July 7, 2001

This is one of those weird things you just gotta hear to believe...

July 7, 2001

Been to St. Augustine, Florida and back. Nice vacation. I actually didn’t want to come back. The weather was awesome and I hadn’t seen some of the family down there for years.

Evan’s sent me the first 40 minutes of score, and it’s some great stuff.

I had sent a question to Metropolis Records about how much it would cost to license a few songs from Velvet Acid Christ(VAC) for the movie and they said it would be $250 a song, which would include sync rights and performance rights(you need both to use a song in a movie). The price is VERY reasonable, so I’m going to try to pin down the songs I’d like to use.

I’m trying to finish the final credits, but I’m not sure what songs I’ll be using from VAC, and what songs I’ll be using from a guy named Leroy Bocchieri and his group, Day One.

I figure I’m going to put his songs in the office scenes, like they’re playing on the radio. He’s offered to let me use whatever I want.

First time I talk to Evan after I get back, he tells me a VERY strange thing. He had his mom over and she watched the scene where Aric kills everyone in the theater, and she apparently thought it was horrifying. And then he drops the bomb.

He says, “You know, it’s very strange that I’m doing this movie, because do you know who Richard Ramirez is?” The name rings a bell, but I can’t place it right away.

“The Night Stalker,” he says. I remember some sketchy details about him. Killed a bunch of people in the eighties, got caught because of something stupid.

So Evan says, “Yeah, my grandparents were killed by him.”

I’m floored. What do you say to that? And it turns out that it was his mother’s parents. The mother he’s showing my serial killer movie to. Hoo-boy. He says that until he was sixteen he thought his grandparents were killed in an auto accident.

I quickly peruse the Hunting Humans encyclopedia which goes into Ramirez’s history. I spot a name that pops up, though it’s not Evan’s last name. I ask him if that’s his grandparents. He exclaims yeah, how’d I know that? I said the name just jumped out at me. He said he didn’t know any of the details about his grandparents’ death. After reading about it, I told him he didn’t want to know.

Just another interesting anecdote in the story of Hunting Humans.

June 17th, 2001

I know--running out of pics I guess. So here's another wannabe actress. Did I post this already? Am I a dick for running these, or am I a dick for other reasons?
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Get ready. It's about to get weird. Not this post. The next one.

I'm just saying. Get ready.

And you do not know tedious until you go in and individually fill in scratches on each frame of a movie. I remember it. It was one of those times I could have said "Screw it," and just ignored it.

But I put the time in. And it was a LOT of time...
(and I used Corel Photopaint, because at this time Adobe Photoshop wouldn't import a movie--only Corel would)

June 17th

Evan called me last night, but I was still brain-dead from the trip, so I didn’t get out of bed to take his call.

I called him tonight. He says he’s got “ground-breaking stuff” to let me listen to, the first eleven minutes of music, and it’s what he calls “one-cue”. He told me that means it’s all one piece of music, and it’s one of the longer ones ever done. He said the only one he knows of that was longer(it was 22 minutes long, but I can’t remember what the movie was)

So I listened to it. Excellent stuff. I’m very happy with it. A lot of what I had heard before was clearly just experimenting, as the final product was great. He’s dropping me a copy of it on CD in the mail, so I’ll be able to hear it in full glory(everything I’ve been listening to has been through the crappy phone-speaker).

I’m trying to get him a video-lock of the final movie, as he’s still scoring to the next-to-the-last version. Once I do that, I have to finish up all the sound, clean up all the film scratches digitally(which I started, but have a TON left to do), and add some CGI work to a few scenes where the special effects didn’t come off. Then when I get Evan’s music back, I’ve got to master it with all the other sound.

And I’ve given myself roughly five weeks to do all that—four, if you count the fact that I’ll be out of town for one of those weeks.