A New Trailer!

Because you can never have enough trailers.

The Post You Were Wondering if You'd Live Long Enough to See!

After only a mere three years in post, "Zorg and Andy" is finally complete! Hard to believe, I know, but it's true (check us out here, it's right there in black and white).

We've got a lot going on right now, including a website redesign that will be up soon (check back often!), and the creation of a press kit and promotional materials.

We also have a new Facebook page, thanks to Scott. Drop by and say hello!

And I want to let you know that we have a new teaser trailer up, both on Facebook and Youtube. More trailers are in the works. Let us know what you think!

See? I told you there was a lot going on.

Our plan in the coming months is to continue to submit the movie to festivals, as well as begin sending it out for review. Assuming said reviews are spectacular, we'll be posting links to them soon! Unspectacular reviews will be rewritten and then posted.

Regarding DVD's, initially they'll only be available for sale at festival screenings, but I imagine we'll start self-distribution sometime later this year. And once that happens, we'll need everyone's help to get the word out.

Of course, all cast and crew members will receive a free copy of the movie, so we'll be sending out an email soon to make sure we have everyone's most recent address. Timeframe to get those out should probably be in the next month or so. But, I appear to be timeframe-challenged, so bear that in mind.

And finally, we want to start planning for that long-awaited premiere! Details to come (and we'd love to hear any of your ideas, too)!

All for now. Thank you all for your patience and continued support!

Guy

Two Pieces of Good News

Guy reports that he has gotten the flying insect effects working. I assume this means something other than him filming himself with cardboard wings and coat-hanger antennae, spinning around the room shouting "I'm a bee! I'm a bee!" then overlaying thousands of tiny copies onto the beetle-room scene.

Why is this good news? Because the bug effects were our final major post-production hurdle, and now there is very little standing in the way of this film being actually done.

Before Guy speaks up, let me add that any other existing post-production hurdles he might mention are now officially minor ones, easy tweaks that can be finished in an afternoon. I declare it to be so.

The second piece of good news? We (meaning Guy) have begun festival submissions! The pebble of "Zorg and Andy" has been kicked over the edge of the glacier, sure to become a massive, devastating avalanche! Run for cover!

Season's greetings, everybody.

Shuddering, we adjust our typefaces

In designing the opening credit sequence, we've experimented with an array of styles. An early option was to roll the credits over a series of illustrations that explained the backstory. Sort of like this:



We decided against it when it became clear that we'd actually have to come up with a backstory to do this. Never explain what you don't have to.

So we thought about the classic Saul Bass look:



Or, more likely, this:



I think we've settled on making the typography do the majority of the heavy lifting when it comes to visual interest. Here's one of our prototypes:



With a little color and motion (in the strict Northanger tradition of tasteful restraint), I think they're going to look terrific.

Finally, since I seem to be piloting the blog ship straight in YouTube Shoals today... Motorhead!

EXT. KUNGSBADEN MUSEUM -- DAY

I think our motto is a big improvement over the one that's really there: "Try to scrape by with a C."

After coming up with a title for this post, I was going to mention that once we had moved beyond the infamous third draft of the script, we didn't have any exterior night shots in the movie at all. Then I zipped through the rest of the effects reel and realized that we still have tons of nighttime exteriors. Just no nighttime exteriors with extended chase scenes.

Effects Shots March Forth. Like Zombies.

The eerie swing in the moonlight. Not the middle of the afternoon.


Chemical-fog toxicity will claim the lives of dozens of lab assistants this year alone. Please give generously to the gas-mask fund.

Clicky-clicky

According to the most recent dispatch from his Cave of Agony, Guy is "officially two-thirds of the way through" with the movie. This means two-thirds of everything--effects shots, color, sound, licensed music (thank you, broad-minded composers of the internet!)--is done.

We're down to details now--little things like bugs crawling along walls, and, most recently, Colette's last name. Those of you who remember the script might recall that hardly any characters had last names. Andy had one because that character was actually a refugee from an unpublished novel and his name didn't require any additional creative thought from the deeply lazy screenwriter. Dr. Harpax had one because, come on, how do you come up with a name like "Dr. Arabella Harpax" and not use the whole thing?

But Colette needed a last name because her name was going to be under her college ID picture on the deliberately-non-brand-name data-storage thingy that Andy is clicking through on the screencap above. So we had to think one up. In the end, she became "Colette D'Ampton," in homage to Hugh Grant's star-making role in the greatest movie of all time. (Anyone wondering where the inspiration for Dr. Harpax's frothing-at-the-mouth liturgical speech came from should watch the end of that movie.)

This attitude toward character names can also explain something a few of our sharp-eyed cast members pointed out during filming: the fraternity boys all had names (Chad and Troy) while the sorority girls had to make do with numbers (Sister #1, Sister #2, etc.). Aside from (or in addition to) latent sexism, this was because the sorority sisters had mentioned Chad and Troy by name before they showed up, so when the screenwriter got to that point in the script, he didn't have to stop to figure out what they should be called. Because no one referred to the sisters by name beforehand, there were no ready-made names for them, so he didn't come up with any. See "deeply lazy screenwriter" above.

Northanger Productions: Since 2004, more than you wanted to know about the creative process!