Barton Police Star Justin Herman and Director Stephen Wolfe
Imagine, if you will, seven people packed into 700 square feet of space. One works in the kitchen to make endless amounts of food, another designs DVD cover art on a laptop, another is composing music using Propellerhead Reason 4, another is doing audio clean up using Adobe Audition 3, another takes pictures of the rest working, another edits the 5th episode of Barton Police using Adobe Premiere Pro, and the entire time Director Stephen Wolfe is walking back and forth, seeing progress on multiple different fronts. This was the picture that you could create this past Friday, February 12th, inside what had become an improvised post production studio office.
While it might sound like a great idea, the entire team did not really get to enjoy the fruits of their efforts so much as they had to enjoy the burden of solving all of their technical problems that had resulted from unknown causes. Audio settings on the computer were going out for editing music, a motherboard fails and they have to go to the electronics store to buy a new one, software crashes over and over again, system restarts solve bizarre glitches that continuously pop up throughout the day.
“It was just insane, I’ve never seen so many people gathered together for the purposes of Barton in one room before in a context outside of actual filming and production,” Scott Lee remarks on the experience.
Barton Police Star/Artist Chester Smith and Musician Chris Worrell
All in all, it quickly became apparent as things were coming close to being pieced together in finality why it has taken so long for the next episodes to be released to the most eager of Barton Police fans; episode 5 currently rests at over an hour in total running time in its rough cut form and episode 6 has had more than an entire album worth of music created for it. Producer Scott Lee performed his usual task of going through the entire show and began to cut out entire sections of polished video which will later be included both on the Barton Police DVD and offered exclusively to Barton Ct. Members.
Justin Herman and Chester Smith were scheduled to film but filming had to be canceled due to Justin Herman being ill. Justin Herman was able to attend for much of the day and attempted, without success, to capture some making-of footage he had filmed on his consumer-grade HD camera. In addition to acting, J Herm has also been working on perfecting new skills, such as editing in post production.
“I didn’t even get to finish my nap,” Chester complains of Justin having to go home and cancel filming. Not only was Chester the only person who was really without constant tasks to perform during the day but he was also constantly chewed out by Scott Lee for tripping over the same cable multiple times.
Though the majority of the day consisted of numerous technical problems and very little real progress due to lots of troubleshooting some actual elements were added into the episodes. Episode 5 had several different pieces of music added into some of its previously silent scenes, excess scenes began to be cut out, audio clean up on dialogue was done, and new music was created for episode 6.
This next Friday, February 19th, the team will be sitting down to focus all of its energies on Episode 5 to meet their newly formed release date of February 26th, 2010, only two weeks away. Episode 6 is also planned for release fairly shortly afterward with as little as 3 weeks after Episode 5 release or as much as 8 weeks after. The cast members have been aching for faster episode releases even as new fans only slowly roll in to catch the beginnings of the series at Episode 1. A brand new, lengthy promotional trailer is also in the works to boost viewership across the board for all episodes.
“One of the biggest problems we face right now, in addition to just completing the project, is that fans are not able to really catch a good glimpse ahead of what there is to look forward to in the show. So we’re wanting to kind of do an around-the-road approach to create a promotional video that will show off the entire series all at once - even content that we haven’t polished and released yet so that fans will say ‘oh I like that! I’d better watch until I get to see that part because that part looks interesting!’” Scott Lee explains Barton Ct. Productions’ marketing approach to getting viewers for the show.
Projections for the future of the show’s viewership currently extend into an estimated 30,000 new viewers for 2010, even though over 70,000 of the residents living in Houston, Texas will probably have heard of the show at some point in time during the year. The promotion plan is currently exclusively internet-based and low cost, using primarily social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook. Barton Ct. Productions Inc. plans to also release higher quality formats of the show later in 2010 and censored versions, the best content of which will be available to those who join the Barton Ct. Membership service. Eventually, Barton Ct. will also consider advertising the show other places, possibly even through local and national television commercials.
Stay tuned for the release of Episode 5 - Internal Affairs and Episode 6!
