Things have been pretty scarce around these parts as of late, so I decided I'd stop back by ol' KREJ central and give an update on what we've been up to these past few months. It may seem like we haven't done much lately, but there's been a lot going on.
First of all, we've been hitting up all the film races around. On all of these, we've been working together with our buddies from OMG (Ogden Media Group) under the banner Third Place Productions. The name comes from our first race, the 24 Hour Film Race, where we placed 3rd in the audience vote. We also took the awards for Best Costume and Best Makeup. That film was entitled "Better Late Than Never" and can be viewed here:
After that we participated in the 48 Hour Film Race, where our film marked the world debut of my favorite character that I've ever played, Jedidiah Crenshaw. You can see "Matthers & Johnson: Southern Heat," our attempt at parodying cheesy crime procedurals, here:
And finally, we most recently competed in the 100 Hour Film Race, in which we placed in the Top Twenty!! In this festival, this is considered an award, and while top 20 might not sound all that amazing, I'm taking it dammit. There's still time to vote to help us win the audience award, so if you would be so kind, please go here and vote for our film, "Suffolk County Blues" by Third Place Productions:
And the film itself can be checked out right here:
Along with all the Film Race fun, were also really, really, REALLY close to finalizing last year's summer project, "Of Rats and Men." I know we've been crying wolf on this one for a little while now, but it's coming. We've just had alot of compositing/sound/post/technical bullshit work to do. We're also hoping to put "Tim and Katie: A Nice Little Love Story with Zombies," our zombie "feature," up here soon as well. In case you don't know or forgot what ORAM or T&K is, check out the trailers for both below:
And if all of this isn't enough for you, stay tuned. We're working on something pretty great right now. I can't wait until you guys get to see it. It's really exciting. If you knew what it was, you'd be really excited too. Way more excited than you are right now. It's ok. Buck Up. Keep a stiff upper lip. It's coming. Relax. RELAX! It's coming. Just be patient. Shit!
I really would like to update this blog more, and I'll try my best to, but if you'd like, you can friend me on Facebook (facebook.com/jeffgrantz) where updates happen a little more regularly.
I know we haven’t posted in a while, but we’ve been really busy with a lot of projects as of late. We’ll elaborate soon on this, but I have some quick business to attend to at the moment.
KREJ, with the aid of our good friends in Ogden Media Group are participating in the 24 Hour Film Race this year. We will be writing, shooting and editing a 4-minute short within a 24 hour period. It’s a daunting task, but we’re confident we’ll do a great job on our short. If you wanna be in this or help out, we’d love to have you.
At the moment, we’re just trying to put together a large pool of crew/actors/extras to select from once we know who and what we need, so you may or may not be used, there’s no promises. We mostly need actresses of all types, and a good sound person to record on-set sound/dialogue more than anything really, but we’re willing to add others to our pool of potentials.
It’s from 10pm on Friday April 29th til 10pm on Saturday the 30th, but we will most likely need crew/actors/extras between the hours of midnight and around 5 or 6pm (probably not for the entire time though, unless you are available for that). There’s no pay, but we’ll try to feed everyone who is working on it.
We are also searching for visually interesting/stimulating locations of all kinds, and musicians who can allow us to use good quality recordings of their band’s or their own personal music. We would love music of all kinds as long as the music’s original writer can give us permission to use it and sign a release.
So, if you’re interested just let me know what hours would be best for you, or if you’re not interested, but know someone who might be, feel free to send them my way. Email me at jeffg@krej.tv to inquire.
Oh, and be sure to check out myself, Trent and Stevzie’s improv group, LaughTrack: The Improvised Sitcom 8pm followed by Revis & Zeiss (Craig Zeiss! From ORAM), every Wednesday night at Relapse Theatre in Atlanta.
I know it’s been awhile since you’ve heard from us, but I assure you KREJ Productions is not dead. Quite the contrary, in fact. We’ve been keeping pretty busy as of late. So, I decided to look back at our last blog posts, see where we left off with you guys, and catch you all up on what has been going on in the world of KREJ.
First up, as Kaminski noted in his last blog, Steven, Trent, and I have finished our Improv classes at Relapse Theatre and we’ve graduated. We did three shows total as a class and now we are all moving on to new separate groups and projects within the company. Speaking of new projects, Steven and I are in a new improv show called LaughTrack, with Melissa Owens and Jan Lefrancios-Gijzen, both of whom you hopefully soon recognize from “Of Rats and Men” and Jesse Cramer, another of our former classmates. LaughTrack is a completely improvised sit-com that we perform based on the title of a made up sitcom that the audience suggests. We had our first show the Saturday before last, where we opened up for IMPROV! the Musical, one of Jackpie’s Featured Productions. The show went extremely well. We have another show this coming Thursday January 27th, and after that we will be performing monthly at Relapse. We hope to see at one of our shows in the future. Oh, and did I mention that Relapse has a full bar now? Now do you wanna come see our show?
Steven’s dad, Jack, recorded the show for us, so I might look into posting it up on the site, if the rest of the in the group don’t mind. I also wanted to mention, while we’re on the subject of improv, that Kaminski has started his classes at Relapse, and we all wish him luck, and we hope he has as much fun working with Jackpie as we did.
Next up on the agenda is the topic of editing. From what I hear, Jerry is back to work on the editing process of “Of Rats and Men,” after almost a month of delays, including his being snowed in in Tennessee. We hope to announce some dates for a screening soon, so as always check back here for updates.
But Jerry hasn’t been the only person editing around here. I’ve been wanted to try my hand at editing for a while now, and finally broke down and bought me some Adobe Premiere Elements, and have been tinkering around with it for about a week or so. The end result of the aforementioned tinkering session is our brand spanking new KREJ Productions Demo Reel. It features footage from all of our previous films, including “Tim and Katie,” “Of Rats and Men,” and the unreleased short that I directed, “Bored.” Take a look:
My next editing assignment is gonna be “Bored” which is a short, Grindhouse-like trailer, which I also wrote and directed.
As always, Kaminski and I are still putting pen to paper and get some good old fashion writing done. We’ve been working on a bunch of things, separately and on our own, like scripts for shorts, comics, and a few feature films and all kinds of good stuff, and I’ve heard tale that the young sir Trenton has been writing a thing or… ok just a thing, but still, good on him. There’s been a little talk about getting together with some of our fellow improvisers and shooting a few sketches sometime soon. I hope we do that. Sketches are a lot of fun to do, and we haven’t made any sketches in a long long time. Before KREJ I wanna say.
There has been some early talk of us shooting a music video for Atlanta based metal band Eyes of Torment. The video will be for the song “Sledgehammer’s Don’t Need Reloading,” which was influenced in part by the band’s bassist Josh Thompson’s experience playing Kevin in “Tim and Katie.” I’ve seen Eyes of Torment play numerous times before and the song “Sledgehammers…” kicks all kinds of ass. The band will hopefully be going into the studio soon to record the track, and after that we’ll see about actually shooting the video. The thing I’m excited about the most with this project, is we are definitely gonna be working with zombies again. If you’re not doing anything tonight, come check out Eyes of Torment tear the stage a new asshole at The Masquerade at 7:00.
And lastly I want to announce that KREJ has recently taken a meeting with our good friend Ron Ogden and his brother and our new good friend Reid regarded some upcoming collaborations between our company and their company Ogden Media Group (OMG!). The first project that we are working on is a short film that the Ogden brothers are developing right now, and that we are planning on shooting next month. I don’t wanna give away too much, but the short will star Ron and will be directed by Reid. There has also been talk about developing some features with the two companies. It’s all very exciting and we can’t wait to work with these talented guys. I have a feeling we’re gonna do great things together. In the meantime, please check out the Ogden Media Group’s Facebook page here: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Ogden-Media-Group/157343300968655?v=wall#!/pages/Ogden-Media-Group/157343300968655
Anywhoozle, that’s pretty much what’s been going on around KREJ HQ. Out of curiosity, I rented Piranha (unfortunately the none 3D version) and I think it’s about time I get around to killing that cat. What say you?
