Casting Call
Diggin' A Hole is a short dark comedy. A person is digging a hole that looks suspiciously like a shallow grave in the middle of nowhere. This sparks a conversation with a passerby.
We require three actors. Gender and age are variable for all three roles.
Auditions are being held at Ed Video (40 Baker St. in Guelph) on Saturday, September 4th between 1 and 4 PM.
1. Matter of fact, short without being abrasive, and sarcastic. Believable as someone who could reasonably dig a waist deep grave by themselves.
2. Happy but not all together there. Takes what people say at face value and doesn't spend a whole lot of time thinking before responding.
3. Laid back, calm, and curious. Smaller role.
Shooting is scheduled to take place the weekend of September 18th and 19th. All cast and crew are under a no-pay/deferred contract.
The roles require travel as the shooting location is in Walkerton. This is an outdoor shoot in the woods.
for more information contact: director@heavyliftingindustries.com
Ramping Up To Film Again
Diggin' A Hole is quickly progressing. I went to check out our available filming location. Since we're filming outdoors and I needed to be able to dig at least one shallow grave I was a bit limited in where to film. Luckily, a family connection came through and I've got a location.
The downsides are location and layout. It's in Walkerton, an hour and a half drive north from Kitchener. It's also pretty heavily grown brush. It's still fairly young, a farm reclaimed by nature, but it's definitely grown thick enough.
Originally I had intended this to be shot in something a bit more akin to a field in a public park. Perhaps with a nearby line of trees for some texture and depth. I'm actually getting the reverse in this scenario, lots and lots of trees with a small clearing. This still works quite well though.
It buggers up the sun a little for me. We'll be shooting with direct light and there are some potential issues with shadows but the crew should be masked by the surrounding tree shadows while the actors will be out in the sun.
In either case it's a good example of remaining flexible with your expectations. As much as I envisioned it with a field this location works nicely despite not being what I would have initially considered. We'll get some nice colours and textures out of the trees as we'll be getting in to the season for it start changing.
Next challenge, getting a cast and crew together that's willing to travel and hour and a half north and be ready to shoot in less than three weeks. Yup. Three weeks. I'm looking at the weekend of the 18th and 19th to film. Not leaving a whole lot of time to get ready.
I'm still finalizing the audition time and space. Looking like it'll be this weekend. I'll update when I have it.
Slow busy week
Piecing together Cassie's dialogue from the ADR work we did last week has been going exceedingly well. I'm really happy with the work she did for me and it's syncing up really nicely.
I'm looking to bring Sue in to do her ADR work (likely) next week. The script for The New Face of Security was lopsided. All the emotion was written for Cassie's character while the dialogue was squarely on Sue. Depending on how smoothly the process goes it could take us three hours or it could take us six. All for a six minute short.
I'm heading an hour and a half north tomorrow to see about my location for Diggin' A Hole. I'd prefer not to have to travel so far, since it will make getting a cast and crew more difficult, but I think this is going to be perfect for my needs. The perfect location trumps the benefits of being local.
Heading out to Guelph on Wednesday for the first night of Ed Video's Cinematics program. I've offered to come out and help where I can over the next three months. I'm hoping to get to at least three nights. Then I'm back in Guelph the weekend after to help Ed Mochrie, who worked as a PA on New Face, with his shoot. He needs a second sound man and I like any excuse to get some miles on my rig.
Diggin’ A Hole
Out next project is lining up. Called Diggin' A Hole, it's a dark comedy slated for around four minutes complete run time. A woman out for a walk crosses paths with a man digging a large hole in the middle of a field. She inquires to his motivations and receives very little useful information in return.
We're still really heavily in preproduction on this with a lot to be sorted out yet, not the least of which being cast and crew. The hardest part, an appropriate location, has been secured. It's looking like, if the pieces fall right, we could be filming as soon as a month from now.
Rough Cut Complete
There are a few things I know about myself as a filmmaker with stunning clarity. First, I'm much better with words on paper than I am with images on screen. The second, in direct relation, I will hate all my footage when I see it. I haven't shot a lot but I have never been satisfied with my footage. Ever. There's always a momentary panic as I sift through shots that I simply don't have enough to cut together. Even if I do it's going to be terrible.
I'm not alone in this. I've spoken to other filmmakers that feel the same. They need separation from the project before they can come back and look at it again. Footage gets better over time. Another issue is the size of the image I'm looking at as well. I remember watching a close to final cut of Plan Z and absolutely hating it. For giggles I watched it again on a 32" LCD TV. I quickly went from hating it to being very hopeful that I hadn't completely fucked it up.
With The New Face of Security I need to suppress the instinct to give it time to breath. The first reason being that I really need to have some kind of cut ready before September to show my cast and crew. The second is that I really need to get over it. The longer I let a project sit, and this one has sat long enough, the longer I have to wait before my next project. So I dove right in.
I started my first cuts this afternoon and finished a (very) rough cut this evening. It's a little rough and tumble at the moment but the basic structure is there. I'm fairly confident not all of the shots or takes that I'm using will survive further edits and there are segments that I have to tighten up but it's a good first start.
Some segments have already been cropped out. There were a couple lines of dialogue that I simply didn't have a good shot to use. Since they weren't absolutely vital I chopped them. Of course, being the diligent writer I am, I referenced the lines later on. With the context gone the repetition no longer made sense and needed to be chopped as well. All together? Probably about a dozen seconds trimmed out. The film will survive the loss.
I grabbed a couple of screenshots directly from the footage. The ones that are posted here are straight from the source. I didn't bother doing any colour correction or clean up at all. There will be more than enough of that to do once I get a picture lock cut together. Then the fun of ADR, foley, colour correction, soundtrack composition, and clean up can start.
It promises to be a fun time.
Post Mortem with Dave Z
Another The New Face of Security crew clip with boom operator Dave Zuch. Yes, getting the boom mic in to the right position is commonly referred to as, "jamming the mechanical penis in to someone's face," on our sets.
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That's my little girl chirping at the beginning of the clip.
Post Mortem with Joe
I've been pulling aside some of the crew of The New Face of Security and chatting with them about filming now that we've wrapped. I'm talking with our camera operator and DP, Joe Szilvagyi, here.
The noise in the background is the epic Bomberman series in progress in the basement below us.
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New Face Rehearsals
Cast and critical crew have been confirmed. We are very much rolling on toward actually shooting something again.
Last week our new camera operator / DP came by as we did some lighting and shot tests with the new lights on the new set. We have a basic lighting setup that looks pretty solid and is going to give us really good results with the new camera we'll be using. It's a flexible set up with nice contrast.
We have a rehearsal scheduled for next Tuesday. I have no doubt they're going to be fantastic for me.
With any luck we should have this shot in the next three weeks.
On a side note, I've been playing with Blender a lot lately. It's a 3D modeling/animation/game development program that is completely cross platform and free. I've been noodling with it to get my head around basic modeling and animation. While some silly thing in the back of my brain says, 'Wouldn't it be awesome to do an animation CG short?' the rest of my brain and is being a bit more pragmatic.
I have a really hard time doing storyboards. It's not that I can't see the shots that I want it's that I can't draw well enough to get the perspective and proportion I'm looking for and eeking out what I can takes forever. Modeling, on the other hand, I'm alright with. It's a whole lot easier to push vertices around to get an approximate equivalent to what I want, stage a scene, and then put a camera in to place.
Currently my modeling skills are still very raw. It takes me quite a bit to get anything worthwhile done. I watched a tutorial of someone model and rig an entire character in an hour. I've been working on a basic human character for almost a week now and there's still lots to do before I get to rigging. But that's okay. Once I have a library I can start pulling existing resources in to new storyboard projects.
I think it'll work out to be a very nice storyboarding tool once I suck a whole lot less.
New Face Set
The set design has been essentially completed for The New Face of Security reshoot. There is some paint that needs to dry and some details that need to be looked after but it is done. My new DP/camera operator wants to come in and do some lighting and equipment tests before we get to shooting. When we get together to do that I'll make sure I get some stills of the new design.
It's a much better design than the last time around. We had too much white and it was, and looked, slapped together hastily to get it together. This time it's slightly warmer and looks a bit more refined.
Hopefully we'll get to shooting in the next few weeks.
New Actor and Camera Operator
It's been a productive week or so in The New Face of Security land. We've secured a new DP/camera operator for the reshoot, who comes with 20+ years of film and photography experience, and a replacement actor for Nicole, who is currently in Saudi Arabia for at least several more months.
Pieces are falling in to place and we're getting much closer to being able to shoot. So camera and lighting tests, a rehearsal or two, and we're off.