The Mailman began production on September 6th, 2001. This movie was filmed on what I like to call a 'part-time' shooting schedule. All of the people involved were volunteering their time, both the cast and the crew, so we would schedule shooting days around everyone's availability. The movie was shot primarily with the Canon XL1, with some additional shots captured with the Canon GL1. We were able to get three shooting days in the can when September 11th happened. The director (Tony Mark) and the writer (Brian Mazo) had both lived and attended college in New York, so needless to say everyone was a bit distracted. We managed to get two more days of shooting in on the 17th and 19th of September. Due to complications with everyone's schedules, we didn't get our next shooting day in until October 9th. We managed to get fourteen days of shooting in by November 14th, 2001 and then I was hired to Line Produce Married People, Single Sex Parts 3, 4 & 5. Because of this we didn't get our next day of shooting in until March 8th of 2002. We wrapped up production on March 10th, having shot a total of sixteen days. Little did we know it would take us another year and a half to finally finish the post-production.

This movie has shared editing credits. Todd Wade did the first two passes at the edit, and then Tony Mark did a couple of passes. It became apparent at this point that the film was taking too long to get moving and draw in the audience, so we decided to cut eight of the first twenty minutes out of the film. We deleted a lot of the expository scenes between the three kids and introduced The Mailman as soon as we could. It seemed to do the trick.

Art Wood was hired to do post sound mixing, ADR and foley in September of 1993. Again, due to our budget this was done on a part time basis. We had to completely re-record the dialogue (ADR) for the hot tub scene and the scene at the beach. ADR is a lot easier and cheaper than it used to be due to the digital world, but it is still best to get clean dialogue on set. When shooting at the beach, however, it's almost impossible to get clean dialogue because of the surf. Knowing this actually helped us 'steal' this scene. It was shot right on Venice Beach. We merely set up the beach umbrella which worked out really good for an overhead silk and shot the scene. It took about three hours and because we used the GL1 no one bothered to ask us what we were doing.

Art wrapped the sound mix on May 5th, 2004. We were finally ready to send out DVD's and artwork to distributors. This is a tricky area for beginning filmmakers. You can't make many demands because you have no track record AND being brand new to the field you really have no idea who is going to be honest with you and what they do with you film and who isn't. Fortunately, the writer and director had attended film school with someone who worked for the AFMA. This organization (The American Film Marketer's Association) is kind of the industry watchdog for distributors. We were able to find out who to avoid and who would treat us well. We were about to sign distribution deals with two different companies, one for international distribution and one for domestic when Erin Starr came in contact with Tony Ginnane at IFM Worldwide. They wanted the movie and were willing to give us an advance against sales, which nobody else was willing to do. IFM then went and sold The Mailman to numerous territories. Silver Nitrate Pictures bought the American DVD rights in September of 2004 and then we waited, and waited, and waited. Now, finally, The Mailman will be released on DVD on February 20th of 2006, five and a half years after principal photography began.

The final budget for this movie was somewhere around $33,000.