It's almost time...

Hi everybody,

Man, has it been a long time since I’ve done this. I do apologize for not throwing my two-cents in here on a more regular basis. All of us here at KREJ have been extremely busy on pre-production for our latest short, “Of Rats and Men,” which longtime followers (yep, still telling myself that someone is reading this) will know this to be the prequel to a feature-length script called “Rat Bastards” written by one Jeff Kaminski. (That’s right Tarantino we spell it like Americans!)

And boy has there been a lot of pre-production to do on this thing. One of the big things I’ve been working on is locking down one of the major filming locations. This will be the first time we use a real business for a location in the history of KREJ. Mostly we’d use friends’ houses and woods and stuff, but this time we’re using a couple different legit locations. One of those is a local branch of an exterminating company, and the other is an office building where one of our actors work. We’re excited to have gotten permission from these people and we thank them.

I had to lock down the Director of Photography and Assistant Director as well. I’m happy to announce that we’re again going to be working with Hakim Robinson and Regina Nicole from Eyes Entertainment as D.P. and A.D. respectively. We’ve previously worked with them on our last film project “Bored,” which I promise will be coming to you in one form or another very soon.

I’ve also been doing a lot of work organizing everything as far as emailing actors and crew. A lot of scripts and schedules and whatnot being sent back and forth. We are still waiting on a few members of the crew to be locked down, so we still might need some more help. If you’re in the area and would like to help, check out the KREJ needs Crew group on Facebook, and if you haven’t already, join the KREJ Productions group there as well. That group used to be the Tim and Katie fangroup, but we switched it over to an all-KREJ, all-the-time kinda thing. So if you were a member of the T&K group, you don’t have to join again, we already got you. We recently posted a few pre-production pics from “Of Rats and Men,” some pictures of people in costume, and a few from a couple table reads and rehearsals we’ve done so far. We also got a couple of really nice group shots with almost everyone in the cast.

Speaking of the cast, we’re thrilled to be working with a lot of new talent that we have somehow managed to aquire this time around. Of course, you’ve got fan favorites Steven, Trent, and myself returning, but a large portion of the cast are people we’ve never worked with before, and that’s something that’s very exciting for us. I’m telling you, we’ve got a really funny group coming at this thing, and I know they’re gonna get out there and make with the funny. A good bit of the performers are people Steven, Trent, and I have met recently in our Improv class at the Relapse Theatre in Atlanta. A few others, are people we’ve known for a little while, and even a couple of people that just answered our casting calls. We got really lucky to bring together all the talent that we have.

I also wanna give a couple of shout outs. First one goes out to Stephanie Norton. Some of you might know her as an Executive Producer on Tim and Katie, others might know her as Kaminski’s mom, we know her as the person who feeds us when we’re on set (and God are we grateful). Stephanie deserves a huge shout out because she saved our ass on this one. As some of you might know, we had a company (that to my understanding predominantly makes animal/mascot costumes for Furries) enlisted to create the rat costume for one Stevie Teuchert to wear for his role. Last second, due to some beef they had with someone else, they decided to say, “oh yeah, we’re just gonna not do that.” We we’re willing to shell out our hard-earned money to these guys, and due to reasons that have nothing to do with us personally, they ditch us. Not good business friends. So anyway, who swoops in to save us at the last second, but Mrs. Norton herself. In just 5 hours (the other guys quoted us a month), she managed to bang this thing out, and man it looks a hundred times better than we ever imagined it. I bet it looks better than the one the other guys we’re gonna make us, cause we had the options to customize a couple of things. It saved us an ass-ton of money on the thing too.

The other shout out goes to our own Jerry, because he took a random stupid idea I had, and weaved it into gold. In this film, wrestling play a decent sized role in the story. We decided early on that we we’re gonna have one Johnnie Holland (who you might remember as Mr. Roberts from Tim and Katie) take on the role of a pro wrestler. I threw out the idea that we take a picture of him and make a t-shirt for my character to wear in the opening scene of the film. Again, he took the idea I had in my mind’s eye and made it a hundred times better than I expected. I guess what I’ve learned here, is to quit having such low expectations for everyone around me. Hmm, I guess I’m an asshole. All’s that’s left to do now is get in touch with the guy who’s supposed to be having the shirt made for us, so we can have it in time.

I mentioned earlier that I haven’t blogged in a good while (which explains why this blog never seems to end), and I plan on making up for that during the shoot. Every night, after we wrap, I’m going to do a new blog reporting of the events from that day’s shoot. It’ll be like a short diary from the set. Very short seeing as how we’re only planning on shooting for four days.

All of this work we’ve been doing, and I still got a to-do list almost two pages long. I still gotta call the people at the locations, call the t-shirt guy, get a hair-cut, wait til my costume arrives so I can make sure it fits right (then have it altered if it doesn’t), re-read “Rat Bastards” to refresh myself with it, take meetings with a few different people for scoring and music and stuff, record an actual song, figure out this whole damn carpooling situation, make a shit-load of phone calls, and then I just gotta send about 37-thousand emails. Fun. Oh well, at least I got stuff to keep me busy these next few days until we shoot.

But, it hasn’t been all “Of Rats and Men,” for me. I have, whenever I can find the time, been working on a couple of other writing projects. The first being a very very rough draft for a feature length script we would love to tackle next summer, entitled “How Not To Make A Movie.” It’s very loosely based on a true story involving us fellas at KREJ, and our experiences in the business of show. The other is a very gritty buddy cop short entitled “T.J. Freelove.” It’s a story I’ve had in my head for well over 2 years, but haven’t written a word on it. I finally got behind the keyboard and started banging it out, and at this point in time, I’m roughly half-way through it. It’s got some very fun characters, and I know we’d have a blast shooting it. We’d like to shoot this sometime in the near future, possibly after whatever we shoot after this (I hear the stable boy has been cooking up a thing or two in that old noggin of his).

Oh piss, It’s 5:15 in the morning, and I’ve been pre-productioning my ass off for the last 5 hours. Time for sleep. Night. Bye.

-Grantzy