More New Crap From Erik
By Erik | February 17, 2010
Man, I’m quiet for months and then, bam! I’ve got more stuff to show you than I did all last year or something.
Aside from The Common Good, I’ve also been busy directing a television pilot for the last year. You may remember me talking about it almost a half a year ago. Well as the first public screening draws close, the final cut comes to fruition and festival entries are on the horizon, promotional materials are coming out.
And so I’m here to show you the first public footage to come out ever, this is the first trailer from the project and I’m proud to have my name on it. Check it out, and if you like it you should become a fan of Hard to Be Me on Facebook and/or check out the official web-site.
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Documentary Directed by Erik
By Erik | February 16, 2010
Hey all,
While Stop That Nun continues to attack your ear buds with new audiocasts on a monthly basis, that doesn’t mean we’ve just abandoned the world of filmmaking! I’ve got a brand new project I’m excited to show you all, it’s a documentary about two non-profits working together to bring their controversial message about emergency contraception to the sleepy state of Wisconsin. It’s a rare look behind the curtain of how an idea goes from just an idea to being in the public sphere, plus there’s some humor in there too. So not quite as serious and stuff as it sounds.
The name of this documentary is The Common Good and it derives its name from a statement made by an Archbishop who claims that controversial issues should be discussed for the common good, even though he seems to be trying to silence his critics rather than discussing with them.
I got a chance to work with Brooke Sperry on this project as she acted as co-director and cinematographer for the project. But the other big Nun connection on this picture is that the whole soundtrack is from the same guy that did Forfeit. That’s right, Kevin MacLeod composed all six tracks that make an appearance in this project. I love working with Kevin’s music and every filmmaker working on a limited budget should have his site bookmarked.
So here it is, at twenty one minutes long it’s a little heftier than anything else I’ve release so far, but that’s a good thing, right?
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The Crappy Music That is Crap - Part 1
By Erik | February 7, 2010
AudioCast - It is Chris Leslie at the helm again this month, guiding the Nuns through a discussion of the hows and whys of pop music. You look like… maybe… you might want to… LISTEN!
Want to join in the discussion? Hit up the boards: http://www.stopthatnun.com/cgi/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1265559542/0#0
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OMG Teh Blew Rea! Teh Few Chore!
By Erik | January 5, 2010
AudioCast - Chris Leslie guides the Nun through a talk about Sony’s Motion Enhancer in Blu-Ray disks with Erik Cieslewicz and Joe Wilkinson. Listen to it! LISTEN NOW!
And, of course, you can talk it up with us on the boards about this topic.
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Microcosm
By Erik | November 6, 2009
Film - The twilight of the high school lives of four Central Wisconsinites. Featuring music from Wisconsin bands and a plot that could only happen in the Northwoods. Watch it now.
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A Look Back at Microcosm: The Complete Series
By Erik | November 3, 2009
The last six days we’ve done a nice retrospective on all the web 2.0 work that went in to Microcosm and how we made it a transparent and almost interactive filmmaking experience. All of you fine folks that regularly poke around Stop That Nun have gotten a great opportunity to see a film come together in real time.
But here’s everything all together and easy to follow thanks to the six posts we’ve done:
- Part 1 - Location Scouting
- Part 2 - Screenwriting
- Part 3 - Public Samples of the Dailies
- Part 4 - The first trailer and a sample scene
- Part 5 - Traditional media coverage of the premiere
- Part 6 - Web 2.0 advertising for the DVD
We’ve made an official Facebook event to allow you to easily mark your calendar and even share the event of free Microcosm with your friends! Feel free to make your plans of getting Microcosm for free official. Facebook official.
Topics: General | 1 Comment »
A Look Back at Microcosm: Part 6
By Erik | November 2, 2009
Following the premiere of Microcosm we started looking to sell the film to finance putting it in film festivals. What followed was a lot of promotion over web 2.0 channels to let people know about the release of the DVD. This is one of the great boons of the internet: it democratizes art and lets anyone (like us!) make a film and distribute it to the masses. So even though we had not a penny to our advertising budget, we were still able to post it to our Facebook Fan Page, put it up here at the web-site and, moreover, create video commercial announcements for it and put them on YouTube and our Podcast!
The first thing to come out was a video of me announcing the DVD was on sale and ready to be bought by any of our supporters and fans. This little thing also opened up as the first new content we put on the Podcast.
The big thing that followed was our deal for everyone that helped spread the word about Microcosm over their social networks. The IMDb launch party campaign. This was probably the most involved web 2.0 campaign we did for this film. While we definitely did a transparent production by broadcasting in the new internet landscape, this was our attempt to really involve other people out there besides just putting comments on our YouTube videos or something. We actively invited people to participate. To kick it all off, we had actor Luke Cieslewicz do a bit of an announcement on YouTube and the podocast.
Aside from these big moves, we continued to allow people to peer behind the curtain as I wrote a series of five posts over on my personal blog that I called the Director’s Statement Series. As if having director’s commentary on the DVD wasn’t enough, I wrote a series of five essays to help people really get into my head and the process I went through while making the picture. After watching the film for free this Friday, I hope you go back and read all of those.
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A Look Back at Microcosm: Part 5
By Erik | November 1, 2009
As the first public screening of Microcosm drew near we were really fortunate to garner some attention of the local media in Wausau, Wisconsin. While it may seem like some that a guy that worked at a news station could easily get coverage for his film, that is not the case. There’s a lot of news, even in central Wisconsin, to cover instead of a no budget short film. Plus I’m not one of those guys that would ever actually ask his friends to cover his silly thing on a real news station.
Fortunately, Matt Behrens at WSAW took his own initiative to do a story about the premiere along with Todd Hicks and Bao Vang on the the station’s morning show, Daybreak. It was nice to see the film was big enough news to get coverage without a single word from me. Aside from that, the only newspaper in the city, The Wausau Daily Herald.
While I am really happy with the web 2.0 stuff we did, but it’s a bit of a boost to get some traditional media coverage of the film as well. There is a certain credibility to be on any for profit media outlet, regardless if it’s on the internet, television or in print. So here’s some of the traditional media coverage we picked up.
First, the small clip from Daybreak. This clip features an interview with myself.
Matt Behrens’ news package was the closest thing we got to a behind the scenes documentary. We didn’t have another video camera on set for chronicling the production, so it was kinda cool to see what Matt did with this. This clip has both myself and Arwen Fonzen being interviewed.
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Finally, The Wausau Daily herald has taken down Keith Uhlig’s from their site on-line, but we’ve uploaded a scan of it as it appeared in print so you can still read it.
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A Look Back at Microcosm: Part 4
By Erik | October 31, 2009
Following production we did retreat from the public eye just a bit. Post-production, while just as important as pre and production, is not nearly as exciting or interesting to look at from a glance. All the same, we tried to get a trailer and sample clip up as soon as possible while we scheduled our first public screening. While a lot of productions will start in on picture cutting in earnest and then cut a trailer from that, I cut the trailer as the very first thing. Sadly, there’s not a lot to share from post production, but the old trailer is always worth a look, and for those of you that never became fans of us on Facebook, the clip that we showed on there is almost exactly as it ended up being in the final cut.
Here’s the original trailer, which uses a take of Zaki that didn’t even end up in the final cut.
And, of course, a clip from the completed film.
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A Look Back at Microcosm: Part 3
By Erik | October 30, 2009
While our pre-production was ridiculously open, our production was even more so. To start with, we used Facebook events to invite people to every shoot day that we needed extras for. Not only could they be an extra, but they could also just watch us shoot. All of our shoots in public spaces were open, that is we didn’t call over the police to get people to leave the sidewalk or street we were shooting on, even though we had the right to.
But more than that, we posted, daily, a small sample of the “dailies” of the footage we had shot on YouTube. Raw, unedited footage with no touch ups, removal of bad takes or any other sort of work. Difference between what we shot and what you see in the final product is pretty startling. The fact that we took the time to do this during production so, again, people could keep up with the production in real time was very cool. I’ve put them all in a collection to easily watch on YouTube. We posted all of these videos to the front page of Stop That Nun every day.
Aside from this, while we were shooting script supervisor Kerry Sandler, aside from taking continuity shots, just took behind the scenes photos and uploaded them regularly to our Facebook fan page. Brett Widmann, associate producer, also contributed a lot to that process as well. The result is almost 200 photos chronicling the entire production.
Our efforts during production to let people see as much as they could whether they were working with us all day or lived over a thousand miles away.
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