Now that that’s outa the way. Let me tell you how excited we are with Gasmask. If you haven’t seen the trailer please check it out.

GASMASK Trailer

So let me tell you we’re we stand. We had a fundraiser last Sunday. And it was it was great. So many supporters came out. It was nice to see everyone, the cast, the crew and the wonderful people that made donations to this project. We had the Alexandra Kaucher’s wonderful costumes out for everyone to see.

We have been lucky on this journey and it still hasn’t run out. Just got a call today the everyone one of our top choices have agreed on coming aboard GASMASK and parking within the budget. So in the next week we will officially announce the team. Hopefully we can get all the post done in the next 3 weeks and begin the submission process.

Pablo

The Housesitter

So much has happened since last I last wrote about this project. He had a showing at Westchester Community College in Peekskill for some of their film students. They were all very nice and filled out the comment cards we handed out. Most comments were overall positive but it was evident that there was a lot of sound problems that need to be addressed.

So through a friend we got a chance to take it to a very well-known sound editor named Larry Lowinger where he gave us notes as far as fixing the issues that were apparent in the film. We were lucky enough to find a sound editor that was willing to donate his time and effort to helping us out fixing them. His name is Chris Farfan, he is doing some incredibly wonderful work as far as fixing the sound of our project. There is still about 15 minutes left of the movie that needs to be worked on but it is getting there.

In the meantime, I created a website for the movie as well as adding some special effects and more color correction. We also have a new trailer for the film as we are starting our submission process. We did a late submission to the Toronto Film Festival but unfortunately did not make it in. A little bit of a bummer but that’s okay because we have other festivals on our list that we feel really good about.

GASMASK

So for the last month now I have been gathering up all our resources, making phone calls, contacting all the people that were involved initially last year when the locations fell through and we are trying to get it off the ground again. We really believe here at Humungoid that this is going to be an incredible project once it’s completed.

I sent out the script to a few people that I’ve met during the year, that told me they were interested in reading it and have gotten back a great response from those people. Some people have changed and some people are still with us but that is normal, projects are always coming up and it wasn’t fair to ask them to drop everything and come back. There a few people still on the team as well as some new faces. We have been working real hard on getting all our ducks in a row and gearing up for our crowd funding campaign to raise the money needed to actually make this short film. i can say that some of the best work ever done in this studio is being made and we are gonna blow you away with what’s we’re cooking up here. In the next few weeks I will be posting some interesting stuff and hopefully it will inspire you to donate to the project. We could use all the help we can get.

That’s it for now but keep your eyes open for some cool stuff coming your way from us!

Well it’s been a few months since we have updated the blog. A lot of stuff has happened since then. So let me fill you in.

Gas Mask

First off, we thank everyone for showing your support for the project. Unfortunately we could not find a location that was satisfactory to us and the window of opportunity was getting smaller and smaller to the point that I decided to postpone the production till the winter passes. I did not want to compromise the vision of the film. When we started the project, I felt that it was a way to showcase the talents of those involved. Some might say it is better to get it out there, but I felt if we were going to raise money for it through Kickstarter. I have an obligation to those that donated their hard earned money, to put our best foot forward and make something amazing. Why push through something mediocre?

But don’t worry.  It will happen that much is for sure.  We are having a meeting next week with someone who is interested in helping produce the film.  More too come…..

So we took a few months off that project and turned our attention to the film we shot last summer.

Demons Cross: The Housesitter

After a 16 day shoot last summer, we hired ourselves an editor. Doug Plomitallo. Doug is a great filmmaker that has strong roots in the horror genre.  He runs a cool website over at www.scaredstiff.tv where he showcases his scary short films, so make sure you check it out!  He is a very talented individual and we are happy with the progress of the film so far.  We just watched a rough cut of the film and it is coming along just nicely.  There is still a lot of work to be done but the basic skeleton of the movie is laid out.

This weekend we will meeting with Jeff to discuss the music.  He has been eager to work on this and we are extremely happy that he has come aboard the project.  His work on the Gasmask score is just amazing and we can’t wait to see what he comes up with for this film.

We ran a kickstarter campaign for the post production of the film and raised almost 5K.  Check it out here.   It’s was an educational experience since we have never raised funds for a project.   It is definitely some thing we will be using for the Gasmask project in the coming months.   We want to thank everyone who gave a little to the project.  It really means a lot to us here and those at Greentown Pictures.

As you can see from some of the production stills it was a huge job.  We had a lot of people on the set.  If you want to learn more about the film. please make sure you check out the movie’s website.  www.greentownpictures.com you can see more production stills there.

Well that is all for now.  I will try to post up a minute or two of the rough cut in the next couple of weeks if I can.  We are scheduled for a few pick up shots next week so I’ll see what I can do.  Also We might have a guest blogger coming soon.
See ya!

Born in Perú, Gabriela’s parents moved to the United States in August 1988, looking to start a new life in hopes of new opportunities for their 2 children.

They settled in Jamaica Queens, New York.  With little English, Gabriela made friends, went to school and was able to adapt to her new environment easily.  The opportunity of seeing the world was through her friends, who all came from different parts of the world.

Making her parents proud, Gabriela finished with a Bachelors on Communications, focusing on Multi Media at Marymount Manhattan College in the upper east side of Manhattan.  She liked questioning and learning and so it was easy for her to graduate with honors, earning her to be part of the Communications Honor Society, Lambda Pi Eta.

Gabriela has an affinity for color and urban life.  She functions with a spontaneous spirit.  Most of her childhood she felt misunderstood, and because of it, she felt mostly confused of her randomness. But through time and circumstances, she was able to explore mediums in which she could express herself.  She is now a solid artist making a name for herself in the midst of the NYC grind.

Gabriela Manrique is currently self-employed and works as a Graphic Designer, Illustrator and Photographer.

 

John “Goose” Siragusa has just joined the team for the “Gas Mask”  as Assistant Director.  His experience is going to be invaluable to this production.  We are so happy to have him aboard. 

John Siragusa has been in the film and television business since 2001.  He graduated from the University of North Carolina School of the Arts: Filmmaking Conservatory in 2009, with a focus in Producing.  He has attended countless workshops and given a few himself.  John has Produced, Directed and Written shorts, commercials, independent features and several viral pieces.  He currently lives in Connecticut with his Wife and two kittens.

 

From the beginning I knew that the world that these characters would be living in, would have to be believable for this story to come to life.  It needed to be rich and realistic.   I knew that I would have to find someone with the talent and the experience to do just that.  And guess what we did.

Cat Torres is an ambitious new york city based production designer for Monstar films in music videos, commercials, reality TV shows, and more.  She has worked with numerous music artists and has recently completed two short films.  Her work reflects her professionalism and innovation cultivated from more than production design but also her background in photography, graphic design, and journalism.  The work put into gas mask, between everyone at Humungoid Films and herself, is sure to be expressive and action packed.

Cat is a young and extremely talented and we are really lucky to have her on this project.  She has been hard at work combing through the script and using everything at her disposal to create a world that reflects each and every character.   She is filled with energy and is excited about bringing this world to life. 

Make sure you check out her website for and some of her work.

Here is the link.  www.cattorresny.com

Check out his reel below and see the the beauty of Victor’s work…

Victor’s work as cinematographer has won recognition in festivals all over the world, winning a SILVER PALM at the MEXICO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL, Best of Festival at OPEN APPERTURE FILM FESTIVAL, BEST SHORT FILM at NAPERVILLE INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL, and BEST PICTURE at the CUNUFF, among other awards. His portfolio includes commercial work, narrative and documentary shorts and features, and music videos. He has worked for MTV INTERNATIONAL, KOCH RECORDS, SONY, and THE DEVELOPMENT PRODUCTIONS.

He has worked with Final Cut Pro creator Michael Wohl as his storytelling mentor.

Victor will be shooting the project on a brand new SONY NEX-FS100. It shoots 2k images at uncompressed 8-bit 422 RGB, with a film-like shallow depth of field.

The project keeps gathering talented individuals. It’s so awesome. This is exactly what could have hoped for. Victor is overflowing with ideas on how to shoot this story.

Swing over to Victor’s Vimeo page and check out of the other videos over there. You will not be disappointed, it really is some wonderful stuff.

Here is the link http://vimeo.com/victorsuarez/videos

This is my good friend Jeff.  He is an incredible musician and has agreed to score my project.  I feel so lucky that so many talented people are coming together for this and I feel confident about the music now that he is involved.

Jeff and I have been talking about working on a project for a long time.  We discuss film on a regular basis.  The conversations we have had over the last few years has really taught me a lot about just how important sound is to a film.

Right before I had taken a break from this project, to produce “The Housesitter”  We had a meeting and talked about the script.  I loved the questions he had about everything.  I told him the emotions I wanted to get the audiences to have and what i wanted to accomplish.  We were on the same wavelength.  He has given me a rough sketch of a piece the he composed for a scene… It was absolutely incredible.  It was more than I had expected and is in tune with what I want it to be.  I will be using it for our Kickstarter campaign. 

Today got up early and got together at the Humungoid Film studio in White Plains with Thomas and Helio to record a little blurb for our kick starter video for The Housesitter movie, we shot last month to raise money for post production. That went really well, Thomas hit all his marks and we got it done quick. We should be posting that up soon.

We also went over some of the dialog changes that Thomas made in the Gas Mask script. Working with him is really making it shine. The response to the initial script has been awesome. It seems that the uncomfortableness and the visceral aspect of the script really is shining through. Later we went over some of the head shots of the actors that responded to my ad for the audition casting call. Yesterday we booked a room in the city of 36 Street Studios room B for casting call to be held so I sent out e-mails in the morning to the various actors that I thought would fit the part and that had an interesting look. Guess what, we got overwhelming response from all of them and all the time slots for the room completely booked within three hours of the original e-mail I sent out. That was completely awesome!

Last week John had made some sketches for the design of the gas mask that the main character James wears. A couple of days ago, he surprised us by making a sculpture of the of the design so we can look at it as reference and actually hold it. It was really really cool just to have somebody actually do that for us. Now that little model is sitting right on my desk looking at me everyday. I love it!

Also on Tuesday I have set up a meeting, after the auditions with a cinematographer that hopefully, will agree to be the director of photography on Gas Mask. So we are excited about that. So cross your fingers.

It’s funny how everything is just rolling now.  We are all excited about the progress and the possibilities. Wish us luck on Tuesday.

Coming up….Kickstarter

Sorry We haven’t been around to chronicle anything recently but it has been a crazy ride in the last month or so. We will try to put aside some time to write everything down. I guess it is a good thing, right?  We have been so lucky in the past month, meeting new filmmakers and having the opportunity to work with such great individuals.

In May, we decided it was time to try and collaborate with some more filmmakers. So I put in a call to a couple of people about meeting up and having some conversations on film and film making, goals and such. Juan Pabon was one of those people. He is a filmmaker in CT, who loves shooting, editing and knows a lot on the process of film. In these conversations, he mentioned how he had registered for a film race, he had no crew but some friends that he could ask. Our response was “We’re in!”.

And so it began…..

Humungoid Films and Nutibara Productions teamed up to compete in a 48 hour film race competition. We had done something like this before, a contest sponsored by Apple called the Insomnia Film Festival and had the same basic rules. It was simple, we had 48 hours from Friday afternoon till Sunday afternoon, to write, shoot, edit and drop off a finished short film that was 7 minutes long.

They gave you three elements:

1. A Prop; In this case it was a coffee mug (simple really)
2. A Character: A criminal named Mickey Sellers
3. A Line of Dialogue: “Do What You Want To Do”

Beside the 3 elements which you didn’t know until it was announced. a representative of your team had to pick a genre out of a hat, which ranged from silent film to western to musical. We got comedy, which believe you me is very difficult to do, comedy is all about timing and just so subjective.

So Juan and Diego, drove down to NYC to receive the info that we were to use, Anthony and I stayed up in Westchester, laptops open and ready to write and research.  We got the call from the guys letting us know what elements our team got and we were off to the races, typing away.

Rodney, our resident illustrator came by after work and between the five of us we came up with a screenplay based on an idea that Anthony had.  We took the buddy cop structure used in comedy and applied it to the crime world.

A mob boss calls in his most trusted, veteran thug Mickey Sellers to locate Vinny the Fist and the package he was supposed to deliver.
One catch, Mickey has to take the mob boss’ nephew with him, Skids.  A young, out of control, fly of the handle punk but Mickey is used to working alone.  We follow them as they must learn to work together to find The Fist!

We wrote all night and never went to sleep. We were lucky enough to have access to a restaurant (thanks to our friend and supporter Christian Burn) as well as a couple of other locations. Everyone met up at 8 am that Saturday morning and right off the bat we were in for an uphill battle. One of the actors, who was supposed to play the lead cancelled on us at the last minute. We had written the part for him and now he wasn’t there. We were on the clock, so we made some calls.

After a few people not answering and us leaving a bunch of desperate messages, one guy called back. Our good friend Mark Lissauer. No experience acting. No problem. He came through, ready to rock and roll. The guy was a rock star.  He drove to the restaurant and jumped right into character. Mickey Sellers, at your service. Chris Saave, from CS Filming was on board to help out. He filled in the part for Skids perfectly. Oliver Rush came in from Brooklyn. A very talented Director of Photography. Juan and Oliver own the same camera so we had Two Panasonic AF100. We were very lucky to have access to those because they produce gorgeous images.

We finished shooting at the restaurant and went next door to our friend’s apartment, after that we hopped in a car and shot the car ride scene as well as some exteriors.  At about 4 pm.  we ended up in a beautiful house that another great friend, Joe helped us secure.  It was very big house and perfect for the mob boss’ estate, where he sends Mickey and Skids on their adventure.  Time was against us still, the hours just melted away and as we rushed to get all the shots we needed as we lost light.  At about 10:30 we finished and the actors and  crew said their goodbyes and the principles went back home for a shower and a change of clothes.  then it was time to meet up in  the studio and begin the editing process.

Unfortunately that is where things went a little haywire.  We had a major hardware failure that wiped out hours of editing we did.   We tried to save the work but it was gone.  It was early morning and we decided to start again.  Three editors on three different computers worked at a frantic pace, We had a timer that would go off every 30 minutes announcing how much time was left till we had to stop and make a DVD, but no matter how fast we worked we just couldn’t overcome the loss we faced earlier that day.
 

We pushed it to the limit and when the last timer went off.  We hit the lights, turned up the volume and watched the movie we had in our hands.  It was good.  but it just wasn’t complete.  We discussed it for a few moments and watched it again and discussed it some more.  The festival guidelines said you could turn in an incomplete film but we couldn’t do that.  Instead, we decided to not submit and work on it some more that week and submit a completed version of the film to one of the many short film festivals around the country.

It was Sunday night by then and we had woken up Friday at 7 am, to take this challenge on.  60 hours had gone by in a blink of an eye.  We were beat up and half delirious.  We shut off the computers and decided to look at the bright side.  It was the first time we had worked together.  We had gone to war together, in the trenches of film making, endured through an extremely tough situation.  Instead of folding like most people might, we had decided to go down swinging.  It was time for a beer and a burger.  So we went to Dunne’s Pub and there we talked about everything that went bad and everything that went great.  We spent a few hours and by the time we said goodbye, I knew we would work together again.

It’s funny how thing work out.  Right after that film race, I got a call from another filmmaker that I met with and he asked Humungoid to produce his first feature, an extremely low budget horror film called Demon Cross: The Housesitter.  He was shooting in less than three weeks, but there was a lot of prep to do.  I knew it was going to be difficult, so of course I said Yes!  I picked up the phone and dialed up the people that would go down swinging with me.

I’ll tell you all about that movie in the next post, its been one hell of a ride so far and it is far from over.  The Gas Mask is moving forward as we speak.

Pabs