Quick Note

It was freezing tonight. Finally got a pretty important, 1 second shot for the movie.

Bloopers are coming. I was going to have some up last night, but I held off, and figure we can start the New Year off nicely with a new round of bloopers, so in the next day or so, be on the lookout, buttheads

SUCCESS!

Greetings from the Lawson Laboratory!

It is a little past 4 am and while most of you fans are in bed with dreams of Lawson parading through your sick minds, we here at the lab have been hard at work. Working through the night, not unlike diligent shoe-cobbling gnomes, we have finally perfected the air propelled squibs! What does this mean to you as the viewer? It means exciting, bloody exit wounds! It means mists of blood showering a triumphant renegade officer of the law! Basically it means people can get shot onscreen without having to use any dangerous pyrotechnics, which we aren't stupid enough to fool around with in the first place.

Hopefully the tubing system remains functioning, but so far the past few tests with water have been very positive. Air is pressurized behind a release valve that leads to a hose with water (or fake blood) and a corked hole in it. When the valve is opened the air rushes forward and pushes the water, propelling the cork with a nice spray. If this ends up failing "in the field" don't worry. We have more tricks up our sleeves down at the lab!

Lawson hates bad guys so much.

Thanks for reading!

-Tommy (a scientist)

Full Steam ahead?!

So, after Wednesdays meeting we made a lot of progress. We set down the final plan for the shooting minus the warehouse scenes, and worked out some of the other things that we had to film. We are finally putting the finishing touches into motion.

In terms of the Muzzle Flare debate, we decided that since I have a fair amount of free time, and don't really have anything else for the movie to work on in that free time I would take care of them, weather having someone else doing it for us(we have had some offers and people willing to help us.), or doing it myself if things don't work out. That way, we won't taking away from Barry's time editing, and John and Tommy working on music, as well as allowing me to contribute more to the movie now. When the time comes, I am going to do some additional editing myself, but until that time comes, I can work on this.

We have been pushing the blog and the trailer hard lately, and it is seemingly working, our hits per day to the blog are increasing with each day, as well as our returning visitors. Hopefully, we can keep giving you some great news, as well as some great teasers and footage for you to look at.

If I could vent for a moment

Maybe I am the only one that isnt completely bothered by the fact that there arent flames shooting out of the gun. Considering we've never made a real movie, and this is our first attempt at doing so, I dont think people are necessarily expecting it to be 100 percent legitimate.

If we can get them done, so be it. Yes it would add a lot to the movie, but as I've been taught, all the flashy effects in the world cant make up for a shitty movie. If the movie is good on its own, the stupid fucking flares will be icing on the cake, theyre not the main ingredient.

The movie is already coming out leagues better than expected, and I can fully say that even without the flares, I still think we have a kick ass thing going for us. This is where my original idea of creatively shooting the scene to show the gun shots as little as possible will come in to play so we dont have to have debates over whether the movie will flop because we dont have fire crackers coming out of the guns. Its going to be good regardless, and yes, it would add a little more "realism" to a movie thats going to have peoples heads getting punched through.

Muzzle Flare?!

With the release of the trailer, the biggest concern with the way it looked was everyone felt that the gunshots didn't look real enough, and I would be hard pressed not to agree. So we went out looking for solutions, the first plan was to find someone proficient in Adobe After Effects. I tried Craigslist and all I got were Web Design companies that didn't do anything with video editting looking to build me a web site. Barry also put something up at his school, as well as, Myspace and Facebook. In the mean time, I started playing with After Effects myself. It isn't brutally hard, but gun Flares might have taken a little more time than we had. So I hit google, and said, hey, how do other people do this. I came across a movie "Bullets over Breakfast", done by another start up similar to us named Quantum Petshop The had a detailed tutorial on how to do the effects they had in their movie, which was loaded with gun fire. So, I figured, I would tinker around with it and see if I could get similar results, and currently, the results look promising, I don't have any of the footage from the trailer on me, but when I get it, I am going to run some test. It is definitely a good solution, but a tedious one, fortunately, I know my way around an editing suite, as well as not being the primary editor, I am willing to take this in my own hands and make it happen. Hopefully, this weekend we will have an updated Trailer with muzzle flares, or at least we can hope.

Twas the night after Chistmas . . .

Hey, everybody! I hope you all had a great weekend full of Christmas miracles and Lawson-related fantasies. I am very pleased with the teaser and it helped fuel my Lawson campaign over the weekend. I was able to see most of my family this weekend and whore the movie out. Gathering extras for the end scene and asses in the seats for the premiere. Even my mom will be there which is huge for me, considering this type of movie is definitely not up her alley. She agreed to not walk out of the theatre either. Bonus! I even got a few recommendations on where to find a warehouse. Let's see how that pans out.

Since we did not film this weekend there isn't too much on which to report. I talked to my cousin Jonathan who is "in the biz," as they say, to see if he knew anyone in the Boston area who could help us out with after effects. As much as I love watching the trailer (at least 20 times this weekend) the lack of muzzle flashes coming out of the gun distracts me. He told me he would look into it. I hope we find someone so that the final movie has them. If we don't get the gun flare then we'll just have to load up more on the blood in order to distract everybody. Instead of three gallons for a paper cut we'll use twelve.

Speaking of lots of blood, one of my other cousins wants to be killed and requested that it be extra bloody. "The bloodier the better," he said to me with a big grin. I think we can accomodate. If we make a mini documentary on the effects I think that would make a great title.

The music from the trailer is by Ravage and Barry had the opportunity to show it to them the other night. While this was happening a guy came over to see what we were watching: our first completely objective viewer (I think). He didn't know any of us and he seemed genuinely impressed and excited. He even offered to be an extra. So cool.

I'm going to wrap up these ramblings for now. But I hope you enjoyed the teaser trailer and I hope you enjoy the final movie! And if anyone out there knows after effects or the where abouts of a usable warehouse get in touch with us please. Lawson would want it that way.

Lawson can implode a building with a cold, hard stare but more often than not he would rather use a grenade launcher.

Thanks for reading!

-Tommy

Here it is

That shitty/cheesey voice over is me by the way. I stress shitty though.

Teaser

I have a rough teaser finished and I am in the process of trying to upload it to youtube, but its being a pain in the ass and not loading anything at the moment. In due time, it'll be up here in its full :36 seconds of glory.

We need an after effects artist that can put together gun shots for us. If you know anybody thats any good at it, holla!

Kyle's view

Barry has edited up some of the scenes we have shot so far and put them on his iPod. I was getting excited for the movie last week while shooting with Egan, Abdi and others, and after seeing it on screen I'm getting even more excited. We have some scenes to reshoot and some other minor kinks to work out before we finish but what I have seen so far is blowing away my expectations. The video quality alone makes the movie seem legit, and after Tommy's nominations for the "Asshole Oscar" going to me and Egan, a weight of credibility adds to the movie. On top of that everyone who knows anyone involved or has scene a small clip at work is now just as excited for the movie to be completed as anyone else directly involved. This is turning into a real accomplishment for us, and not just something fun for us to do.

Video

I showed a brief snippet of what we've been doing to a few people, and the reaction has been awesome. One person specifically said, come on, I want more.

So good

bad idea

so I loaded the tape from the past two nights onto my computer, and browsed the other footage..... needless to say, terrible idea. its now 445 in the morning, and ive just spend the past few hours piecing together the scene and seeing what we are missing. needless to say, we arent missing much, and ive put together what i think is a fucking kick ass sequence. i will have it on my ipod tomorrow to show kyle at work, and if anybody else involved in the movie wants to see, give me a hollar and ill be more than happy to show you.

be mindful that its rough, but its fucking awesome.

weekend update

semi stressful shoot over the weekend. basically not sure if we got everything we need or how some stuff looked. first real appearance of special effects, and i watched the footage and we need to reshoot it. at least its a fun shot to work on, but it stinks that we have to take the time to do it again. gotta make it look good though right?

i have all the tapes we've shot so far and I think there are nine of them at the moment. so thats 9 sweet hours i have to throw onto my computer, with more to come. im pretty excited about editing the movie, but at the same time a bit nervous because ive never done anything this huge. gonna be a great learning experience for me, just as the entire movie is a huge learning experience for all of us.

good times had by all, and the warehouse search is still on so if you know anyplace we can call, get in touch

hmmn

I think I have seen more of my friends tie ties and dress presentably during the filming of this movie than I have in the past 5 years. We had another pretty interesting shoot with some fun action scenes that really ramp up the pace going into the end of the movie.

I'm exhausted and excited.
more later
-johnk

blog comments

somewhere along the line, possibly right from the start the comments on the blog have been set to only allow people with blogger accounts to post comments. That is no longer the case. Now anyone can post comments to any of our updates, which could lead to more spam; but hopefully will allow anyone at all to say "hey, you guys are cool."
-johnk

Best Shoot Yet

Last night, we got Glen to do a couple of reshoots with John, so we had a little extra coverage for the opening scene to make it a little bit longer. Went smoothly, he tried to eat six hot dogs at spikes and lost after 4. Good work anyways.

This afternoon though, we wound up having our best shoot of the entire movie so far in my opinion. We reshot something that had been done about a month and a half ago, but since outside looks a little different, we decided itd be best to reshoot. We lucked out and got a beautiful day outside, not like the other day where it was so damn cold. Anyhow, we got our donut shop sequence done, and in the past two days, our first legitimate running chase scene.

The stuff came out superb, and at one point, without spoiling anything, we had to make Chief Coffeestache be in control of the situation, so we had our first physical altercation involving our cops in the movie so far. It was AWESOME. I think the stuff we did today was the most exciting, the funnest, and the most "real movie" type thing we've done. I really cant tell you guys enough how excited I am to get this thing finished.

Speaking of which, I posted on myspace, but I'll do the same here:

ANYBODY WITH WAREHOUSE SPACE, OR WITH A CONTACT NUMBER FOR SOMEBODY WHO CAN HELP US GET A WAREHOUSE FOR 3 WEEKS TO A MONTH, PLEASE GET IN TOUCH ASAP! WE NEED IT FOR THE FINALE IN THE MOVIE. ANY HELP WOULD BE APPRECIATED.

To keep people updated on what is left on our shooting agenda since the Google Calendar hasnt been updated, we have:

Exterior City shots/Montage footage
Parking Garage
Badis House
Police Station
Finale

Those are the last things we have to shoot for the movie. I am pumped beyond belief for once we cross everything off of that list. As I said though, we just need help with the Ware house so the finale can be done sooner rather than later.

Thanks for the support from everybody, this is very exciting

Barry

Lawson: White Heat #2

Gabcast! Lawson: White Heat #2

Too early for steely dan.

brief update

I am going to make this quick since its late, im tired, and we are doing more in the morning.

Thanks to everyone that came and watched/helped. very much appreciated.

Glen was the dude tonight. He was great. First blood in the movie.

Long night, we lost somebody from the case before he appeared, but we covered our bases and as far as we can tell, we got the shit we needed.

Special thanks to the security guy for not busting up the shoot and letting us stay once he saw we werent junkies or bums. Good guy man!

Barry

Hey John

Those are really some great photographs you got there.

Uh, yeah well why dont you just shut up, its an interesting concept to liveupdate from on set, but hard to put into practice when everyone is busy actually trying to make the movie happen. And we will start conference call podcasts here at some point. It is far too silly an idea not to do it regularly.

Tonight got real cold real fast. I am sore as hell and about to pass out for four hours.

Lawson: White Heat #1

Gabcast! Lawson: White Heat #1







So we can just call in at any point with updates, and even do up to one hour conference call podcasts. Pretty cool feature available from gabcast.
-johnk

Fancy that

So the pic messaging thing is working pretty well, there are still some bugs but at the least we can just keep taking pictures and have them post directly to the blog with no titles from my phone and send emails from egan's.

-johnk

Little known fact: Lawson is quite tech savvy.

Company web site

So, this isn't completely related to Lawson:White Heat, but there is big news on my front when it comes to the website. I have been reading up on a lot of various things I have figured out how to set our site up on an auto-populating RSS feed. If you don't know, and RSS feed allows people to keep up with information on your site, without actually going to your site. The Feed contains information, and links directly to them. This will allow people to see if we updated the site and come to the site if this is the case. Most RSS feeds have to be created by an actual person, typed out and then submitted. I have figured out a way for one to be created instantly as we update the site.

Another piece of pretty exciting news is, I found a open source media player for the website. You will be most familiar with it on Google Video or Youtube. Basicly, it will be on for our site so people can watch videos, and potentially display them on peoples myspace and other pages without using Youtube or Google Video. I am going to tinker with the source code once I get Adobe Flash and use our own branding on it so it looks good and fits in with everything else we do.

Now in terms of the movie. I am very excited for the shoot tonight. It is going to be a late night tonight, and an early morning tomorrow, but either way, both scenes are going to be choice. I would say there is more work to go into tonight, but both scenes are going to be sweet. As everyone else said, there were a lot of laughs on practice Wednesday and I am sure they are going to make everyone else laugh. These scenes are actually a very be step in completing the movie, it will allow us to get to major parts out of the way and is good momentum for the rest of the movie.

Well, I have to head out and start getting ready for tonight...I can't wait until everyone gets to see the movie.

New way to keep up with production

I talked with Egan and Tommy a little earlier about the possibility of updating the blog from the set while we're shooting this weekend. Blogger has added some mobile blogging functionality, and we're going to try it out. So keep refreshing this page overnight Saturday-Sunday for some behind the scenes pictures, commentary about the shoot, and maybe even some audio clips.
-johnk