'Scorpion' Goes to Raindance!

WebBanner_v2_01.jpg

I am excited and honored to announce that our short film Scorpion will be premiering in London at this years Raindance Film Festival. Raindance is the largest film festival in the UK. It has held the UK premiere of such films as Pulp Fiction and Christopher Nolan's Memento. One of the best parts is that any short film that wins an award at Raindance becomes eligible for an Oscar nomination. This is enough to make any filmmaker excited.

The festival kicks off September 24th (the day after my birthday) and runs to October 5th. Mike Cahill will be showing his new film I Origins opening night. The festival will be held in Central London (Piccadilly Circus). 

Neon-lit tourists mill around the statue of Eros at Piccadilly CircusJason Hawkes / www.jasonhawkes.com

Neon-lit tourists mill around the statue of Eros at Piccadilly CircusJason Hawkes / www.jasonhawkes.com

One of the most exciting parts about being invited to the festival so far has been creating the DCP for theatrical exhibition. In doing so I got to see Scorpion on the big screen for the first time and Im exited to share it with the audiences in London. I will be sure to take pictures and put up another post from the trip.

-Eric

Storyboarding

Interview by Jangy Rongus

I had the pleasure of sitting down with Eric Demeusy in his fancy space ship that he bought from the set of Mars Attacks that was littered with empty Chipotle bags and a cardboard cut out of the cast from Gilligans Island. He was wearing sunglasses inside and sandals with white socks... and a gold chain that I believe looked plastic, like something out of a toy dispenser from Round Table Pizza.

Jangy:  So Eric, could you tell us a bit about the process you have for storyboarding a feature film?

Eric:  Well, here I am in the fourth month of storyboarding Mulberry Woods. It has been quite the process so far. It doesn't feel like what I would typically think of as storyboarding. It feels like I'm making a first rough-cut of the movie. I started off saying, "I need to storyboard this thing, maybe I can do it myself." Then, I started doing it myself and I quickly realized I am way too slow and I suck at drawing good. That's when I set out on a mighty quest to find the best storyboardist in all the land. I searched high, and I searched low. It was at the highest mountain at the edge of South-East Asia where only the most skilled illustrators train to become master graphite craftsmen. At the end of April, Victor Lopez and I joined forces and began building a masterpiece of drawings. We have carefully crafted every shot with camera angles, action and composition in such a way that we have a ready-to-shoot visual production manual that...

Jangy:  Ok enough! It was a simple question and did not require a long, drawn out answer.

Eric:  Sorry Jangy.

Jangy:  You pissed me off... this interview is over.

Check back next time for more interesting interviews. Jangy Rongus signing off.

- J

Location, Location, Location...

IMG_2505 copy.jpg

Last month we took a trip in search of some locations for Mulberry Woods. What we found was pretty incredible. This place had been on my radar for quite a while now and I finally decided it would be worth taking a trip to check it out. The primary concern was that this place looked great in photos I had seen, but were those photos the only spectacular parts of the area? Well, it turns out no, those were not the only spectacular areas and in fact everywhere you look is amazing.

We brought some cameras with us to grab some video and snap some photos along the way. You can point the lens in any direction and capture something awesome. I seriously felt like I stepped into some magical land, everything looked fantastical. Anyways, I finally got the opportunity to post up some of this stuff and I wanted to share it. Heres some of the things we saw and experienced. Check it out.

The Season of Development

Illustrations by Victor Lopez © Demeusy Pictures, 2014

The last couple months have been quite on here, that's because we are cranking away behind the scenes.  This last week has been the busiest week I've had in a while.  Early last month we took a trip up to Washington to scout some awesome locations for Mulberry Woods.  More from that to come soon.  Lots of pictures and video coming up.

The biggest task at hand by far right now is storyboarding.  I have been working on storyboards for Mulberry Woods over the past 9 weeks with Victor Lopez.  We are over halfway finished and I'm happy to say the boards are looking amazing.  Victor has been cranking out some great stuff.  We are laying down the preliminary design of characters, locations, and production as we go.  It is coming together better than anticipated.

 It is such an achievement to see the story being brought to life through pictures.  The more we board, the more I fall in love with the story.  I've heard it said that storyboarding is an expensive writing tool but a cheap production tool.  It is so true.  Through it you are able to see the first pass of the movie.  It is especially important for a film like this to have everything planned out down to every detail as much as coherently possible. 

Simultaneously we are creating an animatic with sound, music, and dialogue.  It just reminds why I have spent so much time crafting this film.  It's exactly the kind of movie I want to see.  I've been in love with it the whole time through writing and development and not once have I strayed away from it.  So much fun ahead! Aside from all of that, the next biggest thing is the online release of Scorpion coming up.  So a lot of cool things going on right now.  Will update as we move forward. Take care for now!

Eric

Godzilla Poster

After seeing what filmmaker Gareth Edwards was able to do with a shoestring budget and a crew that fit inside a caravan for his feature project "Monsters", I instantly became a fan and started paying attention to what he was up to.  It was announced that he was attached to direct the Godzilla reboot with Warner Brothers and Legendary.  From first impact I though wow what an undertaking, a Godzilla movie? I started following the progress of the film and when I saw the teaser that came out last year, I was blown away. Beyond expectations. This movie looks awesome. Just one giganticly massive terrorizer with a purpose to bring destruction and chaos. It knows no other motive. I am a sucker for monster movies, I love creatures. Its pretty much all I ever drew in elementary school. So as a toast to the new Godzilla movie, I created these posters as a fan.

'Scorpion' Filming Wrapped

Marking slate for a shot involving the character 'Pauli'

Principal photography on my next short film Scorpion has wrapped. It was a two day shoot at a single location in South Pasadena, CA. We had a five man crew and an eight part cast.  Filming went under way Friday night starting at 7pm and wrapped the last crew members at 7am. We picked right back up Saturday at 7pm and went again until 7am. The cast wrapped a little earlier both nights. The final night was Sunday 7pm-9:30pm where we did B-Unit shooting for the title sequence. The shoot went great, we got some really nice footage. Jason Mitcheltree and Nar Levoni killed it on cinematography. The first night we had 31 shots to get through and did 105 takes. The second night we had 30 shots and I'm sure well over 100 takes as well. Richard Ragon was the on set audio rockstar, capturing up to 8 tracks of audio at once. It was the first time I got to wear wireless headphones on set and heard everything going on. My favorite part though was the midnight taco cart with three types of meats, beans, rice, chips, and salsa. Areba!

So glad to finally be finished with the shoot, however my work is not done yet. I still have plenty to do before I can even hit the editing room. Looking forward to post-production and the music scoring process. I get excited when I remember pre-production is done! Ah man. I was thinking I would release Scorpion online as soon as it's finished, but I may change my mind. We'll see!

Signing out, 

Eric

Scorpion

Banner_03_blog.jpg

Scorpion is a drama mystery film about the last two members of an organized crime dynasty who meet up the night after their entire crew was killed on a job that went wrong. A calm and collected conversation quickly twists and turns into something completely unexpected.

It's a short film I wrote about a year ago that has always been on my mind but remained on the shelf. Since I am busy with Mulberry Woods I have very limited time to spare, but I am itching to shoot something. Scorpion is the perfect project, it is character driven, 6 actors, one room. Pre-production has begun and we are excited to get this film underway. It has already been quite the process. There is a very specific look and feel to the film so we have been doing lighting / camera tests and tackling the best DI process for color. I don't want to say what the majority of our focus has been on because it might give some things away so I'd like to keep those things a secret for now. The plan is too release the film online the moment it is done. Perhaps some process material along the way!

Previs Camera Motion - Escalation

 

Will post all updates here so stay tuned!

-Eric