New Moon Gets It Right And Rakes In The Dough

Hi there whoever may be reading this. I've been really happy to hear of New Moon's success. Stephenie Meyer really seems like a great person, and I love to see her succeed. The thing that has really surprised me is how much she and the no-name production company Summit Entertainment is succeeding this time. In case you didn't know the movie made $275 million dollars in the first weekend. Third to Dark Knight and Spider Man 3 in it's opening weekend in the US. Top opening ever in China. Amazing.

I mean, put this in perspective. Today Disney announced that Johnny Depp has agreed to take 35 million to reprise his role as Captain Jack. Dark Knight and Spider Man 3 cost around 250 million each to make. New Moon is competing against these movies and cost only 50 million to make. They are making a killing.

Why does this movie succeed where so many others fail, and at such a tiny cost? Well, I can think of 3 reasons that probably have something to do with it:

1. They are relatively clean. Devoid of crass language, potty humor, and overt sex.
2. They target women. 80% of the tickets were sold to women this weekend. Let's face it, women are rarely targeted effectively with the blockbuster movies. Hollywood usually puts much more effort into men.
3. They target the fans! Less people are excited about the Harry Potter movies because the people who love the books (a HUGE number of their viewers) hate the destruction of the stories that happens in the movies. The twilight movies (and the books for that matter) are designed to please the fans! What a revolutionary concept! This makes me wonder what would've happend if the Harry Potter movies had gone after the book fan base. Would they be up there in the top 3 too?

Anyway, I was happy to be one of the men in the 20% this weekend. Sure the movie was a bit cheesy, sure it would be nice if Edward smiled once in a while, sure Jacob could show off his chest a bit less... ;-) But I really enjoyed watching it with my wife. I am happy to see a movie that compliments the book, one that is produced outside the hollywood mainstream, and one that is changing the rules of what movies can succeed in a big way.

I am sure that this will not go unnoticed by Hollywood, and that we are going to see a ton of copycat movies coming out soon that I will have to sit through... Chick flicks are back in vogue, and I may even like it.... Maybe....

Halloween 2009

Well we survived another crazy Halloween season. This year in haunt news:

1. Bought a brand new projector with money from our DVD and music sales. A Panasonic PT-AE3000U which is the one I have been planning to purchase for a few years (at least the older model). It is a very nice full HD projector, and looked great on my house. We watched Johnny Depp in "Secret Window" last night, and it looked great. OK movie by the way. Johnny Depp can make anything fresh.
2. Remixed the whole haunt to 1080p HD. That took most of my time for haunt enhancement this year, but it was worth it. When watching the haunt everyone kept saying "____ is new this year right?" I just kept saying, "no, it was there before, you just couldn't see it ;-)". Hooray for HD! Only problem is that with the 16x9 aspect I had to put the projector further away from my house. I also had to lower it to let me get the sidewalk and the top of the house. This is very unfortunate because people's shadows were much more obvious. Don't know the solution to that one though because any farther back and I will have to cut down my neighbors trees just like I did mine ;-).
3. Built a huge 16 foot projection tower to put my new projector in. I opted to make it out of 3" ABS so the projection box can go up and down like on a flag pole. It worked all right after some battling. Of course it is also nice that ABS is black. Because of the new tower I was able to put the projector whatever height I wanted in the middle of my neighbors yard without having to use the fence for support. Very cool... Very large galvanized pipe stakes holding that baby there... Hope I can get them out.
4. Worked on some new segments for the haunt, but didn't finish in time. Tried them out at the end of the night on family and friends and they were a hit.... Next year!!
5. Got a nice write up in the Taylorsville/Kearns newspaper that got a lot of nice comments. You can read it here: Bates Haunt in Local Newspaper

The video is still in progress. I taped it with my kind brother in law's professional HD camera, so it should look good... Unfortunately I used the P2 compression so he has to convert it to something useable for me.

I thought you might be interested in some stats on my Adobe Premiere project. It may be the most complex Premiere project ever (probably cause no one else is stupid enough to do a show this complex in Premiere ;-) ). I really need to port it to After Effects.

• 43 Video Sequences
• 287 Video Tracks
• 2422 Layered Video Filters
• 4729 Positioning Keyframes

Not sure how long it takes to render because it crashes Premiere unless prerender most of the sequences. If I start from scratch and combine the time for all the individual builds it adds up to 6+6+4+2+5+3+5 = 31 hours. Fortunately the final mix is only 5 hours, so if I am making only minor tweaks at the top level, I can render it overnight.

Hope you all had a Happy Halloween!!!