You are putting makeup artists out of work; you are putting the guys who hang the lights out of work. It’s not all just about the big movie stars, companies and big directors. You are putting real everyday people working for a wage out of work and it affects every realm of the film industry, high budget and low budget. It’s a food chain. You are also taking away from hard working people who don’t get anything in the back end percentages.

By you going out and buying our movies, our DVD’S, we get to keep our jobs and can help fuel the economy with even more jobs and work. We need to fight against online movie piracy and not just talk about it. We are makers, not takers. We need to protect our creative.

When you watch a movie online without paying for it, it is stealing. It’s the same as walking into HMV, grabbing a DVD and walking out the door with it. Just because you didn’t get caught, doesn’t mean its okay. It’s the exact same motion and intention.

Many cheap alternatives are around, such as used cd stores (the beat goes on etc, you can buy ANY DVD you are trying to find pretty much for less then 5 dollars) and even independently owned video stores (Thomas Video, Queen Video, Suspect Video etc). Love cinema. Hate piracy.

Bellflower
Drive
Melancholia
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Take Shelter
The Innkeepers
Hugo
Midnight In Paris
Insidious
In Time

Moving along on the 10 year project…I’ve started on the rewrites for the 1985 Future Kill remake.   It will be quite different from the originally with new characters but with the same themes.VERY amplified. That’s what will make it feel like a new film, alongside a very sleek and scary look into the near future of 2017.

There was a lot of humor in the original and I’m trying to keep some of that humour in, but it willl be dark humor.  For example, the film ALIENS had some dark humour with the banter amongst the marines, same kind of deal.  Regarding mood and atmosphere? I am naturally drawn to the dark side of the story. Who is this character Splatter?

Well, it basically starts with a group of radical underground protesters, who’ve taken extreme beliefs into their own hands after being brutally assaulted by a group of young police recruits. These aren’t the “nice” kind of protestors, these are the bad apples and but for some reason, you feel for them.  They stumble upon an alienated being whose genetic makeup is extraordinary and could help them fight against the new oppressing forces that threaten the freedom of the western world. This “being” was a freak accident and everything goes to hell when things get going. Humans have no self control. The film will also focus on some side storylines that explore peoples outlook of death in the future and their understanding of it.

What if a cure for cancer and aids is available to the public but only in limited quantities? Who gets it? And what do we do when nuclear radiation from years prior is causing mass deformities in our western culture?  All of this will be in Future Kill v2.0.

With H.R Gigers design of the original character Splatter, I will attempt to give the film that mood!  This is where it gets exciting. In other words, this is the same world that exists in Ridley Scott’s mind with the ALIEN universe because of the Giger connection. Perhaps this story could have taken place hundreds of years before Ridley’s space hunters confronted more of Giger’s beautiful designs in space.  Because of this Giger connection, the film will be very haunting and a large focus will be spent on bringing that classic Giger character Splatter design to life.  One of my goals is to make you deathly scared of him.

On that note, have some great holidays. If you haven’t seen it yet, here is the trailer for a great leading example of art in the cinema.

Shopping  this week would involve me going out for an hour here or there to become a heavy panting consumer in line. I have very little to buy, which makes the search for gifts even more intense.  What would help the situation in an overcrowded tiled starship? An Icee. I caved into a massive ice sugar rush to help cope with the painful dawdlers lugging milk sacks of plastic.  Back to work.

Post-production on In the House of Flies has been going extremely well.  We are having another private screening of the film Tuesday.  Sound/Foley is under way the same with the score. We should see completion of this film by late February.  Hopefully it will have its world premiere at the Fantasia Film Festival in 2012, fingers crossed.

Future Kill remake front? Still designing the engine for the concept design for the engine to begin development on a portfolio to find funding for the film.  I can’t explain how much I love Future Kill the movie. As the days and weeks go by, it becomes clearer on what the next project will be. Since Future Kill needs a modest budget to get off the ground, one must continue with making movies on all sorts of levels.

I am safe to say that I am 95% sure my next feature film will be “BULLETHEAD”. It’s a fairly hard/genre film.  Recently I’ve been on a huge Koen Mortier kick with his film Ex Drummer. Even though I wrote Bullethead and its concept 5 years ago, tone and style, there is a lot of Koen Mortier’s work inspired here.  I am completely obsessed with and hope to somehow tap into what he’s done and put “that” into my next film.  He is an amazing artist and you must check out his films. I love Future Kill though.

I just had an interview with a Macedonian horror magazine called “Koshmar” (Nightmare).  I went into new detail about some past projects such as KILL, Desperate Souls, If A Tree falls and In the House of Flies, basically everything was touched upon. I was a little hesitant to dive into the logistics of KILL which we made back in 2005, but spilt some beans about the film and some thoughts behind it. Why not eh?

Brainstorming new ideas is always a great exercise to get the creative juices going.  This week a few of us will be meeting with guys over at Nictophobia Films to shoot some ideas and discuss any cool potential opportunities.  They recently finished a film with Daniel Harris called Devils Night. Check these guys out at http://www.nictophobiafilms.com/

I can’t thank everyone enough involved with the films we’ve created. Also, thank you ALL for the support this year. I will TRY and squeeze another post before the end of 2011. If not, find me on facebook and you’ll be punched in the face with assults. I really need to get another MKD episode up as well, so maybe I will try and throw something together this week. I might steal Angus McLellan and put him in a video.

In the meantime, I leave you with this.

I have some news on the FUTURE KILL remake front, including a wicked artist who will be adding onto the already awesome H.R Giger design of Splatter, but I should share that on another post.   Let’s just say, he’s a friend of Batman.

Bleeding Apple, a Canadian film collective I’m apart of, recently upgraded their site to a blog. Most of the activity/news gets released via their facebook, but it looks like members are able to log in and post whatever we want on www.bleedingapple.net. I’m sure whatever I post here will get posted there.

For now, this post is about the new IN THE HOUSE OF FLIES teaser that we just released.  Again, it’s just the teaser and I’m hoping we can release a full trailer in mid January.  See below for the teaser.

If you are near a magazine stand, check out the latest issue of Fangoria. We have a solid 2 page interview about the past, present and future. Myself, Chad Archibald and Ryan Barrett were interviewed by Lianne Spiderbaby. We dive into the past and what started this pipe dream of film-making. It’s a good issue because of the support and focus on Canadian film, with so many folks kicking ass, Justin McConnell, Jesse Thomas Cook, John Geddes, Ryan M. Andrews, Mike Klassan, Jason Armstrong, Reese Eveneshen, Warren P. Sonoda, pardon me if I forgot your name, but it’s good to see so many fellow filmmakers kicking butt with hard genre films and not just the typical horror crap.