The DVD Approaches....

The Beast of Bottomless Lake DVD is imminent.


Much of last week - between Stanley Cup Final games - was spent tweaking audio levels on commentaries and picking fonts for chirons in the featurettes. By now everything is out of my hands and we are working on plans for the release party while the manufacturing is completed.

If you are in the region (of Vancouver) on July 15th and you haven't had a chance to see The Beast of Bottomless Lake on a big screen this very seriously could be your last chance.

The party will be at the Denman Cinema starting at 7:30. We will be screening five short films that we have selected from a heap of entries and giving away a prize to the film that the audience deems the best.


We will announce the chosen short films in a day or two.

Also there will be music by The Pucks who have two songs of their CD Martha in The Beast of Bottomless Lake.

There will be door prizes, 50/50 draw and of course beer and wine and popcorn.

Tickets are available at the Denman, online at Stubmatic or if you happen to know one of us, we have tickets available too. They are $15 in advance and $20 at the door.

They Kicked Ass Again...

We clearly brought the right guys on as crew.

They just won the Telus WSSF Filmmaker Showdown.... AGAIN.


Poached Earth - 2011 Telus WSSF Filmmaker Showdown - BEST IN SHOW from Patrick M. Henry on Vimeo.


Well done guys!

DVD Pre-orders

It was going to happen eventually - you knew it.

We are currently working on the extras for the DVDs with the intention of having them available for purchase in late June.

What do we have planned for the added features?

(With the necessary disclaimer that any of these planned items could fall through before we get to the final authoring of the discs for any of a variety of reasons.)

We are working on two separate commentaries.  A whole bunch of deleted scenes, including an alternate ending.  Several short "making of" featurettes.

We do not yet know the sticker price on the DVDs as it in part is a result o the cost of making them - which of course we are not finished doing... and as with the cost of Mastering tapes, the price of DVDs is unstable right now due to trickle down from the fact that Japan is where most DVDs are made.

As soon as we have the price fixed we will make orders available on our website, but for now, you can do us a big favour by letting us know if you would like a DVD - the closer we can match our demand the better we can price the final product.  Send us an email at ogopogodvd@gmail.com and give us an email where we can let you know the details as they come in (IE. When DVDs are available we'll tell you precisely how to secure your order and how to pay.)  If you can also let us know how many DVDs you would like and the format (NTSC, PAL, or even Blu-Ray).  We will assume NTSC region zero on all orders unless specified otherwise.

And for those of you in the Vancouver region, we have plans for a DVD release party which should be a lot of fun!

How Surreal....

Well, there we have it folks!  Not that The Beast... can't do more, or go further than a Canadian cable broadcast - indeed we hope it will and are working on possibilities, at least one of which is essentially a certainty.

Last Wednesday night - almost late afternoon here on the West coast - Super Channel had it's first screening of the film.

I had taken my family back to my hometown on short notice to see my father who had recently had knee replacement surgery.  It was good timing.  While we were there, Dad and his wife ordered Super Channel and we invited some of their other grandkids as well as the band that lives in Prince George that plays two songs in the film - the Pucks - to come over and watch the film with us.

I must admit that it was kind of odd.

On one hand, I've seen the film on TV before... or at least on A TV.  So in that sense there was nothing remarkable about the viewing.  Indeed, I sat in the kitchen (still in view of the screen, but very off-axis) and drank beer and listened to people's reactions.  But on the other hand there was the knowledge that at the same time there could be people in Halifax and Montreal and Kenora and Moose Jaw and Kamloops all watching the same broadcast.  It's something I could really only grasp intellectually - it didn't really feel any different than watching a DVD screener.

I grudgingly suppose it is now only a matter of time before the damned thing is available in pirated form for download*.... sigh.


*THIS IS NOT AN INVITATION!

BIG News!!! ...that is pretty much out of the bag already.

If you are a member of our Facebook group or are connected to us by just about any other means but this blog you already know this...

The Beast of Bottomless Lake has been purchased by Super Channel!

The first showing is April 6th with over a dozen and a half showing scheduled for April (and possibly beyond.)

Obviously this is very cool from our perspective.  Rewind in time to the first post of this blog.  Back then we were just a couple of guys with a big dream, no budget and a lot of heart.  We are now just two weeks away from being film-makers with a broadcast history - which is a BIG threshold to have passed.

I've mentioned the idea of the "four Everests" before... each stage of making a film is like climbing Everest.  Pre-production; production (shooting); post-production and distribution.  Over this past month I have really had to face that metaphor.  Distribution has been a rough road.  We "finished" the film in early 2010.  (The quotes are because we had to do more work on it to close this deal.)  It took a long time, more than one aborted attempt, plus sucesses at film-festivals and so on to get to this sale - and I for one had all but given up hope.  But getting a first sale, makes secondary sales much more likely.  When the call came from our sales agent we could hardly believe it.  Fortunately we had just asked one of our investors for assistance with his business acumen on a number of things (most of which are still up coming), and he was indispensible to have available through the last month.

At some point I may write about the sometimes Kafka-esque process of getting the film ready for broadcast, but to be perfectly honest portions of it were simply too emotionally exhausting for me to want to revisit it so soon... which is also part of why it took so long to get around to posting this announcement on the blog.

Back to the fourth Everest...  It occurs to me now, that as arduous as these past few weeks have been, and how satisfying it is to know that Beast is going to be on TV, and that that represents in a sense the scaling of the fourth Everest... the reality is that the fourth Everest either never ends, or only ends when no one wants to see your film anymore.  Sobering thought.

I will share one small funny story about un-anticipated issues...

When I say "funny," I should be clear - I do NOT mean "ha-ha funny."  Not in a million years as in this case the background to what makes it "funny" involves the deaths of thousands of people.

In order to prepare the film for broadcast the movie had to be mastered to HD-SR tape.  There is one factory in the world that makes HD-SR tapes... in Sendai Japan.  Since the factory was severely damaged ten days ago there has been a worldwide run on HD-SR tapes - check this out on eBay, the price is outrageous.  Our budget for tapes practically doubled as trickle down from the earthquake.  Which compared to the chaos in Japan is nothing - beyond insignificant.  And to be doubly clear... the couple hundred dollars extra we have to pay is really nothing even compared to our own budget.  We suck it up.  We move on.  We hope the best for people in Japan.

Our First International Screening

It was pointed out to me last night that I had teased in my last post, some weeks ago now that we had news upcoming.

Well I can confirm it now - I could have confirmed it about a week ago if my head was screwed on straight!

As you can probably guess from the posting title, Beast of Bottomless Lake is going to be seen but it's first international audience in April.

At Olamot Con in Tel Aviv.  It is a science fiction convention in Israel.  And here's the kinda wild part... they are making Hebrew sub-titles, which we get to reuse at our leisure.  So as unusual as that is, we get to include a Hebrew track on our DVD, all in the service of more people getting to understand our funky tale of ambition gone awry.  Unfortunately, it doesn't help me understand more than the limited English text on their webiste, but hey - the want our film!

If you are in Tel Aviv for Passover (and let's face it, it isn't entirely out of the question that some people might be), check out Olamot Con and The Beast of Bottomless Lake!

A Brief Interlude...

Hey everyone, there is some new "Beast" news coming soon that for the moment I can't say more about.  Tease, tease.

But in the meantime, over the past two weeks I've been working on a short film for a contest.

In short, the idea was to pick a film and make a one minute version of it.  Not a trailer, but a one minute version of the film.  As it turns out that's pretty hard.  To make it more difficult we decided to do something that no other team has (yet) done.  We did it in stop motion with paper figures, kind of similar to south park... kind of.

Oh... and the movie we chose was Reservoir Dogs.

Part of the judging in the contest is based upon the rating that the film gets on the Virgin Radio website.

So, click here and go to the Virgin Radio website register and give our film the top rating you can.  You have to do this SOON.  The voting ends on Tuesday January 25th at 5pm PST.  There has been a wave of cynical and capricious organized negative voting - which has totally upset the balance of the contest.  (IE. Teams are organizing their friends to go and give ratings of zero to other films in serious contention.)  We are emphatically NOT doing that and I want to actively discourage you from doing so. 

Simply vote for our film with the highest rating you genuinely think it deserves.

Actually,

I'm just going to just cut and paste some info that Scott - one of our team members who incidentally was an Executive Producer of Beast... (and other assorted jobs on the film) - posted on our Facebook fan group (Go join!) the other day.  There is some duplicate information here about voting, but  the last two items are original.

1. Vote for the film. Go to the link below and register. You see our video is Stop Motion Reservoir Dogs. Then give us 5 stars by scrolling over the blank stars just under the video until they turn blue and it hits 5.... thats it. You can leave a comment as well in the dialogue box just below that.

http://vancouver.virginradio.ca/VideoChannel/FakeFilmFestival/View.aspx?PostID=35764


2. Promotion is part of the contest and we are kicking butt in that category so far, this step is as important as voting for our film! If you have a Facebook account, could you log on and go to the link below. You have to like the page which opens all the content, then select the “wall” tab. You will see a whack of entries by Scott John with promo photos for the film. Please “like” these entries and comment on them so the PR Director knows folks saw them.

http://www.facebook.com/virgin953


3. This one is for YOU if you want to win $10,000! Only for local folks who have the evening of the 28th free unfortunately. There is an invite only gala which shows the top ten films and has a $10,000 door prize plus a trip to Hollywood as the prize for the person with the best movie character costume. Its a nice free evening out regardless with some cool films and a live band. Simply go to the link below and copy our film title “Stop Motion Reservoir Dogs in 60 Seconds” into the empty dialogue field.... you could be joining us at the party!

http://vancouver.virginradio.ca/Contests/Register.aspx?ContestID=122842