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.
New Face Editing Continues
Had a wow moment last night while I was continuing working toward a picture lock cut. I have a ways to get yet before that happens, by the way. It was when I stopped and realized the current film length. I was really shooting toward a completed six minute run time. I was kicking around eight or nine pages throughout my drafts and was worried I'd overshoot my target.
Without credits the rough cut I put together last week runs 6:09. With the edits that I still have to make, some general tightening of the shots, and then credits I don't imagine this will end up too far out from that six minute window I was looking for.
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 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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Plan Z
Did I mention PLAN Z is done and public? Well, it is.
Plan Z from David Shute on Vimeo.
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.
Plan Z
I'm back on my feet and at it again. I have been for a bit now but I'm actually making some headway on some things. PLAN Z, for the most part, is fundamentally done. We've had a really great composer working on the soundtrack for it, Steve Lehmann, who provided a high quality version today to drop in to the project.
The music is fantastic. I gave Steve some basic ideas of what I wanted and he pretty much nailed it. PLAN Z is a short comedic zombie piece less than two minutes in length. Frankly, I was a little concerned as to how music was even going to fit in. The piece I was given is so genre typical and serious that it helps to sell the short. It's completely inappropriate in a very awesome way and still makes me laugh every time. I really enjoy how it sits in the short.
When I say fundamentally done that means that I still have a bit of audio layering to do and a little bit of recording. I'm missing a bit of what I'm calling 'zambie mooing', which I hope is pretty obvious what I'm referring to. I've got a couple layers in there already but it's just not quite deep enough yet. I need to record some audio from a couple people to really fill out that sound.
If you were involved in filming and want to record some audio contact me. If you weren't involved in filming and would be okay with an uncredited contribution then, again, contact me. There's room in the mix for everyone.
The video has been settled for quite some time now, including colour correction and tweaking. All that's left, once I have the remaining audio layers down, is to finish out a mix of the audio and render out. Provided I can keep my head on straight, PLAN Z, should be done by this weekend.