Today I met with Donna and a lawyer friend, Jim, to discuss our business plan for the *Artists’ Essentials* series of instructional art DVDs we are going to produce. I drafted a 15 page business plan packed with details on our market and the competition, marketing and sales approaches, distribution plans, a summary of our project and a complete financial breakdown. It took me a long time to do that, but let me tell you it is a *huge* help to focus your plans and be forced to put everything down on paper. And it’s just the professional thing to do.

I get more and more excited every time we meet — this project has a really good vibe to it. Case in point: Jim is a published author and has lots of experience producing and marketing educational products. He came fully prepared to poke holes in our plan and play devil’s advocate. He was surprised, however, that we really knew what we were talking about and had thought it through so well. He turned from skeptic to cheerleader over the course of just a few hours.

Donna treated us to lunch at Applebee’s to finish off the discussion. We have finally settled on the aforementioned name for the series. Donna and I are forming an LLC, which gives us personal legal protection in case the whole thing goes bust and we owe a bunch of money. Plus, we can claim our losses on our own personal income tax. We agreed to split the expenses and the profits 50/50, which is just easier in the long run.

What concerned me most is not the actual production of the video — I know that’s going to go well and I have confidence in our combined abilities — but how we are going to *sell* these DVDs. Amazingly, Donna has incredible relationships with both national and international art supply distributors. Once again, we’re tapping our network and pooling resources to do amazing things.

First things first, though. We registered a domain name (“artistsessentials.com”:http://www.artistsessentials.com ), which will soon have promotional information about the upcoming series. Keep watching this space!

Since this is my first post to the shiny new website, I’ll introduce myself. I’m Dakota Russell, the second half of Red Forty Entertainment. My work is mostly in the screenwriting arena.

The process usually goes something like this: Todd calls and says, “I need a script about x in y weeks with z amount of toilet humor.” Then I just do the algebra.

This formula has produced some of my best work.

In conclusion, I’m glad to be contributing here. You’ll hear more from me as projects start progressing.

I just finished producing a slideshow to play during a wedding next week. There are other things I’d rather be doing at 2 o’clock in the morning, but I am getting paid for it so I won’t complain. Something must have happened since I left the country. These photo montages of the bride and groom from babies through engagement seem to be the latest big thing to show at weddings. Usually, it’s during the reception. But in this case, they want it projected on the wall of the church, right above and next to the altar, during the ceremony itself. Right after the mothers light the unity candle. With an appropriately cheesy song to play along with it. Hey, whatever floats your boat — you only get one chance at your first wedding.

If you’ve seen enough PowerPoint presentations, you’ve probably experienced all the potentials for error. First of all, there’s that embarassing Windows desktop just before the show begins. Then there’s the “oops, I bumped the mouse” gambit where the pointer suddenly becomes visible and we all wait for an eternity for the little arrow to disappear again. And that’s if you don’t accidentally click a button while you do it, which usually brings up the pop-up menu and more fiddling. If you’re lucky enough to get far without any mishaps, then the screensaver kicks in and all goes black. The music stops.

I see this crap coming from miles away. That’s why I’m *not* doing a Powerpoint presentation for this wedding. Instead, I’m importing the photos into Final Cut Pro and editing it like a video. Once it’s burned to DVD, all we have to do is hook up the DVD player to the projector and have someone nearby with a remote. I’ve created a completely black menu screen, so we can turn everything on before the ceremony gets underway and you don’t see a thing on the wall. If that operator can manage to press the ENTER button and set the remote down, the whole slideshow will play and revert back to the black menu when it’s finished. Clean as a whistle.

You sacrifice a little bit of resolution doing it this way, but it’s not enough to make a noticeable difference. I’m already dealing with scanned photos and digital pics in many different sizes and resolutions. And if you use a progressive scan DVD player and use the component video (instead of RCA) outputs to hook up to the projector it makes a big difference.

So I’m grateful to my friends Charles and Debra, who gave me both an excuse to buy a digital projector *and* half the money to pay for it! When you have a spare moment today, say a prayer for their happy marriage and a long life together.