Thursday...far out, man!

Hey there, gangland, it's been a whirligig month or so... The first order of business is that I'm officially stepping down from my position as Editor-in-Chief of Diabolique magazine. My decision is essentially due to financial necessities; although time was a big factor, too.

In any event, it was both an honor and an educational experience working for Diabolique, and I want to thank Publisher / Layout Designer Dima Ballin for the opportunity of being the steward of his enterprise for five beautiful issues.

About a week ago, Screem magazine issue #26 came out. It is the first of several other horror magazines that I will now be writing for. For the Screem issue, I interviewed Stuart Gordon (director of Re-Animator, From Beyond, and many other films...), and we spoke mostly about H.P. Lovecraft. If you're a horror fan, you should check it out; it's a pretty good interview!

Also, I've pretty much got all of my old programs re-installed on my computer (after the crash), and since I'll now have a bit more time on my hands, I can proceed with the documentary for TITO. It's just a little making-of featurette that I'm going to include on the Tuning In, Tuning Out DVD that I'm giving to all of my investors, cast and crew members -- who have been most patient!

In the Harley news, after being told at the Illinois Secretary of State office that I could ride the 2004 Road King, that I'd basically inherited from my dad, from Chicago to Los Angeles and register it here, I called the California Department of Motor Vehicles. On the phone, I was told that I needed my mom to sign the bike over to me since she was the official custodian of all my dad's possessions. So, I mailed her the form, she filled it out, and I went to the DMV office only to be told that both the Illinois SOS office and the DMV phone representative had misinformed me. So, I mailed the title back to Illinois. Next, my mom went back to the SOS office, submitted the paperwork to have the bike put into her name, and next I will be able to return to the DMV office to finally register the bike. Unfortunately, I have to wait about three weeks until the SOS office completes the title transfer process.

All right, that basically catches you up. Beyond that, of course, there are numerous little and big projects that I'm always chipping away at on any given day. Thanks for tuning in! I'm out.

You hit me on the head with a Thursday?!?!

Dear imaginary readers,

Just another day in la la land for your humble head of Dervish Pictures. I thought I'd dedicate this blog entry to the human side of an independent artist. Many of the students whom I work with are on Spring Break this week which means that I've had time to dedicate to catching up with projects.

Unfortunately, Life has its own agenda, and most of my time has been spent dealing with putting Humpty Dumpty back together again (aka trying to put my computer back to the way it was before I suffered my first hard drive crash a couple weeks back), having my car fixed, and finding ways to compensate for my lack of decent, steady income...

When my computer crashed, all of the contents of my hard drive were salvageable, but I still have yet to re-install all of my programs. And since there are a couple of film festivals into which I wanted to enter TITO, I needed to be able to open my editing / DVD (and Blu-ray) authoring programs in order to burn discs to submit. Unfortunately, this proved VERY difficult... Alas, yesterday I had a limited success and was able to burn one copy. One more to go, and I will be sending TITO to both Fantasia and Atlanta Underground for consideration; both require being post-marked by today.

While driving back from L.A. last weekend, my temperature gauge went to the red and a little light went on. I pulled off of the Freeway in some unknown and eerily uninhabited area of the city, let my car cool down, added more coolant, and drove back to Orange County while blasting my heater to help keep the engine a little cooler. Next step was to get the car to my mechanic. Since my mechanic is about eight and a half miles away, I usually throw my bicycle into the back seat (removing the front tire, of course), drive there and pedal back (then pick the car up by reversing the last step). Unfortunately, while riding my bike last week, I had a couple of rough moments of riding which yielded a slightly warped tire and a deflated tube. So, to remedy the situation, I rode the Harley (usually reserved for serious road trips and pleasant day trips [for sanctity and because I don't like riding on CA's freeways]) to the bicycle shop for a new tube, did my best to re-align the tire on the bicycle's frame, and threw it in the car.

Yesterday morning I rode to my trusty mechanic's place, dropped the car, rode back, and later received the call; broken water pump and thermostat (~$460). Car is slowly shutting down, last month there was some other stuff wrong with it that cost me just as much... Oh well, that's what credit cards are for. I'll be riding my bicycle to pick up the car in about four hours.

Despite these problems, I have still managed to catch up on most of last month's e-mails from Diabolique, have been corresponding with writers for the current issue, and have been working on my own articles. Work on the Tito documentary has been paused due to the computer setback. And I guess that's about it. Y'all have a great day, y'hear?

One, two, three...Wednesday.

All right, it's been about four months, so it's time for another blog post. Who says I'm not regular?

Let's see here, at the top of the heap, there's Tuning In, Tuning Out, my short film, which I FINALLY put the finishing touches on about a month or so ago so that I could submit it to more film festivals; the cut that I screened at the premiere party in November had a couple of glitches (the frame rate was off in one scene and the sound was slightly out of sync and poorly mixed in another) and things that I wanted to change (specifically the length of one or two shots and at least one sound effect).

Now I've only yet to finish my work on " The Making of Tuning In, Tuning Out" documentary, so I can package these babies up and send them out to all of my incredibly patient investors, actors, and crew members...and then I can begin work on my next film project, whatever that may be. Oh, and speaking of documentaries, the doc I made about the cross-country Harley trip that I took is now in consideration at several documentary film festivals. The trip was taken on the 2005 Road King that I inherited from my dad, and the documentary was kind of a "trial run" for a more expansive documentary road trip film project which will also be a tribute to him.

In the literary world, editing Diabolique magazine has given me some very interesting opportunities. The theme for the current issue, which I brainstormed with Brandon Kosters, is Rock and Horror. After coming up with this theme, we pushed around some ideas; I wrote a bunch of outlines and assigned them to a pretty awesome stable of writers, and ended up with nothing short of a brilliant edition. For this issue I reviewed Dan O'Bannon's book on screenwriting (which was very entertaining and inspiring), and I interviewed Kevin "Ogre" Ogilvie from Skinny Puppy. If you've never had the opportunity to speak with someone whose work you loved (or of whom you used to have a poster when you were a teenager), I highly recommend it. Anyway, Ogre's projects have always been fascinating to me from thematic and production-based perspectives, and I'd never really read anything about band members Ogre or cEvin Key that answered all of the questions that I had about the methodology of their work. Ogre was very candid and spoke to me at length about his inspirations, his stage shows, and his work in film. He also supplied me with a bunch of really cool images that I ran in the mag. I am told that this issue should be in stores in a week or so, so make sure you get a copy before they're all snatched up!

Wednesday I'm back in "The Lab"

After a nice little trip to Boston, I've resumed my pre-production tasks in high gear.

While I was away, I took the opportunity to memorize the lines for my character in Tuning In, Tuning Out. I also wound up composing some additional music for the musical score I'm recording. How do I do this while on vacation with no instruments? I wake up in the middle of the night with a vision of a certain melody playing over a particular scene and I sing it into my voice note recorder.

Oh, I might as well mention that while I was on "vacation," I was also invited to contribute some more writing for the British Horror Magazine Diabolique. For those of you who don't know, this is a pretty prestigious magazine that is available at your local bookstores; the last article of mine that they published was about the making of Outtake Reel. Anyway, I am about halfway through writing my third article for them (the second is about nudity in horror films and is scheduled for publication in 2013); this article will concern children and horror movies.

Back in the lab, I've made a mold of my teeth (I was successful after two attempts) upon which I will sculpt creature teeth. Additionally, having received the postal scale that I ordered through Amazon, I was able to measure out the delicate balance of components to successfully mix up a batch of Silicone. As mentioned on the Tuning In, Tuning Out Facebook Page, the cracked plaster cast of my face needs duplication; so instead of casting my face all over again, I'm casting the cast of my face. And to do that, I needed to take safety precautions (goggles, mask) to avoid the harmful effects of the chemicals.

I've also been generally rounding up some of the miscellaneous props and supplies necessary for shooting - which starts next week!

Anyway, there's still plenty to do, so I'm gonna get back to my things before reporting to one of my "real" jobs at the tutoring center. If you haven't already done so, now would be a good time to help me out with ANY amount of donation to the project, which you can do here: DONATE

What? It's Monday...In December?

Someone recently informed me that they visited my blog, which reminded me that I have one. Sorry, dear reader, if you've been waiting long...

Okay, let's have me catch you up on what's been going on in the world of Dervish Pictures (ie. Scott Oliver Feinblatt). A cursory spin around the Dervish Pictures website will reveal to you that I've been doing some photography and musical tinkering.

Obviously, I know a few things about photography. Or, if it wasn't obvious, then it is now. My mother used to be a professional wedding / family / boudoir photographer, and I learned a few of her chops as well as having my own flair for nature / artistic photography. So, anyway, I added a photography section to the site.

Some of you are also aware that I am a musician. I used to write / record music under the moniker T.he O.range M.an. The productivity of this phase of my existence essentially stretched from 1992-2004. All of the music that was recorded after 1993 was done on an 8-track Yamaha recorder, which I recently discovered no longer works. Upon taking it to local technicians and calling the Yamaha dealership, I was laughed at and told that such things belong in the past.

Luckily, I had mixed and dubbed just about all of those tracks onto a minidisc recorder (my earliest form of digital media). Unfortunately, when I went to transfer those discs to a new format, so that I could update my archives to a more contemporary digital source, I discovered that my minidisc player / recorder no longer worked. So, I shopped online for a used mini-disc player. I landed one at Amazon for about 25 bucks.

After I began the task of transferring somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 hours of music, it occurred to me that - while I used to mix my songs and slap 'em on cassette tapes for my friends and artistic peoples everywhere - I had a bunch of material from my early years in California (circa 1999-2004) that I had never shared with anyone except maybe my dad and a couple of friends.

So, I narrowed down a cross-section of my favorites, did some digital re-mastering and bounced them down into a new mix that I posted on my site.

In other news, Outtake Reel officially became available through Amazon (and allegedly other retail outlets as well). As far as other film projects go, I've been chipping away at a few different script ideas, but overall I feel like I've got my creativity cruise control on; I'm doing stuff at a moderate pace, but I'm not currently in the fast lane.