PMH #17 – Animation, Puerto Rico, Comic, PorcFest, Amerika

The End is Near

No, I’m not talking about hyperinflation, but maybe that too.  I mean that we are allllmoossst done with Silver Circle.  The list of animation tasks is growing shorter, and our board of completed sequences is almost full.  We just submitted a screener to the Toronto Film Festival, and it’s actually a viewable movie now.

We’re still pushing towards our August-September release, barring anything strange. We’ve got a room of animators chattering away next to my office and it’s all coming together.  We’re still speedy by Hollywood standards, but by my standards I bet we can do it even faster next time.

Puerto Rico Rocks

We just got back from a really awesome show at Puerto Rico Comic Con.  It was kind of an experiment – we had little idea what the comic or political culture was going to be like on the island.  Wow.  That con had far more energy than many of the larger conferences we’ve gone to – there is no comparison between the mojo at Puerto Rico versus, say, Wondercon in San Francisco.
Out of the maybe 15,000 attendees, over 400 signed up for the cosplay contest – the winner was a ten-foot Bumblebee costume, though I really thought the ten-foot high Jack Skellington (complete with Zero) should have taken the prize.  Apparently Anime is huge in Puerto Rico too, but honestly it just seemed that people were starved for something new.

Since our film is like a magnet to political and conspiracy-minded folk everywhere, we quickly got a pulse of that scene there.  There is a strong cognizance that Puerto Rico is and always has been a US colony.  Most talk about us here as “back in the US” as if it’s another country.  The average income on the island is about half of that here, and there is a strong feeling of economic inequality.  More there know about Argentina’s inflation in 2001.  Our economic message was on fire for them.  Most seemed to acknowledge that their government has a healthy share of corruption, while here we tend to pretend otherwise.

It’s impossible to make generalizations, but it was really encouraging to see.  Depending on distribution deal details, I bet we could have a great release at the Fine Arts Theatre in San Juan.

Finally, a shout-out to our booth neighbor, a local animation studio and producer of Guabaman, a pretty interesting looking parody of Spider-Man.  A Guaba is a spider local to Puerto Rico.  I bought his DVD and look forward to having a few drinks to watch it…

Comic Cover and Publication

I know many of you followed our comic all the way through online , and/or have bought our first chapter in paper format.  Now it’s time to get the book out in paper and digital formats.  We’re soliciting artists to make a cover – the idea is to draw on some bigger names in comic-land that have done similar genre work.  At the moment we have some leads out to some artists of Brian Wood’s DMZ series – a similar post-crash story set in New York.  Good story.  We’re figuring out publication details as well as digital options like Comixology.   That is if, Comixology will return our emails…

New Round Design

I have the new silver round design proposal on my desk, and it looks great.  Once we approve it, we’ll make a new die for our one-ounce rounds, and when the movie releases, we’ll never use the old one-ounce design again. For those of you that care about limited edition rounds, the window is closing.  I think the die would make a great paperweight.
We also will be unveiling a really amazing new concept based on the tenth ounces – thanks to Davi for a brilliant idea.  Unveiling at Porcfest!

Porcupine Festival

Speaking of which – we will be at Porcfest from Wednesday June 20th through Sunday the 24th.  We are doing a very limited test screening of the movie on Thursday at 8pm – it’s still a work in progress but it’s getting darn close and we’d love to share the early results with our core peeps.  Also I’ll be sitting down with Stefan and anyone else who comes on Friday at 1pm to hash out some futuristic concepts for the sequel.  I’m psyched that F. Paul Wilson, the novelist will be there too – I am hoping to get down with Repairman Jack in time to chat.http://repairmanjack.com/Stop by our booth #19 on Agorist Alley and say hi anytime – I’m looking forward to seeing y’all.

Song of the Month – Rammstein Amerika

This one just cracks me up.  Rammstein cracks me up.  So here’s the song of the month.  Coca-cola, sometimes war.

Thanks Again!

See you in the theatres!

Pasha.