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.
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.
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.
Not dead. Just napping.
It's been awhile since anything has been posted and I wanted to take a minute to update as to what's going on.
THE NEW FACE OF SECURITY
I don't know if I posted this. I get the distinct feeling that I did not. We shot the footage for this late last year. Other projects were on my plate to be edited so this got pushed to the side for a few weeks. When I finally got back to the footage I found that we couldn't use it. I'm inclined to blame the equipment we were using.
We were using a Canon XH-A1 with a RedRock micro kit running out to an SD monitor. I was aware there were some focus issues during the start of the first day of shooting but I wasn't aware of how bad the focus was. It appeared to be in focus on the camera. It appeared to be in focus on the SD monitor. Going back over the footage it was definitely not in focus. This wasn't a camera operator issue. At some points three or four different people were verifying that appeared in focus on the camera.
I'm inclined to say equipment. The combination we had likely wasn't configured to work together. The same RedRock kit works just fine with a JVC camera Ed Video has in inventory and we're not the only crew who has faced this issue.
All that said we need to reshoot. With one of our actors in Saudi Arabia for several more months and our original location no longer a viable options we're working around those issues to try and pull together another shoot. It's coming along.
RENAISSANCE UNFAIRE
I'm slowly slugging my way through set design for this. It's a single set but I have a specific idea for how I want it to look so it's taking a bit of time to get everything together. Add the fact that I'm building it all in my spare time so it doesn't get as much attention as it should.
EVERYBODY'S DEAD
I started working on a new one act play earlier this month. A first draft has been completed and it just sitting to rest for a little bit while a couple sets of eyes look it over. It's also a good chance for me to get some distance from it. This way when I come back to edit it's fresher than if I just jumped in to editing right away.
SCRIPT FRENZY
Script Frenzy '10 is coming up. If you haven't heard of Script Frenzy it is a collective self challenge to write a 100 page screenplay in the month of April. I took part in '08 and '09 and jammed out a zombie script each year successfully. I'm considering, should my schedule permit, taking part again this year. If you're in to screenwriting and have some problems with completing a script this is an awesome chance to break that cycle. The point is not a script you can sell but filling the page count with the best content you can in a month.
BUTTERFLYBULLSEYE
I'm pretty sure I've mentioned it before but my personal site is at butterflybullseye.com. I tend to talk in a bit more depth and more informally about what I'm working on there. It also spans far beyond the confined of just heavyliftingindustries projects.
If you've already visited there and subscribed to the RSS feed you may want to pop over and grab the new link for the new feed. I've had to update it switching from blogger over to WordPress.
New Face Post Mortem
It's been over three weeks since we wrapped shooting on The New Face of Security. I figured it might be time to say a few things about shooting.
We were shooting within a large garage that was previously used to service diesel trucks. Needless to say it wasn't the most pleasant smelling place. Before filming I swept the entire garage on three different occasions. Each time I came up with piles of dust.
If you looked toward the ceiling you'd see black covering the length of it. This, of itself, isn't so bad, until you realize it's supposed to be the silver of corrugated metal. Those black fans on the ceiling? Yup, those are supposed to be white. Guess where all that dust I was sweeping up kept coming from?
The real fun was in how cold the place was. It somehow managed to be a good ten degrees colder inside than it was out. I kept expecting the lights to warm the location up but they didn't really perform as much as I was hoping. At one point it was around 12 or 13 degrees Celsius outside. Inside we could see our breath.
Despite the cold, the smell, and the near certainty we were surrounded by carcinogenic dust, the cast and crew were fantastic. The girls helping out with hair and makeup spent the large majority of their time out in the car to keep warm when they weren't needed. Nicole, fighting off a pretty nasty cold, slept in between takes where she could. The heaters came on when we could and having a hot lunch on one of the days helped.
We managed to stick to the schedule fairly well. I booked out two days each at ten hours including our lunch breaks and we really didn't go beyond that. It's nice when the schedule is maintained, though I'm a little shocked with how our last half a day went that we managed to make it through.
Our first day of shooting was as smooth as can be. We moved through shots pretty quickly and got everything that we had planned for, a good two thirds of the footage. I put a lot of time in to planning in advance and the planning paid off. Of course, we left the difficult shots for the second day. The morning on day two went smoothly as well. We moved in to the equipment dependent shots in the afternoon and things started to unravel.
We were largely using rental equipment and some of it was not in it's prime. The tripod that we were using had the arm completely stripped and the head was not nearly as fluid as it should have been. This meant that Amanda, our camera operator, needed to essentially hug the redrock assembly and the tripod to do any tilt or pan movements. Not the greatest way of doing things.
From there we moved on to the tripod dolly. It liked to move in elliptical curves quite well. Straight lines, you ask? Not so much. Which brings us to the crane.
The crane wasn't meant to hold a lot of weight which forced us to do all those shots with the stock lens on the camera, removing the redrock kit. For very basic shots it was fine, especially the simple overheads. Anything that required wider movements was torture.
We had a few audio snags. Chances are we'll be going back and doing ADR for the entire short. Came down to some equipment issues. Truthfully though, if it wasn't for being able to blame the equipment I would blame it on the natural echo in the room. Getting the audio to feel natural across an entire edit would have been murder. Either way we'd be redoing all the audio, regardless of the excuse.
I know it sounds like a rough shoot but it went really well. My cast was awesome, though I fully expected them to be. They'd rehearsed well and they knew their characters. They delivered what I was hoping I'd get out of them. The crew was pretty much on it as well and we had a chance to expose a few new people to a film set. The majority of the problems we encountered were largely technical. Those that we couldn't fix we worked around. It was a good experience and I took away a lot from it.
Editing should be starting on THE NEW FACE OF SECURITY in the next week or so. I'm just finishing out the last few details of PLAN Z and then it's moving forward.
Location Scouting
Spent a bit of time going through our shooting location earlier this evening. There was another possible location, within the same building, but the one we originally scouted is going to be perfect. We have this big, open industrial garage to work in. The floors are all smooth poured concrete so we should be able to get away with some dolly work on a less than ideal handbuilt item that is not entirely dissimilar to a child's wagon.
This weekend is going to be dedicated to getting our set completely built and in place. We'll essentially be able to treat this location like a sound stage for the most part. Being able to get in the weekend before shooting to build is going give us much more time to work with when we actually get in there with a camera.
Nine days until we shoot. Still lots to do in the meantime.
If you're interested in helping out shoot me an email. We can always use an extra hand. director@heavyliftingindustries.com