One Hell of an Angel at Sick Chicks Flicks Film Festival

One Hell of an Angel not only had a great screening at the Sick Chicks Flicks Film Festival in Cary, NC we also won best feature film!  They call the awards the blood ravens.  What an honor!  I could feel a genuine love for independent film from everyone involved.  I had such a blast at this festival!

 

My Fantasy/Comedy Feature Film playing in downtown Asheville!

May 9th at 7pm 

at the

Fine Arts Theater, 36 Biltmore Avenue, Asheville, NC 28801

Get your tickets here (be sure to select the 13th) Order Tickets Online Now

more info at: www.fineartstheatre.com

A demon with an existential crisis and an angel with PTSD team up to save the career of a washed-up rocker.
Demon, Kyle, is a stabber on the third level of hell. He knows his business. But when he starts wondering about the nature of life and death, his superiors shut him up and send him to the "Angel in Training Program."
Angel, Mezudio, has been around a very long time-so long that he developed PTSD and goes catatonic at the sight of blood. Relegated to feeding parking meters and cleaning up dog poop, Mezudio is afraid to trying anything new, but his boss has other ideas. Mezudio is charged with training the stabber, Kyle to be a good angel and earn his wings...or at least stop stabbing everyone.

Katie Damien is an Asheville based award winning Writer, Director, Photographer, and Producer. Support local film making, get your tickets today!
Tickets $10 and are available at the Fine Arts Theatre box office, or online here

One Hell of an Angel Trailer

See my Indie, Comedy, Feature Film on the Big Screen!

September 13th at 7pm 

at the

Fine Arts Theater, 36 Biltmore Avenue, Asheville, NC 28801

Get your tickets here (be sure to select the 13th) Order Tickets Online Now

more info at: www.fineartstheatre.com

A demon with an existential crisis and an angel with PTSD team up to save the career of a washed-up rocker.
Demon, Kyle, is a stabber on the third level of hell. He knows his business. But when he starts wondering about the nature of life and death, his superiors shut him up and send him to the "Angel in Training Program."
Angel, Mezudio, has been around a very long time-so long that he developed PTSD and goes catatonic at the sight of blood. Relegated to feeding parking meters and cleaning up dog poop, Mezudio is afraid to trying anything new, but his boss has other ideas. Mezudio is charged with training the stabber, Kyle to be a good angel and earn his wings...or at least stop stabbing everyone.

Katie Damien is an Asheville based award winning Writer, Director, Photographer, and Producer. Support local film making, get your tickets today!
Tickets $10 and are available at the Fine Arts Theatre box office, or online here

One Hell of an Angel Production Stills

 

Local Filmmakers Screening

I had a short excerpt from "One Hell of an Angel" screen at the Fine Arts Theater along with other local filmmaker's work.  It was a wonderful evening!  The audience was fantastic and they laughed at all the right places.  It was a good piece to tease the movie with.  Right now I'm slowing collecting the last of our digital FX from our awesome FX guru.  Our composer is about to send me the rough score to listen to and our Foley artist is working on getting all the sound FX we need created.  Once all these elements are completed and added to the cut, it will go off to our sound designer and hopefully we'll manage to get some color correction in there. Then we can call the movie finished!

Picture Locked

We are officially picture locked! This is a huge milestone for "One Hell of an Angel."  This means there will be no more cutting of the image part of the film. Now our sound work, music and digital FX can move forward. Cheers everyone!

Broadcast

Because I had a documentary film, it made sense to broadcast it over the air for free on TV (I should say free for anyone to view, not free for me to play it.  Buying air time was actually pretty expensive.)  This might not make sense for most projects, but I’ll tell you why I did it.

First and foremost, I wanted to make sure that everyone in the area had an opportunity to see the documentary without having to purchase a copy.  I think it's important information for people to have no matter where they live, but most especially in Western North Carolina where the documentary was shot.  Having it broadcast also made it eligible for awards like the Emmys and I wanted to have a chance to enter it.  I should hear if it's nominated in May.  Keep your fingers crossed.

In order to have it broadcast, it had to be closed captioned.  There are multiple ways to close caption a film both in how you create the captioning and how you deliver the film with captioning.  I used Adobe Premiere to caption and I ended up needed 2 types of files for delivery.  For broadcast I had to embed the closed captioning in a quicktime file.  Later for selling on Amazon I had to create a separate file called a scenarist closed caption or .scc file.

After having done the work myself, I now know that I'll probably hire someone next time.  It's not that expensive to have a company do it for you and it's so worth the money.  Captioning was long and extremely tedious, but I'm glad for the experience and for gaining a better understanding of how it all works.

I had some difficulty finding a local station that would air my movie because it's a point of view documentary.  Here's a link to a previous post with more on that. 

Warning the follow is boring technical information.  Only Read this if you want more info on captioning in Adobe Premiere CC:

1. You can import a file into premiere or do it from scratch.  I made mine from scratch.  Right click in your project window and choose "new item - closed caption" (bottom right of the project window.) The default is CEA-608 and CC1.

2. You won't be able to see any captions until you go to the upper right corner menu in your program and source monitors and click on "closed caption display - enable."  But that alone isn't enough. You must make sure you are enabling CEA-608 (the default on the monitor was CEA-607 for me. You won't see the captions unless the type you are making matches what you've set to display!)

3. To edit your captions go to the "window" menu and click on "captions" to see the window you'll need to edit in.  Click on the add a new item in the bottom of the project window and choose "captions." (make sure you have selected the caption file in your timeline to see it in the captions window.)

4. Hit the plus button to add a caption and start typing.  You can see the in and out in the timeline, but to change the in and out you have to adjust the time code in the project window.  Text doesn't wrap, so you have to do a hard return at the end of each line.

Those are the basics.  If you have an specific questions leave a comment. Hope that saves you a little frustration in your captioning endeavors.

Winner Best Filmmaker in WNC!!!

Thank you to everyone who voted for me as best filmmaker for 2014 in the Mountain Express Best of and also My Toxic Backyard for best film of the year!  Wow! I'm so happy for the attention this brings to the community living around the CTS site and long fight they have had for safe drinking water. I'm so honored!

Katie

http://bestofwnc.com/category/arts-entertainment/locally-made-film/
http://bestofwnc.com/category/arts-entertainment/local-filmmaker/

World Premiere of My Toxic Backyard

My Toxic Backyard had its first screening at the Thin Line Film Festival in Denton, Texas and I was able to attend.  This was my first time in Texas.  Denton is about 30 minutes North of Dallas.  Sadly I didn’t meet any real cowboys on my short visit. I had been expecting to see horses, holsters and hats everywhere.  The cowboy hats I did see a lot of, but Texans are not all cowboys.  In Denton everyone happen to be friendly and welcoming.  The land is flat and scrubby, but the sky is huge.  I know the sky seems like the kind of thing that should be the same everywhere you go, but it’s not.  In Texas the sky is just bigger.

There was a great line up for documentary films at Thin Line.  The festival covered room, board and transportation while there.  The staff was fantastic.  They were on call 24 hours a day!  The greenroom was stocked with food and drinks and was a great place to network with other filmmakers and VIP festival goers.  I met some great people there.  The town square is really cute and full of musicians.  I think over half the population is in a band.  My screening was at the Campus theater, which was a wonderful historic theater in the middle of town.  This was my first time attending this wonderful documentary film festival and I tip my hat to the festival organizers for putting on such a great festival.

Principle Photography Wrapped on New Feature Film

Jaime Byrd, Katie Damien, Coco Adams (DP, Director and AD) photo by: Lexi Rufty

I've just wrapped principle photography for my upcoming comedy feature Angel Demon, Stab Stab Stab (working title, it was Touched by Angels.)  The shoot was grueling and glorious.  We did 17 days, with only one day off, working 12 to 14 hours each day.  The movie looks better than I could have hoped for thanks to our amazing cast and crew.  We had great actors all around, crew members that really stepped up and did much more than was asked of them.  I'm really excited about where this movie will go.

We'll be doing a completion fund raising campaign soon, so stay tuned.  This photo is all I have to share at the moment and I have no idea what I'm directing people to do, I obviously had plenty of coffee that morning.

Katie

I'm Making a Movie!

I'm making a Comedy Feature Film!

The documentary is still in the works. I'm still editing and there will be just a little more shooting to be done with that. For the past 2 years I've also been developing a comedy feature length movie with a local production company (Gorilla With a Mustache Films) and we're about to start our fund raising so we can shoot this summer.

On Wednesday, March 28th we'll be launching our kickstarter campaign. A lot of you have already given to my documentary and I expect the rest of the group will be doing most of the fund raising. What I'm hoping to get from my friends is $1. Seriously, just $1 on Wednesday will help boost our interest level on the kickstarter site and hopefully get us listed prominently.
I'll be sending a link to the campaign on Wednesday. If you want a copy of the movie or want to give more, that's awesome. Just know that giving $1 right in the beginning will really help our visibility. Thanks everyone!

Katie

Here's a Clip from the Documentary

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/233019965/toxic-asheville-feature-documentary/posts/152588

Only 4 days to go. I'm burnt out on trying to get the word out about this kickstarter campaign. I only have a few hours in the day to devote to this project and I need help. I need all of you to google environmental groups, bloggers and other communities with superfund sites that might be interested in seeing this movie. Send them an email, give them this link, tell them to contact me. Whatever you can do, even if it's just one community leader, one environmental group, one other person that you contact on an individual level, it will be a great help.

Thank you,
Katie

Screening a Clip of Toxic Asheville!

This Friday and Saturday at the 7pm and 10pm shows I will be screening a ten minute cut from the documentary and will be there before and after the movies with a table by the ticket booth to answer questions. I'll also have some prints to raffle off. So if you're in town, come see a movie and support my documentary!

http://ashevillebrewing.com/2011/index.html

Katie

P.S. - If you can't show up, you can still pledge: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/233019965/toxic-asheville-feature-documentary

I'm Crowdsourcing my Documentary!

So what is crowdsourcing? Well, instead of funding a project through a few large investors, you use a large group of investors giving a small amount. The site I'm using is called Kickstarter. You can check out my profile here: http://www.kickstarter.com/profile/233019965

They have lots of artists who need funding to complete their projects. The project I'm working on is my feature length documentary "Toxic Asheville." With kickstarter, if you don't meet your goal, no one pays. I will be fund raising for 40 days and my goal is $5000. The really neat thing about this site is that when you pledge and the goal is met, you will get different rewards for your pledges. For example, with my project if you pledge $25 you'll get a thank you credit in the movie and a DVD of my movie when it's finished. So in a way, it's kind of like pre-selling. I won't go into detail here, because that will all be on my page when I launch it.

So why and I telling you all this now? I'm hoping everyone will go and pledge on my opening day (Wednesday the 16th) or shortly there after. You don't have to give big, just $1 on Wednesday will get me some attention. If I can generate a big start with a lot of interest in my page, it might be featured as one of their "New and Noteworthy" projects and hopefully get seen by a lot more people. So go check out kickstarter and register now. The payments are made through Amazon.com, so if you've ever bought anything on Amazon, it will be easy to set up an account at http://www.kickstarter.com. I'll send out a reminder on Wednesday with a link when the page has been launched. Wish me luck!

Katie

Scapegoat Marketing Shoot

"Scapegoat" is my friend Dave's feature film. It's taken him about three years from start to finish, but he's finally there. He needed some marketing and publicity photo for his movie and I volunteered. I took these photos just before his screening. He has entered the film in the Sundance Film Festival and is looking into other festivals.

Katie