I don’t know how many people read that title and realize the magnitude of it. For those who have been following my Making of Do Not Disturb Blog, I started with an idea and decided I was sick of waiting on people to do things — I was going to make my own movie. Soon I’ll have the official announcement up on the site, on a press release and out to who ever will read it, but before the next ball starts rolling, I think you should know what it took to get here, because it’s been a fucking journey…

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It’s finally time for Do Not Disturb to start heading out into the world! After all of the blood, sweat and tears it’s ready to be judged, loved, ridiculed, who knows!

We’ve officially screened the film for cast and crew and hopefully in the near future Do Not Disturb will make it’s way out into the world via festivals and/or some other kind of release for people to enjoy.

In celebration, we have for you the premiere of the official trailer below… Enjoy!

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Wow… I never though — especially after the past few days, weeks, hours, not sure, time is lost on me — that I would ever be able to say “I’m done”. Technically it’s still rendering, but in all intents and purposes, it’s done! Do Not Disturb, my first film, the thing that I’ve put my everything into, my heart, soul, my savings account, and the last 9ish months of my life… is over. Well this stage at least. It’s yet to be copied onto a bunch DVDs and sent off to festivals and god forbid SEEN by anyone… but that’s it. The making of the film, all of my “work” in creating it is done.

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Last Friday, the cast and crew behind Do Not Disturb got together with friends and family to try and do what every film has to do at some point… RAISE MORE MONEY. Although we’re done shooting, nearly done editing, and quite honestly, nearly done all around, we needed help getting through color correction, sound design, and some other important steps. We threw a fundraiser extravaganza at amazing YADA (Youth Academy of Dramatic Arts) studios. It may seem odd that we brought blood, sex, and quite a bit of adult content to a Youth Academy, but it was the perfect venue! We had two rooms, one with a lounge area and another for the screening -  and don’t worry, no children were scared in the raising of our funds.

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After as brief hiatus for the holidays, Do Not Disturb is almost fully edited with music, Foley, and an awesome animation by Andy Windak on it’s way. After looking through all five films, although I loved what we shot, I wanted a little bit more of a set up for the film as a whole and each story individually soooo… welcome to the underbelly of our currently unnamed hotel! Maureen and I grabbed Death Takes a Holiday Inn director Brandon Nicholas, a small crew of Zach Voytas (DP), Tyler Harrison (AC), Drew Aiello (Gaffer), Sahib Dhanjal (AD), Brent DeGraff (DIT), and Edan Mason (Sound) and some equipment from Indie Rentals (yet again, the best place to rent from in LA for indie filmmakers) and put everyone in the two tinniest shooting spaces we could find and shot 14 more pages written by yours truly in two days!

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***Updated: New Video made by Laura Aguirre Added***

Our fifth and final film of Do Not Disturb, entitled Death Takes a Holiday Inn, written and directed by Brandon Nicholas, starring Diva Zappa, Jason Alan Smith, and myself, Mali Elfman, was wrapped a couple of weeks ago and we finally have a little behind the scenes look for you to watch!

All the films are currently being edited and are headed towards picture lock by the 30th of December. After we raise a bit more money they’ll all be on their way to being scored (we’ll announce who is doing that soon, we’ve got some really talented people in the works) and color corrected.

Enjoy…

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Last Wednesday I wrapped my first film Do Not Disturb. Last Thursday and Friday we tore down our beautiful beige set which took so much time to build. We returned all of our set decorations and almost all of our props (our PA Brent even managed to return the snickers bars we used on set!). I did keep some of the props for myself, our “Do Not Disturb” sign is hanging proudly from my office door at the moment.

Saturday was a hard day for me because all the adrenaline I’ve been running off of for weeks died out and all I wanted to do was get back on the set and shoot more. Sunday, we began post production and by that night, one of our directors had a rough cut of his film and I was re-invigorated. It looks fantastic and it gave me the push I needed to move forward into post production!

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We’re getting close to the end of our “making of” videos for Do Not Disturb. Below we have some behind the scenes footage of Jon Mann-Krieger‘s Intrinsic starring Jason Alan Smith, Diva Zappa, Troy Garity and myself, Mali Elfman. All the films are currently being edited, I saw a rough cut of one of them last night (won’t tell you which) and to my delight it was amazing. I can’t even begin to explain how excited I was to see that it’s coming together so well. More on that later, for now check out the making of Intrinsic below…

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We just wrapped Do Not Disturb two days ago and while on a major come-down and tearing apart our set, I received a few stills from our grand finale taken by photographer Brendan Holmes. Our final two films, Intrinsic by Jon Mann-Krieger and Death Takes a Holiday Inn by Brandon Nicholas both use the same cast in two very different stories that interlace with one another. Both directors had one day to shoot their film and another cross over day in which they shared the set. It was probably one of the most difficult ways of doing things but somehow it managed to work!

Below are photos of our two directors along with cast members Jason Alan Smith, Diva Zappa, Troy Garity and myself…

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