'Curiouser and curiouser!' cried Alice.

Well it seems like my monopoly of dominating the Found blogosphere is over.  Filming has been going well.  We have been taking shots slower, getting a lot more angles, and we are golden.  The actors are doing a fantastic job.  I have seen things.  Amazing things.  Things that make me wake up in a pool of sweat each night, in which I close my eyes tightly begging for more.  In other words, I saw Brandon beat the ever living shit out of a door with a pipe.  Yeah, it was cool.  When the camera is off during the shoots it is remarkable to see how quickly Found gets turned into Found the musical.  People sing in character, dance, and use the props in many different ways.

I have a bunch of people in my Communications class making a behind the scenes feature of the making of Found which we decided to call "Finding Found".  It will be on the website in late November.

In other news we got to talk to Tiger Council.  Nothing is more fun than talking to twelve people enjoying a power trip circle jerk.  We go in to pitch to them our proposed budget for Found, and it ends up where Andy, J.D., and I feel like we are standing trial for charges of Witchcraft.  There was this one guy, Son, who stared at us like he was a bad guy from a movie torture scene, and whenever he asked us questions I had to suppress myself from whimpering, "Why do you hate us?"  So we make our well argued case, and in their infinite wisdom they decide not to fund us.

Yeah.  That was not cool.  ASR on the other hand is awesome.  I love those guys.  Not only are they incredibly people, but they are all pretty sexy.  Oh, and what’s great is that we voted for them.  What a novel idea!

In other news, I have been finding tons of music that we can use.  There is this one group, Beyond the Shattered Mirror, which has some nice dark music.  I also got in contact with the guy who does the musical score from South Park.  He says that once the season is over he is going to shoot a couple mp3s my way.  I really like this one from the first episode of the imagination land trilogy where Cartman is in the truck at the end (listen).  I also have contacted the legendary Brittney Nixon to use her incredibly vocal skills for Found, and she is willing to help! Musically, this show is going to be incredible.

I am very pleased with how the filming has been going for Found.  The actors are incredible at what they do, they get along, and they are reliable.  Getting that basement ready for filming took a lot more effort than I thought it would.  We require a lot of equipment down there, especially since we are using lights.

When we first brought Keating down to the basement, he whipped out his lighting expertise to tell us that the lighting sucked hardcore.  I was reluctant to use a lighting kit, since I had only basic knowledge about fill and key lightings and gel use.  Fortunately, Chris has some knowledge in this area.  Man oh man, do I love gels.  Gels are these colored pieces of plastic that you put over a light to make the light turn a different color.  To keep with suspense we could use blue lightings in the main area, a green light to illuminate the storage area, and pink lights for Chastity’s location.  These shots look sexy as hell.

I’ve begun more work on episode 4.  I’m convinced that we could make an entire movie based on what I have in mind of episode 4 (I might call it Penthos...) so I have to contain that.  I am think of using music by Chris’s sister as a major plot element.  The episode is definitely going to be nonlinear, and it is going to be a blast.  It is heavily inspired by Westerns (Once Upon a Time in the West, Fistful of Dollars) and the "Max Payne" series.  There is this one YouTube video of a duel to the Arcade Fire’s "My Body is a Cage", which was the main inspiration for the episode.  I am trying to figure out which elements are necessary and which are not before I put the dialogue in.  Tausif and Brandon are really hardcore about the project, and seem to like the plot so I am excited that I have this enthusiasm to tap into.

I also want to give props to Laura Morgan for costumes.  Originally we were going to have Chastity and Natasha’s dresses be red, but Laura decided to make them black which ultimately worked a lot better.  Not only is black better for storytelling purposes, but it looks a lot more fitting.  Roger’s outfit is perfect and helps set him up as the group leader.  Lars looks bad ass with his jacket, and Ferg looks sinister.

In other news Team Sexy entered a video for Apple’s Insomnia 24 hour film race (Michael Elder and Nick Nobel went rogue to make their own project) and both came out looking very nicely.  On the Team Sexy side, the project looked awesome and was done without any internal conflicts, which is a great indicator to the quality of Found.

Our next round of filming is on Saturday, so until then we have more props to make, locations to scout, and rehearsal to do.  I’m sure it will all come together.

Tomorrow we are assembling the crew of Found to figure out who we are going to cast as our primary and secondary actors.  I figured that I might as well jump on this whole "Producer Journal" thing and share with y’all my thoughts on the casting call.  If I had to describe my reaction to the casting call, it would be that of amazement and guilt.  Firstly, I was amazed by the sheer number of people that want to get involved in Found.  We had fifty people try out!  That’s like 2% of the entire student body.  These are numbers that are bigger than most drama/film productions at Trinity.  Going into the casting call I anticipated to be bored as we all waited for a few students to audition, so I downloaded some old school Doom to keep me distracted.  It must have been those demons lucky day, because we faced a back to back onslaught of some of the most talented actors I have ever seen.

For the auditioners Michael and I prepared two monologues each for them to read.  I decided to take on Lars and Brent, while Mike went for Jake and Tweek.  For the Lars piece I started at 11 the previous night, downed a coffee, put my Collateral and Serenity soundtrack playlist on repeat, and started typing away.  For Lars I wanted to make a more serious piece that reflected his isolation.  I had to do some research on counterterrorism techniques for identifying suicide bombers so I get to make the dialogue realistic.  I thought that it came out pretty well, however I made one mistake.  The last two sentences of Lars monologue rhyme at a sad point, making it sound like some Linkin Park song.  The Brent piece was a lot of fun to do.  My main inspiration came from The Onion: Embedded in America article "Blowing dudes up in wheel chairs is awesome!"  I thought the full monologue captured Brent’s stupid good intentions nicely.  I also have to give a tip of the hat to Mike for his Tweek and Jake piece.  Both were hilarious, and made it fun to see the different takes the actors used for each piece.

While I’m giving props to the crew, I think Jaime Mire deserves a round of applause for all the organizational efforts she put into this process.  It was great to have someone that actually knew what they were doing.  JD and Shane did a great job at holding people at bay on the upstairs.  It was great to also have the legendary Jon Simpkins with us to give us his two cents, as well as the slightly above average Nicolas Nobel.  Oh, and then there was Andy.  He was... no, that would be a lie, he was pretty much worthless.

Alright, back to auditions themselves.  I have to say that I am highly impressed by the people that showed up.  Since the crew hasn’t met yet to choose the new cast, I am going to have to avoid name dropping, just let it be known that there were a lot of specific performances that blew me away.  I was so impressed by everyone that I started to feel guilty.  There are definitely more qualified people than roles, and it is going to suck knowing that some amazing actors didn’t get picked.  I especially feel bad for the girls.  Overall more girls auditioned, as a whole they were more talented, and they were competing for significantly less positions (three primary roles compared to the seven secondary roles).  I definitely have decided to use more female secondary characters in the show so that way we can still access this massive female talent pool.

I don’t know how the cast selection is going to go tomorrow, but I do know this: everyone should be incredibly proud of themselves for what they have done.  Found is gaining more and more of a following, and is shaping up to be something special.  Let’s hope we keep up this momentum.