J U L Y   4 ,   2 0 0 8

FILM FESTIVALS, STUDIO WORK AND MORE
I'd like to wish my fellow Americans a happy Independence Day. (If there's an "independent film" joke in there somewhere, I can't find it.) I have quite a few updates for you today. First of all, my short film Portrait of a Pensive Lady (retitled from "Still Life With Woman") has been accepted into its first festival, and on August 1-2 it will play at the Ballston Spa Film Festival. Ballston Spa is a beautiful old Victorian resort town in upstate New York. The festival is free to attend, and all the short films - many of them world premieres, like mine - will be screened outdoors under the stars. It sounds wonderful. I wish I could be there. But if you live in the area or plan to visit there around that time, please go. (If you haven't seen my film yet, you can watch it right now, right here on this site. Just click here. It's on YouTube and Vimeo too - just search for "Mark Tapio Kines" on either site and you'll find it, along with some of my other films, including old work from college which I've just digitized; I'll soon upload that to this site too.)

I've been working for Hollywood again, too. The Cloverfield Blu-ray, which features my creative writing, is now out! The disc turned out great, and the movie's many fans seem to really enjoy my work (I wrote all the entries for the film's "Special Investigation Mode," where you can watch Cloverfield from the government's perspective; this makes more sense if you know the film. I also researched all the locations for the disc's "live" map, and even wrote trivia questions for the tie-in website). The company I was contracting for then asked me back to do some writing for the Iron Man Blu-ray, which should be out in a few months, and very recently I finished up - mostly - writing work for the Indiana Jones and the Temple of the Crystal Skull Blu-ray. Big movies. Nice additions to the ol' resume. So I've been keeping busy with all that, as well as with some design work. And on top of everything, I still hope to make another short film before summer's over. I have the story worked out and it can very easily be shot in my house. I've just been lazy about getting it all together, but it will happen. It'll be my first out-and-out comedy, even if I've put a lot of comic elements into my earlier work. Once I shoot it, you can be sure that you, dear readers, will be the first to know.

M A R C H   1 1 ,   2 0 0 8

A NEW SHORT IN POST-PRODUCTION
I'm very happy to report that on Sunday, March 2, I got together with three friends and we shot a little movie about a middle-class housewife posing for her portrait... in 1662 Holland. It's my first period film! The budget is a whopping $250, with $100 of that going into the costume rental, and most of the rest going into food for the crew. Its tentative title is Still Life With Woman. If any of you can think of a more clever title for a slightly comedic, slightly bittersweet short film about the thoughts going through this Dutch sitter's head, please share. I'm not totally over the moon with my rather generic title, but for the life of me, I can't think of anything better right now. [MARCH 18 UPDATE: As of now, I'm calling this film "Portrait of a Pensive Lady."] Nevertheless, now that the footage is shot and the voiceover has been recorded, my editor Marc Wade and I are leaping into post-production tomorrow, as I want to enter it into a film competition that has a March 24 entry deadline. I don't know about my chances of getting in, much less winning any of their valuable cash prizes, but it's something to shoot for. I don't have any other plans for the film right now. I just wanted to be making movies again, and decided to pursue this story idea. I'm sure that soon enough it will appear on this site for your viewing pleasure, as well as on YouTube and the like.

In other news, I recently had a fun freelance gig writing creative content for the Cloverfield DVD. As of this writing, I'm not sure if my work will see the light of day, but a boy can hope. I am also working semi-fulltime as a creative director for a new online game for girls, which is about to shift into high gear. It has little to do with film, but it's paying the bills so that I can hopefully make more $250 shorts later in the year. In any event, the rest of March looks to be a busy time.

J A N U A R Y   1 0 ,   2 0 0 8

WHAT'S IN STORE FOR 2008
Happy New Year to you! Let's hope 2008 is a good one. It's no secret that 2007 was, for me, mostly a news-free (and somewhat fun-free) year. I got into an arbitration case against my former foreign sales agent, I won, and although he never did pay me everything that he owed me, at least he finally signed the rights to the foreign deals over to me in the fall. What this meant was that I could at last collect my revenues from Claustrophobia/Serial Slayer's sale to Japan, more than a year after the film's DVD release there. So I've achieved a sort of closure, and now it's time that I start truly focusing on new projects. And while I promise you, dear reader, that I would make Dial 9 to Get Out right now if I had the money - with the writer's strike on (and I am not a member of WGA), it's a perfect time to gather up a talented cast and crew and shoot an independent feature - I do not, in fact, have the money. So as I hope for a new producer or for pure luck to bring in some investors, I'll have to put any feature filmmaking dreams on hold right now unless I get a brilliant idea for a feature that I can shoot for under, say, ten thousand bucks. Which is possible, but it ain't easy. Meanwhile, I am promising myself to make a short film in 2008. Hopefully several, if I can think of enough ideas. I do have one solid idea that should be pretty easy to realize. Just a one-day local shoot, in fact. I only need to find somebody who has a nice video camera. It should be a fun, pretty-looking little movie.

Copyright © Mark Tapio Kines 2008