Anyway. 2014 is going well and I wanted to tell you about what I have going on.
"Brian" - my next feature film as director, fell into my lap about 6 months ago or so. One of my wonderful actors from my first feature film "Willa" referred a friend to me - and that was David Bold, the writer of Brian. I read the synopsis of several of his screenplays but fell immediately in love with the script. As with Willa, there was no doubt in my mind that this had to become a film so I started the machinery. Pretty quickly the film was mostly cast, we had our first reading and a bunch of meetings and right now we are in very active pre-production, collaborating with JAJ Productions on finding crew, funding, locations and everything else we need. Planned shooting is July this year so it feels like it's right around the corner. And I am very excited to get started.
Late last year I co-produced a short film, "Talk To Her", shot in Chinese. A film dealing with difficult choices and a man split between what his heart wants and what traditions dictate. Around the same time another short film "A Surprise" was shot. This one I wrote and hired two brilliant people to shoot it, Rob Margolies as director and Tony Xie as Director of photography. Both films are in the last stages of editing and should be ready in a matter of weeks. I am excited to tell you more about those as well.
Then something else happened. I decided to make a documentary about drag queens. Why you ask? Like many others I have followed the RuPaul's Drag Race show and from watching that show I felt the need to take a deeper and more profound look into their world. So this I quickly put on track as well and the plan at the moment, is to follow some of the most popular drag queens around on their Drag Race tour of the US as well as some relatively new performers in New York City. This I am also very excited to do and at the moment we are seeking funding for that project as well.
So 2014 is off to a wonderful start. I am doing what I was hoping to do when I started Alpha Tree Productions in 2011 - creating and employing! And it's great. My hope is that we will send out more and more excellent productions and that I will get the chance to work with and for a whole bunch of talented people. Keep posted on our progress and maybe I will get to work with you too.
Christopher Birk
www.alphatreeproductions.com
