Well, while I sit around waiting for this economy to get a little better - and by better I mean where people will want to invest in my films again - I am going to start g on the novel for Cinco de Mayo Massacre.

As I sat on the script for the last year I began realizing that there was so much more to the story that I wanted to tell. I had been toying with the idea of doing a novel for a long while now. Way back in the day I had actually written a number of novels, shorts and poetry. As my creative side boils over with ideas I think it may be best to start churning out more of these as novels.

The nice thing about a written story is that the MPAA can’t tell you what to cut. You don’t have to argue with producers over the script and there are no technical issues with telling your story. All you have to do is get the words out onto the page

As far as who will publish the story and so on, I have no idea yet. I’m going to write the book before I market it. If you guys like my films, then I know you will love the original stories. If everything goes according to plan, I want to a novelization of Slaughter Disc next.

The Shadow Ward is a website dedicated to ghosts and other paranormal phenomena that have been witnessed in Hospitals. I have enough other projects keeping me busy, but I need to let this let this start maturing on its own.  Right now it is a work in progress. If I keep the project tangled up in my brain, nobody else will ever be able to share their ideas and stories with me, so I need to start somewhere.

Since I am a health care worker - and I work the night shift - I have heard some interesting ghost stories.  Either fortunately or unfortunately I have never seen an actual ghost myself, although I may have and simply didn’t realize it.  I have several friends who swear they have seen something paranormal in the hospital. 

I figure that a hospital is a perfect place for a haunting to occur since people often die there in a variety of tragic, painful and horrific ways.  The people I have seen pass away at work are often sad and/or depressed and have some kind of unfinished business in this world.  Why their spirits would want to wander around such facility, I don’t think I’ll ever know until I die myself.  Unfortunately I will probably learn the answer to that sooner rather than later.

Hopefully I will be able to gather a wealth of information with this project.  If I do gather enough information, I am strongly considering starting a podcast devoted to the topic.  Only time will tell.

The official blog for the project can be found here: http://www.shadowward.com/blog/. I will be posting all of the major news for the project over there and not on this blog.

Enjoy.

You know, I’m starting to get sick and tired of this “business” I call a hobby.  It seems every time I have depended on something or somebody on the last couple of projects, they have miserably let me down.  I know that this is all part of this “business” - but when you are a struggling filmmaker, it can really suck sometimes.

I was getting ramped up to film Hospital Hill this fall and I just recently learned that the studio I was planning on renting has gone out of business.  This really sucks because one of the sole reasons I was going to make this film was because they had an awesome medical set with this brutal looking hospital bed that I planned on using.

At this point we don’t have the resources to film these scenes someplace else locally and we certainly don’t have the $3000 to $5000 dollars a day that the hospital set studios up in LA wants to ass f**k us for.

So, unless somebody has an operating room we can film in, or somebody wants to donate $10,000 so we can film in LA for 2 days, I am officially shelving this project at this point in time.  Luckily, it’s a sweet and short script, so it’s easy to dust off.

Oh well.  F**k it.  Again.

I’m sleeping in tomorrow.

I published the casting call for Hospital Hill today and the actors are already pouring in.  It looks like there will be some fresh, promising talent this time…  Check it out at http://www.steelwebstudios.com and see if there’s a role you are interested in.

I am extremely happy to announce that I have finished the script for Hospital Hill!  I actually finished it two days ago, but I have been reading over it a few more times just to make sure it was ready.

This is by far the shortest script I have ever written for one of my Horror projects.  I have written a few comedy skits for things I did in the past, but that was about it. The grand total on this puppy is 6 pages long - not including the cover page.

I have already drafted the character breakdown and whipped up some concept art.  Next I’ll start with the storyboarding.  I’m 80% sure of my filming locations as they are mostly all studio based, so location scouting is pretty much done too. 

I have an idea of a few of the actors I want to use, but I’m still going to be holding a casting call because I am very interested in casting an awesome femme fatale for the role of evil nurse I have created.  

Be sure to sign up for the Steel Web Studios Newletter if you are interested in working on this film with me. All official casting/crew calls will go out through the newsletter.

I stayed up late tonight scripting out the first draft of the Hospital Hill screenplay.  It needs a little work, but I am very happy with it so far.  The poem the film will be based on is rather creepy and disturbing in its own right. 

I do not think I will have any problem getting this film to run around five minutes, yet I hope to have more blood and gore in this film than Slaughter Disc had in its entire 90 minutes. 

If all goes according to plan, this is going to be one hell of a film as it is already one hell of a script - and I still have some work to do!

I found myself sitting around one day, a few weeks ago after the Fangoria convention, in a bit of a creative slump. I was racking my brain on different films we could incorporate Dr. Phobia into - and then it hit me…a simple poem started flooding my brain.

I picked up my handy notebook and began jotting down he lines as they poured from my psyche.  The result is a poem I entitled Hospital Hill. It was an attempt to create a mythology around the good Doctor since viewers of our films have seen a few incarnations of him so far; one of those urban legend nursery rhymes that people begin spreading by campfire and slumber party.

The Doctor in this piece is the same mysterious and scheming menace we saw in Sustenance, but this time more of his handwork is hinted at.  After I started looking at the poem I realized it would make a crazy little film, especially if we shot it in black & white and loaded it with creepy shit!

So, now the race is on to script the poem into a film and hopefully have it ready for a Halloween premiere.

Stay tuned…

Well, another Comic-Con is over and now I can look forward to next year.  This year felt like a different kind of crowd at Con, with attendance at an all time high I think there were some ruder individuals in the crowd.

Steel Web Studios had a good year at the Con, despite the fact several vendors told us their sales were down by as much as 80%.  We have a much different mentality about attending Comic-Con than most.  Rather than trying to make a ridiculous profit, we aim to connect with our fans and make new fans, so it is my main philosophy to sell items at a price anybody can afford, we started our $5.00 DVD program two years ago and it has been a hit!  For $5.00 you can buy one of our DVDs, get it autographed and add it to our collection.  This is a great deal for any fan as our autographs have sold for as high as $45.00 on eBay. On Sunday, we did the unthinkable and sold our DVDs for $1.00 each - yeah, it was a f**king crazy idea, but it worked - and we sold out of all the stock we took to Con.

On a personal level, I was ale to attend a few panels and walk the floor in my Dr. Phobia costume.  I had a ton of pictures taken of me and now I’m starting to see them show up on blog, photo streams and even news sites.  Personally I hate having my photo taken, but in costume, I don’t mind.  It’s just more branding for the company - and by the looks on most people’s faces it’s a rather frightening imprint.

Fans wanted to know if we had anything new to sell and sadly the answer was no.  The fires in October set us back quite a bit and it has been harder to recover than usual. The spike in gas prices and living expenses hasn’t helped much either.  Despite the downside, the energy of the crowd and positive feedback from fans has left me very optimistic about going foreword. It is my personal goal to have two new DVDs ready for Con next year -now it’s time to deliver.

I’m happy to announce that Glitch won Best Drama Short at the 2008 El Cajon Video & Film Festival yesterday.  The film was written and directed by my friend Roger Gobin.  I was the Director or Photography and Editor.  Together we have co-produced the film and my friend Peter Gorritz provided the music for the film.

The win came as a huge surprise to all of us. I had submitted the film simply because I hadn’t completed anything new in time for the festival.  It was filmed on my old camera and edited with old software, but it still managed to win.  Personally I’m still trying to see how.  I felt there was several films more deserving than mine.

I’m not going to knock it any more.  I liked working on Glitch because it was somebody else’s idea and it let me work in a subject matter that I am not used to.  Usually I am the sci-fi, horror and comedy type, so this was a very welcome experiment.

I think the best thing about making Glitch was that it was a true group effort.  It wasn’t I did this and I did that, but we all did it and we can be proud of our accomplishment.

I have been working hard on finalizing Redress over the past few days.  The story is growing and growing all the time, and right now that is a good thing.

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again, the backbone of the story for Redress could stand alone byitself with all of the horror elements torn out of it.  That being said, when I embarked upon writing this script I wanted to make a hard hitting horror film, so I am working on increasing the level of supernatural terror in the story.  From what I’ve seen when most people have physical encounters with ghosts, there is a very emmotional connection at a psychic level which usually leaves people in a state of shock for a matter of moments. As I look back on horror films I have watched in the past that deal with “ghosts” in general, I’ve never seen this type of characterization used very much.  Usually people scream and run or they scream and die.  A few cower in terror before they get killed off.

I’m trying to do something a little different.  I’m trying to do something a little more real.  When the characters in my story get exposed to a few supernatural elements, they will have long lasting effects from the encounter, if they survive that is.  This film isn’t about racking up a body count like most horror films try to do.   There are a number of corpses and brutal deaths, I can’t let my gore hungry fans down, but the sole purpose of the movie is not to just create horror by killing people left and right with a monster that suddenly pops up.  There is a growing element of psychological horror and dread that is beginning to evolve in the script.  Every time I touch the script this happens more and more and now I find myself hopping all over the place patching up little inconsistencies and shoring up the characters a little more.

When it’s all said and done, I think this film is going to turn out to be very good. At the very least, I have had a great time developing it even if it’s taken longer than expected.  My goal is to have this baby all wrapped up by the end of June so we can seriously start filming this fall.

For those of you dying for the next project from this guy, I think you will be happy to know it will all be worth the wait.