframe LA color-correcting The Cassidy Kids. It's a beautiful thing to watch your movie on a 30" HD monitor -- it'll probably never look better than it will these next three days. PJ Raval, our cinematographer, is here with me and we're making our way through the opening credits right now with our colorist, Mickey. We're attempting to get the TV show to look a little like The Brady Bunch. Mickey got it on the nose.

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This just posted today.

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Here it is, folks.

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I'm back in Austin for a week to cut a trailer and finish up some grahics work. Will post the trailer as soon as it's done which should be next week.

Yesterday I lent my voice to an animated film that Seth Caplan is producing called Flatland. It's a story that takes place in a 2-dimensional universe. I play the corrupt head of circles, Pantocyclis. I modeled my voice after Sean Connery, Emporer Palpatine, and Dennis Hastert. Today I am hoarse.

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Here are two stills from the movie that we are using for publicity.

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Well it looks like the Austin Chronicle has the scoop on some films that will play at SXSW this year. I can neither confirm nor deny this report, except that I confirm it. I'm thrilled to say that The Cassidy Kids will premiere at SXSW! Woo!

I'm also very happy to see that Gretchen will also premiere there. Congratulations Steve!

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I'd like to point readers to Ian Blake's new blog. He plays Scooter Cassidy in TCK and he's here in LA having some auditions. Good luck, Scooter!

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I ran into Braedon (young Norman in TCK) at the Grove yesterday. It's only been 5 months since we shot the film and he already looks a lot older. I think Ian and Drew might be out here too. If you kids are reading this send a comment, include your email and let's get together.

I ate breakfast at this place called John O'Groats on Pico and Manning and sitting at the next table was Peter Boyle. You may recall that he played the monster in Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein -- he's done a ton of other movies too, but I'll always remember him in that film.

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Check out this mention of The Cassidy Kids in the current issue of Filmmaker Magazine. We were interviewed for this piece a couple of months back.

I landed in LA two nights ago. Been driving around town with a car filled with my belongings looking for a place to live. Hope to find something today. Lot of work to do here.

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It's going to be another looong night on TCK. We're making our way through reel 3 out of 6 at the present moment and it looks like Jeff, the engineer, and I will be here until 1am (we started at 9am). But I'm fine with that because I get to watch the movie on a glorious 30" HD monitor. The only drawback is that as I sit here surfing the net and only occasionally having to give input to Jeff (who's an artist with an Avid), I end up eating a lot of junk food -- they've got it laying around everywhere! Reeces pieces, Butterfingers, Cheetos, Gummy Life Savors, Skittles, Hershey's, Look! My heart is pumping overtime. Jeff says that Match Frame is known locally as Snack Frame. I'm dying for some Mr. Natural from back home.

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As Bryan reported yesterday on his blog, we had some serious technical issues getting ready for the online session. Final Cut bottomed out on us -- clips went missing, render files got corrupted, and basically nothing was reliable. By some miracle (named Kyle Henry) we were able to output all the necessary files. Now I'm here at MatchFrame LA working with Jeff, our online engineer, building the movie up from our original master tapes. It's great because now I can watch the footage on an Hi-Def monitor and see what it really looks like. For months we've been working with a low-res version of the film on a regular NTSC monitor.

Some of the files that we need are actually not here yet. They're on a plane from Austin that should be arriving around 11:30. So it's a little slow-going right now. There's not a whole lot we can do without those files. We've got a lot to do in the next 2 days so as soon as those files arrive we should be able to move very quickly.

I'm crashing at Brian McGuire's house while I'm here. He and good friend Alex Holdridge have formed a band and they were practicing last night. Another bit of news is that Alex is going to shoot another feature in January. It'll be a low-budg, run-n-gun affair shot on the new HDV camera based on a script that Alex has been working on for about six months. Brian and Alex will act in it, Robert Murphy is flying in to shoot it. Sounds like a great project and I can't wait to see it.

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It's official, we locked picture on The Cassidy Kids last night. Now we're in the middle of a complicated process of outputing an accurate EDL (edit decision list) which requires that I stay in the edit room all night rendering sequences, importing sequences, rendering them again, watching them to make sure there are no scenes missing, and then repeat the whole process over and over again. On Tuesday I'll pack my bags full of master tapes and firewire drives and fly to LA where I'll spend another three days doing the online. Then I break for Christmas.

After Christmas a team of hotshot sound editing students will begin the process of editing sound for the film. They'll spend two months doing that and then our Sound Designer will do a final mix of the soundtrack. So although we won't be making any more changes to the picture, work on the soundtrack has only just begun and there's still more work to be done.

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We picture-lock for the second time on Saturday. (The only thing better than picture locking your film once is picture locking it twice. It's like a the deadbolt lock on your door, gives you that added protection against the outside world of mediocrity.)

Before we can lock picture however we have to shoot a few extra shots that we didn't get during principal photography. These include various establishing shots of the Peabody house, the Vanderpool house, the hospital, and a shot of young Dennis turning off his alarm clock in the morning, and riding through a baseball field on his bike. We're getting these shots today, in fact. Jonathan, who plays Dennis, is in from Houston to do the filming with us. The crew will be arriving at my place this morning in about 20 min to get the alarm clock shot. Breakfast tacos are on the way!

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If you're hip you don't say "I saw Aeon Flux last night!" Instead you say, "I saw Flux last night!" That's if you're hip. If you hear someone call it by it's full name, that's how you know they're not one of the innovators, the trend-setters, or the image makers. That's how you know.

So I saw Aeon Flux last night and it sucked. Well, it didn't suck, it was actually more watchable than I had expected. That is partly because we were treated to some form of pre-show entertainment from the theater manager just before the movie started. He was telling the crowd about their new idea (!) of having Monday night football screenings, and their plans for selling alcohol to patrons. Sounds to me like they're trying to tap into the success of the Alamo Drafthouse. They've been doing weekend football sceenings for a couple of years now. And of course they sell alcohol. Anyway, part of this pre-show announcement was an effort on the manager's part to sort of undersell the movie we were about to see. I think he really was trying to lower our expectations about Aeon Flux (some people just call it Flux) in the hopes that we would enjoy ourselves. I have to say it didn't work completely, but I didn't hate the movie or anything.

One thing about the movie that was cool was that they shot it in Berlin in some very futuristic looking locations. Berlin has some amazing architecture and a lot of it is very modern. That's one of the things I really loved about Berlin when I was there in 2002. There was a great mix of old-world buildings and uber modern devo-construction modernism (look it up). It is a place where the old and the new collide, which is entirely to be expected when you consider the events in history which have taken place there (i.e. National Socialism, the fall of the iron curtain, the filming of Aeon Flux, etc).

Which brings me to The Cassidy Kids. We're about to lock picture for the second time, about to start scoring the music, about to shoot some pickup shots which will make the film flow even better. I'll try my best to update this blog more often. Expect a series of articles on the unrequited lesbian aesthetic apparent in Flux.

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We reached a major milestone today -- we completed a version of the film that will soon be seen by the Sundance committee. We send it off tomorrow and I think the film is in very good shape. There are still two weeks until picture lock but we're at a point now where we need to rest for a couple of days, take a breather, and then regroup. But for now our minds our on sleep and Tylenol.

I'm watching part 2 of The Sorrow and the Pity, about the German occupation of France in WWII.

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As Bryan reported earlier on his blog, we've been able to take out a 6 whole minutes from the first act. This took us totally by surprise. We knew that we were making a lot of trims but I had no idea that we'd be able to trim that much from just the first act of the film.

Today Kyle is transferring our media to a new set of drives. After he's done with that we're going to try to barrel through the second act and then maybe we can get the third act done on Friday. Needless to say I'm very excited by this version of the film.

In other news.... INDICTMENTS! INDICTMENTS! INDICTMENTS!

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After a very imformative rough cut screening this past weekend we now have a very clear idea of what's working and what's not. So now I'm in the editing room working on a re-structuring of the opening sequence. Can't say too much except to point out that I'm very excited by the changes we're about to make.

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...went great! The temp music we added went a long way to helping the story flow smoothly. And afterwards we got a lot of great feedback about what is working and what's not, what is confusing and how we can tighten up certain parts. I think it was a successful rough cut screening in that we learned so much about where to go from here.

So now over the next week we'll make revisions and then we'll have another screening at AFS on Nov 2. We'll actually be doing some kind of moderated discussion after the screening which should be very interesting.

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We've been editing like mad this week, preparing the film for a screening tomorrow morning. Late last night Bryan and I went to Waterloo Records to see if we could find some appropriate temp music to use in the film. We ended up pulling some tracks from a few different soundtracks.

I've been watching Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage, the television series version that the Criterion Collection put out. It is a fascinating series because he taps into the never-ending evolution of relationships. Johan and Marianne never really break up, even though they get a divorce. They go through denial, divorce, violence, infidelity, but the relationship always continues in some way or another. You think he's going to walk right out the door and then at the last minute both of them do an about-face and rush back into each other's arms. They'll make bold pronouncements about loneliness and love and then suddenly they'll realize that it's all just talk. On and on, over the course of years we see this couple change and grow, divorce and find each other again. It's sometimes hard to watch but it is never gratuitous or over the top. And it's not even that depressing really.

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Finished up a revision to act 1 last night. Begin work on part 1 of act 2 today. Going to LA this weekend.

I can't help but be thoroughly excited about the approaching finale to the Fitzgerald investigation into the Plame leak. They say that he's onto something bigger than just the leak itself. Some say what he's doing is criminal - others say it's high time Libby and Rove get canned. Whichever side of the issue you fall into, one thing is for certain: these are interesting times.

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Well it looks like we won't be getting any editing done today due to problems with the SAN Raid server. The damn thing has been beeping for weeks and we've had all kinds of minor issues. But today the drives won't mount and that means we can't get to the media, which means we can't do work. Kyle has been on the phone with SAN all day long trying to figure out how to get our server off life-support. Maybe it's the Raid control card? Maybe it's a faulty drive? In either case they may have to ship us new hardward which could mean an even longer delay.

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Watched The Passion of Anna (Bergman) and My Best Fiend (Herzog) last night. My Best Fiend is about the unique working relationship between director Werner Herzog and megalomaniacal actor Klaus Kinski.

Kyle and I made revisions to the first half of Act 1 yesterday. Maybe today we can get through the first part of Act 2. We also had a meeting about reshoots yesterday -- we wouldn't actually be re-shooting more than one or two shots, though we will shoot additional establishing shots and inserts.

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For years I passed over the films of Ingmar Bergman for whatever reason. Maybe it was because he is such a giant of cinema that I felt I wasn't ready to take him in yet (similar to how they say you're never really ready to have children). Well I finally dived into the Bergman cannon and I'm glad I did. I just finished watching Fanny and Alexander, the television version (which runs 312 min). I don't know what I was expecting but I was completely taken by surprise by the shift that happens halfway through the story. In a way it is the Twin Peaks of Sweden. Maybe that's not the best analogy but it does take you on a journey that you never expected to take.

Scenes from a Marriage is up next. Last week I watched Cries and Whispers and Persona, both amazing.

Today we begin work on the 3rd draft of TCK. Bryan compiled a list of notes we received from our colleagues who came to the rough cut screening. We know exactly what we'd like to do with this cut. Qasim Naqvi, our composer, is currently working on a composition for the opening credits.

And if you were on the crew and you're reading this and you haven't yet picked up your t-shirt, come by and pick it up asap. Otherwise we're going to give it away to other deserving folks!

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So much has happened in the last couple of weeks that it's hard to keep up a record of it. I've seen a handful of really fantastic films and today we watched a rough cut of TCK.

First, the films. A lot of these are older films that I'm just trying to catch up on. I have some significant gaps in my film knowledge so I'm trying to go back and see everything I've ever heard about and some that I haven't...

Star 80 - very disturbing film about the death of Dorothy Stratten. I think what is disturbing about this film is that I started to identify with the killer in the movie, which of course gives one pause to reflect on whether or not you're going crazy. But I talked to a good friend who had the same experience as me and we both agreed that that is what makes the film so interesting and disturbing. And it's directed by Bob Fosse who is nothing less than brilliant. [Additional note: While I said that I began to 'identify with the killer,' what I meant was that Fosse had created a uniquely complex murderer, one whose constant inner turmoil is a magnification of one's own inner battle between right and wrong. In no way did I intend that Ms. Stratten deserved to be killed.]

The High and the Mighty - Yowsers! Times have sure changed! I heard Tim McCanlies say that this movie created the disaster movie genre. John Wayne is an old flyboy who helps Robert Stack safely bring in an airliner that's lost an engine. We get to know the foibles of each of the passengers and in the process we get to see how crazy the world has gotten (or maybe how crazy the world was back in 1954 when this film was made). Not only do people in the film smoke on planes and do not have to show identification at the ticket counter, but apparently they also can walk right onto a plane with a handgun in their pocket!

Women in Love - All I can say is Ken Russell is a genius-freak. This movie sports a wrestling match between two naked men (one of them Oliver Reed) in front of a huge roaring fireplace. One has to see it to believe it. See it if you haven't.

And finally...

The Cassidy Kids - We watched our second rough cut today (which ran about 1 hr 40 min) and we learned a helluva lot about where to take the next cut of it. Got some great feedback and criticism from a few colleagues and I feel good about where we're at. We have a lot of work ahead of us, but what else is new? We have very specific ideas about how to improve it which is all that we could ask from a rough cut screening. Very exciting indeed.

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Everythings going well on TCK. I've re-ordered the entire film and Kyle and I are now going into each scene, tightening and revising everything. We'll probably sit down and watch the whole thing sometime this weekend depending on how much progress we make this week. One frustrating part of the process is that it's going to take a full day and a half to prepare the movie for the screening. We'll keep working on it for that day and a half, so there will be somethings in the screening that are already outdated. Sometimes technology just sucks.

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Putting together the first rough cut is a thoroghly depressing endeavor. It's been said that your film is never as good as your dailies and never as bad as your first rough cut. They say that because your first rough cut is always painful to watch. It's like the baby just came out and it's all gross and bloody and his head's all deformed and you gotta slap it around to make sure it's breathing. If your lucky your baby will grow into someone really smart and pretty and interesting, but for right now it's just an ugly baby with lots of potential.

In any case I've been trying to polish up Act 1 of TCK. Act 1 is roughly the first 35 scenes of the movie. While I do this Kyle is frantically cutting the remaining scenes so that we can watch the first rough cut (or assembly) Monday night. I'm not sure if we'll make that deadline but we're gonna try. Tomorrow I'll begin a rough polish of Act 2.

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As you can see I've changed up this site, added some color and spice. I don't know much about HTML or any of that but I'm learning by trial and error. I just added a Links section on the lower right side of the page. I'm probably the last person on the third planet to add a Links section to their website. I feel so 20th Century.

Anyway, check out the links. My mom has come up with a new product that she's marketing. It's called KageLiner and it's... well it's a cage liner, like for bird cages and stuff. It makes for very easy cleanup so you don't have to mess with newspaper and such. It's really cool and if you have a bird (or a cat or a hamster, for that matter) then you should definately get yourself a box of KageLiner. Plus there's the added bonus of being able to use these square pieces of hypo-allergenic pooper-catchers for just about any other purpose you can think of. For instance, if you run out of toilet paper; or if you need to eat a Gyro without making a mess; or maybe you've lost a few inches due to the fact that you had vertebre #6 removed and you want that extra height back... so just fold one of these things in half and in half again about a dozen times and put it in your shoe and it works as a great shoe insert. Try it!

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Reading the news it's apparent that the White House press corps is finally growing some teeth. Journalists in the corp have been pummeling Press Secretary Scott McClellan -- and it's great to watch over at at C-span.

Watched The Agronomist -- about Jean Dominique, a popular journalist who owned and operated a free speech radio station in Haiti trying to effect social change. He was assasinated in 2000.

Looking for a composer for TCK. Need to find someone with a unique voice.

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Well it was a hard won match, and for a minute there we almost fell apart, but in the end we won the game 14 to 10. Though to be completely honest, since very few actual Cassidy Kids team members actually showed up today, more than half our team was made up of Jumping Off Bridges crew people. So really, they won. And luckily we had our very own MAX CASSIDY on our team... that's right, the only actual ACTUAL Cassidy Kid to come out and show his true Cassidy spirit was the talented Mr. Billy Evans (who plays the TV show Max). He's responsible for one of our points. Way to go Billy!

Now I'm back in the editing room doing some revising of Kyle's excellent work. It's looking good.

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I'm finding that the hardest thing to do when watching the raw footage is to leave behind the stuff that was happening off screen on that particular shoot day. All sorts of memories, from the mundane to the dramatic, creep into my viewing of each take of each shot. Then again the footage is so beautiful and the Anne and Kadeem are great, and so i'm starting to get more and more drawn into the various pieces of the story.

Went hiking on Santa Cruz island, part of the Channel Islands National Park. Last night had dinner at a nice place called Lucque's, where a friend of Anne's is a cook. Ate Alaskan Cod -- so good.

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I'm in LA right now taking a break from the film. Yesterday I saw Reel Paradise at the Laemmle's Music Hall theater. Kevin Smith was there to introduce the film and the Piersons answered questions after the show. Said hi to Janet and John and Georgia afterwards, they seemed very happy with the turnout as well they should -- there was a line of people around the block waiting to get in. The film is an account of the Piersons' final month in their year long stay in Fiji where John operated "the remotest theater in the world" called the 180 Meridian because it's situated exactly on the 180th longitude. The idea was to show free movies to Fijians. He did just that and the story of how he pulls it off is pretty amazing.

Tonight I'm going to something called Cashino at the M Bar with B and Anne Ramsay. And then tomorrow we're going to the LA stop of the Rolling Roadshow -- they're playing Repo Man. Yay!

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