We have wrapped our production! Kind of. We still have half a day shooting left for the Police Chief Hudson scenes, but most of the key photography has been completed.

The wrap party on Saturday night was great! We had a wonderful time sharing and reminiscing about the previous 3 weeks. I really enjoyed hearing people’s thoughts about everything. Our cast and crew were truly amazing. It was such a joy to work with everyone.

Bobby Bastarache (First AD), Jennifer Beasley (UPM), Russ Pond

Scarlett McAlister (Sara Grunning), Jim Macdonald (Paul Grunning)

What’s Next

I must say, it’s been an incredible journey these past three weeks. I was feeling really good up until the last few days of the shoot. Tiredness really set in. But, we pressed on and captured some amazing footage.

All in all, we captured about 56 tapes of HD footage. With each tape being 30 minutes long, we have about 28 hours of HD footage to work through. And, what’s amazing is that every take of every shot is on one hard drive in my computer. And, embedded within that 28 hours of amazing footage is a movie, a story to be told.

My first task is to create a trailer for the project. It serves two purposes:
• To provide a marketing piece that we can start getting out to potential distributors.
• To provide a foundation for editing. Robert Rodriguez (Spy Kids, Desperado) said that he always cuts a trailer first so that when he’s editing, he has that one thing to go back to over and over to help him keep his energy and focus on the story to be told.

After I finish the trailer, I’ll start editing of the show. I’m really excited about the days and weeks ahead. Editing is one my favorite parts of this process. It’s where the story comes alive. It’s where you get to shape and build and mold your story into what you want it to be. And, I’m really excited about it.

It’s also nice to have my house back.

It was used the final week of shooting for the Grunning Home. My wife is a really trooper! It’s not easy inviting a bunch of strangers into your home for 14 hours a day, especially when they are moving all your furniture and changing everything around.

The funny part is that we had a squib scene, and we did two takes. On both of the takes, blood went flying everywhere, and splattered against our living room wall. I’m sure that will be a huge selling point when we get ready to sell.