Another Rough Cut And Print

Well, I've reached another milestone on my movie. I finally worked through all the footage I'd shot on the 13th and cut together some transitions. I put the transitions into my rough cut and I have a full rough cut of the movie. I popped it onto a DVD and sat down to watch it. The sound is very rough and uneven throughout, not to mention it's clear where I cut it together, and of course, there's no music yet.

I even noticed that I'd screwed up one scene that I probably won't be able to fix. In moviemaking there is a sort of invisible line or plane that the camera is not allowed to cross so that the audience's perspective of two conversing characters remains consistent. This way one character looks left and the other looks right. If you cross the line, you end up with a cut where the characters are both looking the same direction. Well, you can kind of tell where the characters are in this scene, but when I cut back and forth between them, they are both looking to the right. I considered flipping the picture for one of them horizontally to make one of them look the right direction, but it would make the background look strange and facing the wrong direction, so I think I'm stuck with the mistake.

Of course, the Engineer was wanting the avi file of the movie, but at the moment, I can't get a 15Gb file on my portable hard drive, so he'll have to be content with the wav of the soundtrack and a DVD of the movie to match up. The only other thing missing at the moment is a series of voiceovers at the end that tell a little about the main character's resolution, but I figured that for the Engineer to do anyway since it deals with sounds that would need cleaning.

The movie with the mock credits only runs for 73 minutes, which is really short for a feature. My answer to this will be including the four minute short I shot in April 07, so the disc has enough content to justify itself. It'll just make this DVD release my "first movies" disc. That'll have to do, since I can't make it any longer.

I've also found that I'm way too familiar with it at this point. I watch it, and mostly, I hate it. But it's not a sort of despising hate, but the kind of hate where you've just seen something so many times and dissected it so much that you know it too well. While the sounds are being worked, though, I need to leave it alone, so I will. Otherwise, it won't line back up right.

I'm handing off the DVD with the movie on one side and the soundtrack on the other for the Engineer to work, and I'll just mail the other DVD off to Beggs for Farmer to work on the music. We're getting there, though. Once The Engineer is through the soundtrack, we'll get the cast together to do some ADR (Additional Dialogue Recording) and once the ADR is done, I would hope that Farmer is done with the music (it really needs music). From there, I've got an outlet to get the DVD onto Amazon in fairly short order, and I suppose at that point, you'll know who I am if you look it up.

But that is another day. It's just nice to get through something.