Everything Must Go!

Yes, if you read one of my recent tweets, I have set up shop on Virb and will be getting rid of this dinosaur within the next few days. My new site will focus solely on my film work, as I have found little use for this blog, and felt that I needed something a bit more professional to guide people to so they can see examples of my work. The DiMattiaFilms blog was a fun and exciting experiment, one that got me through my college years and then some! Not to mention Jump Cut Radio, which was fun, but in retrospect, felt like the biggest ego-stroking project I ever got involved in. Sorry, Nathan. :-)

Just FYI, this blog isn't going away anytime soon. It will still be available at its original URL of http://dimattiafilms.blogspot.com. I'm just officially announcing that I will no longer be updating it, and that dimattiafilms.com will soon point to my new site on Virb before the week is through.

Thank you, everyone who ever visited my site, and I hope to see you on the other side!

Help Support a Late-Night Double Feature Picture Show! (Actually, It's Just One Feature)

Some of my FFFs (fellow film friends) have gotten together and put up a Kickstarter page asking people to pledge funds so they can put together a bad-ass performance of Rocky Horror Picture Show at the Browncoat Pub & Theatre. They only need $250, and there's a wide variety of rewards for pledging, including signed posters, t-shirts, your name in the program, and more! If you got a minute to spare, swing on by their page and drop 'em a couple bucks.

New Firewall of Sound Trailer!

So excited to finally be able to post the new trailer for my music documentary Firewall of Sound. Enjoy!



Please leave me your comments, either on here or on our Vimeo page!

Update

I just realized I haven't posted a single thing on this site since June. This marks the first time I ever skipped an entire month without posting anything. I apologize for my lack of updates, but here's a brief overview of what's been happening in the world of DiMattiaFilms.

The big news is my crew and I just returned from a week-long trip in New York City and Boston for Firewall of Sound. I spoke with record store owners, venue managers, bloggers, and tons of musicians. I hope to start editing this footage in the next couple of weeks, and will post a new trailer for the film when time permits. In the meantime, keep checking the official website for the film for further details and updates.

Only $50 away from achieving our goal!!

As many of you know, I've been hard at work on a feature-length version of my documentary project, Firewall of Sound, focusing on the independent music industry and its relation to the Internet. In order to help raise funds for the project, I've created a page on Kickstarter.com, asking people to donate toward us completing the film, and as of right now, we are only $50 away from achieving our goal of raising $1,000!!

But, the rule is if we don't reach our goal by July 10, WE WILL GET NOTHING, so we need people to come to the rescue and get us over that mark! IF ONLY TEN PEOPLE DONATE $5 EACH, THAT WILL BE ENOUGH TO MEET OUR GOAL, so as you can see, every little bit helps! Thanks for taking the time out to read this, and I sincerely appreciate all your support.

Interview on Destroy Before Reading

In case you haven't been following my other blog about my documentary Firewall of Sound, I was recently interviewed by Andy Maddison of Destroy Before Reading. Check it out.

Firewall of Sound website, new and improved!

I've revamped the official website for Firewall of Sound, and while it doesn't really have anything new to report (just synopsis, trailer, etc.), it will soon be a haven for all things related to my feature documentary. We've got some interesting interview subjects and my crew and I will soon be making trips down to Athens, GA, and possibly up to Chicago. In the meantime, check out the new and improved firewallofsound.com and subscribe to the RSS feed to be kept in the loop!

RE: OMG TWTR

Let me explain the addition of a new sidebar that you may (or probably may not) have noticed. Because my public demanded it (they didn't) and because I have such a fascinating life (I don't), I decided to sign up for Twitter, the all-purpose digital personal space invader that's like Facebook, except minus everything but the status updates. Anyhoo, mildly interesting and possibly embarrassing (depending on my intoxication levels) updates will be collected in the new DiMattiaTwitter Incessant Ramblings sidebar. Apparently a lot of famous people do it (including the aforementioned LeVar Burton), so that's usually enough to convince me to tag along (and before you ask, yes, I would jump off a cliff if LeVar Burton did it, too, but don't take my word for it. BA-DAH-DUMM!)

Other famous (and semi-famous) people twittering (or tweeting, or whatever):
John Cleese (famous for throwing a dead parrot)
Bill Corbett (famous for impersonating a robot)
Jonathan Coulton (famous for writing a song about cake)
Felicia Day (famous for being the love interest of evil genius Doogie Howser)
Stephen Fry (not famous for throwing a dead parrot)
John Hodgman (a famous minor television personality)
Paul F. Tompkins (famous for loving many various decades on VH1)
The staff at The A.V. Club (famous for eating cheeseburger in a can)
Barack Obama's PR department (cleverly disguised as Barack Obama)

Firewall of Sound - Official Trailer

I was in the lab all this week, cutting together a short trailer for the upcoming feature-length version of my indie music doc Firewall of Sound. I'd prefer you visited the actual YouTube page, so you could watch it in high-quality, but I've embedded it here for your convenience:



So...what does this mean? Well, I am currently applying for a wide variety of grant money, which will go towards equipment and travel expenses for the film. I have ideas about who I would like to interview and where I would like to go, but all of that is dependent on how much money I will be receiving and who agrees to be a subject in the film. I have been immensely grateful to the people who agreed to be interviewed for the short film, and they will most certainly appear in the feature, some of whom I might contact for follow-ups in the near future. Ideally, I would like to use the feature-length to focus on topics I wasn't able to cover in the short, like bloggers who started their own record labels, the recent trend of bands doing impromptu gigs for blogs like La Blogotheque, and what it means to be a "sellout" in an industry where little to no money can be made off of traditional distribution.

As you can surmise, a lot of this is up in the air, and I hope to have more definite answers to your burning questions in the near future. For now, there's a trailer and a placeholder website, which will only exist long enough for me to modify the blog I made for the film back in '06. Until then, keep checking back and I'll keep you posted on updates.

Become a DiMattiaFan®

So, I'm sorry for updating this blog so sporadically. Hall of Awesome '08 is on the way, so that oughta inspire me to get my act together. In the meantime, click on the "Follow this blog" link in the sidebar to become a follower of DiMattiaFilms, or a DiMattiaFan® as I've taken to calling them. This will make it so updates to this blog will immediately pop up in your Dashboard, and it will also help convince myself that there are people who actually do read this blog on a regular basis. Please...the inflation of my ego depends on it!

Christmas Update!

So, I should probably go ahead and let everyone know that I am hard at work on a documentary short about the indie music industry and how the Internet has changed the way bands market themselves and distribute their music. It's gonna be called Firewall of Sound, and hopefully, everyone will be able to see it this April.

But, for now, let me wish everyone some good 'ol fashioned Christmas cheer with this video of the Prayers & Tears performing "You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch" at the Christmas at the Cradle event last year. Perry, the leader of the band, is one of the people I am interviewing for the film and he is a super-awesome guy who makes some amazing music, which you can hear a good deal of on his band's official website.



Plenty more footage from the concert can be found here.

UPDATE: I almost forgot. Perry pointed me in the direction of this really solid compilation of Christmas music by fellow blogger Hard to Find a Friend. It's only seven bucks and all proceeds go to Toys for Tots. I'm listening to it right now and I can tell you it's totally worth it!

kiva.org: A worthy cause

So, even though my sidebar states that this is an ad-free blog, I feel it is important to plug this one service, namely Kiva.org. You see, my family and I loan money to over 10 different entreprenuers in many different parts of the globe. We do it through Kiva, which acts as a middleman, connecting residents of third-world companies trying to start up businesses with people willing to support a charitable cause. This is a great way to give to people who are really in need, but also a great way to see exactly where your money goes. For more information, check out this New York Times video all about Kiva and their services.

A new look for Blogger

You may notice some small changes on my blog. This is because I recently made the switch over to Blogger Beta, which takes advantage of various Web 2.0 devices like tags, labels, built-in drop down menus, and the like. So, from now on, all posts on this blog will include tags (usually no more than two or three per post). So, if you'd like to see what other posts I've written on the subject of Gnarls Barkley, click on the "Gnarls Barkley" tag at the bottom of one of those posts. Of course, all pre-Blogger Beta posts don't have tags and I probably won't be working to update them any time soon (I don't have that much free time!) Also, I've tried using the new drop-down Archive menu in the sidebar, and it works...up to a point. It seems that if you try to find back-posts before July of this year, you'll get a little "Loading..." notice, and then nothing. I assume they're working on it. Which brings me to another announcement. Since this new version of Blogger is in beta, it's important that my readers keep me informed if they start noticing any bugs on this website. If you see something that looks out of place, or if a feature suddenly doesn't work anymore, send me an e-mail to devin@dimattiafilms.com.

Thanks, gang!