Kevin Tostado – The Blog!

I’m now on Twitter. Follow @tostie to keep up with my tweets.

“Under the Boardwalk” is also now on Twitter (@monopolydoc) with shooting and travel updates.

Happy New Year 2009!

In 2008, I worked as an Associate Producer for Imageworks for such projects as police training videos and a video to help insurance adjusters do a better job with claims management. The adjuster video was screened on Blu-ray at the Walt Disney Studios in Burbank and looked awesome!

Through Tostie Productions, I worked camera at the Jeff & Jer Thank You Party, shot a naturalization ceremony on the USS Midway for a documentary, was a “Helicopter Ground Crew” in a Russian film that also filmed on the USS Midway, worked as a gaffer for an episode of “Game Trailers TV”, shot footage for a documentary on Teen Court, worked on crew of “The Jumpitz”, camera operated for a fitness video, and covered a dog disc show.

With the Monopoly documentary that I’ve been producing I traveled to Vancouver, played games of Monopoly with the defending US Champion, filmed with the very 1st Monopoly world champion, shot an interview with actress Masiela Lusha, and learned way more about security law than I ever thought I’d need to.

Hopefully 2009 will be filled with lots of exciting opportunities.

There’s a new site called SnagFilms which is aiming to do for documentaries what Hulu has done for TV and some movies – Free viewing with some minor ads to pay the bills. The great thing about this site is the filmmakers split the ad revenue with the company 50-50.

Check it out at SnagFilms.com

For your viewing convenience, I’ve snagged Super Size Me from the site. Watch it right now for free!

Previously posted on YellowLightsMovie.com by Tom Kochem:

I just returned from the awards ceremony at Indie Fest, and I am pleased to announce that Yellow Lights won two awards – Best Cinematography, and Best Feature Film!!! The awards were given by the Academy of Independent Cinema Arts and Artists. This makes Yellow Lights an Academy Award-winning film! Okay, maybe not quite. In any event, we were just hoping to win a student film award, so to win the Best Feature Film (overall) was a great honor! Thank you again to everyone involved in making the movie!

Indie Fest was a fun week of networking with other filmmakers, seeing their work, and talking with them about true independent film. We will soon post links to the sites for some of the other filmmakers that we met this week. Most importantly, for all of those who are wondering – we will soon be updating our website to include the graphics of the olive branches surrounding the two awards! Apparently, that’s how you know your movie is real.

[tags] Yellow Lights, indie, Indie Fest USA, movie, award, AICAA [/tags]

I got my first review and it’s generally positive!

Originally posted on YellowLightsMovie.com:

Well, the screening for Indie Fest USA is over. We didn’t get the turnout we were hoping for due to a lack of publicity by the festival’s organizers, but it was great to have our movie play on the big screen at an AMC theater. Those that did come seemed to enjoy the screening and had some nice comments afterwards.

One of the attendees at the screening is a Film columnist for OCWeekly.com. In his blog post about the first day of the festival, he had a nice write-up of Yellow Lights, the relevant sections of which are reposted below. The full article can be found here.
From OCWeekly.com: “Two features came next. The first, YELLOW LIGHTS, was a truly pleasant surprise. A college movie made by college students on their weekends off for approximately $500, it belongs in a class with Tom Huang’s 1999 feature FRESHMEN (full disclosure – I did the DVD commentary for that movie with Tom, but only because I was a fan of the film and asked if I could; I accepted no payment).

Hollywood has an incredibly distorted view of colleges when compared to the truth. Dorm parties generally aren’t that exciting, but merely crowded room were one can maybe get drunk if the keg doesn’t run out too soon. Nerds don’t manage to steal the football quarterback’s girlfriend. Students are dirty and untidy, and their rooms are minuscule. YELLOW LIGHTS, directed by Kevin Tostado, gets it right, though the campus seems so empty at times that it’s almost Kafka-esque; only one character decorates her room with any flair.

The movie opens with an answering machine message (clunky exposition device, yes, but makes sense in context) to our mopey protagonist Brian (Bennett Chabot) from his girlfriend back home, telling him it’s over and never to call her again. But hey, it isn’t long before he meets Alex (Aja Munsell), a total babe who’s totally into him. In an atypical gender-role-reversal, the only problem here is that Brian wants to jump back into an ironclad commitment immediately, and Alex isn’t sure she’s done sleeping around. Also, Brian gets obsessed with his friend Chris’ love life way too much, determined to make sure he keeps his commitments.

Tostado ultimately seems to come down on the side of commitments being detrimental, or at least obsessions about them – I’m not sure I agree, and even though Alex is a babe, the idea of winning her heart while she’s still determined to maybe sleep with other guys doesn’t seem quite like the prize one would want. But Brian’s not me, and as an audience member I’m rooting for what he wants. The sex scenes may be of the extremely truncated “fade-to-black” PG variety, but they turned me on and I’m not ashamed to admit it, dammit.

A better sound mix is needed – early on, it’s clear that Chabot and Andrew Tsang, who plays Chris, recorded their ADR at different times, even though they’re in the same scene. It’s distracting at first, but eventually I stopped noticing. And Tsang needs to bring it more – in scenes where he’s supposed to be mad, I’m not feeling it like I should. Still, I can’t hold these things against the movie because it rings true in ways that teen movies generally don’t.” –Luke Y. Thompson

[tags] Yellow Lights, movies, indie, Hollywood, review, film [/tags]

Previously posted on YellowLightsMovie.com:

I have just gotten word that Yellow Light’s screening date for the Indie Fest USA 2007 festival will be on Monday, October 29th at 7:00 PM in Theater 9 at the AMC Downtown Disney 12 in Anaheim, Caliifornia. If you or any of your friends are in the area, we’d love to have you at our festival premiere.

It looks like tickets will run $8.50 each (based on other information on the festival’s web site) and there will be audience choice and best of fest awards given so we could definitely use all the support we can get!

Hoping to see you all in Anaheim in a month!
[tags] Yellow Lights, Indie, Film Festival, Anaheim, AMC, movie [/tags]

So it’s already April ‘07. Almost a year since I graduated?! Almost five years since I graduated high school?!?!?   It just seems crazy that a year ago, I just had finished shooting Yellow Lights, and we were making final plans for the Senior Week and the MotoSCOPE team was getting ready to go to Chicago to present our final version of Traces to Motorola.

Well, since I last posted about my life, my job, etc., there has been some fairly dramatic changes.  I finished work on Saints & Sinners, the crappy telenovela airing Wed nights on MyNetworkTV, and decided it was in my best interest to move onto better work.

After a month of scattered freelance work (which included shooting a music video for Nico Stai, being a Camera Op and Assistant Director on a week-long start-to-finish short film, assisting on a green screen commercial for the Disney Channel, and shooting a wedding), I finally found work for a very small production company in San Diego named Imageworks (not to be confused with the divison of Sony Pictures). There, my official title is Associate Producer but I am kind of a editor/pa/office asst and will be working mostly on private and corporate videos. Not the goal of working as a Producer on big budget movies, but I still feel it is a step in the right direction.

However, since the job with Imageworks is only part-time (~20-30 hrs/wk), I also just started work as an Assistant Field Manager for Image Quest World Wide basically hawking credit cards at San Diego Padres games. I managed to get the position of Asst Field Manager by using my experience working with confidential info in the Olin Office of Admission as well as my experience working as a Registration Supervisor for BOMA’s International Conferences to get a pay bump and essentially become a Marketing Rep . Last night was the home-opener for the Padres and thus my first night hawking credit cards. Within 5 minutes of pitching Padres fans of the wonders of the credit card and free gift that they would get, I felt dirty for becoming one of those guys that you just hate to deal with (telemarketers, door-to-door salesmen, anyone related to the IRS…). I’m just looking at this as a way to help supplement my income (pay is pretty decent) and a cool way to partake in the Petco Park ambience that I love so much.

So pretty much the two of those jobs mixed with some additional freelance work as a camera operator/assistant is what my life consists of right now.

I have come up with a potential title for the next movie that I’ve been working on, Perfect Attendance. I’m actually curious to see what imagery comes to the minds of you all readers from this title. Leave me a comment with what it makes you think of.  I’ve also parked the site perfectattendancemovie.com just in case this movie goes somewhere. I don’t want to give away any story details yet, but it’d essentially be a PG-13 comedy.

On a totally random note, one of the Wired bloggers used one of my photos taken from the 6th Floor Museum in Dallas as the graphic for a blog post about the JFK conspiracy. Very cool to see how many random places photos I’ve taken turn up around the web, including some foreign language entries in Wikipedia and a Dutch article about a new Web 2.0 company. I think the age of stock photography/footage is starting to die out as more and more amateur photographers/videographers post their content online with a Creative Commons license.

Hopefully, I’ll get back in the habit of doing more regular posting. Until then, Go Padres!

[tags] Imageworks, movie, Perfect Attendance, JFK, Wired, Padres, San Diego[/tags]

I recently came across this post on FirstShowing.net about the upcoming movie Across The Universe. After watching the trailer, I found myself smiling, thinking that it was a very well done trailer and that I am pretty much sold on seeing this movie. The trailer emphasizes the fact that it is a musical with lots of Beatles songs and the cinematography in the movie looks to be excellent.

I am very much looking forward to the release of this movie in late September. If you’d like to check out the trailer (and I recommend you do), visit the post on FirstShowing.net.

[tags] Across The Universe, Beatles, music, movies, Hollywood, musical, trailer, FirstShowing.net [/tags]