Rough cut done... We watched it... And...

It actually DOESN'T SUCK!

Ah...

I was a bit nervous before watching the rough cut with our director Bill Mitrus, our editor Caleb Kerlin, Bill's friend Jeff (who has a pretty broad depth of movie experience). After all, the possibility was that it would, em... Suck, and the only thing we could do to fix it was to start from scratch. But it doesn't. It's actually pretty good. Overall the quality is good, and there were some especially sweet moments, acting, camera and lighting-wise.

We knew ahead of time that a movie consisting of two people who don't get along trying to escape a cell or face certain death (or worse) ran the risk of being agonizingly boring (at least visually), and that we would need certain devices to get the audience out of the cell periodically. While we had planned some of these in advance, we realized there were many other good opportunities to do this, so we will of course take advantage of them.

So... On to phase two: Plan out those other scenes and the reshoots... A few of our scenes were 'blown out', most likely past the point of salvaging (and we'll need a little ADR)... So we'll get out the green screen, shoot them, edit them together, and then it's off to post.

So far so good!

WarIsBoring.com offers to give us some footage!

Hey All,

Good news, independent war correspondent David Axe (check out his excellent blog War Is Boring ) has offered to give us some real Third World hellhole war footage and stills for our opening montage.

I can't believe how lucky we are he's going to do this for us, I hope he gets home safe and we can make him a tidy sum.

-Dave

Production photos uploaded!

Here's a sample below, or browse the whole lot of them (there's a few hundred!) here.

Any photos with (Isaiah) in the filename were taken by our Intel Officer (Isaiah Tannenbaum), all others were taken by Kevin Pittinaro. Thanks Kevin!

Update - Rough cut done (sorta)

I'm going to try and update this more frequently so that everybody who helped make this movie can stay... Um... Updated.

Caleb is finished with the rough cut and is going back to make another pass at it. There's some clips he had trouble finding that somehow didn't make it onto the external hard disks I gave him. Not to worry, I have two other copies here.

Sometime after Thanksgiving we should have the VO work he needs for the "dream sequence", I'll probably shoot some more of the kids during that period.

With any luck, we'll have the President and Rebel Leader shot by the end of December. I hope to have comittments for the CG SFX, sound design and music composition by then.

So far we're on track to be at the festivals by Spring.

So far so good!

Best always to all of you,

Dave

PS Once we have a full rough cut we're havin' a parrrrty wooo! : )p

Finally going back to see my wife...

...After TWO MONTHS away from home. Which in hindsight, isn't all that much time considering how much we got done.

I think I misunderestimated how much fourteen days of very high levels of mental effort combined with a fair amount of emotional strain coupled with the physical requirements of 14-16 hours of work take out of you. For the last six weeks I feel like I've been operating at 50%.

BUT... In addition to getting most of the secondary photography done, I also managed to flip 23 hours of high-def footage, get it into a suitable editing computer, and get it to our editor Caleb (who's last editing project looks like it's goin' to Sundance(!), whoo hoo!)

Oh yeah... Did I mention that using a 35mm adapter makes your recorded image come out upside down, and then will require you to flip it in post?

I was aware of that going in, but one thing I hadn't counted on is that it would take 34 hours of processing time on a fast* computer to flip that much material... And Premiere will CRASH if you try and flip much more than 50gb at a time (we had just over a terrabyte), so I'd have to set the computer to flip clips for 1 1/2 hours, set a timer, then come back and do it again... And again.

Next time I'm using multiple computers. Actually, next time I'll have enough clams to use a 4k camera and will have a ginormous raid storage device, and will probably have a whole other set of post-production hurdles to vault.

Anyhow, the footage is now going through it's rough cut stage. Yeaaahh..!

-Dave


*Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.40GHz (quad core, 8MB Cache 1066MHz FSB), Intel 975XBX2KR socket 775 Motherboard, 4 gigs of PC6400 DDR2 800MHz Memory, ATI Radeon X1650 Pro 512MB GDDR2 PCI Express Video Card, RAID 0 w/4 Seagate 320GB 7200RPM 16MB cache SATA-300 drives. Fast.

Wow...

...We GOT IT DONE!!!

Well, almost. We got primary photography done. We still have to shoot a couple actors that appear as "talking heads", but I'll be doing that at my apartment in NYC - And I want to get a few more shots of the kids, but I'll do that in a couple weeks (I have enough, but it would be nice to have a little more to play with).

Needless to say it was quite an experience - Mostly good (but that's because I absolutely love making pictures). We caught quite a bit of said experience on B-roll for DVD extras.

I'll provide more details later, but here's some important points.


First point:

If you've never shot a movie before, whatever time you think you need to shoot it? Double it. And I mean, double it.

However, if you're a very organized and person who is obsessively compulsive about details, schedules, having everything just so, etc; and you're completely sure you've taken all the variables into account - Then triple it.

Seriously. You have no idea what you're in for. If you're the type of person who doesn't deal well with the controlled chaos of a fast-paced movie production (imagine the confusion and violence of a truckload of dynamite going off in a tornado stretched out over two weeks, punctuated by the inevitable blowing of stacks by various production personnel), you'll have a nervous breakdown in the middle of the shoot and won't get your picture finished.

Dana Offenbach gave me this advice (in not so many words) on hearing my proposed shooting schedule (she actually told me I was being wildly unrealistic and would lose all my money). So I doubled the amount of time I figured it would take.

Dana, you saved my picture.

...Which was merely the first of about a dozen bullets dodged during the course of production, all of which had "Cell killer #XX" engraved on the metal jacket. I may get into those later.


Second point:

If you're an actor, and you've given yourself a big part in in your picture - Make sure that your character is subjected to an absolutely ungodly amount of stress during the course of the story. This way you won't have to act much at all, and you won't need "stress makeup" after a few days.

Gotta go - I'm building a computer for our editor to cut this puppy on, and I'd like to make it home before the snow flies.

-Dave

Shooting starts TOMORROW...

...And I'm not freaking out. Not even close.

I guess it's because I planned so much for this and didn't leave any problems to solve for the last minute. Amazingly, everything is going according to plan.

Last night I even got a FULL EIGHT HOURS OF SLEEP... Felt like I went on vacation. This will be the first day in a week I won't need a nap.

The director/DP Bill Mitrus will be here later this afternoon, we're going to go over some details, then watch Dark City, and if we get a chance, Blade Runner.

Long live Sci-Fi Noir!

-Dave