Great day today.

I was feeling a bit down last night (as yesterday’s blog shows) but we got a lot of things straightened out today. We had a long meeting and broke a lot of scenes down and we all felt a lot better after realizing that we had a lot more locations than we thought. Still have the village at the beginning to find and some roads to finalize but we’re all working hard to find those.

We even figured out some stuff about how to really pump up the Hungry Ghost festival that was a bust this week. Feeling damn good about this, too.

Then we had some dudes come in to audition for the bad guys in the film (called Pale Figures) and there were some great performances in there once we nailed the movement down a little bit. We still don’t know how these guys are going to move but we might hire a movement coach to come up with some unique shit. Anyway, it was cool seeing them in action.

So it’s a good way to go into the weekend, after a pretty solid first week of prep.

Peace and have a great weekend.

-ed

Been in Hong Kong for a week now and things are going pretty well. I’ve been dealing with jetlag this whole time but I got the first 4+ hours of sleep last and I’m feeling pretty bubbly. Bubbly I say.

The flights over were freaking long but uneventful. Stef and I went to LA on Wednesday and then we met up with Gregg, Matt, Adrian and Amelia at LAX on Thursday to head the hell out. Our baggage pile was massive. We not only had our personal junk but we had to take one of the cameras and the laptops for working so it was quite a pile of crap.

The kids were pretty good for flying so much. We had a 12-hour flight to Seoul, Korea and then headed on a three-hour flight to Hong Kong, so along with the flight to LA the day before, we had spent 20 hours of the last two days on planes. I wasn’t surprised when they were running all over the place at the airports.

Crew members Tasman and Josie picked us up in Hong Kong in this little bus with room for like 20 but we just fit with all the luggage. Got checked into the Kornhill Apartments and tried to go to sleep as soon as we could.

Of course, we couldn’t, and sleep has been something that has mostly eluded me on this whole trip. Now Matt and I both have a little thing that starts with D that is killing us. Keeping me up at night.

The crew is great. The biggest concern right now is locations. I’m having to adjust the way I’m seeing the film every time we visit a location. Just going to be a huge challenge.

And this week we shot some b-roll of the HUNGRY GHOST festival that completely underwhelmed us in just about every way. On Tuesday, the parade started so early that there was barely anyone on the street. Then yesterday, the burning of the King of Hell, which was supposed to end the opening credit sequence, was major bust.

From the script:

EXT. TOWN SQUARE – DUSK

The biggest fire yet towers thirty feet into the air, surrounded by a MOB OF PEOPLE.

Yul and Melissa can’t believe the dangerous spectacle taking place in front of them. Yul brings out the video camera. Melissa snaps pictures.

The Mob circles the fire, some getting dangerously close, working themselves to a frenzy.

We close in on the seemingly out-of-control fire.

CREDITS END

What we got was five dudes hurriedly carrying the King of Hell into a furnace and horizontally feeding him into the fire with about three people looking on. Lasted about two minutes. They didn’t even stand the sucker up! I guess the photos I found online a year or so ago were of a different Hungry Ghost celebration, because in that joint, people were getting down to the nitty-gritty for sure. Just GOOGLE Hungry Ghost festival and hit the images button, you’ll see what I’m talking about.

Still don’t know how we’re going to pull that one off.

But all’s good. Shit like this happens on films all the time. You just have to adjust and sometimes you end up with surprising results.

Anyway, I’m pretty sure that I’m not going to have much time to write but I will be updating the FLICKR and YOUTUBE deals as much as I can, so tune into those if you’re really bored. Some cool shit on there, actually. Shooting a film in Hong Kong is turning out to be quite a ride. Can’t wait to see what’s just around the bend.

So peace from a D-ridden, sleep-deprived, tall-ass Cuban director from Hong Kong.

-ed

I arrived in Hong Kong on Friday night, and by the time I got into my apartment, it was about 2 AM local time. Completely exhausted from 17 hours of traveling, I immediately went to sleep. Got up the next morning, and plugged in the ol’ computer to check email and do a little work. After a couple hours, I stepped away for lunch, leaving the computer on. When I came back, my computer had restarted itself… or, more precisely, it had attempted to restart itself. However, it didn’t finish. Instead, there was some weird error message on the screen. It was one that I hadn’t seen before, and I’ve seen quite a few error messages in my day. I attempted a hard reboot a couple of times, but each time I got the error, which appeared to be saying that it was unable to access the hard drive.

I called the IT guy that works for our Hong Kong Line Producer. He told me it sounded like the hard drive had crashed. He’s going to look at it for me in a few hours, but says there’s only a 50% chance that he’d be able to get it started. He says if not, in all likelyhood, all the data is lost and I’ll have to reformat the drive and start over.

Let me tell you, that is going to suck. I had ALL of my files related to the movie on there, including budget, schedule, to do list, etc. Not being able to access them now is quite inconvenient, to say the least. Luckily, not all is lost. I have all of the files on my desktop computer, and my good friend Ben is going to my condo to burn me a DVD, and then ship to me via Fed Ex. (Gotta love Fed Ex for shipping to Hong Kong.) The real pain is going to be reinstalling all the program files — and that’s if I even have all of them.

While I’m can’t be 100% sure, I think the problem happened because of a power issue. Hong Kong’s power is 220 volts, like the UK. (In the US, we use 110 volts.) When I was here in June, I was able to plug my computer into a wall outlet directly, just using a plug adapter. However, I didn’t use a transformer to actually change the voltage. I didn’t have any problems then (neither did Ed and Gregg), but perhaps we just got lucky then. My guess is, some kind of power surge happened, and because of the extra voltage, the hard drive got screwed up. But I’m not a tech guy, and certainly not an expert on electricity, so I may be completely wrong.

So, this isn’t quite the start to this journey I was hoping for. But, I’m not letting it get me down. If this is the biggest adversity that we’ll face on this film, I’ll gladly take it.

Other than that, so far so good.

There is a giant store connected to our apartment building, called Jusco. It’s like a Target and a grocery store rolled into one, and we don’t even have to step foot outside to get there. To top that, just down the street from our building is the largest mall in Hong Kong. So going shopping won’t be a problem!

As for getting on a regular sleep schedule… that hasn’t been so easy just yet. Last night I went to bed at 8:30 PM, and woke up this morning at 3 AM. It’s 8:45 PM right now, and I’m fighting to stay awake. Trying to make it to at least 9:00 PM. If I can push it a half-hour each night, I’ll be at an 11:00 PM bedtime soon enough.

That’s all for now, kids. I’ll try to write again in a day or two. We officially start prep tomorrow, so hopefully I’ll have some good production news to report soon.

Hi everyone!
I’m going to try to write at least once a week about the adventures of making “Seventh Moon.” As some of you already know, it’s a feature I’m producing, along with longtime friends Gregg Hale and Robin Cowie. Another longtime friend, Ed Sanchez, is writing and directing. It’s a pretty damn good script, and all of us are very excited to be making it.

Here’s a one-line synopsis: A newlywed couple experiences a night of terror, while on their honeymoon in rural China. I won’t say anymore than that, for those of you who want to remain as “spoiler free” as possible.

We’re shooting the film in Hong Kong, and we leave in 4 days. The shoot is 35 days, but we’ll be over in Hong Kong for a total of about 3 1/2 months. It’s going to be great. We were there in late June scouting locations, and it was a lot of fun.

Stay tuned for more…

Going nuts over here, plenty to do as we head out to Hong Kong in 5 or so days. Jeez.

Bunch of stuff to report but I haven’t had time to organize myself and write some freaking blogs, but I wanted to get this out there real quick with some links to some cool interviews we just did.

This one was a great one with Dan, Mike and me about BLAIR WITCH and all the other junk we have going on. You can hear it here:

MOVIE GEEKS UNITED

This one is just plain old me, but there’s a lot of stuff in there about the good old days at ARTISAN:

BLOODY GOOD HORROR

Anyway, check that out if you want and I’ll hopefully have some time on the plane to HK to write some shit about all the camera tests and casting and production junk on SEVENTH MOON. I even have a little blog to write about BLAIR WITCH, too. No PREQUEL news, just some geeky location hunting that we did with Lonnie’s GPS thingy. Should be a real hoot.

Okay, gone for now. Next time I should be reporting from half-way around the world!

Peace to everyone and their brothers and sisters.

-ed