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 promise I will do a full post on what has been going on in my life sometime this weekend.

On top of all of that yesterday, as we had been planning to for a long time now, Francys and I broke up. We decided that although we felt that we were great together, it didn’t make sense to do the long-distance dating things for the next three years or so. Especially with me being her first boyfriend and all. If we’re supposed to be together later on, things will work out that way. All that logical stuff aside, I still already miss her a ton and am looking forward to the next time I’ll be back at Olin (Oct 14-15 for Family/Alumni Weekend) when I can see her in person to hang out as friends.

Currently, I’m about a third of the way done with my cross-country trek to get my crap back to San Diego. In the last 28 hours, I’ve driven over 1000 miles already. I was at Sean Munson’s house in Jersey last night, and I will hopefully make the trek to Grant’s house in Oklahoma City tomorrow night. The goal is to make it back to San Diego on Sunday or Monday.

When I make it back to San Diego, I’ll be picking up my RX-8 on Tuesday!!!!

Alright, enough blogging for now. Time for some sleep so I can do the next leg of the trip tomorrow.

[tags] Olin College, Boston, San Diego, RX8, travel [/tags]

The “premiere” for Yellow Lights went really well. We had somewhere between 150 and 200 people piled into the auditorium to watch the movie. We got a ton of applause at the end of the movie which made me very excited and happy about the prospects of this movie. We still have some fine-tuning and a layer of polish to add to is so that it will be ready for submission to film festivals starting with Sundance in the late summer. Although I’m definitely curious what the reaction will be from audiences who know nothing about Olin.
I’ve been starting to pack my room up and clean the stuff off my walls. It’s a slightly weird feeling, but it still feels like it hasn’t quite me yet that I’m going to be done with Olin. Maybe during the ceremony?? Maybe I just feel like Olin is such a part of me that I’m not actually losing it? Who knows?

On Monday, I’ll be packing up most of my room into a minivan and starting to drive across the country. I’ve never done a road trip of that extent before, so it will definitely be a cool experience. I’m not sure where I’m going to be staying after the first night yet though…

To the Classes of ‘07, ‘08, and ‘09, I have a lot of friends amongst your classes and I look forward to hearing how you guys make Olin even more of an awesome place in the future. Feel free to keep in touch with me. I’ll also be at campus every once in a while, and I plan to be at each of your graduations.

To the Class of 2006, you all are so amazing. I feel so lucky and privileged to have been a part of your class. It’s been great being one of your guys’ Senior Class Reps and I hope you’ve had a fun and enjoyable last week of events leading up to Commencement. I’ll be proud to walk down the aisle tomorrow with all of you and I definitely want to hear what you guys are up to!

My new email address will be kevin.tostado (at) alumni.olin.edu for those who want to stay in touch via email. I’ll be in San Diego for most of June and hopefully in Los Angeles/Hollywood after that.
[tags] Olin College, graduation, Yellow Lights [/tags]

Wish us luck!

[tags] Motorola, Olin College [/tags]

Sadly, my time at home in San Diego for break is already quickly coming to an end. I’m only here until early Friday morning and then I’ll be flying back to Boston. It’s always nice to see my friends from home and see how things have slightly changed.

I haven’t really done any posts in a while because I’ve been so busy at Olin with things for Yellow Lights or for SCOPE or for CORe stuff.

To be more specific, in the last 2 weeks before break, my SCOPE team ran a 22-person focus group spread all over the Boston area involving cellphones with a program that we had developed. We had to coordinate all of the meetings as well as providing technical support for the buggy software that we had written. Luckily, the program was working decently for a majority of the ten days that the focus group was going on and we feel like we received a lot of justification for the decisions we’ve made to this point, which was good to hear.

In Yellow Lights, we’re slowly winding down with filming. We’ve got about 8 scenes still to film, 3-4 of which have dialogue, and we’ll hopefully be done with filming by the end of the first weekend in April. We’ve already begun the tedious editing process and so far we’re happy with how things have turned out. We may need to do some dubbing for the outdoor scenes, but luckily no complicated reshoots.

Last night, I was thinking about the fact that I only had two months left until I would be graduated from college. It’s still weird to think about, I guess.

Oh, one other thing was that I finally got to see the 2006 RX-8’s in person and I’ve picked the color and model that I’m going to order tomorrow! Here are a couple pictures as well as a link to all the pictures of the Phantom Blue RX-8 that I’ve taken.

[tags] Yellow Lights, RX-8, RX8, Olin College, San Diego [/tags]

Since November, we have started principal photography. We’ve filmed 10 out of approx 50 scenes and finished 2 out of 9 shooting weekends. The filming has generally taken longer than we expected it to, and we didn’t originally budget in time for costume changes, makeup fixes, or pizza breaks on the longer shoots.

We’ve filmed all of the scenes in June’s and Chris’ rooms because we’re trying to get as much filming done that takes place at one location at the same time (or at least the same weekend). The scene that has taken us the longest to film was the conversation between June & Chris over a game of pool. Although the scene itself is fairly short, the storyboards ended up having 23 different shots of the two characters, and we had to spend time having Amanda attempt to make shot after shot on the pool table until she sunk the balls.

It definitely is going to continue to be a lot of work to spend each weekend filming, not even counting the 1-2 rehearsals we’ll have each week. But in the end, I definitely feel like it will be well worth the effort and time put in.

Hopefully, the official movie site should go live in the next 1-2 weeks. You’ll be able to find it at http://www.yellowlightsmovie.com.

If you have any questions about how the project is coming along, feel free to leave comments on this site, or email me at kevin@yellowlightsmovie.com.

Once it is up and running, our movie updates will be going on that page instead.

Reality Check: Progress and Plan of Work
As far as our current plan of work goes, we are a little ahead on finishing the screenplay. Our goal is to have a finished version by this Saturday (11/5), which will essentially have incorporated any feedback on the script that we have received. We are currently awaiting feedback from Mark Chang and from Connie Burge, a Hollywood writer.
We decided that for the sake of the movie, it made more sense to deliver a finished script to the actors sooner than later, so that they would have more time to acclimate to the screenplay and the lines. We’re doing a full cast read-through this weekend, and noting with them how we intend for scenes to come across and for certain lines to be delivered.
As far as the annotation goes, I am definitely a little behind. I have not spent enough time looking through my sources yet for the annotation. I plan to spend a fair amount of time over the next week and a half looking through the books and working on my annotation, so that I can have my annotation completed on time on November 17th.

Brief Assessment of Work Done
I have fallen behind on the reading simply because I have devoted most my time to reading the script. After talking with Tom about the film theory book, it doesn’t really make sense to us to try and incorporate that in because film theory is a huge subject, and the book that we chose does not lend itself very well for skimming.
We met with Gillian last week to go over Version 3.0 of the screenplay with her. On the whole, she was very impressed with the improvements that we had made on the script. She still gave us a lot of areas that could be worked on for Version 4.0, which I have already begun to incorporate into the screenplay. We expect to have the screenplay finished by this weekend, which will free up a lot more time to work on the annotation.
We also have finished our test shoots in the last two weeks. Tom has edited the material we shot together and for the most part, it has turned out looking awesome. Being able to see the actors act out the lines we have written really helps us to figure out which areas of the script still need work.

Big Picture
I am really excited about the fact that we should hopefully soon have a finished copy of the screenplay. Our plan is to have a cast read-through this weekend and then start the actual filming a week later. We are still definitely concerned about the time it will take because we have shoots scheduled every weekend from November 12th through Spring Break (with Winter Break off).
As far as the Capstone goes, I am concerned about the annotation, but if I make the effort to solidly read through the books we have purchased, I feel like I can do a good job with my annotation.

It kinda feels really weird that October is already winding down because that means that soon it will be November and soon I will be 21! I don’t quite understand what happened to October, but I guess when you have meetings scheduled all day, every day, you don’t really have time to stop and think about things.

My SCOPE project is shaping up better than I expected it to: we’ve gotten a lot of stuff from Motorola that should really help us out, and we also just completed our first round of user studies tonight. Some interesting budget related issues have come up recently, but nothing too unusual for the realm of new Olin classes.

I decided to apply to UCLA film school about 2 weeks ago. I hadn’t really given it too much thought before then, because I didn’t really think film school would help me that much for what I’m interested in doing. I’m still not actually sure how much it will help, but I realized that the app deadline was November 1st, so I figured it would be worth applying, and then I could always decide not to go later. (If I didn’t apply now, I couldn’t just apply later if I wanted to)

Things seem to be coming along for the senior class. We have a ring design, senior t-shirts have been ordered, senior photos are in progress, we chose a cap and gown, we’re working on the process of how to choose student and staff/faculty greeters, we chose a diploma artist, and probably a bunch more stuff that I’m forgetting. Although I can’t wait to graduate, I know that I’m going to really miss all of my friends here at Olin as well as the whole atmosphere. One of the reasons I didn’t consider studying away is that I felt I’d be missing out on too much here at Olin, and I can always travel later on.

Tomorrow will be the first Halloween dance that I actually have taken the time to put together a costume. Hopefully people will think it looks good and recognize whom I’m supposed to be.

Things with Francys are going well. It’s kinda weird to think about the fact that there’s kind of an expiration date on things with her though, because once I graduate in May, I’m moving back to Southern California. I have no idea where the two of us will be by then, but we’ve both realized that it wouldn’t make much sense to try to carry on a relationship after that point, and I’m glad that we both seem to be ok with it.

Of course, since this is a brain dump of what I’ve been doing, I have to talk about how the movie is going. We’re getting to the point where we’ll soon have a “final” script to start shooting with. The cast seems to get along very well. The edited first test shoot turned out very nice. I keep thinking about what it will feel like for us to have a finished movie in just under 7 months from now. If anything, working on this movie has made me respect even more the Hollywood film industry.

Alright, time to start some homework… Who am I kidding? I need some sleep. G’night.