Weekend

Lily has been accepted to the Fright Night Film Festival in Kentucky. August 15-17.
http://www.frightnightfilmfest.com/

I think we are up for best short at this festival.


Back to my musings of Lily. In June I moved out to LA and immediately saw there were no plans in place to start shooting. In fact, there was still a bit of casting to handle. Then there was the shooting schedule to make. And all the props to buy.

A note on shooting schedules, do not use pen.


But first I needed a bedroom. We stuffed a couch in the kitchen, and bada beep bada boop, bedroom. The living room was to be cleared out to make way for our largest studio set, the white room. Muslin!

The purchase of the white muslin was a funny tale. We found the fabric place online. It was over in the valley, the inside was dark and filled with more muslin then one could imagine. No sales person was in sight. A man, nay a gremlin of a man came out to help us, he had long fingernails and reeked of coffee. I was slightly convinced at that time that if the undead walked among us, this man would have been one of them.

"How much you want?" He asked.

"A whole roll of it," we replied.

This blew his mind, what could two nice boys like us want with all that muslin? He was not empowered to make a decision on the market price of the white. He pointed us to a back corner muttered something about go see the boss. The boss was a used car salesman, who had found himself a gold mine in the fabric trade. He took one look at us and knew we weren't in the fab-biz, as they call it in the trades.

"Well we don't have a whole roll of muslin here," the boss told us. I could sense his bluff, he was stalling for time, trying to feel us out. "Now what's this for again?"

"We're using it to build a white room, for a set."

"Oh, a movie, I knew it, you boys aren't from California right?"

"No, we're from New York."

"New York," he said, "never felt the need to go there. I mean if I want tall buildings, I just go to downtown LA."

He meant to squeeze us. Like all the other merchants we crossed paths with on this trip. This was in fact Los Angeles, a city where they are often suspicious and none to kind to us movie folk.

ESPO SINGS R. KELLY

Some say I might be a little ESPO obsessed. True.
It's summer time in the city, that means trips to Coney Island.
Here's what you missed last year.
Video by Matt Goias

LILY

Lily Part 1 of 5 (Prelude - Beach Peril/The Birth)

Lily Part 2 of 5 (26th Day in the White Room)

Lily Part 3 of 5 (Cliff Confrontation/The Keeper's Lair)
Lily Part 4 of 5 (Pier Search/Beach Dig)

Lily Part 5 of 5 (Reunited At Last/Coda - A New Beginning)

Lily started for me as a phone call from my old friend Dan Boneville aka Daniel aka the Bone. He was living out in LA and still editing YEARN, a movie in which I starred as the Boy from the Lake. He had just shown the movie to Peter Facinelli, and Peter had really liked it. Especially, the part played by our friend Shane. Peter encouraged Dan to stop editing YEARN and get working on a new project, one that he agreed to star in.

At the time of the call, I was employed as a industrial/commercial editor on Long Island. A few weeks later, Dan sent me the early version of the script and I began my initial breakdown of props and locations, and we started talking about the timeline for this project. I think we initially figured we'd do a month in LA, two weeks preproduction and two weeks production (yeah, right). This was sometime around May 2005.

So I packed up my little life and moved back to LA in early June. More words soon to follow.

Lipa Schmeltzer

5 years ago I had the pleasure of creating this video for Lipa Schmeltzer. It was a very fun video to make, and became an internet sensation. Garnering millions of hits and was featured as one of the top videos on Google video. Because of retail sales issues, the video was taken off the net, and has only been seen by people who purchased the HASC 18 DVD.

When I was in Israel a few years ago eating a schwarma at MASSOV, the young yeshiva boys at the table next to me were discussing this very video. It made me smile to know something I made had such a life of its own.

The part of the video with all the Lipa heads came to me in a dream the night before I shot it. I think it might have been slighty inspired by that old dee-lite video.

Lipa has been in trouble recently with a bunch of Rabbis, he had to cancel a big concert at Madison Square garden, because they felt if he played his music on Purim, it would have caused a riotous party and you can only imagine what would happen if a bunch of guys had that much fun!

This video was great fun to make and helped me make my mark in Jewish Music.