Pre-production meeting in Hollywood

We will be shooting a short film in January for festival entry. Fat Monster has a tradition of holding pre-production meetings at the Hooters restaurant directly across from the famous Grauman's Chinese Theater. After availing ourselves of the Happy Hour specials we drove to the home of director Stuart Ortiz, who lives close by. Stuart has been banking cash for cutting trailers for b-movies and he gave us some insight into the process.

One of the most striking parts of his trailers is the amazing sound. Stuart enlightened us by explaining that there are a couple really high-end sound/score providers who deliver most of the sounds you hear on high-end film trailers. If you're working on a legitimate trailer they'll send you a hard drive completely loaded with all their stuff at no charge! So, Stuart called one of the companies up and got a freebie drive in the mail. The company rep mentioned to Stuart that the sound effects (i.e., 7-second whoosh) pricing starts at something like $7,000!!!!! So, that's why these guys are happy to send you a free hard drive. They make a gazillion dollars every time a trailer is cut. We listened to a bunch of the music clips and we actually recognized a couple including one from the Spiderman trailer.

Later in the evening Matt McDermott, who has cut several A-list music videos, stopped by and screened one of his recent projects. There was enough RedStripe to last the evening and we all returned to our hovels happy campers.