EPILOGUE
We started in August of 2011 and we ended in October 2012. For some reason I can't even begin to comprehend, we were saying that we'd finish this in October of 2011, which I had to actually count the months on my hand to make sure I wasn't completely out of my mind. Three months. What the hell were we thinking? No. Way. In. Hell. So, while we told everyone that we would release the movie in time for Halloween, we joked later on that we never specified which Halloween. Jesus... three months. My mind is still blown.
The one thing we've learned from working on numerous movies is that it will never, ever, take less time than you originally expect, and will almost certainly always, take twice as much, if not more. The Cutting Room Floor took a while. About a year and 3 month, not counting the time it took to write and do any pre-production time. Of course, it's not like we worked on it every day, but it was always there, kind of hanging over our heads; you can imagine the wave of relief that washed over us after the premiere. However, there was definitely a feeling of nervous anxiety, because, holy shit, we've just spent over a year of our life working on this thing, and now we're ready to show it... what if it sucks?
Well, I'm not one to toot my own horn, but I don't think it sucked. And I haven't heard anyone else think it did either. So that was a relief.
While we filmed sporadically over the year, finishing Haunted in Spring of 2012, we tried to keep up on editing it as we went. That kind of worked. Paul and I worked on it as much as he could tolerate me sitting over his shoulder. We trimmed everything down to a rough cut together, but over the summer he took off to film a documentary, and I borrowed a computer and started fine tuning various sequences in my basement. One of which, was the damn zombie footage that we were having a hard time cutting together coherently. I think I worked on most of Haunted as well. Then PK returned in August and I remember sitting down with him and saying, "Paul, I think if we're going to premiere this at Mindframe, we almost have to do it over Halloween weekend." Paul nodded his head calmly and said, "I agree." I was kind of shocked that Paul was going along with this, because it would mean a TON of work for him. "Do you think we can do it in time?" I asked him. Paul thought about it for a moment and said, "Yeah, I think we can do it." This was, without a doubt, the most ambitious Paul has ever gotten about the project, so I ran with it. We set up a schedule of what we needed done, and by what dates and we worked harder on it in the last three months than we did in the first year. It was insane. Paul fine tuned the editing, and I would drop in to give feedback and help out. Then he added sound effects and digital special effects, while I was scouring the net looking for royalty free music we could use, and jotting down websites, track names, and where I thought they'd fit in the movie.
Somehow, we got it done. But it went right up to the wire. In fact, if Mindframe, or anyone else knew how close it came, chances are they wouldn't have agreed to the premiere. But it worked out, so forget I said anything.
While we were getting the finished cut perfected, we started creating some promotional material. Graphic artist extraordinaire, and star of the movie, Neil Potter worked with me on creating posters. I basically drew up some thumbnails and he made them happen. We got some really great posters too. Other graphic artists extraordinaire, Scott Reuber printed out a pile of them for us to give away during the premiere, as well as to hang around town and distribute among cast and crew. They were really great looking. Neil and Scott would also go on to create the DVD cover and inserts; also amazing looking. Extremely professional. I couldn't be happier with the turn out.
A couple weeks before the premiere, which we had locked down, despite the finished film not being... well, finished, was Dubuque's Fall Into Art gallery tour. This is something Dubuque does every Autumn, where a handful of local businesses downtown host art gallery showings over the weekend. Paul had some connections, and got us a venue in the Warehouse Art Gallery, where we displayed our promotional posters, flyers, and we even had a couple of cast members dressed in full, disgusting zombie make up. They wandered the nearby venues handing out flyers for the movie and posing for photos, while me and Paul dressed nice and acted like big shots. It was awesome. However, we decided that we needed a trailer to have playing at the gallery, so, we had to take a week out of our already extremely cramped editing schedule to shoot a promo piece of us at Mindframe talking about the movie, and then also a short teaser trailer with highlights of the film itself. If anything was going to break Paul, it would be this, but he kicked it out on time, and it looked great. He's got a knack for this kind of thing.
So, with the gallery tour done, next up, we got featured in the local paper and had some radio ads going. The telegraph herald interviewed Paul and I and ran a front page story (in the community section) about the movie, then a week before the showing, a local radio station aired a couple 30 second spots for us, and the morning of the premiere Paul and I were guests on the show, giving us a chance to talk about the movie and get the word out even further. It was all pretty cool. After we left the radio station, I followed Paul back home and we continued work on the movie that would be premiering in about 12 hours. The only thing we had left to do was burn the finished film to a disc, which ended up being about the most aggravating challenge of the whole project. You can have everything perfect, but sometimes, the DVD burner just wants to be an asshole and not burn it correctly. I remember we went through about 15 DVDs, each one with problems ranging from small skipping or split seconds of scrambled picture, to full-on-nightmares with audio cutting out or pieces of footage looping over and over again. At one point we had to run out to Best Buy to purchase more blank DVDs because we had used up everything we had trying to burn a perfect copy. We even had a couple "maybe" DVDs that we were okay with using if we couldn't burn a better copy. It was one of these Maybe DVDs that I took to Mindframe and did a quick test screening of about 2 hours before the premiere. It worked pretty well, and most of the audience wouldn't catch the issues, but we would know it wasn't perfect and it would always bug us. So, while I was getting the theater set up and making sure the projector would work, Paul was back at home, trying one final time to get a final copy burned. (I should mention too, that you can't really tell if it's a perfect copy or not until you watch the entire disc. So not only did we have to burn it, we'd have to watch it and keep an eye out for any problems- then mark when they happened and look for the same errors (or new ones) to occur in the next burning. So we were generally burning another DVD right away, as soon as we started previewing the previous one. It was a nightmare, and if Paul wasn't able to quote the entire movie by heart after editing it for a year, he certainly was after the DVD burning process. I think he was up until about 4 am the night before the premiere, fighting with the computer and trying to get a perfect copy) I remember while I was testing the DVD, I went down to the theater to get a ground-view look to make sure everything looked how it was supposed to. I took a moment to just enjoy the fact that here I was, in a soon-to-be full theater, where my movie was about to play. I sat down and just let it sink in for a moment. This is what we were waiting for. I hoped to God everything went according to plan, but for a minute, I didn't care. I just sat there, by myself in the darkened theater and enjoyed seeing the movie we spent a year filming on the big screen. Then I got my shit together and continued freaking out. 
Well, somehow, fate smiled on us, because about an hour before the premiere, Paul arrived with a new disc. He handed it to me and said, "This one should work." I asked him how much faith he had in that, and he didn't have a very confident answer. I tested it out quick in the projection room and it seemed okay, but we didn't have time to give it a full preview, because people were beginning to arrive for the show. So, we threw it in the DVD player and crossed our fingers, then went downstairs to see the turnout.
It was amazing; and I'm sure Paul can attest to this; as someone who has studied films, and made movies for a large chunk of his life, this was as close to an official movie premiere as we could have asked for. The lobby was packed. And I mean, packed. People were buying tickets and getting popcorn; to such an extent that they had to open up an extra register and Scott Goedert, cast and crew member (and Mindframe Theater employee) had to jump on and help sell tickets. We had Troy there, dressed as his character "Whiskers," talking with the crowd and posing for photos. We had red carpet photo area, and everyone was excited to be there and to see the movie. Tons of people were in the movie, appearing as zombies, so they brought their friends and family to see it too. We sold a shit load of tickets. It was very, very cool. Soon enough, we began funneling them into the theater, and when the place was full, we dimmed the lights and Paul, myself, and a couple other cast and crew members got on stage and introduced the movie. The audience applauded, and boom, we began.
Paul and I sat in the back, taking it all in. We'd seen it so many times, so we just watched the crowd. Took notes on their reactions, and also just enjoyed seeing so many packed theater seats. I don't think I'd ever seen Mindframe as full as it was that night, and I heard later from one of the employees that it was one of the most tickets sold to a midnight show ever. Eat it, Lord of the Rings. The crowd reaction was phenomenal. Everyone laughed and had a good time. They applauded after Tagged, they gasped during some of our special effects gags, and cringed during others, and then as the movie ended, we got another round of applause as the theater emptied into the bathrooms. (it was, after all, a 2 hour movie.) Thankfully, the majority of the patrons returned from the restroom, and Paul, Neil and I resumed our place on the stage for a fairly lengthy Q&A session. Again, so cool to hear an audience's reaction and response to something that you literally created from nothing. We had tons of interesting questions, ranging on how we came up with certain elements (the idea for Tagged, the ideas for frog-zombies) to whether or not I was wearing underwear under the tutu I wore in Murder Party. It proved people were watching closely. We concluded the evening by signing posters that we had, and that was another surreal experience. All kinds of people were asking for our autograph and asking us what we had planned next. Definitely one of the great moments of our filmmaking career, because while all of us have had fun making short movies and sharing them on the net, this was by far the most personal and intimate reaction we've ever had, with a crowd that just ate it up. I can't thank enough people, from everyone involved in the production of the movie, (especially Paul, with whom, none of this would've been possible (and I'd like to think he'd feel the same about me), along with Mindframe for letting us film and premiere the movie at their fine establishment, and finally, all the fans that came out and saw it at midnight on Halloween weekend. Like I said, we didn't kid ourselves, this wasn't going to get picked up and distributed by Lionsgate or anything, but we just wanted to have a cool little indie premiere at the local theater, and we ended up with a bigger turnout than we ever could've imagined. We worked so hard on this, for over a year, and it was such a relief to hear overwhelmingly positive feedback on it. It was like validation. We knew it was good. But then as the premiere loomed closer and closer, nerved kicked in and we started second-guessing, like maybe it's really not that great, or maybe people won't think it's as funny as we do. Luckily, that wasn't the case. As I mentioned in last week's look back at Murder Party, we overheard a small child leaving the theater telling his mom he wanted to be Whiskers for Halloween. Maybe he was joking, but damn it if I wasn't touched.
Oh yeah, and the DVD that Paul hastily burned, just hours before the premiere... it played perfectly.
We had originally planned to have DVDs for sale at the premiere too, but as things piled up, we decided that just wasn't going to happen, and put that on the back burner, opting for a DVD sign up sheet instead. Then, over Christmas we got the DVDs finishes, using a great company called "Blank Media Printing" to burn all the discs and create professional looking labels. They looked great, and the finished product could sit proudly on any DVD shelf, never hinting that it was a independent film made for under $500. Hopefully everyone that wanted a copy has got one by now. We printed 100, and I think we were left with about 12... if anyone else wants one, just let us know.
Premiere done. DVD done. What's next? Why not enter it in a festival? Why not? Dubuque has begun to hold a yearly International Film Festival, so we submitted it. While the festival is still very new, it's attracted a lot of press and recognition. Movies from all across the world are featured, so imagine how thrilled we were when our two shorts: Tagged and Murder Party were picked as official selections. We didn't win anything, but it was amazing to be included. They played all weekend at a variety of locals around downtown Dubuque, along with a handful of other local shorts. Another awesome experience that really made us strive to do even better with our next project.
Okay... so... that was done. Wow. The biggest, most ambitious film we ever did was finished. It was a sigh of relief, and with the DVD done, and all the special features and behind the scenes footage cataloged and included, we felt like we could close the door on The Cutting Room Floor and never look back. It was an experience that I'll treasure forever. I mean, we made a full movie. And not just one, but like 4 full movies. I wrote it, we filmed it, we edited it, and we have a finished product that we can show people and say, "Hey, look what we did." It's dedication. I mean, how many people can say that. My entire life, I've loved creating. I was never big on sports, or cars, or anything like that. When I was young, I'd sit in my room and draw, or write. I'd make books to share with people. Then I got into movies, and found another way to tell a story. So, all these years later, I'm still doing it. I've just found other people that like to do the same thing, and we've gotten better at it. This movie was such a learning experience, for everyone. We discovered great actors, amazing resources that we can utilize in the future. We learned what works, what doesn't work. Things we do well, things we need to improve on. Way to manage time. How reliable we are under deadlines (pretty damn reliable it turns out). But most of all, I think everyone can say, it was fun. Sure, staying up till 5 am covered in fake blood isn't always the most fun (but sometimes it is). We did stuff like this before, and we'll continue to do stuff like this after. And it's not for money, or any recognition. It's because we like to create something and share it with others. 
I told myself after the DVD was done, I was done with The Cutting Room Floor. I had spent over a year thinking about it non-stop. And yet, here I am, almost a year later, writing an (overly) lengthy blog about my experience on it. I'm glad I got to make it, and I hope everyone else had as good a time with it as I did. Now, I feel like I've said all there is to say about it. So with that in mind... we move forward... onto the next one.
Nice work. On the movie, and this blog series.
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