Precious Metalhead #3: Shooting, Silver, Shows, Sons of Liberty

This month we crossed a couple of important milestones, so I’ll take a break from bold economic proclamations and metallic ruminations, and talk a little as director/producer.

Shooting Actors

We just finished 11 incredibly creative days of shooting the action for our movie, with 14 actors spanning about 25 roles (depending on what you count).  Since we pride ourselves on being a lean, mean, small animation studio, and that directly translates into us producing a movie for less silver than Pixar, I’ll share some of our numbers.

Our script is 123 pages long – usually a movie script is a minute a page, but our script is a bit more verbose due to some animation details.  We aim for the film to be 90-100 minutes.  We shot 266 action scenes (we call them “chunks”), in about 44 hours of captured footage.  Our 11 days were short by industry standards, less than 6 hours a day, because we kept running faster than schedule, and running out of things to shoot each day.  Apparently 10-hour shoots are common for film; if we had done that we could have shot in 6.4 days!

For a non-animated film, it’s common to shoot 3-7 pages of script per day.  Because we had minimal stage setup, costume, or lighting issues, we were able to shoot 11.2 pages a day.  Actors spend a lot of time hanging around waiting to perform; most of them brought books…  It’s much better, and more in-the-moment, and cheaper, to just get through the scenes quickly.

Now we have to go off and work on this footage for some months to finish it off.   This is the easy part – we are very confident about production from here on out….  it’s just the actors and script that were the big variables, and they are done!

Kickstarter

As most of you know we finished our Kickstarter fundraiser with flying colors.  Thanks so much to our supporters – we’re working now to get silver, t-shirts, and other stuff (including my Von Mises bowtie) out to supporters.  The money goes straight to pay our actors.

In particular the silver community really came through strong.   The more I meet and get to know the metals world, the more I’m loving you guys.  Same goes for metalheads and comics people, and of course our anti-fed political base….  What a crazy arrangement of fans, but we love it.

Silver Supply

We are running low on our first run of official Silver Circle .999 1 oz rounds, are are thinking about doing another run.  I understand that Mom’s Silver Shop has sold out of our rounds, and we will be replenishing the supply!

If any of you are bullion dealers and want to carry our round, please asap.  We can supply hundreds or thousands as you need at bullion prices; but it will be easier now when we are doing a new run.

Silver Surfer

Our online comic is now in production!  I’ve seen the first draft 6 pages and they rock.  Starting in about a month, we’ll be putting a couple of pages up every week, to get everyone on the story.

In just less than a month, on October 8-10 we will be the coolest booth at New York Comic Con.  Come on by… many of our actors and crew will be there, along with 77,000 fans.  It will be completely off the hook.  We’re booth 2169.  Meet us!

And, we’ve also got a booth at Libertopia in LA Oct 15-17, and I’ll be giving a speech titled “The Fed, Silver and Inflation: Recipe for (a) Disaster and (b) a Cool Film”.  No rest for the wicked!

Iced Earth / Sons of Liberty

Ok, one night I’m listening to Sirius Radio’s Liquid Metal station.   Some cool sounding song comes up… and what are they saying… Jeckyll Island??  WTF?

A quick bit of research shows that the legendary metal giant Jon Schaffer (Iced Earth) has just started a solo project called Sons of Liberty.  And you guessed it, heavy anti-fed, pro-liberty message.  What a perfect friggen match.

So, I have to make this month’s metal choice .  It’s incredibly awesome to see this stuff make it into the culture and onto the radio.

We’re looking for some badass songs for the movie…. so we’ll talk.

Next Up

There’s so much going on that this one column is kind of newsy.  Sorry to the econ and precious metals fans.  We’ll hit that hard next time; I still need to finish my Zimbabwe hyperinflation aftermath, plus we are working on a really interesting interview with one of the sages of the Silver world.

Finally, I’ll also be attending the Silver Summit and probably the New Orleans Investment Conference, just as an attendee for once.  Let me know if you’ll be at any of these shows and we might be able to meet up.

That’s all from here – Horns Up to everyone,

Pasha!