Empty Nest

Gonna take a break from these memory-lane nostalgic posts to ruminate a bit on the present status of FLOWERS and its future. My own too, incindentally. This blog had to take a hiatus due to the demanding workload of amassing the supplementary features for the formal release of the movie. I finished my contributions and obligations to FLOWERS a couple of weeks ago and sent the hard drive with all the masters to the distributor's DVD author. April, 2015 was another intense month of creative editing. The bulk of which was the production of a behind-the-scenes documentary, FLORAVISION: THE MAKING OF FLOWERS which turned out to be the longest feature I've ever done. I also assembled a half-hour's worth of deleted scenes, some of which I edited from scratch. That was a lot of fun! I treated them as if they were proper scenes that might fit into the final movie itself complete with sound effects, music and the "FloraVision" image filters. This was such a hefty supplement that Phil Stevens and I recorded commentaries for it, which we also did for the feature itself. There will be a 10-minute storyboard featurette set to portions of the FLOWERS soundtrack. Phil recorded a commentary for this also. He shot a private interview with "The Exile" (i.e. the killer character) actor Bryant W. Lohr Sr. that I cut down to a comfortable 10-minute runtime. I would love for there to have been similar interviews with each of the actresses in the movie, as well as a cast commentary, but sadly this wasn't meant to be. We had a May 1 deadline to deliver the masters and time only allowed so much. At the last minute I suddenly remembered that a big deleted segment had been neglected! One that I even referrenced in my feature commentary, so it had to be included somewhere! We'd already recorded our commentaries for the Deleted Scenes & Sounds featurette and there was no time for a redo. Luckily, the DVD author will be able to sneak it in as an Easter Egg by itself which makes me very happy. :) Had I more time to concentrate on the documenatry, I probably would have trimmed some fat into a tighter flow. But there's a lot of great stuff in there, if I say so myself. Plenty of content and interesting footage, rather than the usual talking-heads that pass for "documentary" these days in DVD supplements. This isn't everything; I'll not spoil all the surprises..

Yesterday, Unearthed Films, the distributor posted a "coming soon" announcement on Facebook with a link to the FLOWERS trailer. Only gonna say this once, but I've grown to loathe that damn trailer. It's spoilerish, bombastic, too gory, too long and doesn't really represent the tone of the film. Don't misunderstand, I adore the movie itself! I've watched it dozens of times and will revisit it many many more. No contest, the best movie I've edited and may never be dethroned. The trailer, to me, feels like a short-sell and a cop-out to the lowest common denominator. There. Got that off my chest. I've always been my own worst critic, so take my complaint with a grain of salt. Knowing and seeing what FLOWERS ultimately came to be, it's as if I was short-sighted myself when I cut that trailer together, which happened in the middle of post-production. Everone else seems to dig it, but I feel like it should have been better. For a marketing tool to hook the target audience, I guess it does its job. Still, I have this nagging urge to make another trailer. For my own edification, if nothing else. I'm glad that Unearthed finally made the official proclamation, rather than Phil and I continually hinting at a big bona fied release. No cover art yet and no release date but both are forthcoming, of course. There was a time when we seriously considered branching Borderline Cinema to a distribution company. The more I researched the prospect, the more I got turned off by the sales and marketing viewpoint. That ain't me. I'm not a salesman; never have been, never will be. Other established distributors had contacted Phil with offers to put the movie out, so it wasn't hard to abandon the not-so-prudent plan. Unearthed Films is hot, popular with modern indie horror fans and a natural to represent FLOWERS. The movie deserves that, not some fledgling entrepreneurial experiment. I have zero doubt and the utmost faith that they'll get it onto more screens, into more retailers and into more fan collections than anyone else could. I sincerely hope it's the biggest hit they'll ever have! It's a helluva great movie and surely has that potential. To say that I'm anxious as hell to see what the future holds for FLOWERS is an understatement. If all the early positive reviews are any indication, that future certainly looks bright! Now that FLOWERS is out of my hands, I have to consider what my own personal future holds. With so many irons in the fire; two jobs, an orchard, a garden, a wife, multiple hobbies, et cetera, I'll never be bored. There are never enough hours in the day. But there's no turning back to the Ronnie-the-former-filmmaker days. There are a couple of editing gigs already in the forecast but not yet set in stone. I experienced some postpartum depression around the time of the crowdfunder release. So much lively creative intensity for several months suddenly, abruptly ceasing felt like a personal loss, a deprivation of sustenance. It didn't help that this happened during the dead of winter. Thankfully, the job of creating the DVD supplements cured me! I kinda expected a similar repercussion after wrapping the package up and passing it on to the author. To a small degree, I did but it was like a bittersweet echo, thus much more manageable. I consider FLOWERS to be as much my movie as it is Phil's. We've sent our child out into the big bad world. When I gave Raychelle Keeling her copy of the movie recently, she asked me what my next movie was gonna be. Ugh! That's like asking a woman who's just gone through labor and birth if she's ready to make another baby. But, yeah.. there'll be more to come. As Bryant says in his interview, "Now that I've got the bug..."