Just because it's been over a year and have completely let this blog go to waste.

Hello Peace & Riot (aka Girl Meets Boy) fans,

I haven't posted in a long time, mostly because the movie has taken so many turns that were beyond my control and I wasn't aware of much of them.  So for those 15 or so followers I decided to give you all a little bit of a treat.

Peace & Riot got renamed Girl Meets Boy and came out on DVD June 4, 2013.  It was also available in June on Pay-Per-View in millions of homes.  Audiences have enjoyed watching it on Xbox Live, Amazon streaming, PlayStation, Google Play and illegal downloads/streaming.

Around the first of May, I received a text that Girl Meets Boy was on TV.

It was true.  The movie got released to broadcast television. Fox, The CW network and CBS played the movie that I wrote/directed.  Seeing my movie on TV was amazing.

It was hours/days later that the scope of the broadcast became apparent.  It was on several nights a week on stations all over the country.  From the left coast to the right.  I went and grabbed some screen shots of different programming schedules.

Here are a few.

Off to the ratings.

Hey folks.

Lots of stuff has happened since I last posted. 

The biggest bit of news is that Peace & Riot has signed a distribution deal with a very cool company (happened the first week of January 2013), which means that it's just a matter of time before the movie will be available to the masses.

It's being submitted to the MPAA for a rating.  Which is kind of neat.  I mean, I'd like to know where it falls.  In 2012 PG-13 movies included The Dark Knight Rises, Red Dawn, Taken 2, The Hunger Games... while getting the R rating were Ted, Argo, Magic Mike, 21 Jump Street and Zero Dark Thirty.   

Where Peace & Riot will end up?  I'll let you know.

Happy New Year

Hello there friends and fans of Peace & Riot. 

I would say that I have made a New Year's resolution to post more about the movie.  The truth is, instead of wanting to post more, I have decided to give up peanut brittle. 

But for the few of you who are following Peace & Riot blog posts.  There isn't much going on.  It's more or less a waiting game to see which film festivals we will get in and which company or companies will want to distribute our movie.

Once I know something more I will post more.   In the mean time you can come and "like" our facebook page (which is getting more popular as friends speak to friends and I keep posting about it on the Boy Meets World facebook page).

Please turn off your cell phones...

For the dozen or so actual followers that I have right now, I apologize for not keeping up with this blog.  Perhaps it's good that I'm not keeping this so-up-to-date that it become like one of the obsessive posters on Facebook who just eventually gets blocked. Though I did intentionally slow down my posting on Facebook, I didn't intentionally slow down my production blog on Peace & Riot.

Monday, October 17th was a big day for the movie.  It's the first time we screened it for anyone.  Sure the producers, color correction folks, composer and sound mixer have been watching it all the time, but the majority of our cast and crew had no idea what the movie was shaping up to be.

I don't want to give any spoilers, but I will say that I'm happy with the movie.  And even though we are still making small changes, the majority of the audience was happy with it too. 

It was good to show people how their hard work paid off.  It was good to have friends and family share that experience with us. 

I was actually planning on giving this great speech at the beginning. I was going to thank specific people for specific events.  But when I got the chance, I got too nervous.  My nerves actually kicked in when the crowd swelled to about 50.  Even though I knew we were having over 70 people show up, once I saw more than about 50 people I started to get this feeling like "what if they don't get it?" 

They got it.  Our audience was a mixture of men and women.  From 15 to 75 years of age.  They all laughed when they were supposed to (well some of them didn't laugh at all my jokes) they got quite when it got important, but they all enjoyed themselves. 

When you make a movie, you're basically saying "I want to tell you a story for 89 minutes. But the good thing is, I've got these other really talented folks who are going to help me tell the story. Hopefully it's a good experience."

The Damion is in the details?

The movie is getting better every day.  

We’re now in the final stages of completing Peace & Riot.  I recently went work at the home/studio of our sound mixer Michael Kelly .  It was at this time that I could see some of the original score composed by Jonathan Price, mixed into the movie.   One of the jobs as the sound mixer is to lay all the music into the movie and adjusts the levels of the dialog.  

Flashback to New York City – October 2008.  I am in the Metropolitan Museum.  I’ve never considered myself an “art” guy but knew that on my first visit to the Big Apple, I needed to check out the museums. After a few hours of looking at paintings, some of them a thousand years old, I took out my cell phone and typed myself a note. 

 “Attention to detail can make good art great.”   A painting of a city by the sea from the 1600s, probably measuring six feet across stuck out to me.  The people in the background, they all had personalities:   one girl getting her haircut, a boy was swatting a fly away from his face, a fisherman checking his line.  Keep in mind these figures were no more than an inch in size on a painting that was twenty-four square feet.  With the choice of color and composition, the painting was beautiful, but was the fine detail that stood out to me.  

While watching the most recent cut of the movie, there is a scene in which Ben Savage talks to Anna Pheil – while she is holding a guitar.  I’d seen the scene a dozen times and it’s a good scene that moves the story forward.  However, this time I watched it Michael Kelly had mixed in some guitar sounds that Jonathan Price had recorded.  Now, I never asked Jonathan to do this for this particular scene as there were other scenes that we needed to brush up the guitar work.  So when Anna’s changes her grasp on the next of the guitar and I suddenly hear an almost silent hum/ buzz.  I am totally taken off guard.  

   

It’s the fine details like this that are making the movie that much better.

 

70 bucks for your opening credits.

Last update, I mentioned the end of the movie and how our audience would be so captured by our credit roll that they would keep watching until the very end.  And just like the end credits there are the opening credits. 

If you asked a handful of people you are bound to find a few that have their favorite title sequence.  I particularly like the opening sequence to the HBO series Entourage.  As I have lived in Hollywood for about fifteen years and watching those signs that I sometimes pass twice a day become the names of the people in the show is really nifty.  

 

Being my first movie, I wanted a cool opening title sequence.  I knew I didn’t have any money, nor did I have a kung-fu expert who could dodge arrows (and it really wouldn’t flow with the movie either.)  So I racked my brain and thought about various ways of putting names on the screen.

I decided that record albums for the opening credits of Peace & Riot would be a good choice.  We contemplated having the records come out and spin around or something, but it would end up taking some type of computer whiz to pull that off.  And a whiz usually wants money.  With limited funds, we figured something “real life” would be the cheapest route.

After discussing ideas with my brother and other people involved in the production I set out to create my own original artwork.  Though surely I’d be inspired by graphics I have seen while growing up and hopefully those influences would come out of me to create something visual.  I am no artist.  Let me repeat, I am no artist.  The only thing I think I got going for me, is that I know what I like when I see it.  So it’s not hard for me to say “that doesn’t work” or “that sucks” even when I just put a few hours into it.  Knowing that, I would just have to create hundreds of albums until I could bear to look at eleven of them.

I drew a couple of crude sketches on some post its and borrowed a digital camera and went out into the streets of Los Angeles.  Days later and a few hundred pictures that could become a handful of good ideas .  I then passed along some of the more creative concepts.  I asked my brother to take a picture of someone handcuffed.  The picture would then be put through the magic of photo-shop to get the savage look I was after.  Then I relayed some of my more visual ideas to Mari Kossman and we worked on some graphic art pieces together.

After calling a number of print shops, I found one that would agree to print up each cover for $5.  We also priced out printing on actual album covers, but that was way too pricey.

As I am about as good with crafts as I am with Photo-Shop, I took the prints to Ventura to again work with the ever-so-talented Ms. Kossman.  We went shopping for used/abused 12” Vinyl.   Cost was most important as we knew we’d be cutting and pasting on them (the old fashion way, not with a clicks of a mouse) and so we found the cheapest used records we could.

Sure enough we found a place that sold these pieces of the past for under a buck each.  Walking away with a dozen, we headed back to the art studio (Mari’s apartment) and scissor’d/glued the stuff like a couple of 4^th graders.    I inevitably destroyed a couple because I am a little excessive with the glue, so I’d have to spend a few more bucks on new prints, but she got them right after I completely handed over the task to her.

You can be a part of the movie if ....

For the few followers I have on this blog I apologize for not posting in quite some time.  Of the billions of other things you could be doing online you’ve chosen to read what I’m writing and I do appreciate that enough to not want to bore you with anything less than “real exciting stuff.”

We’re at the final stages of Peace & Riot.   After a few tweaks and the technical/artistic work of a few professionals (mainly music composing and color correcting) the movie will be done. 

One of the jobs that I’m handing off is performing the song to our closing title sequence.  If you haven’t seen the video of Jake Busey introducing this idea, I will break it down for you.

The people making the movie have a song called “Running Over Raymond” that was written for the movie “Peace & Riot.”  You can upload yourself performing this song to Youtube and send us a link.  If your rendition of the song is good enough, we’ll use your performance in the end title credits.

I don’t remember exactly why I thought this was going to be such a great idea.  But I knew that it would be fun if we had people playing the song in their style.

Opening it up to the internet and having global exposure (by posting all over the world on Craigslist) I figured some one with an instrument and a dream would love the opportunity to play a song in a movie.  And as the Youtube promo video has had some 1600 views, we’ve had about a half a dozen submissions.   I’ve also had my fair share of hate mail.  

I don’t expect nor did I ask for a professional singer/band to play the song and upload it for free.  If they wanted to do that, I would gladly accept their submission and rate it with the others, but I figured most people submitting would be doing it for the love of music and the chance to be a part of something.  

 

I won’t apologize for asking for volunteers.  I won’t say that I am too cheap or lazy to find someone and pay them to play the song for our movie.   That’s not what this is about.  This is for you, your friend or your sixteen (or sixty) year old cousin who plays/sings and doesn’t always have an audience – to have the chance to have an audience that you wouldn’t normally get to see you perform.