11.22.07
Posted in Classes/Books, Contests, I-Man Cast Film Update, Internet, Mike McCafferty at 8:10 pm by Amanda Rogers
I apologize that this piece of news is over a week late, but I’ve been snowed under with homework. It’s the middle of the semester and our assignments are getting more complicated and, thus, more time consuming. In addition, I’ve also taken a business plan class and a cash flow analysis class within the last couple of weeks. Busy. Busy.
But I don’t want to talk about my classes tonight. Let’s talk about The IT Room! This is a brand new webisode series starring Mike McCafferty. It’s a cute little show that pokes fun at IT problems. I think a lot of us can probably find something to relate to here. I know I sure can. You may, also, find it fascinating that this show is completely improvised.
Look around the site and you’ll find lots of ways you can interact and help out. They are looking for IT horror stories, which you can submit via a video or their blog. You can even submit a design for the official IT Room t-shirt. There’s a couple of contests with some pretty cool prizes too.
The first episode went online on November 11 and is ready for you to watch. Simply go to http://www.theitroom.com to view it!
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10.30.07
Posted in Classes/Books, Fans, Film Production, I-Man Cast Film Update, MySpace, Website Updates at 10:03 pm by Amanda Rogers
Yesterday was the one year anniversary of this little project going online. Can you believe it’s been a year already? Wow, where did the time go? This is a good time for me to catch everyone up on the latest happenings.
Film Project Update
A week and a half ago was a nice little milestone. The writer turned in the first draft of the treatment. I looked it over and, overall, I have to say I like it. Now, first drafts are never perfect and this one will probably have to go through several edits before it’s ready to show to the cast, but there were some really good scenes in it and it has a lot of promise.
Classes and More Classes
The last few weeks have been especially hectic for me. Besides doing a lot of homework for my Story Analysis and Screenplay Development class, I have also taken a couple of film budgeting classes.
One class was an overview of all the various film budgeting programs available on the market and their various applications. The other class was an introductory budgeting class. It’s funny, I would have never thought of budgeting as being a creative endeavour, but film budgeting is actually quite creative. Did you know that a budget describes the fundamental look, feel and style of a film? Yep, budgeters have to be able to take a scene in the script and have a point of view about it. They have to imagine how they would shoot or direct the scene. Now the director might have a totally different point of view on how a scene should be played, but if a director isn’t available yet, the budgeter has to make a best-guess estimate based on his or her own vision. Every excruciating detail of each scene must be budgeted for: every prop, every actor, every light, every vehicle, every piece of wardrobe, every camera. And it’s just not what’s on the set that must be budgeted for. A budget has to allow for how you’re going to feed the crew, how the actors are going to get to the set and how they are going to get home, how you’re going to get the equipment to the set, who’s going to build the set. It can seem endless. Needless to say, budgets are incredibly detailed documents. Screenplays are often described as the blueprint of a film, but, interestingly, budgets are also blueprints of a film. It’s really all very fascinating.
Saturday was a really busy and exciting day for me. In the morning, I had my weekly Story Analysis and Script Development class. In the afternoon, I met the writer of the treatment. She had flown out from the east coast and we had a really enjoyable meeting over a seafood dinner at the wharf in San Francisco. We hit it off and I’m looking forward to continuing to work with her on this project. She’s just as excited about it as I am. In the evening, we both headed up to Marin County, north of San Francisco, to attend a shortened writer’s workshop given by writer/producer James Hirsch. I say shortened because, originally, the workshop was supposed to be all weekend, but the LA fires put a crimp in those plans. Cheech Marin was supposed to be a special guest the first night, but because his home was in the middle of the fire area, he was busy hosing down his house and yard. Thankfully, Cheech’s home is safe. Because of all this, James Hirsch decided to give a “sneak preview” of the workshop instead. It was a great mini class and James is a really nice guy. I’m looking forward to attending the full workshop, which will be rescheduled in the future.
Whoa…I just felt some tremors. As I’m typing this I’m wondering if that is it or if they are just a precursor to a bigger jolt. Well, so far, so good. Let’s continue and wish for the best.
Website Updates
Between everything else in my insanely busy schedule, I’ve managed to get a few much-needed updates done to the website.
First off, the Blog Info page has been updated to more accurately reflect the various ways that readers can get news from this blog.
There is still the mailing list, of course, and I’ve updated the mailing list subscription page with some info that subscribers might find useful. For example, while the mailing list has a digest option, I don’t recommend it. There’s a couple of reasons why: For one, I rarely blog more than once per day. Secondly, digests are usually sent the day after the blog has been posted, which often delays the receiving of time sensitive information. Of course, the digest is still there if you want it and you are free to choose the options you prefer for this mailing list. If you want to change your options, PLEASE DON’T EMAIL ME. Simply go the mailing list subscription page, scroll down to the bottom and enter your email address. You will be then be prompted for your password. Enter your password to make the changes to your options. Forget your password? Scroll further down the page and you’ll see where you can have it emailed to you.
If you prefer the convenience of a blog feed, a feed for both posts and comments is available for your convenience. Simply scroll down to the Meta section of the sidebar (available from any page of the blog) and click on “Entries RSS” and/or “Comments RSS”.
For you Live Journal users, a syndicated feed is available for your convenience. I want to give a big shout out of thanks to Sheera for setting this up. To add the feed to your friends list, simply go to http://syndicated.livejournal.com/shoomzone/profile and click on the “add this journal to your friends list” link.
Lastly, if you have a MySpace page, you can subscribe to the blog via the Shoom Zone Productions MySpace page. Just click on “Subscribe to this Blog” and you’ll be notified whenever new items are posted to the blog.
Available on the front page of the blog, which you can get to from any blog page by simply clicking on the header, is a section for the online petitions. Just because I’m not actively pursuing an I-Man project right now, doesn’t mean that they should be ignored. I might be able to use those petitions to help sell my current project with the I-Man cast so, please, if you haven’t signed them yet, please do so. We all benefit by getting to see the cast together again.
If you haven’t checked out Shoom Zone’s home page in a while, you’ll see that it looks quite different. Well, I’m playing around with a new look when I can squeeze out the time and, as you can tell, it’s not done yet. The logo there is simply a placeholder for now. I’m going to be getting a new one designed in the near future. Eventually, the whole website will have a new look.
Fans Worldwide
Without you, fans from around the world, this project wouldn’t mean much. Without an audience, films would be worthless. So whenever I go and look at my website statistics, I am very encouraged by what I see. It’s obvious that there are a lot of you who want to see the cast together again just as much as I do. In the past year, the number of visitors to this site has more than quadrupled. Fans from 55 countries around the world regularly visit this site.
I thought it would be fun to see what countries we hail from, so following is a list of all 55 countries in alphabetical order.
- Algeria
- Argentina
- Australia
- Austria
- Belgium
- Bosnia-Herzogovina
- Brazil
- Canada
- Chile
- China
- Costa Rica
- Czech Republic
- Denmark
- Dominican Republic
- Estonia
- Finland
- France
- Germany
- Great Britain
- Greece
- Hong Kong
- Hungary
- India
- Indonesia
- Ireland
- Italy
- Iran
- Israel
- Japan
- Latvia
- Malaysia
- Mexico
- Netherlands
- New Zealand
- Norway
- Oman
- Pakistan
- Philippines
- Poland
- Romania
- Russia
- Saudi Arabia
- South Africa
- South Korea
- Spain
- Sweden
- Switzerland
- Taiwan
- Thailand
- Ukraine
- United Arab Emirates
- United States of America
- Vietnam
- Yugoslavia
Wow. I want to thank each and every one of you and I know the cast appreciates your support too. It’s this kind of increasing awareness that will help to make this film a success. Thank you and I look forward to another productive year as the film project moves forward. I can’t wait to see Vince, Paul, Eddie, Shannon and Mike together again on the screen!
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09.30.07
Posted in Classes/Books, Film Production, I-Man Cast Film Update, Scripts/Screenwriting at 2:49 pm by Amanda Rogers
That rather long title is the name of a course that I just started taking. The class started Friday and for the next twelve weeks I’m going to be immersed in watching films; reading scripts, books, and articles; and writing coverage and development notes for the assigned reading material. Fun!
Coverage, for those of you not familiar with the term, is the process of reading and analyzing a story and then writing a summary and critique of it. Story analysts or “readers” are employed by production companies to do this job, and some independent producers also hire readers. They are usually the first person to read the scripts sent to production companies and their opinion counts. If they don’t think a script is any good, it usually doesn’t get passed on to the producer for consideration.
But for independent producers who don’t have the luxury of having a reader, having the ability to analyze a story and assess its potential both artistically and financially is an extremely important skill (and, really, all producers need this skill). Contrary to what some people believe, producing isn’t just about business. It also has a creative side.
The timing for this course couldn’t be better for me. I’ve been giving notes and comments about the story in progress to the writer for a few months now, but I’m really looking forward to this class to sharpen up my skills and help the writer make the story the best it can possibly be before I submit it to the cast for consideration.
If I thought my life was busy before, it’s now going to be absolutely insane. But this beats being bored any day.
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08.04.07
Posted in I-Man Cast Film Update, Scripts/Screenwriting at 2:20 pm by Amanda Rogers
Dearest readers, I recently recieved some feedback from a fellow fan and it was suggested to me that I should be writing more about the film in development and giving more frequent updates as to how it is progressing. Now I had planned to wait until I had news that was more concrete, but I can totally understand wanting more frequent updates. After all, you want to see the cast together again and you want to know what’s going on!
I’m cool with that, but I should give you a little warning first. It’s important for you to know that film production can be, for lack of a better analogy, like an old mountain road, with its accompanying unexpected turns, twists, and bumps. One can think that they are going in the right direction and that everything is fine and then suddenly something happens that slows down progress or gets one off course. That’s just the way film production works and one has to be willing to go with the flow and deal with these unexpected occurances when they happen. So if one week I report about some plans in progress and the next week I tell you those plans have stalled or been changed, don’t worry, I might have just hit a pothole. I’ll find another way to get the job done and get the project back on track.
With that in mind, let’s talk about the film, shall we?
Let’s go back to February of this year. I had just found a writer who was interested in tackling the script. I had some personal stuff that was coming up and I knew it was going to keep me busy for quite a while, so getting a writer onboard and working on the project before that happened was very important to me. My top priority is to keep the project moving forward.
Things seemed to be going fine then I found out that the writer didn’t have the time to work on the project. A couple of great opportunities had come her way and I don’t blame her a bit for grabbing them. I couldn’t be more thrilled for her successes. But, now, I’d hit a pothole. The project had stalled. Nobody was working on it.
The next logical step would have been for me to get the project back on track by finding another writer. Fortunately, I was saved that effort when another writer approached me out of the blue and offered her services. That was about six weeks ago and I’m happy to report that this writer has been hard at work on a story. Things are moving forward again. Already, she has written the first draft of Act 1 of a treatment and it is coming along quite nicely.
I should explain what a treatment is for those of you who may not be familiar with the term. A treatment is basically a screenplay written first as a short story. Writers often them use them to focus and flesh out the story without having to worry about formatting and all the other considerations that come with writing a script. But treatments are also used to sell a story.
Now the decision as to what story we tell isn’t just mine alone. It also belongs to the cast. They have to want to do the story also. So I’m asking for a treatment instead of a script because treatments are generally shorter than scripts so there is less to write and less to read. I figure it’s easier to write and read a 10- to 20-page treatment than a 90- to 120-page screenplay. If the cast likes it and wants to do the story, then I’ll give the go ahead to the writer to write the script.
So that’s where we are in a nutshell. I promise I’ll try to be better about giving more frequent updates.
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02.01.07
Posted in "The Invisible Man", I-Man Cast Film Update at 9:43 pm by Amanda Rogers
Five years ago today the Sci Fi Channel aired the last new episode of The Invisible Man, thus bringing to a close a show that ended all too quickly and deserved a much, much longer run. By the time the last episode, entitled The New Stuff, aired, we all knew that the show had been cancelled and yet many of us were hoping that by some miracle someone in authority would see fit to continue it and give the show the chance it deserved.
With anticipation we watched Darien getting closer to permanent madness as the Counteragent was losing its effectiveness. How would he be saved? Would the Keeper find a way to safely remove the gland? Knowing that Craig Silverstein wrote the last two episodes as closure to one chapter of Darien’s life and the beginning of a new chapter, that scenario didn’t seem likely.
Would a new counteragent be developed? Perhaps giving Darien more time between shots? That was a possibility. But, instead, a cure was found for the madness, courtesy of his nemesis, Arnaud de Fehrn.
In the end, Darien chose to stay with the Agency, which meant that the series could go forward with the same characters we had grown to love. Not knowing whether the series would continue or not, Craig had set up a sort of closure for Darien and the series, and yet left the door wide open for many more new stories.
I miss this show.
Each of us who call ourselves fans can describe how this show has touched us and why, after five years, we are still here, still hoping. We’ve come to care, not for just the show and its characters, but also for the actors who portrayed the characters. Over the years we’ve been able to interact with them online via bulletin boards, chat rooms, and blogs; and some of us have been able to meet them in person. We’ve had a relationship with them that very few, if any, fandoms ever develop with their cast. They have generously given us that unique opportunity. They all love the show and would be willing to come back to it, and they all enjoyed working with each other and would love to do so again.
It’s for that reason that I’ve taken on this project. It’s not the project I originally set out to do. Believe me, I would love to be producing an I-Man movie; and if it weren’t for that little issue of rights, I’d be doing exactly that right now. But if I can’t do an I-Man movie, bringing together a cast that I care deeply about is the next best thing. This is a project that I’m thrilled to be a part of. It is my wish that this will be a movie that will thrill you too.
Call me crazy, but I’m not totally giving up on I-Man. There is a chance, albeit a slim one, that this movie could possibly trigger interest in I-Man. But this movie would need to be a hit and be profitable. Like it or not, money talks in Hollywood. On the production side of things, I’m going to do everything I can to make that happen, but I can only do so much. In the end, it’s the audience that decides whether to watch or not.
No matter what happens, seeing our cast together again on the screen is so worth all this work. I can’t wait for that day!
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