Umm……. hey guys……. I’m, uh…. home? For a little bit, anyhow.

Anyone there?

I’ve been away for a while, haven’t I? According to the last post, since May 27th. Whoa!

Okay, well, where should I begin?

I’m directing a web series. Yeah, you know that.

It’s a story I wrote back in April. And it deals with music.

I guess when we started, I didn’t really think about where we were going with it. It was just like, “Musical web series. Okay, let’s do it and see what happens.” Well let me tell you what happened.

In May, we began a casting process that had us seeing (and hearing) about a hundred actors and actresses within 3 weeks. Every last one of them played an instrument, and the level of acting was through the roof amazing? I have to be honest, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect, but my casting director, Mara Casey of Gilmore Girls fame, pretty much rocked it like a mega phone.

What we landed with was a cast so full of concentrated awesome, that I wasn’t totally confident it would stick. I didn’t talk much about it, cause I didn’t really want to jinx it, but our line up was (and still is) Chelsea Staub, Noah Hunt, Minni Jo Mazzola, Justin Stein, and Zach Cumer.

The next step was contracts. And without going into great detail about that, I’ll just say, contract negotiations suck ass. They so utterly suck beyond words, I can’t even begin to explain. I totally get that people need to be protected… songwriters, actors, producers, financiers, agents, managers, lawyers, in some cases even dogs… but it’s so incredibly difficult to work in a medium that relies on guerrilla style speed and nimbleness when you have the representatives of 15 different people all trying to make sure their client is protected… and doing it at Old Media pace.

And so the first big lesson I learned was that if you want your talent in your New Media project to have a certain high level of professional experience, you need to be willing to throw away a certain amount of guerrilla style speed and nimbleness. The catch is, the longer you take, the more money it costs. And so what happens is you end up compensating for the time lost by cranking out crazy 20-22 hour days.

We had a week to get the reps of our 5 main cast to a place where they felt comfortable having them basically record an album for a month before diving into a 14 day shoot. And we did it. At practically the 11th hour.

And on June 7th we began one of the coolest artistic processes I have ever been a part of: Making a record. We’d been collecting a batch of original compositions and unknown covers during the final days of May… artists like The Blueflowers, Haroula Rose, Jon Cornoyer of Old War Shirt, Justin Clay of The Kax and others… and with our little team of rock stars, we started hammering them out, instrument by instrument.

We recorded at VAVV Studios in Van Nuys under the supervision of our music producer Sebastian Sheehan. I acted as a sort of music producer as well but had to learn a lot of the vernacular as we went. For example, I now know that you can’t just throw around the phrase, “that sounded a little flat,” when trying to describe a note that isn’t perfectly on pitch… because there’s a 50/50 chance it’s not flat, but rather sharp. Better, when you hear the note, to just make a face like you saw someone get beamed in the head with a baseball.

Oh, I should mention that Noah didn’t join us until a week into the recording. He had to finish up a show in his home state of Washington, so he drove down on the 13th. Oh and I should also mention that I offered to let him stay at my place during our near 2 month process. Oh and I should also mention that on his drive down, within 45 minutes of Los Angeles, he flipped his car 4 times trying to avoid a rabbit on the road.

Miraculously, he survived with nothing but a few scratches, but this is what his car looked like when I got to Lancaster to pick him up.

As freaked out as I was about that, I decided to think of it as a good omen for the project… and so far (knock on wood) everyone is still ticking. More than that, we finished the album… just days before the start of principal photography. We also finalized several other contracts, scouted and secured some crazy locations, and through all of that, somehow managed to shower and eat……….. oh, that reminds me, I have to pay my cell phone bill… and gas and electric…. and a traffic ticket I got back in May.

Anyway, so that brings us to this first week of shooting. Which has been so utterly amazing… my cast… my crew… I even got to meet a few twitter peeps like @mlmcw who helped out as extras on one of the days of the shoot. I’m being dead serious when I say, the background talent in this looks sooo good!

It’s funny, but sometimes you forget that part of the magic of making movies involves shooting the script out of order. We recently shot the last scene of the series. It was a really emotional moment, and afterward we all went in for this super cheesy group hug. There were lots of “I love you”s, and even a few, “I’m gonna miss you,” before someone was like, “guys we’re not even halfway through shooting.”

So yeah, that’s sort of what the past couple of months have been for me… in the broad sense. I mean there are lots of little details I’m leaving out… stuff like the fact that Adobe is sponsoring the project and that we’re editing on Premiere Pro on set… or that my production company Unboiled now officially has an office space (and a soon to be revealed new logo)… or that the new firmware on the 7D is really boning us on this project (PLEASE BRING BACK THE HEAT SENSOR!!!)… or that this man is one of the members of our cast. I know… awesome, right?

I can’t promise I’ll have another post up before the end of the shoot, but my hope is to write my next one from my new office… which right now is just an empty room. I don’t even have time to set it up yet. But the first thing it’s definitely getting is a little refrigerator…. to me, that’s the sign of a true office… and a plant… which @edrafalko has offered to provide. I just need to give him the address, which I’ll do as soon as I find out what the address even is… I haven’t had time to check.