under construction

so... just in case anyone is still reading this and interested, our official website has been simultaneouly shrunk and expanded. we're in the process of remodeling our web presense, so all you've got to see right now is a pretty new splash page. however, on that splash page we've posted some downloadable video. if you opt to download some video from the page, please be patient - we couldn't bare to post super small low-quality clips. also, please note that one of the videos is the brand new never-before-released director's cut of our highly acclaimed short film, this song.

check it out.

update this!

the neverending project.

it's mostly done. but it's been mostly done for several months now... just some fine tuning left. correcting a few of the closing credits. perfecting the home-burned dvd just a little further. securing final rights to some of the music. etc etc etc.

new things currently being considered:

there's a fantastic idea for a 13 episode, 30 minute television series. we've got some notes for the pilot episode and a nice outline for the full season.

there's a new feature script for which pages are being written and re-revised and bickered over on a semi-regular basis. the top-secret story may or may not involve the following: hand grenades; anti-government uprisings; dairy farmers; weird europeans; the mending of father-son relations; semi-obscure languages; country regulations regarding alcohol sales and consumption; trapeze. needless to say it's going to warm your heart and kick your ass.

there's a neato little short that is semi-related to the television series and involves role-playing games.

there's a music video for a terrific local musician.

back to work...
m

little pictures

i probably shouldn't be posting this since it's incomplete, but... our good friend isaac holk has been working on a poster/flier/promotional piece for the film and he sent me a partial/rough draft last night. anyway, it pretty much kicks ass, so i thought i would post a few small pieces of the incomplete work... enjoy.







additionally, if any of you were at the norfolk & western show last night you might have noticed a couple of annoying people roaming around the stage with video cameras. that would have been us and our friend, chad crouch, whose record label, hush, has contributed a number of songs to the soundtrack for 'almost everything.' anyway, we're hoping to have future multi-media collaborations with hush and will keep you updated on any news there.

so long for now...
m

multiple medias

as per previous posts, i'm dropping some multi-media on all you chumps.

the following are a couple of stand-alone scenes that you may or may not have seen on our myspace page. youtube still sorta sucks (at least as far as a/v quality is concerned), but it's obviously also the most convenient way to spread the video.

here you go:

slow going...

so it's been a little while. i don't wanna say we've been slacking exactly, but let's just say that our television consumption has seen a sharp spike since the film got sent of to sundance. anyway... no word yet on that whole sundance thing. and being as no news is good news, we're just fine with that.

but, so, yeah... we've started back into polishing the whole thing. not much to talk about there, really. only boring-type stuff - running final color correction, re-recording of the some of the music (tho, i have to comment on this one thing: due to the complications of scheduling legitimate recording sessions with everybody in parks & recreation, ljb has taken up the herculean task of re-creating and recording his own versions of a couple of their tracks, featuring support from jake powell and a few others and vocals by michael johnson and chad crouch, which will appear in the final cut of the film. i don't know if you realize how impressive that is, but trust me, it's pretty damn impressive), working out the details of creating a dvd, etc. so, yeah, boring stuff to talk about, but it's gotta be done, hasn't it?

in other news, we've got a couple of writing projects we've started on. though, of course, we cannot discuss them with you as we know you're a plageristic bunch and would likely steal our million-dollar ideas and claim them as your own, if we gave you the opportunity. which, we're not going to do, by the way, so forget about it.

oh, i know what will keep you possibly entertained! how about sometime in the next week or so, i post to the blog maybe some multi-media stuff... a track or two from the score and maybe a small downloadable clip or trailer or something. there's something to look forward to, eh?

sorry if all this sounds weird... we tend to not know exactly what to do with ourselves during these transitional times. maybe it's best we just keep our mouths (e.g. fingers (for typing on the blog)) shut during these times of not-knowingness. i dunno... what do you think?

one other thing...

i almost forgot! we had an eleventh hour title change go through: we are now in post-post-production on "almost everything."

what do you think?

gonna leave you where i found you...

long time no bloggy, eh?

sorry about the silence, we've been racing hard and fast toward a firm deadline (which was this morning) and haven't had much time for anything else. really.

but, so, yeah... a brief up-date on where it's at:

our shiny new post-production audio master, noah davis, has done some spectacular work on our tracks and we've now got a pretty damn clean soundtrack.

ljb and dana bourland have composed and recorded some perfect clips of score and they are all placed and pretty well mixed into the film. (one or two will likely be revised before the officius release, but they pretty much nailed everything the first time out.)

ljb also recently spent a long weekend (with mike and anthony) mixing and recording over-dubs for a parks & recreation b-side, love and war, which plays lovingly over our closing credits.

and finally, we've reached a sort of stopping point for now. is there still work to be done? sure, there is. but it's finesse work - tweaking some colors and replacing a demo track of source music with proper studio track, that sort of thing. and being that we're momentarily happy with where the movie's at, we've decided to send off the first festival application. i'm not saying which festival we sent it to first, but it's probably pretty obvious... we should be able to report on our rejection by the first week of december or so. the next festival submission we're looking at is november, so between now and then we should be able to wrap up a the little things and start screening the film for family and friends (public screenings will be announced once we figure all that business out... later. but don't expect anything really until probably early next year.)

thanks for checking in with us!

new and exciting...

OPEN CALL: Short Films for Benefit DVD

Grammar School Pictures is collaborating with Antoine Doinel Records on a cd/dvd package to benefit SMART, a non-profit early literacy program in Oregon.

The title of the project is Guilty Pleasures and we are asking interested parties to submit a short scene (5 minutes or less) from their favorite cheesy movie, re-created or re-imagined in their own style (basically, a "cover" of the scene - like Wes Anderson's Rushmore-style MTV Movie Awards commercials, for example).

The final due date for all submissions is October 23, 2006. By that date, all films should be delivered in Quicktime .mov format (no larger than 900 mb) on either data-dvd or cd to:

Matt Knapp
Grammar School Pictures
2368 W Burnside St ste. 209
Portland, OR 97210

Since this is a charity project, we can offer no cash prizes, but the selected filmmakers will receive 10 copies of the final product and, of course, a credit.

If you plan on submitting a scene, please register by emailing your name, the name of the film you are covering, and a brief description of the scene to: headmaster@grammarschoolpictures.com. Please direct any inquiries to the same email address.

Thanks and good luck!
matt

no news/good news

not much to report these days - toiling away on the minutia, as it were. new musical additions have been presented by dana bourland and ljb, and i'm really excited about where our original score is going. also, made a few editorial changes to some source music - nothing major really to speak of, just tweaks and a couple of substitutions. and we've got a firm deadline now - september 25 is the absolute last day for a dvd of our fine motion picture to be arriving in the hands of the good folks at sundance (so that they may watch it and have a mild chuckle before tossing our dvd in the waste basket and crushing our hopes of escaping our lousy day jobs by way of major film festival glory). that's all for now. sorry to be sooooooo boring.

oh, also: i showed the little niece and nephew a few of alicia's scenes on sunday. while 4-year-old dennis was distracted (though strongly insistent that i continue playing the movie), it appears as if we've won over a fan with 2-year-old emma (who couldn't even sit through Cars! take THAT pixar!). so i guess we know our demographic now...

post-script

also, lest you think we intend to rest on our laurels when this somethingness is all said and done. the last line of the next thing is currently: "are you contractually obliged to be an asshole, or is that still a hobby?"

more on that later...

cutting syllables

we've been working on adr (automated dialog replacement, for you laymen) and foley (original sound effects) for the last week or so, and so far:so good. the editing of this adr is really the only difficult part. there are little tricks to getting things to synch up (e.g. i prefer to leave the original "scratch" track in place and slide the adr track back and forth by a frame or two until the echo is as minimal as possible), but it's such detailed, meticulous work. it's funny, you can actually cut an entire syllable out of a word that lasts a frame or two too long and, as long as the lips synch up, the brain just fills in what's missing. the scary part is that it's impossible for me to know how these lines are going to sound to an audience. i mean, i've lived with the scratch tracks for so long that, even in their imperfections, they sound right to me. this is where our post-production audio dude/dudette comes in. hopefully, when all is said and done, he/she'll take these clean new tracks and dirty 'em up a little bit. fit them with the right amount of reverb and eq them into normalcy so they closely match our production audio.

but besides the adr, the fun part of the last couple weeks has been recording the little details: a flight attendant's announcement over the airport pa, aaron's voice mail recordings, the little whistle that joe's nose makes when he exhales with vigor.

anyway, things are coming together quite nicely. i'm about a week or so away from a locking down picture and i feel really confident in the project as a whole right now. (but this might be because i haven't shown it to anyone in quite a while - even joe just the weekend got to take a look at it for the first time in over a month.) hopefully, we'll be able to finish strong.

swimmingly.

yes sir, we're doing just that well.

we (the royal we) made quick work out of that little computer blip a few weeks ago and the movie is officially back in place. all the original scenes were restored by saturday morning and by the end of the day sunday, we'd mixed in the re-shoots and pick-ups as well.

and not to sound sickeningly positive, but i think the time off probably even did us some good. as we sat down recently with a potential post-production audio guru to watch the last tangible cut on tape, we started noticing things - places where it dragged and scenes to be jumbled up and just how fucking long are the opening credits supposed to be anyway... so, all that stuff that maybe we were too close to notice last time around is being worked on. we all feel supremely confident that this next cut will be pretty damn close to final. not quite final (what is final anyway?), but pretty damn close.

in musical new: ljb played for me a few bits of score that's he's working on and they sound fantastic! i'm very excited to see what he and mike johnson (who i believe will be tossing his musical hat into the mix at some point as well) and the inimitable dana bourland come up with for the final score. also, we've got official permission from hush records to use a few of their fantastic tracks including grave's modern 'love's a killer', blanket music's cover of 'i take on your days', and our own re-mixes of super xx man's 'garage apartment' and toothfairy's 'sorry' (as featured in the trailer). also also: the dazzling strangers, who are both dazzling and strange, have granted us license to their strangly dazzling track, 'petey libertine' in the film. exciting stuff!

stay tuned for so much more...
mtk

shameless plugging for friends...

dear reader,

my good friends, Parks & Recreation, who have been kind enough to provide a number of their fantastic songs to the movie are looking to play the PDX Pop Festival this summer. PDX Pop is now taking requests for bands to be put on the bill. So, if you've got the time and the inclination, please drop by PDX POP and put in a vote for the boys.

if you don't feel comfortable voting for a band you're unfamiliar with, by all means, get acquainted: P&R

thanks and godspeed.

mtk

return of the edi(ting suite)

just a quick note to say that we're back in business. thanks in part to some generous dvd pre-orders, we've managed to replace and repair our editing system and are well on our way to reconstructing the missing scenes from the film. reconstruction should be complete within the next couple of weeks, if all goes according to jim belushi.

additionally, re-shoots last weekend went extremely well. the two revised scenes and one additional mini-scene are going to work beautifully, i know it. all that's left is some foley, a little bit of adr, and a days worth of random pick-up shots, and we'll be absolutely finished with the production end of things.

that's all for now... except that (and this is the last time i'll mention it) our paypal account is still ready and willing to help you buy a small portion of artistic credibility... see below for instructions.

buy for now.

so that happened.

hi gang...

just a few quick notes...

1. there's a much better quality version (quicktime!) of the teaser trailer up on our myspace page (and if you're on myspace, be our friend!).

2. my imac died! after less than 1 year! last week it just wouldn't boot. initial trouble shooting by the genius bar at my local apple store indicated it was merely a problem with the power source, however yesterday they called to tell me that my hard drive was ruined as well! this was a major concern since most of the movie was on that hard drive. however, i also have an external drive i use and, luckily, i had saved a copy of the project file and about 40% of the footage on that external drive. so... long story short, i had to arm wrestle the manager of the apple store to get my old hard drive back (they're holding my imac unrepaired until i return it - bastards) so that i could explore my options for (unfortunately costly) data recovery. needless to say, this is a set back. assuming macforce can recover nothing (without having to send it to a drive recovery lab), i'm staring down about a month's worth of work to reconstruct my last cut. plus bills for attempted data recovery, software replacement, etc... which leads me to...

3. grammar school pictures is now accepting donations. for $20 you can pre-order a copy of the dvd (which we will ship by the end of september). for $50 you can purchase a "special thanks" credit (and receive a copy of the dvd). for $150 you can purchase an "associate producer" credit (and receive a copy of the dvd). for $300 you can purchase a "co-producer" credit (and receive a copy fo the dvd). and for $500 we'll credit you as an "executive producer", send you a copy of the dvd, and invite you to the premiere. take some time... think it over. when you decide how much you'd like to give, simply send it via paypal to: headmaster@grammarschoolpictures.com. we'll send you an email confirming your donation and it's associated credit. thanks for your support.

okay. that's all for now... hopefully i'll have more good news to post next time.

m

teaser trailer!

so this is pretty rough... no real sound work done and youtube doesn't provide the highest quality video (and it slips the audio out a sync a little too)... but, irregardless, here you go...

done with all that.

alright people: by popular demand we are officially ending this back and forth over a new title. the votes have been counted (all one of them) and the new official title is ... somethingness.

take it or leave it. or comment on it.

boring you and me: more potential titles

i'm not exactly trying to beat a dead horse, or drive away the few of you who actually read this drivel on occassion, but... the title issue has not yet been resolved.

here's a fresh batch of words/phrases under consideration:

- distraction
- all you need is me (courtesy of reclinerland)
- directions
- idle
- returns/returning/return
- hesitation
- backspace (i've bounced this one around for a while - and i kind of like it)
- the lack (does no one like 'the lack'?!? am i really that much of a freak?)
- somethings
- somethingness (yes, i'm serious...)

in other title news: 'how it ends' is out of the running for the picture as it has been reassigned to another potential future project.

thanks for putting up with us.

something else?

how does anybody feel about "bent" as a title...

thoughts?

feelings?

general misgivings?