For Love & Stacie

“Before he has a chance to think too much, struggling filmmaker Michael Davis throws himself wholeheartedly into crafting a celluloid valentine for Stacie, his very recent ex-girlfreind and soul mate. What could go wrong? Even Michael couldn’t have predicted the unbelievable twists and turns he would capture on his camera in the following days, which would eventually evolve into the feature “For Love & Stacie” – at once a courageous, cathartic, hopelessly romantic testament to the lengths to which we will go for love, and a darkly comic, almost-too-honest, painfully familiar odyssey through the kind of misery and psychological debasement that only a loved on is capable of inflicting”

So it’s been quite awhile since I made my feature doc For Love & Stacie, though it’s won a handful of awards it’s yet to make me rich … or even buy me a taco. With that in mind like most “artists” it’s become more important to me for it to be seen than for it to make me money. Of course it would be nice to have both but as the latter hasn’t happened I’ll just have to push for the former. Basically I’d rather give it away and hope its seen by many rather than continue to try and sell it and have it only seen by a few. All that said, here it is, free on the internet for the world, or at least a couple people with too much time on their hands, to see in all it’s original glory. Well, not “all” it’s original glory, had to compress it quite a bit to get it online but you get what I mean. I only have two favors to ask if you watch it:

1) Post something about it! Somewhere! Anywhere! Even if you hate it and want to dog it that’s fine with me. If you love it tell the world. Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, your blog, message boards, whatever. Since it seems impossible for a little indi filmmaker to make a dime doing this (at least for this little indie filmmaker) it would mean everything to me and I’d be ever grateful just to know it’s been seen by many and hopefully liked by a few. So give it a mention and share the link.

2) No SPOILERS! Again, you can crap all over it if you want to when you post but do me the one honor of not giving anything away to those who haven’t seen it.

That’s it, if ya really REALLY like it you can find it for sale on DVD or a much higher res download on bside.com but honestly at this point it would actually mean more to me for people to post about it than to buy it.

DVD : http://www.bside.com/films/forloveandstacie

Facebook : http://www.facebook.com/loveandstacie

MySpace : http://www.myspace.com/loveandstacie

Look forward to hearing what you think. There are some tidbits about the film on it’s MySpace page but in here I’ll only say that For Love & Stacie went from concept to completion, by that meaning literally from the day I had the idea till the day it was shot and completely edited in six months. The total budget was 3k. It was filmed on Canon XL2’s (oh how I wish I had my EX1 back then!) and edited in Sony Vegas. Any questions just ask, but if your question has spoilers I won’t be able to answer! For full cast and crew visit it’s IMDB page:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0773284/

Thanks a bunch and hope you like it.

- Ray

P.S. Okay, a friend of mine nicely pointed out that since my electricity is about to get cut off because it’s two months behind and I don’t have rent, mayhaps it wouldn’t hurt to put up a donations page for those who enjoyed it and would be willing to make a little donation. I can’t imagine anyone would but if you do well God bless ya, a penny would make me smirk, a buck would make me smile, 5-10 and I’ll do a happy dance, and anything more I think I’ll just spontaneously wet my pants. Know that anything I manage to get back from this will go to rent and the pile of bills I’m behind on. If it ever gets more than I need (like that’ll happen) it will help me payoff some equipment. So if your feel so inclined just click the link below to PayPal and pick a number! I seriously find the quality of my life is just so much better when I have the lights on!

REDucation

Finally nearly recovered from an unexpected trip to Salt Lake City & LA. I was asked by Mannie Frances and Douglas Spotted Eagle from Vasst to come out a shoot some test footage with the RED Tesla for Sony’s presentation during RED’s first REDucation week.

The shoot was meant to be fairly simple, some glam type shots of three BMW’s on the Slat Flats. Originally the owners of the cars were only willing to get the cars out there and more or less plop them down for us to get some shots with perhaps a couple slow drive-bys. We actually spent a good 30 minutes in a nearby gas station while they painstakingly polished every detail before heading out to the location. After filling up the only two 8 gig cards we had with footage one of the owners spontaneously peeled out and started doing donuts, the other two were quick to follow. When this began Mannie and I had been looking at some of the shots on a laptop straight from the camera in Vegas and without batting so much as an eye decided to format one of the cards so we would have some room to capture some of this. Glad we did, got some amazing shots. I’ll see if I can get some of the source footage to make a little montage.

Fast forward a couple days and Mannie and I are in LA at the LA Center Studios for REDucation week demoing Sony Vegas with the fresh footage in one of their awesome 4k theaters in front of a live audience. Was a blast, the presentation went great considering just days before I had no clue that I’d be doing it! Vegas performed flawlessly during my part of the demo and Mannie did a great job co-presenting and filling in the blanks by pointing out some of other RED specific improvements Vegas had made in their latest updates. On a side note I had met Ted Schilowitz from RED at NAB before but it was kinda neat to have him come up and welcome us while we were getting ready to present. Really wish we had had more time to just hang out and absorb but was back in the airport and on a plane just hours after we wrapped up.

Suffice to say it was an incredible week. Getting to spend some time with Spot (Douglas Spotted Eagle) and Mannie as I bounced between staying at their respective houses in Utah, to the shoot,  to the cool room at The Standard in LA, to the presentation at REDucation, just incredible. Hope we get to do it again next year!

- Ray

Casting Professional Dancers

Casting is moving along for Larissa’s music video and spots are filling up quickly! Need just a couple more female dancers and a handful of guys to round things out. If you’re a dancer read the description below or if you know any dancers in Austin that might fit the bill pass it along!

Searching for Ballroom Dancers who would like to participate in a music video. The shooting will take place in Austin. All men and women dancers are required to provide their own attire. We will do one costume change that involves the men to wear only bottoms and women to wear boy shorts and a top. That will be for the contemporary part of the dance so we will be dancing bare foot. Experience required, must have a flexible schedule for the day of shooting.

Please email Carly at : livewell247@yahoo.com or call 512-696-5145
Leave a contact number and a brief description about your experience.
Please attach recent face shot and body shot if available.

Next Project! Larissa Ness Music Video

As of today it’s officially official! Underground Planet is tickled pink to announce that we will be producing a new music video for pop-artist Larissa Ness. The video will be for her song “Thoughts Of You” which was featured in Jennifer Love Hewitt’s hit TV show The Ghost Whisperer and its gonna be unlike anything we have done to date.

Among other things (can’t give everything away!) it will be our first music video to have (drum roll please!) choreography! Instructor/Choreographer Carly Bell has graciously signed on to handle and oversee all things dance which will be a blend of ballroom, hip-hop and contemporary. Slated to begin shooting August we’ve swiftly moved into pre-production and casting has begun! Let the games begin!

In the meantime go grab her CD off of CD Baby or buy and download it directly from  iTunes, a girls gotta eat!

Larissa Ness – “Hello” on CD Baby

Larissa Ness – “Hello” on iTunes

The NEW Underground Planet!

Whelp I’m just giddy as a school girl! The new site went live today and although we’re still plugging in some content and flushing things out I really couldn’t be happier. Lots of great features and I hope you’ll take a little while to poke around and see some of the neat things Julien at madfrogdesigns.com has built into it.

If you didn’t notice you can leave comments on this blog (or any blog for that matter) as well as leave comments on all the videos and I hope you will! Can’t wait to read em! Beyond that if you have Skype and click one of the little “Contact” buttons you’ll notice you’re just one click away from talking to me if I’m online.

I’ll be posting more info about upcoming projects as well as more specifics about our brand-spaking new Handsfree-Transporter over the next few days, hope you’ll check back often! In the meantime, go watch some stuff, go comment, ring me on Skype, and don’t forget to bookmark us!

One last time a HUGE thanks to Julien, you’re awesome man.

- Ray