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Happy speaking!! Let’s do this!
(This is the last LOLcat picture, I swear, but my sisters think the LOL cats are funny, and I love my sisters, so… please humor me!)
We need your stories – post them here!
Long enough blog post title for ya’? At any rate, we had a fantastic interview with Terry Mcgraw of McGraw-Hill publishing. Yeah, he’s a pretty big deal, and a huge fan of Toastmasters. If you work for his company, and you finish the first ten speeches of the Toastmasters program, you receive a thousand dollars. Good stuff. Here he is today breaking news about the Apple “tablet”.
Does anyone have a brief story about public speaking? We’re looking for some input!!
Great filmmaker. Brilliant. Genius. But not the best public speaker. Remember his Titanic speech? This is probably worse, right?
Loading ...The documentary film about the fear of public speaking and the Toastmasters World Championships of Public Speaking has a new poll up. Vote!! Just a click. (We’re trying to have as much fun as possible while waiting on our festival submissions and final cut to be locked). Leave a comment! Tell a story about a bad public speaking moment!! Bad wedding toasts!! Anything!
…our film will be finished and seen by the world. Suffice to say, this is pretty darned exciting. It’s been such a tough slog – delays with financing, long editing days and nights, re-shoots, endless therapy sessions (haha), and every other etcetera you can possibly imagine has been part of this process of cutting over 400 hours of footage (it’s still mind boggling) to 95 minutes. There’s just been soooooo much ground to cover.
Tonight, we see a long awaited new cut of the film, beginning to end. Chris Leong was all over it over the holiday season. After tonight, we’ll be seeing the finish line, even after we give him our notes to work on. We’ve had all sorts of new ideas to solve some narrative problems over the break, so we may be bringing those to the editing room. I’m sure Chris’ Jack Russell Terrier, Bolt, will have some editorial suggestions as well.
We’ll keep you posted on our progress tomorrow – fingers crossed. But it’s thrilling that the world’s only documentary film about the fear of public speaking and the World Championships of Public Speaking will finally arrive in 2010.
Either way, we sure hope we’re feeling this, just a little tiny bit, as we talk to audiences after screenings of the film.
One of the great thrills of this project, and of creating this site, has been getting attention from speakers and Toastmasters from all over the world. Speakers and fans from over 30 countries have visited our site. We think that’s cool. The fear of public speaking is a universal human fear, after all, so it does make sense. Toastmasters is also in over 100 countries, so we’re still playing catch up.
On Saturday, however, we received a visit from Ulan Bator, Mongolia. One speaker in Ulan Bator found out about SpeakEasy. It’s not like it’s Chicago, or even Peoria. It’s ….Ulan Bator, Mongolia.
Yes!!! We’re coming your way Mongolia!!! Let’s do a screening!!!
Brian is already working on his moves. In this scenario he pops his leg off and calls for peace.
We’ve put up some pictures in the… wait for it… wait for it… “PICTURES” part of speakeasythemovie.com. Joshua Pickering has been our still photographer and overall moral guiding voice for the filmmakers throughout the life of the film- talking us down from anxiety attacks and enabling sugar binges and giving Brian neck massages while whispering soothing words of comfort in his ear. OK, maybe just the still photographer part. Yet we think he captures some fantastic images and we’re really proud he’s been a part of this. Awesome pictures, even better dude. Much respect, Brotha Pickering.
Enjoy!
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There you go. A little sunshine. A little of the ol’ 8 hours sleep thing. Vegetables. Hydration. Catching up on TV shows. Watching a movie that isn’t your own. Reading a magazine. Some exercise. A nap for god’s sake. The joys of a 3 day weekend spent living a semi-normal life feels really, really, really really really good. No more complaining from here.
And back to the edit – still sorting through the notes from the test screening and trying to apply them to the film. One problem we’re running into: we have 415 hours of great footage. I would say almost 95% of it is completely viable and usable for this film. That’s…. uh… a lot to sort through. And we have essentially 90 minutes to use in the feature version, or as we’ve described it to certain people, “the movie theater version”. The biggest worry we’re faced with is basically stuffing a mansion’s worth of material into a closet. It’s a nice problem – in a way – to have.
Because the boxed set is going to be sick.
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