All posts by Mike

The Green Machine – Rough Edit

the mindlab

I finished the rough edit of The Green Machine. Tim and I will now go through the movie, tweek various edits, add wipes/transitions, mix the sound and figure out what is going to happen on the intro and outro sequences.

Things are moving along.

Interview with Mark Tapio Kines, Director

writings,

Recently I conducted an email interview with Mark Tapio Kines, director of Claustrophobia (2003) and Foriegn Correspondents (1999) (to our female readership over at the Wheaton-club on Theology Girl and The Result of a Sleepless Night, Foreign Correspondents stars Wil).

While the interview touched on a number of topics ranging from Kine’s experiences as a director to his current work, it also cleared the water on Claustrophobia (2003), a film that I feel has not received the critical attention it deserves due to its marketing by Lions Gate Home Entertainment.

Claustrophobia tells the story of three women who are held hostage in a house by a killer with a crossbow. A suspense film with a nod to Hitchcock, unfortunately it was released by its distributor, Lions Gate Home Entertainment, as a slasher flick. This meant changing the name of the film to Serial Slayer (a truly awful name) and coming up with misleading cover art. In my mind, the result of these decisions has been the prevention of the film from reaching its intended audience.

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Green Machine – Update

the mindlab

It has been a little while since I’ve posted about the progress on The Green Machine. Things are still moving along. I just finished editing the longest scene of the movie this morning and besides a couple of sloppy edits which I’ll fix later on, it looks pretty good. It still amazes me what people who can act can do to dead words. I’ll go back to editing this evening once I get off work and try to knock out another scene.

Something connected to The Green Machine in a very roundabout way is my recent rediscovery of Dr. Syn, a series of stories written by Russell Thorndike (check Dragon’s post Thee where I’ve posted some on Thorndike and his stories). The stories loosely center (very loosely I might add) on the character of Captain Clegg, a retired pirate hiding out as a vicar named Dr. Syn. Syn and his men ride about the marshes dressed as scarecrows scaring off the King’s men (I think… to be honest I don’t know. It’s pretty hard to pay attention to a story where characters keep on talking about “rascally pirates”). It is all pretty Scooby Doo and awful to be honest. However, I really like the idea of scarecrows. Among other characters, the original Ameviathan universe was to feature two scarecrows (who knows, it one day still might). The scarecrows of the Syn-verse are pretty dark, and at least in feel suggest a very spooky vision that artists like Mark Masztal have picked up on.