The NAME THE MOVIE CHARACTERS CONTEST has now come a close after a run of eight weeks. My does time fly! I hope you all had fun! I want to give a big congratulations to our winners:
Rochelle Ramos for naming Eddie Jone’s character Sam Weber
Cheryl Johnson for naming the antagonist Sebastian Grey
Rochelle Ramos for naming Mike McCafferty’s character Lester
Carol Ward for naming Vincent Ventresca’s character Ethan
It’s not often that the opportunity to name characters in a movie comes along and now our winners will have those bragging rights; and Rochelle Ramos gets those bragging rights times two! And if your friends and family don’t believe that you named that character, just show them your name in the credits. That’ll vindicate you! I’ll be contacting each of you winners in the very near future to sign a release form, so keep your eyes open for an email from me.
To everyone else who participated, thank you for your support and enthusiasm! If you didn’t win this time, don’t fret. There will be other opportunities in the future for you to participate and support the project. I’m cooking up ideas all the time!
I, also, want to give my appreciation to my fellow judges: Shawna Buchanan, Joyce Harrell, and Joan McCartney. I couldn’t have done it without these wonderful ladies giving me a hand. To keep it fair we each got an equal vote, which means that they had the power to outvote me. But, we were actually pretty much in agreement most of the time. (You think it might be because we are all fans of the same show? 🙂 )
A little about the voting process: I first listed all the submitted names in an email to the judges. (Towards the end that got to be quite laborious with the large number of entries that were submitted!) Then everyone gave their opinions about the names. That afforded us all an opportunity to get each other’s viewpoints, which was really useful because many times someone would make a point that the others hadn’t thought of yet. Finally, I created a voting form (Again quite laborious with all those names!) and each of the judges voted for their favorites. It was always majority rules with each name needing at least three votes to go to the next round, which is where all of you would make the final decision based on your votes.
So, Shannon Kenny’s character’s name, Tara, remains the same because of a tie that left the final decision with the judges. But, not surprisingly, the question has been asked, what about Paul Ben-Victor’s character? Don’t worry. I didn’t forget about Paul’s character. I just didn’t include his character in the contest because he already has a name that fits him perfectly and I think it would be a crime to change it. Sorry to disappoint anyone who may have been looking forward to naming Paul’s character!
Next Steps
So what’s next? Well, I need to get some computer problems solved first before I’m completely without a computer. Then I’ll be getting right back to work getting the story finished. This means I need to finish the story bible. After that I’ll be giving the treatment a very thorough going over and have my screenwriter make the changes. Hopefully that will be the final edit before I send it to the story analyst(s).
I’m, also, going to do some research in preparation for my series of interviews of distribution companies for the United Filmmakers Association. That keeps getting pushed back, but once my computer problems are solved, I’ll be able to move forward with that.
I’m looking forward to a productive year and really making some progress with this project!