Down to the Wire

For those of you who have been there since the start of my blog, you remember me talking about directing my latest short film. Well, we're in the last big push of post-production this week. We're having a test screening, which is basically the unofficial premiere since we really won't be changing much afterward, this Thursday night. We were planning on finishing it this past weekend but things always take longer than planned -- now we're pushing to have it done late Wednesday night. Not much extra time to squeeze there. Zoinks!

One thing I'm realizing about myself as a director -- I'm a producer's nightmare. I'm one of those guys who is constantly saying, "Oooh! This'd be cool! Let's try this!" This is great for the creative process but it pinches the pocketbooks. I'm lucky that my editor is really excited about the project because he'd have thrown me out the door weeks ago. After all of the amazingly hard work he's done just helping get the picture cut together, he's done the following with me to make this the best it can be:
-- Re-record and loop one of our actor's dialogue because of some audio issues. Let me tell you, this is a very difficult process. Try this to see what it's like -- videotape yourself then play it back over and over again and try to say the lines different ways with different emotions, but make sure it fits within how you moved your lips in the video clip. It's insane. I've never been through the process before, but watching our poor actor struggle with one particular line for a good half hour, I realized it's so much easier to get it right on the set. Unfortunately, there are so many more time constraints on the set. It's really a difficult balance between what is reasonable to do without going into overtime (or in our case, since we weren't paying people, going so far that people would refuse to come back the next day) and what is feasible to rework on set to get the right emotion. It was made even more difficult because our lead actor had some difficulty finding the emotion needed for some particular scenes. But it's done, thanks to my brilliant editor.

-- Going through the film shot by shot to do all of the effects work. In case I haven't mentioned it before, this film was shot in color and we're now dropping all the color so the film is in black and white, but we're keeping certain reds. If you've see Sin City, you have an idea of what we're doing. What this means in the filmmaking world, however, is that we have to go through each frame and rotoscope around all of the reds. Rotoscoping is basically a process of creating a mask for each frame of the film around the reds that we want. This makes those pop out while any other reds -- skin tone, random colors in the curtains, etc. -- turn grayscale. But because of movement w/in the frames, he has to move the mask with every frame. Luckily, he can cheat by drawing key frames every few frames. When he does this, the mask moves between the frames. Anyway, it sounds complicated and it is. And he's spending at least 100 hours -- probably more -- doing this. And it looks fabulous.

-- Remixing and normalizing all of the audio. We locked the picture on Thursday last week (which means we're not making any more changes to the edit). Since then, he and I sat down with an audio expert friend of mine who gave us some great advice. Now, my editor is spending whatever time he isn't doing effects work on remixing the audio. And there are up to 10 tracks sometimes. It's a lot of work.

-- Manually animate the closing text slide of the film to make it look like someone is writing it.

-- Add a magical teardrop that brings a character back to life.

-- Add the moon in one shot.

-- Change the name of the motel on the sign. One of those effects you hope no one actually notices -- it's supposed to look real.

-- My latest creative addition. I listen to a great podcast -- Photoshop TV. They had a really interesting tip about making photos look hand tinted. I've been playing around with it. I noticed that it kind of added a smoothed-over look to certain textures. One of the problems I have w/my film is that the makeup tends to look a bit chunky in the closeup shots (my leads are a clown and a mime). I've been vexed as to how to make it look better. And then I saw the trailer for Ultraviolet. I hear it sucks, but it looks really cool. And they did something to make the characters' skin look really slick and shiny, kinda like vinyl. I knew right away that it's what I wanted. And then I remembered this technique from Photoshop TV. And I tried it with a shot of the film. While it smoothed everything over, it also really crushed the blacks so the blacks lose a lot of detail. Normally, that's a bad thing -- you want detail. But this is a really stylized film. My editor and I played around with some possibilities. Today, we finally came up with something. It's an effect that can be applied to the entire film to give it this look. It'll probably be a good 12 hour render time, but it looks frickin' sweet. I can't wait to see how it looks on the finished project.

So that's what he's been up to. The poor guy has a 2-year old and a wife who's about to pop, and his own video business, but because he loves this project, he blocked out today, tomorrow and Wednesday to get this done. He rocks and this film wouldn't exist without him. So this is my thanks to my editor. Who will never read this, but at least it's out there.

And while I'm thanking people who work hard, my composer -- one of my long-time best friends -- has worked his tookus off as well and has come up with some BRILLIANT pieces of music, my favorite of which has some funky 70s jive going on. It's great.

So it's all coming together, but we're really in the last crunch. If any of you are in the Phoenix area March 23-30th, it'll be playing in the IFP Phoenix Shorts program.

While I've been writing this, I've been listening to a loop of the song "10,000 Miles" by Mary Chapin Carpenter. It's such a beautiful song! If any of you saw the movie Fly Away Home with Jeff Daniels and Anna Paquin, you'll remember it as the song that plays during the opening credits when Anna's mother/Jeff's ex-wife gets in a car wreck and dies, and also when Anna is flying solo toward the nature preserve at the end of the film. It's hauntingly beautiful and I can't stop listening to it.

While I have your ear -- Oscars. Did any of you watch it? What'd you think? I thought Clooney's speech was the best, though it's hard to beat Tom Hanks getting beaten by a violin. And it's also hard to beat 360 Mafia winning for Best Song with "It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp." If you haven't seen Hustle and Flow, rent it. Terence Howard is brilliant and it's strange to actually watch a movie that makes you identify with a pimp.
What were your favorite speeches? Moments?

To close, here' s the transcript (minus the "You're a motherfucker") from 360 Mafia's acceptance speech.

ACCEPTANCE SPEECH - Best Song
Oh, my. Hey, we want to thank Keith Young our choreographer. And the whole Sony Records, Lisa Ellis, our moms, our whole families. Thank you, Jesus. And for giving us a chance, the Academy. We love the Academy. You know what I'm saying? Gil Cates. Everybody. I got plenty of time. Ain't nobody else. I want to thank everybody. Yeah. Donnie Ienner. Once again our families. Ludacris. What's up? Going down. George Clooney, my favorite man, he showed me love when I first met him. We bringing the house. We out of here. Memphis, Tennessee!

The Movie Monkey