Walk to Defeat ALS - Join Fiver's Team!

We're back from a brief hiatus! And we've been scheming in our absence to get people involved with ALS Advocacy in our own particular... Um...

"Idiom, sir?"

Yes, Idiom! Thank you. So here is the deal:



Fiver and I have started a team for the annual Walk to Defeat ALS, sponsored by the ALS Association of Georgia. This is the big fundraiser for ALS, since we don't have a telethon, and Mel wants to put our own Geeky spin on the event:

It's common to have people dress up for the walk, but I don't think they've been inundated with full-on geek cosplayers yet! Imagine if we had whole casts of movies and shows marching ?



The walk is Saturday, November 8th in Centennial Park in downtown Atlanta. Registration opens at 8:30 AM, and the Walk starts at 10 AM. The walk isn't long, only 5k, which most can complete in an hour. Heck, the DragonCon Parade is probably more of an effort than this!

Melissa and I would really appreciate people turning out for this event. The ALS Association has been a lifesaver in these past months. They provide counseling and equipment loaning for families with ALS. They have provided Mel with a roller-walker, a stair-chair and wheelchair, without which she would have been shut in and practically stranded upstairs in the house. The people are so very nice and helpful, and they seriously need your help. Just a few people are staffed for the whole state of Georgia, and they have to drive this equipment from their Atlanta headquarters to ALS patients from Savannah to the border of Alabama-stan, and you can imagine what that costs in gas these days.

So please consider joining us in the walk, or donating to sponsor Melissa. If you know anything about us, you can bet there will be lots of fun hanging out afterwards, so it won't be just a 1-hour deal.

Join Fiver's Team and Walk with us! (Select "Fiver's Team" from the drop-down menu on the page and register)

OR:
Make a donation to Sponsor Melissa in her walk. (And remember: Talk to the HR Department at your workplaces! They often will match your donations!)

Thanks to everybody that has helped so far, and we'll have more details on the walk later.

Contact with Production

Melissa and I have been going back and forth on how to break the news, but we're just going to cut to the chase.

A Production representative has contacted us, saying "We'll be in touch when our plans for shooting are more concrete, and do our very best to assist Melissa."

To quote someone famous: "There is no emoticon for what I am feeling." Apparently your letters of support and our story have really affected them.

We did it, folks. We really did it. There is no variation on "Thank You" that would begin to express the gratitude that I owe all of you. No words can do it justice. This is something incredible that you all have helped me accomplish, that I could never hope to accomplish on my own. Melissa is just over the moon about the whole thing, it still seems like a dream.

Want to know the funny part? The first thing the guy does is apologize that they weren't in contact sooner.

SOONER? This thing has only been live for three months! This was still Phase 2 of the Project (getting a metric buttload of signatures). I figured that once we had a huge number (5000 was my ballpark figure), we would launch Phase 3 - Direct contact. By then our geek social network would likely have made contact with someone inside, who could put the petition in the right hands. And with 5000 signatures it would be taken seriously. And I had planned a timeframe of collecting this many signatures through this fall. I was considering reserving a Fan Table at DragonCon as one last push.

I expected this to take six months to lay the GROUNDWORK, and he is apologizing for waiting three months to contact us!

Apparently, I had wildly under-estimated the power of Geek Social Networking. 4200 signatures in Three Months and enough letters and emails written to convince Wingnut Films to make this a reality. The outpouring of concern is just amazing.

But this is not the end of the story. It is a beginning. PROJECT FIVER will continue. We now are on the road to the goal, and the journey has yet to be written. Filming will not begin until sometime next year. Our mission is the same: To have Melissa be a Hobbit extra in the film. We now have the company's support, but it will still be a hard road to get her there in a year. We don't know what kind of shape Melissa will be in by the time Filming starts. It will be a fight, but we will be fighting together.

Project Fiver will continue. This site will change over the next month. The Petition will be closed, and a Guestbook will be created for people to check in and send well-wishes and greetings to her. Our son, Matthew, will have this, to know how his mother lived. The Blog will continue, and we will try to use the attention we have garnered here to promote ALS Awareness and support for the ALS Association of Georgia, who has been so very good to us in our time of need.

So thank you from me, from Melissa and from our family. You have accomplished something truly incredible. Now it is our turn to rise to the challenge of it.

Stay tuned.

Gone for a weekend - 3800

Melissa and I celebrated our 10th Anniversary this weekend, so we weren't online a great deal. But when we took a look at the site, we were absolutely floored. 3800 signatures!! Words fail me, this is simply amazing. It took us three weeks to get the initial 844 signatures before we went public, and that was using up most of our friends and direct connections. Now the number of signatures jumped 600 in a WEEKEND. Thank you guys, you have no idea how happy you've just made Melissa.

Special thanks go to the incomparable PhotoGnome, The Movie Blog.com, and TheOneRing.com for all their support!

ALS Benefit in Atlanta

For those of you in the Metro ATL area, there is an Art Institute Culinary School dinner to benefit the ALS Associataion of Georgia.
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When: May 10th, 2008. Silent auction begins at 6 pm, dinner service begins at 7 pm

Where: Creations Dining Room, 5th floor Art Institute of Atlanta

How: Reservations are required so please contact Creations at 770.689.4851 or 1.800.275.4242 ext. 4851 or e-mail aiacreations@aii.edu.

What: Half the proceeds from the dinner and all of the donations and proceeds from the silent auction go to benefit The ALS Association of Georgia. Our goal to raise for this cause is $6500 so if people cannot come to the dinner, we will gladly accept donations.
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I can vouch that this is an excellent culinary school, and their dinners are famously good. If you're up for a great evening for a good cause, check it out.

Del Toro!

Good news for HOBBIT fans! Del Toro formally confirmed his directorship of THE HOBBIT, and confirmed that Andy Serkis (Gollum) and Sir Ian McKellan (Gandalf) were on-board. (An extensive conversation with GDT on TheOneRing.Net) This really gets the ball rolling for pre-production, and as far as Project Fiver is concerned, gives us new hope and a definite direction. For those of you writing letters with us, you can now send them to Guillermo Del Toro.

Signatures stand at 3167 now, not bad at all! I am collaborating with a few friends on a YouTube video introduction to the project, and hope to reach a wider audience that way. We don't have a lot of time in the evenings, but it should be done by mid-May.

And on a personal note, I'd just like to geek out for a moment at a recent P5 supporter: Richard Pini. My brother and I didn't agree on much as kids, but we both loved the ELFQUEST comic that Richard and his wife Wendy Pini created. We'd bug the comic shop guys so much to get the most recent issue in stock, we even bought a cassette tape of some fan-penned Elfquest songs (which I now know as "Filk"). My brother even wanted to get plastic surgery to remove his pinky and extend his ears so he'd look like the characters! FiverFriend Maddy also loves these comics, and emailed Richard to sign the petition. Not only did he sign, but he added a link to Project Fiver on ElfQuest.com! Thanks Richard!

And if any of you haven't read the ElfQuest comics, do yourself a favor and pick them up or Read them online . The original saga is just 20 issues, and is still one of the best comic narratives that I have ever read.

Mrs. 3000!

Woot! We've just passed the 3000 signature mark! Thanks to everyone who is passing this on, and all of you who sign it and check back on the progress. I'm getting lots of great comments on the petition.

While we are writing letters to Peter Jackson and other stars of the Lord of the Rings films, our hopes for PROJECT FIVER's success lie in the "Six Degrees" connections of people that sign it: Someone might have a daughter who's married to a Production Assistant to a director, or see the same therapist as a Key Grip for WETA, and pass this along to them. This "Six Degrees" effect has already resulted in many friends getting back in touch with us that we've lost over the years, and we're thankful for that as well, it's just icing on the cake.

I want to take a moment to thank someone personally. My friend Jay and I go back to our years as "Gem Clear Warriors" at Lipscomb Hall at the University of Georgia. He's always been a talented artist, and has recently turned to making ceramic buildings in miniature. Sometimes we use them as set pieces for gaming, but all of them are incredibly detailed. He made this Hobbit "Treasure House" for Melissa in a single day. Isn't the work on this incredible?



It's just the perfect size to keep Melissa's "One Ring" and Fellowship Brooch in. (Back in 2004, a Fellowship of Nine pooled our money to get her the Jens Hansen ring from the same mold as the ones they used in the films.)

So thank you for your support and signatures. And keep them coming!

Words of Support

Some people have written expressing regret that they cannot financially support Project Fiver. While we appreciate the sentiment, that is not what this is about.

Money is not necessary for this Project to succeed, and that was my intention from the start. People can feel for your causes, (Poverty, injustice, hunger, what have you) but nearly all will fall short of supporting monetarily. People have their own financial issues, and you never know if the organization that you pay is trustworthy. So I set out this project without a goal that required money to show success, just people's support. Granting this role in the film will cost the studio nothing more than any other extra's wage, and no money is required to sign the petition. No money in, no money out, which makes this Project run on 100% goodwill and requires only 30 seconds of free time on the internet, which nearly everyone has. So the net "Profit" we see from Project Fiver is the well-wishes and support from people, both known and unknown to her.

And with 2650 signature so far, these "Profits" are soaring! Thank all of you for your support, and for spreading the word.