Sound & Vision Part Two

Well, I got the Tolltaker sound mix from Rodney, as promised. It was a little rougher than I would have liked, and there were one or two essential fixes that had to be made. Fortunately, I caught a break on the New Jersey Film Festival deadline: no one's in the office until Wednesday, so Rodney had the weekend to work on it. I'll be going over to his studio a little later today to listen to the mix and give final notes.

On the non-Tolltaker front, we're delivering a batch of footage that we shot for the Annapolis tourist bureau about a week ago. Part of the shoot involved going to the first home game of the season for the Naval Academy's football team. After filming elaborate tailgater parties in the parking lot, we went on to the field in the stadium and filmed the equally elaborate rituals the Navy team and its supporters performed to take to the field.

The march of the midshipmen was an impressive sight. They came out 0nto the field, marching in formation through an opening at one end of the stadium: seemingly endless phalanxes of young men and women dressed all in white, filling the field before taking their seats in a large swath of stadium seating that had been reserved for them.

Europe After Dark, our spec TV series about European nightlife, continues to limp its way towards completion. While there have been some sales, the main quarry - broadcast on American television - remains elusive.

It's really a chicken-and-the-egg scenario: the Fox Station Group, the division of the Fox Network that owns and operates its affiliated TV stations, is enthusiastic about the show, and is willing to move other programming around on its schedule to accommodate it. However, it's up to us to find the advertisers.

Now, we have signed a deal with a media-buying company called Apex Media to secure that advertising. However, what we're being told is that advertisers are being very close-fisted with their dollars these days, and are mostly unwilling to take a gamble on an untried brand, which is what Europe After Dark is at this point. They want to see ratings data, hard numbers, which you can only get by putting the show on the air.

So, to get the show on the air, we need advertisers. To get advertisers, we need a show on the air. The chicken and the egg.