The big PR push for ‘Gone Fishing’ is now starting. We have been to Cannes and now that is over, we are going to focus on première festivals and competitions.

One of my observations about short films that come to me (because of The Guerilla Film Makers Handbook I get sent lots of shorts) is that often they are quite badly presented. There really is no excuse for a DVDr that is hand scrawled in marker pen as a cheap on-disk printer is only £50 now. The same is true for paperwork, and so I decided to go ahead and brand everything connected to both ‘Gone Fishing’ and Living Spirit Pictures – I am making an A4 full colour paperwork folder with Vistaprint, to hold loose papers, application forms, press packs and business cards. They will costs about £100 for 250, which is more than enough for now. And the DVD cover is hot on its heels, but more on that in due course.

On another note, editor Eddie Hamilton has just been doing a re-cut on my friend, Jonathan Newmans short film, ‘Meet The Finkels’. This reshoot was done using the Red One camera with prime lenses and here is what Eddie had to say about it…

‘Watching the "Wanted" trailer in the cinema, and how amazing it looked having been shot on the Red camera and transferred to 35mm, we tried using the camera on a short at the weekend. It's great to use, but most importantly for low budget filmmakers, you can take the Red camera data, run it through the free Red Cine software on a reasonably powerful PC, then create Quicktimes to import into Avid or FCP and start editing. No lab developing, no telecine, just convert the files and away you go. And the Time Code remains in the DV Quicktimes you create so you can easily reconform later, at full resolution. 

The main bottleneck is how many hard disks you have, and how to backup all that data (which there will be TONS of)… On a low budget feature, this could quickly turn into a logistical nightmare…'

All very interesting…

Chris Jones, Film Maker and Author
www.livingspirit.com
mail@livingspirit.com