6 weeks away from completion!
Hello Kickstarter backers!
It's been a while since our last update, but we were waiting for a few key things to fall into place so we could announce some exciting news to our followers. That good news has arrived. As of today, we are only SIX weeks away from completing "GORK!" and launching this labor of love into the world. Finally, we can give our brother Adam the big and bright spotlight he's always wanted, AND give people across the country a unique and authentic look inside one family's experiences with disability.
For those of you who are interested in the behind-the-scenes steps of how a film like this gets finished, read on! For those of you who just want to know if your contribution has made a difference --the short answer is "YES!!!" (triple exclamation point). We could not have done this without every dollar of support given to us, and we THANK YOU from the bottom of our hearts! We are so thrilled to finally see the light at the end of the tunnel and really start to envision how we will release and distribute this film, rather than being forever stuck in the rut of "how do I finish this damn thing?". A huge relief --and so exciting-- and it's all because of you!
So, here's how the last 8 months went down since the project was funded through Kickstarter. In September and October, I (Devon) was negotiating with a post house here in Los Angeles that had graciously offered to do the technical finishing work (final edit, color correction, sound mix, fine-tuning motion graphics, re-importing and putting VFX on photos, creating chryons and end credits, etc) on the film for the small budget that we had. These negotiations were going well and we were hoping to start work in November and be finished by the end of December. THEN there was a small snag, that turned into a big snag, that turned into us not being able to do the finishing work at this place at all. Unfortunately, this is the way things often go in post-production. The glitch had to do with the fact that we started editing this project years and years ago on AVID (the top-of-the-line editing technology back then, pre-dating the advent of FINAL CUT PRO software that is available these days). Around 2004, we eventually moved our project to Avid Express Pro to cut the film on our editor's home editing system, and that's how we finished our rough cut. But nowadays many of the post houses that can do finishing work for lower budget projects like ours are using FINAL CUT PRO, not Avids. This was the case with the post house that we were negotiating with --they thought they could convert the project to Final Cut Pro, but I discovered through consultations with lots of professionals that there could be problems with this conversion, and we simply did not have the budget to deal with ANY problems of this nature. So, I had to scrap that whole plan and start from scratch seeking a post house that had AVID systems (a more expensive technology), AND that would be willing to do all the work needed for our tiny little budget.
From January through March, I was hunting for such a place. I dug deep into my contacts in the film business and finally reached out to a colleague from my very first job in the business (at Viacom Productions) and she suggested a post house called Secret Headquarters. I called them up, made the pitch, showed them the rough cut, met with everyone there last week, and they said YES. They are totally into the project, they have all the technology and resources we need to finish everything on the project, AND they have some great ideas to make the film even stronger with the final cut. I was able to use the Kickstarter funds to make a deposit and they are starting work this week. The schedule for completion is 6 weeks. During this time, I will also use Kickstarter funds to license music that is in the film.
As soon as the film is finished, the next step will be to submit the film to two Iowa film festivals that have deadlines at the end of May: The Interrobang Film Fest in Des Moines (happening at the end of June), and the Landlocked Film Fest in Iowa CIty (end of August). We'll be crossing our fingers that "GORK!" will be accepted into one or both of these festivals so that we can invite all of our Iowa-based supporters to come see it on the big screen. These are both big and competitive festivals, so we will be lucky and very honored if our film is accepted, but we are confident that we will be submitting a quality, finished film that we can be proud of no matter what happens. We will keep you posted on what happens...
For now, I will be plugging away with Secret Headquarters on the finishing work, and Autumn and I will be putting together the rewards that we'll be sending your way. We already have the super-cool T-shirts and several other rewards ready to go.
Thanks so much again for your support!
Cheers!
Devon & Autumn
