Rivals in hi-res!

Finally pulled together a Vimeo account and decided to put up Rivals on this blog in hi-res (better than dvd quality), once and for all. You can also download the original file and burn it to a DVD. Figures that this is also a more economical way of distributing it rather than giving out DVDs to everyone.



True to John Woo Finalist Entry "Rivals" (2007) from Benjamin Carthel on Vimeo.

Thanks for watching!!!

Rivals on IFilm!

Just thought I'd let everyone know, Spike has been generous enough to post all ten finalists on Ifilm. Here's the link;

http://www.ifilm.com/movie/22103

I promise there will be more content on this blog. We'll have a high-rez downloadable version on here soon!

The right way to shoot a "john woo railing" scene

One thing that bugs me the most when I watch some of the entries is when they do a "john woo railing scene." They make it look so awkward and weird...



The original:



Mine:




Now look at some examples from the competition:

STRANGLEHOLDS TRUE TO JOHN WOO SHORT FILM CONTEST


STRANGLEHOLDS TRUE TO JOHN WOO SHORT FILM CONTEST



Ok if you notice the biggest difference from others is the position of the main character's body on the rail. The original idea from the movie I believe is he was positioned on the rail to draw the fire of the bad guys away from the innocent civilians. Now his upper half of the body is completely away from the staircase. On the examples from the competition the body is usually parallel to the rail instead of perpendicular.

It's On!!!

After a month and a half of preparation, our hard work and efforts have paid off and our finished project is now online! I would personally like to thank everyone involved in the project for your efforts and support!!!!

CAST:
Detective Nick - Dave Almond
Clay - Terry Post
Clay's Wife - Cassandra Post
Clay's Daughter - Vin Nuguyn
Thomas Lin - Danny Silveira
Quin Lee - Matthew Miya
Wei Kahn - Matthew Miya
Dead Gangsters - Vincent Lee, Andrew Ahn, & Moises Cortez

PRODUCTION

PROPS, MAKE-UP, AND ORGANIZER:
Dallin Pitcher (Big thanks!)

PRODUCER, EDITOR, AND DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY:
Daniel Miya (Humongous thanks!)

STORYBOARD DRAWINGS
Ian (Kumo) Anderson

MUSIC FEATURED:

Jorn Lavoll - "Revisitation"
http://www.productiontrax.com/

Andrew Kramer - "Setup"
http://www.videocopilot.net

*Some excerpts from the Stranglehold Soundtrack found @
http://www.myspace.com/strangleholdgame

SPECIAL THANKS TO:

Chad Jackson
http://www.utahlovedoves.com/

The Ficher Family
(For letting us shoot in their awesome garage!)

Jesse Biesecker

Davi Silveira (Congrats!)

Jordan Coff

Vin Nuguyn's little brother



And anyone else I forgot, write me a hate-mail to tactilefile@gmail.com
Thank you all again so much for all your help and support!!!

the contest entry

Hey guys!

Well we've done it. The movie is finally ready for competition and it is all submitted and ready to rock on myspace.

STRANGLEHOLDS TRUE TO JOHN WOO SHORT FILM CONTEST



So check it out, leave your comments, and wish us luck!

Thank all of you for support helping us make this film!

Bringing it all together

Hey guys!

Ben's been hard at work editing the footage and we've been trying to assemble the video together the past week. Meanwhile I've been trying to get things set up on my end to start some of the special effects and post processing effects. So far we're almost done assembling the movie and we've got the majority of the muzzle flashes in. Hopefully we'll have a draft of the movie in by Friday. Let's just hope (crosses fingers). Anyway here is some more eye candy for all of you, some screen shots of Terry in the shooting scene:








Update:
thought i'd share this... I thought this particular screen looks pretty awesome

Shooting Our Brains Out

Filming started last Saturday and Sunday. We started off shooting the dream sequence, where we stuffed 10 people in an apartment. Check out some scenes we shot:







Anyway so hopefully we'll start editing the footage pretty soon. Also I'll post some more screen shots later as we get more along the process.

Till then... ADIOS!

Starting out with a bang

Hey Everyone! Welcome to the development blog for the short film "Rivals." So far we have almost everything set up preproduction wise. We have most of our cast, wrote the script, found most our locations, almost all of our props, and dates set up for filming.

Speaking of filming, we are starting our filming this weekend and filming should take up about 2 days. Ben and I are hoping to have the movie completed by the 20th of this month. Meanwhile you can check out some of the test videos Ben's been working on the past month:

Check back soon for some sweet screenshots of what we film this weekend.