Sunday Synopsis: A $100+ Gift of Hope Goes to the American Red Cross

It’s been seven months since my Red Cross fundraiser launched with the first stop on my Dinner-and-a-Movie tour. As the dust settles on this campaign, I am blogging today to thank the small businesses, military families and citizens from the southern and northeastern regions of the country who helped make it possible.

The tour raised over $100 to provide emergency shelter for men, women, children and pets who escape home fires. Did you know fires are the biggest disaster people experience in the United States? Just within the last few weeks, this organization assisted dozens of families who became displaced when fires destroyed their homes and belongings in a matter of minutes, leaving them with nowhere to go.

Individual donations enable the Red Cross to cover a night in a hotel, food, and clothing as well as provide emotional and spiritual support to these survivors, among other services including finding new homes. After the Red Cross provided aid to the U.S. Air Force Veteran I worked with who lost his home in a New Year’s Day fire, I am glad that I decided to use my short film “Abyss: The Greatest Proposal Ever” as a vehicle for hope – putting more people on the path to recovery following our nation’s most common disasters.

How often do YOU practice fire safety drills with your family (including children)?

Sunday Synopsis - Experimenting with Themed Weeks. Cast Your Vote.

Writer’s block and time management are some of the biggest challenges that I deal with while juggling blogging duties with filmmaking matters and my general day-to-day life. Thankfully, one of my favorite blogs by Australian husband and father Darren Rowse, has helped me hone in on a possible solution for the former matter that could help me also get a handle on the latter issue – themed weeks!

Darren and his team write posts about blogging, centered on topics that help people with the maintenance, growth, challenges and many other aspects of having a blog. He is also big on using series to get the creative juices flowing and thus, has been doing themed weeks at least once per month on his blog, focusing on subjects such as content and tips for newbies. I’m experimenting with my version of a theme week to figure out if that will help streamline my blogging activities so I won’t find myself scrambling to figure out which topics to focus my attention on.

Here are some upcoming themes that I have in the works:

• Special Features Week – All about topics involving the “extra features” on DVDs.

• Posters Week – A continuation of observations and discussions about key art concepts for a film and what works in movie poster designs versus what doesn’t benefit certain flicks.

• Film Festival Week – My experiences attending festivals and/or submitting to festivals, along with observations about various aspects of festival-related matters that affect independent filmmakers.

How long does it take YOU to carry out all of your blogging (or online) activities?

What do YOU think about this theme week experiment? Is it a deal or no deal?

Are there any particular themes of interest YOU want to suggess for me to cover here at The Madlab Post?

*Movie Screening photo courtesy of the U.S. Navy.

Sunday Synopsis - The Gift from Steve Jobs and an Actor's Call of Duty

Earlier this month, I imposed a challenge on myself to create 30 videos in 30 days, leading up to the World Premiere of "ABYSS: The Greatest Proposal Ever" (or TGPE, as I will be referring to it as from time to time). These videos are part of my YouTube webseries "30 Days - The Making of ABYSS: The Greatest Proposal Ever" -- a collection of mini documentaries chronicling the making of the project, with many behind-the-scenes images, interviews and footage clips not shown until now.

The point of it all is to help build more buzz for the January 15th screening and also re-launch my YouTube channel since I've neglected it for a long time. 

After starting this challenge, however, I soon realized that some major techinical limitations would make it very difficult to produce them on a daily basis. Now, I'm planning to make and post them in batches, to figure out if that can help make the process less stressful and the web series project more likely to be completed. While the first episode serves as a quasi-trailer, here are the second and fourth episodes about how Steve Jobs simplified our workdays as well as why actor Rodney Benson answered to the call of duty for participating in this movie. 

Episode 2 - The Gift from Steve Jobs, or What the iPad 2 Taught Cast & Crew about Multitasking:

Episode 4 - Why actor Rodney Benson took on the Call of Duty

Boy, it seems like year flew by so fast. Tell me this...

What are YOUR plans for New Year's?

*Those of you who are on Twitter -- if you feel like sharing this post or the links to these videos or commenting on them via a tweet, please use the hashtags: #TGPE #30DAYS #ABYSSMOVIE #GreatestProposalEver