The Opening and Closing of Rockstop Studios

The Opening and Closing of Rockstop Studios

Since I'm going to be as honest as possible with what I do and how I'm doing it, I figured I should talk about one of my other plans to break into the film making world, which was by starting my own movie studio (the website has since been taken down).

I wrote a short script called "Snubbing David Cross" and I wrote it in such a way that there were a minimal amount of scenes, a minimal amount of action, and a minimal amount of comedy (whoops).

The idea was to write a script that could be filmed on as small a budget as possible, that I could get together with a few people and we could do it ourselves. In January of 2006 this task was accomplished, I think the website is even still up at www.snubbingdavidcross.com/ and I may still even have a few copies of the DVD laying around if you're in a masochistic mood.

Initially, I was proud of the movie. It was done on a budget of only $400 and a borrowed camera. Everyone worked on it for free, and I worked as the producer/director/actor/co-editor/make-up artist. I had no experience whatsoever and kind of learned how to do things as I went along, from setting up scenes and framing to not looking at the camera when I was supposed to be looking at someone behind it.

Even so, cutting corners ultimately has its downfalls. The sound quality was terrible, some of the scenes sounded like a fan blowing into the microphone, there was no color correction, and a lot of the scenes were static and dull. None of these faults really became apparently until we tried submitting this monstrosity to several film festivals, falling flat each and every time.

My co-editor (and the one in charge of the Power mac G-5 that I bought) decided that he didn't see a reason to re-edit the movie and so it was shelved and nothing more was done with it. It was onto the next project.

The next project was something I had grand ideas for. It was an animated series pilot that we'd enter into festivals. I spent a lot of time writing and re-writing the pilot episode until I was happy with it. My two business partners and I recorded the audio for the episode in April of 2006 and it was that day that began the decline and dissolution of Rockstop Studios.

My two business partners were Shawn, a lifelong friend of mine that had lived up the street and majored in English in college, he helped me polish my scripts and basically did miscellaneous things as needed. Sean was the other one, he was in charge of the technical aspects of things, such as sound, websites, and starting character animation on our new animated pilot.

Rather than going into the gory details of April to November, I will just summarize that, when promised a finished, working pilot to submit to festivals that I had already paid for, I was met with the disappearance of Sean. He didn't actually disappear, but after finding him in person I found out that no work whatsoever was done. Not even a little. I suppose in retrospect I could have done more in person assessments of progress, but he was always busy... so everything kind of started to make sense.

Being the nice (stupid) guy that I am, I decided to give him a second chance. I even hired on a girl named Kori with her masters in computer animation, I figured with help things would get done. Once again, I was horrible mistaken, and in January of this year I took the computer back and began to make reparations to all the people I borrowed money from to get things for the company since Snubbing David Cross didn't make any money at all.

Even so, I had the computer back in my possession as well as all the original clips of Snubbing David Cross. As an aside, the day I went to get the computer back he had to spend four hours deleting and cleaning off his and all of him family's personal files from the "work" computer which was used as their home computer. I appreciated that I could pay every month for something the whole family could enjoy. Yes, I know I sound bitter, but that was almost an entire year of my life wasted on someone not telling the truth. Rockstop Studios officially dissolved and I haven't talked to Sean since.

Anyway, Kori stuck around and we tried to find new character modelers only to have several quit on us and it got to the point that Point Blank was put on permanent hold, and we decided that should things every get going again, we'd pick up where we left off.

Aftermath

I want to do more movies, but I want to do them right, and the problem is money. This is what ultimately brought me to where I am today, wanting to break into the industry with a good script.

I want to establish myself, get my name out there, and when I do direct another movie I want the crew, the equipment and the funding to do it right. Conversely, if you'd like to get me started, I'd love to own the RED 35mm digital HD camera ... only $14,000!

/cry

As an aside, I've been very slowly reediting Snubbing David Cross into something more interesting, and when it's interesting enough to watch, I plan on re-dubbing all of the audio so it sounds like it should. I've also bought several books on using Final Cut so I've also learned how to even make it look better... but that's neither here nor there until it's actually finished.

So, from here, onwards and upwards.