Hunting Humans Remastered on Amazon Streaming Now!

Yeah, I have too many blogs and forget to mention when important things happen. Weirdly, without ever telling me about it, Amazon put Hunting Humans Remastered up. You can get it here!
http://amzn.to/1Ycs0PE

If you want to see what I mean when I say "without ever telling me", then check out my other blog here which details my experiences with Createspace.
http://indyfilmmakeradvs.blogspot.com/

And also of note to HH fans--I actually got a note from the serial killer Adam Leroy Lane, who was caught with HH in his truck's dvd player. Maybe I'll go into it later.

"Hunting Humans" Returns To Us

After twelve long years we have the license back to our film. (well, technically they still have six months from July for sell-off) But for all intents and purposes it's ours again.

The question arises...what are we going to do with it?

I haven't taken a look at the film is many years. The crew wanted to watch it one night on the set of "Garden of Hedon", and I was there but I'll tell you now that my brain wasn't and I was exhausted so didn't pay much attention.

I took a look at the original master files I handed in to the distributor and the first thing I thought is, "Man, does that need some color correction". Back when I finished the film(1999) I had no idea what color correction was, and even if I did the software didn't really have any tools of value.

Would color correction really improve the picture enough to merit me going through and scene by scene fixing?



If you take a look at the sample I think you'll agree the answer is yes. The right side is the original way it was, the left is corrected.

The image is never going to look amazing because we shot on 16mm film and only got the one-light transfer. But clearly I can improve the picture quite a bit.


Here's a second quick piece. This is how it originally looks:


This is how it looks with some simple color correction:


And this is how it would look with some color correction plus denoising, though too much.

So I'm definitely going to go through and color correct the whole film for my own release to Amazon streaming, and also a dvd. If a Blu Ray seems warranted then I'll do that too.

But you know what's great about looking at a movie you made around fifteen years ago? You get to see just how little you knew about making movies.

We jumped the line a TON of times, resulting in eyeline mismatches. You may be like "What the hell are you talking about?", so let me show you.

See how these two are supposed to be facing off? The problem is that Rick on the left is aiming his gun frame left. But Bubby is frame right, so it doesn't look like they're facing each other. It looks like they're both looking in the same direction.

I can fix it this way:

See how they appear to be looking at each other now? The cut works now. Granted, now Rick is using his left hand to fire but as long as it's not a continuity error you can do it like this using the horizontal flip.

Oh, and if you wanted to see what it looked like before I corrected it.

Here's another scene where we screwed up. You can't quite tell but Joe is frame right looking in the same direction as Rick(frame left). When this cuts together it doesn't feel like they're looking in the same direction.

So a simple flip of Joe, and it's okay. Sure, the part in his hair flips, but most audiences won't even notice. (trust me)

Finally this one, which isn't correctable but is acceptable as is. See, on the left half he's driving frame right. But on the cut he's driving frame left.

It's pretty bizarre, but clearly we did it because we couldn't get a great shot through the passenger side(we were driving parallel to it in a minivan), so we drove on the other side.

It's little things like this that make you cringe as a filmmaker.

Finally I've decided to go ahead and redo the end credits because they're hard to read, and if I do a Blu Ray at some point I'm going to have to redo them as they're super blurry when blown up.

Here's the original creds followed by what they may look like in the future. Unfortunately I didn't have the original After Effects file I used, so I had to do it manually. Luckily I'm a really fast typist.

Anyway, keep your eye out here for more updates!

Little Snippet of Goodness

A couple people had asked me whether I had done any more on HH2, the script.

The answer is, not really. I had about 35 pages--only about 25 sequential, then 10 with various conversations, notes, and then the ending.

But here it is with a few more than I last posted. So if you're interested, check it out. It's still early-draft stuff, but you might like it.

http://www.kangaskahnfilms.com/hh2-txt.htm

And Aric gets SOOOOO badass in this script, it's really hard to tell who I'm rooting for, the good guy or Aric...

July 24th, 2008: Blast From The Past

Funny afternote: The actor I met at this screening was Richard Cutting. I tried to cast him in Bounty, but it didn't work out, but we reconnected later on and he's starring in my new flick "Garden of Hedon".

The theater is closed again though...

July 24th, 2008:

So there's a local movie playing a couple of nights at a theater near me. It's a Western. I'm still looking for decent actors for my flick, and one of the actors already IN my flick says he's going, so I decide to go.

I hear it's at Westview Theatres and my first thought is--"Hey, I shot HH at a theater in Westview, but they tore that theater down."

I drive up there. Turns out it's the EXACT theater. Apparently it wasn't torn down, it was just bought my an indy theater chain.

I park around back where Aric stalked the projectionist(I took this picture today), and the memory of it all is VERY overwhelming. I haven't been up there in about 10 years.

I meet up with Neil, an actor I wrote the part for, and we go inside and watch the flick. IN THE EXACT AUDITORIUM Aric kills all those movie-goers. It was weird to say the least.

Good news--one actor in the film is particularly strong, and it turns out Neil knows him, and he was sitting right in front of us during the screening. He said hi to Neil after the showing, and I was startled to find out he's nothing like the character he played in the movie--which was a big sign of how good an actor he was, that I actually expected him to be somewhat like his character.

I think he could play one of the main roles I've been having a hard time casting. I'm gonna set up a time to audition him.

May 28th, 2008: Mail...and MURDER!

I got a letter yesterday in my company's PO box. In the interest of preserving it rather than retyping it, I've uploaded it so you can read it for yourselves. (I blacked out info to preserve some semblance of anonymity)

You should be able to zoom in on it.

LETTER

Anyway, yeah, the guy's in prison. His name looks familiar to me so I googled it. And here's a little tidbit about him:

"His statement begins with details of how Milner, then 19, lured 17-year-old Frankie Garcia to a rural Carson County barn with a promise of beer.

Once inside the barn, Milner said he hit Garcia and told him to get down on his knees. Milner then took a rifle he'd hidden in the barn and told Garcia to put the barrel of the gun in his mouth.

"He grabbed hold of the barrel and I said now put it in your mouth," Milner told the Ranger. "And we just sat and I just kind of made him beg a little bit and then I just shot him."

Mull asked Milner whether Garcia said anything before he died.

Milner's reply: "He said, 'Please, please don't do this."'

When Mull asked how many times Garcia was shot, Milner said:

"Once, I made sure it was quick. The only time he suffered was when he was scared."

After killing Garcia, Milner said he went to Lake McClellan where he knew a large birthday celebration was being held.

"My intention was to I guess rack up a body count," Milner said in his confession.

Anyway, he was to serve three life prison sentences(he wounded but didn't kill any of the people at the party) but some technicality knocked his sentence down. He'll be eligible for parole somewhere in 2012 or something.

Cool, eh? My murderer-fan club seems to grow by the day!

But then today I got a package in my company PO Box with the new Jack Reacher novel that doesn't come out for a couple of weeks. Some fans knew I love those books and sent me the hardcover! And just a little note with their names, but no email or anything so I can thank them.

Not sure how they got it early, but it's super cool.

February 26, 2008: SK Update

This story just continues. They just ran this on 48 hours mystery last week:
CBS NEWS 48 HOURS

------------------------------------------------------------------
Feb 26, 2008
For those of you who don't know(and I can't remember if I mentioned it in this blog), an alleged serial killer(confirmed kill of 1, and they're linking him to more now) was caught and they found a copy of my first movie in his truck.

Yeah, my first flick which is basically a how-to-be-a-serial-killer movie.

Yay me.

If you're interested, you can read a ton of articles at THIS LINK.

There's tons of them, and CNN even had a little video spot showing a clip from my flick.

Well, this month's People has a little three-page article featuring the story of the last family he attacked(where he got caught), and they even mention my flick in there.

The best thing, though, will be if he turns out to be an actual serial killer. See, I stole the name of my flick from a book--it's an encyclopedia of serial killers. They update it every ten years or so.

So if he turns out to be a serial killer, they'll mention my movie in his listing in the very book that helped inspire the film in the first place. Man, talk about the circle of life(or death, as it is).

September 16th, 2007: The serial killer entry

Here's the actual note in my log where I first started hearing about the killer who was caught with HH in his truck.

Okay, if you haven't seen this yet, check it out:

CHECK VIDEO BELOW

Pretty weird. I'm torn about how I feel about it. Obviously it's pretty horrendous, but if you've seen the film you know I have a pretty twisted sense of the world. I've read about every serial killer who ever lived, and there's always some interesting footnote about each.

And now my flick will be one of the interesting footnotes to this guy's description. I know it's a bad thing, but part of me is a little thrilled.

Not so coincidentally, I've been watching the imdbpro moviemeter on HH go up. Three weeks ago it was 52,000 and some change. (FOC hovers around 18,000) Two weeks ago when the story broke it moved up to 22,000.

This week it's 15,928.

And to answer your question: No, I don't get any piece of increased rentals.