Wednesday, April 13, 2005

How To Order Pre-Sale Tickets

So a lot of people have been asking me, "How do I get tickets?" Fairly simple.

Tickets are $10 a piece. Simply write out a personal check or money order for the number of tickets you would like made payable to Chris Preksta. Put it an envelope along with the address where you would like to recieve your tickets. You can also request us to hold them at the door for you the night of the premiere. Mail the check/money order to:

Christopher Preksta
2703 Tilbury Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15217

And we'll mail you out your tickets, or have them waiting for you at the premiere. Whichever you prefer. Tickets will also be available to purchase at the door, but as I've said many times, it is guaranteed to sell out. There's 571 seats and we sold 100 of those the very first day, so get those checks in the mail. All the proceeds from this premiere go to covering the cost of renting the theater and the future costs of film festival submit fee's and travel expenses. DVD's will also be available for purchase at the premeire for $10 each.

If you've got any questions/concerns call 412-377-6140 and Ashley the ticket lady will help ya out.

Looking forward to seeing all of you there.

Friday, April 08, 2005

Blasto Premiere

It is finished.

Well, sort of. The movie is done. But now it's a whole new ballgame. The premiere. If you've been to the website you'll notice that the premiere is set for:

Captain Blasto Premiere
May 26th, 7:00 PM
Loews Theater, Waterfront

Ticket's will be $10 at the door and we will be selling presale tickets because it WILL SELL OUT, I guarantee you. We will also be selling DVD's there for $10. All proceeds will go to paying for submit fees and travel to film festivals around the country.

So now it's into the publicity and advertising. The DVD artwork is in it's final days and should be getting printed early next week. I'll be making up flyers, press packets, posters, and all that. For those of you that would like to pre-order tickets I'll give you information soon. Just check the website.

Man this is crazy.

Friday, April 01, 2005

Head Games

DVD is working now. It was all in the transcoding, which means nothing to 90% of you reading this, which equals roughly eleven people. It's really neat to see the menus and music and all that. No matter how the movie does its nice to know I could always get a job doing credits or promotional design.

Now that we're in the final day of the DVD I'm having to watch the movie OVER and OVER again. I watch for any errors etc. and then fix them and then watch it again and then fix them and then watch it again. It's starting to mess with my head. When we had the first screening with a small crew of us, I enjoyed it tremendously. I thought, story's good, it's got a neat visual look, the characters are easy to connect with, sure there are things I'd like to fix, but overall I'm happy with it. Now that I've watched it 20 more times and had to pick apart all the little problems, I hate it. Now I find myself thinking more along the lines of the story's weak, it looks like a home video, the characters are two dimensional, sure there are a few things I like, but overall I want to light myself on fire. It's so odd to have worked on something that can be measured in YEARS and then sit here with this DVD that can now be measured in MINUTES. This feeling has been the major documentation of this blog. These head games. One minute you love it, the next you hate it. Had a conversation with Eric (the guy that did the Blasto theme song, who you can check out at www.ericjames.com), about this phenomenon of being an artist. It's like at first you come up with an idea for something that your convinced is amazing. You work and toil to make it into something real with that same vision in your head, all the while loving it, hating it, loving it, hating it. Finally you've got a product, like some wrinkly little newborn baby that's all purple and gooey, and you show it off looking for some sort of validation. "Like me and what I'm doing, please." And it's like having a kid because those closest to you are going to say it's beautiful no matter what. Who goes up to a new mother and says her baby looks like Don Rickles has been taking a bath in grape Kool-Aid? There are bad movies and there are ugly babies. But, no matter how good or bad the product ends up being, the whole experience is just weird. And unforunately right now I'm in the middle of the "hate it" phase, where you question even ever having the vision in the first place. It's all head games. Too much time of lookin' and analyzing the same stuff. Just today my mom's boyfriend Tom said he saw the trailer and he's really excited to see it. Melanie Reevers' IM'ed me out of the blue and said the same thing. And there's about 20 - 30 other people who have said similar things. If all these people have seen footage from the movie and are excited to see it, then there's gotta be something there.

So what am I doing now besides complaining? Currently rendering what I believe to be the very last of the changes. From there I'm going to compress the movie down into one big old video file and make a few little changes to the DVD menus. From there I'm going to start this bad boy burning tonight and will have myself a finished Captain Blasto DVD. While all this rendering and burning is taking place, I will be working on the packaging artwork so that this all can be ready to send to be duplicated early next week.