Dear “Catalyst” Diary…
by Alan Fine

Gratitude…

I could actually stop and hit “send” now. That one word says everything.

My world is suddenly like Harry Bailey’s at the end of “It’s a Wonderful Life” when all his friends and family came to his rescue. I can’t thank people enough for their kind investments; investments of ghost stories for the Ghost Story Archive and actual cash from those who came forward to help fund a short film. The ghost stories and the money for the short film will help us this summer as we attempt to attract traditional deep-pocket investors for the cost of a fall feature film shoot. (Several have expressed interest and are awaiting a presentation.)

As this is the first email update going out to a wider audience than just our investors, please allow me to review while adding the latest events.

We are currently in preproduction on a scene taken from a pivotal point in the feature. You can read the script and see what I have planned shot for shot here. In order for our little scheme to work, this short film must look, sound, smell and taste as if came straight from a major film studio with recognizable stars, as well as be good enough to submit to film festivals.

The plan is to use EVERYTHING generated so far to land investors. That would include the increasing participation in the Ghost Archive (with now over 1600 Twitter followers and climbing), the shooting script, the short film, the novel, the business plan, and the stellar reputations of the partners and crew who are joining us.

Gratitude is again the main word I have to describe my feelings for these partners and crew members, joining us knowing we are cash poor, but equity rich in the stories we will be telling (see the trilogy list here).

Our IMDB (Internet Movie Database) listing is starting to fill out. Our producer, Anthony Vorhies, brought us Mechanism Digital for Special Effects. Lucien Harriot is our Visual Effect Supervisor and Fangge Chen is our Visual Effects Artist. You can see some of their great work if you visit MechanismDigital.com. (We are keeping their “Ghost Tests” under wraps a while longer to protect the “look” of our film from being copied.)

Also to be listed on our IMDB page will be the The Law Firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP (http://www.paulweiss.com. They prepared our offering papers for the feature film investors, all 54 pages of it!

Hopefully by the next update, Anthony will make sure our production is in compliance with SAG (the Screen Actors Guild) and we will be able to reveal our Casting Director who has the connections to help us find those recognizable actors. Also we should have our DP (Director of Photography) by then and will have a lot to share about the planned mash-up between the filming styles of the 70s-80s and today.

We may have found a shooting location in Irvington, NY, just within the SAG mileage limit from the city (measured from Columbus Circle), but we can’t commit until our future Director of Photography signs off on the location’s feasibility.

By now I hope you are familiar with this site. Half of it is dedicated to “The Catalyst” movies and half is dedicated to telling ghost stories. Please consider donating a ghost story. The instructions are on the site, but feel free to email me directly for help.

Please consider donating a ghost story as it helps drive our Twitter following and will possibly influence investors to fund our feature film. (We are now accepting written stories and not just videos. It has been taking too much time to create videos for them.) Underneath your ghost story, we would be pleased to cross-promote anything (within reason), the message reaching not only our Twitter followers, but we have calculated retweets and favorites from just our top 20 Twitter influencers could potentially be seen by over a million people! DONATE STORIES HERE

I still can’t thank everyone enough, but I’ll keep trying.

Thank you everyone!

If you would like to be emailed these Catalyst Filmmaker Blogs rather than remember to visit our site, please click here…

Alan Fine
alan@catalystghoststories.com
catalystghoststories.com
@Catalyst_movie