Marriage Matters and Basic Rights Oregon

I recently completed a project with Basic Rights Oregon for their Marriage Matters campaign. Here is an excerpt from the site about their project:

Does marriage matter to you too? Please join me in signing the Freedom to Marry Pledge!

Marriage is the ultimate expression of commitment and responsibility to the person you love. It says “we’re family” in a way that no other word can – and there are many ways that only marriage can allow you protect and care for the people you love.

By signing this pledge, I am joining the thousands of Oregonians who support extending civil marriage to committed gay and lesbian couples.

I pledge to talk with friends and family about why marriage matters to all of us.

I am proud to have helped with the campaign, and I wanted to include the clips that I made for them. I hope they mean something significant to you as well, and you will be willing to sign the Freedom to Marry Pledge.

My life has meaning and completeness to it!

What, you ask. Because a movie is about to come out…a documentary about the greatest, most influential band of all time. They are the 3 most selling act of all time behind The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. They span 4 decades now. They are RUSH…my favoritest band in the world. And the documentary movie of the band comes out summer 2010. I think I just shed a tear.

The official trailer for “Rush: Beyond The Lighted Stage”, the long-awaited RUSH documentary produced by Scot McFadyen and Sam Dunn of Toronto, Ontario, Canada’s Banger Films Inc., can be viewed when you hit the link.
“Rush: Beyond The Lighted Stage” will make its television debut on June 26 on VH1 and VH1 Classic.

A poster for “Rush: Beyond The Lighted Stage” can be viewed below. The film will receive its Canadian premiere at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival, which runs from April 29 to May 9 in Toronto, Ontario.

The film will be shown on the following dates/times:

* Thursday, April 29 at 9:30 p.m. at the Winter Garden Theatre
* Friday, April 30 at 4:00 p.m. at the Isabel Bader Theatre

The Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival is North America’s largest documentary film festival, conference and market, held annually in Toronto.

“Rush: Beyond The Lighted Stage” will receive a red-carpet premier tonight (saturday, April 24) at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City. All three members of RUSH — singer/bassist Geddy Lee, guitarist Alex Lifeson and drummer Neil Peart — will be on hand for the event.

For more information, go to this location.

Dunn and McFadyen were interviewed last year by Classic Rock magazine’s Jerry Ewing about the first-ever feature film documentary on Geddy Lee, Alex Lifeson and Neil Peart.

“Geddy had been in [Dunn and McFadyen's previous documentary] ‘Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey’ and we were thinking about other bands we could work with,” explained McFadyen. “We felt that RUSH had always been overlooked by the critics so we met them on tour and they liked what we said. We started working on it, then IRON MAIDEN came about so we took a break to do that and raised the financing for the RUSH film. We’ve started on it now and done a load of interviews so now we’re editing with a load of archival footage.”

“We’ve been lucky. Not only have we had access to [RUSH management] SRO’s archives but also Geddy, Alex and Neil’s own personal archives,” enthuses director Dunn. “I was just at Geddy’s house this week. Going through his personal collection of memorabilia. I dug up some gems I don’t think RUSH fans have ever seen so we’re hoping to offer something new.”

As RUSH fans themselves, Dunn admitted this made him feel like a kid let loose in a candy store.

“Well, Geddy’s definitely the premier band archivist,” Dunn said. “He has a massive collection of photographs and clippings. We even got our hands on Neil’s handwritten lyric sheets from back when they were making ‘Fly By Night’, ’2112′ and ‘A Farewell To Kings’, and I don’t think they’ve ever been seen before.”

Holy cow, where does the time go?

I can’t believe I haven’t posted in so long. I need to catch things up on here and be more diligent about being on my blog. That is the whole reason to have one, right…to tell you all what is going on with me?

OK, let me sum up:

First off, we have completed The Last Stand season one. Or series one, as I have been calling it. We completed the viewing of The Last Stand Episode 5: Best Intentions to what has continued to be great reviews. Our viewership has continued to increase, and we seem to have fans staying with us! That makes me very happy. We also made t-shirts available for sale to help get the word out and help with our production costs. Feel free to come on over and check them out!

We have had a lot of people help us out with getting The Last Stand out there, and I would like to take this opportunity to thank all of them and talk about their role with us. First off, we were contacted by Earth’s Mightiest Fansite about creating a fan page for The Last Stand and keep a constant news and video update alive. Ed, with Earth’s Mightiest, talked to us about creating a home away from home for our web series, and Earth’s Mightiest has certainly been that. We launched our episodes about once a week over there, and every time we did, we always got a spike in views. Not just that, they also featured us on their front page header. It was a really great deal for us and I really want to thank Ed of Earth’s Mightiest for all of that. Ed also created a web series, Dark Commandos, that you can all check out online.

We have had a whole bunch of great zombie web sites that have helped us out as well. I hope I get them all listed here! So thanks to all of these folks:

Zombie Command
Buy Zombie
Brains Brains Brains
All Things Zombie
Geek Girls Network
Hot Zombie Action
Lost Zombies
My Zombie Pinup
The Inevitable Zombie Apocalypse
The Local Zombie
The Zombie Armory
The Zombie Escape Plan
The Zombie Nation
Webseries2Watch by Danger Shoes
Zombie Army Productions
Zombie Pinups
Zombies Defined

All these people posted and embedded our episodes, and helped to push our viewership up. Thanks so much!

Also, we can’t forget RenderYard. They have had a contract with us for a couple of months now, and they continue to grow and gain viewers, helping us to do the same. Not only has Mark over at RenderYard been someone that believes in our project and helping us to promote to new markets, he has also gotten us a new site that will be promoting us with RenderYard. DailyMotion is considered the largest source of viewer content in the world. Even more than YouTube, believe it or not. Starting in the middle of May, we are the featured series for DailyMotion. Not just that, they are having our series dubbed into French, so The Last Stand will now be multi-lingual! Pretty damn cool if I do say so myself.

None of this would have been possible without all the people that helped in front of and behind the camera. Thanks to you all.

More info to come on other things not zombie!