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.

Never As Planned

Life's funny sometimes. It's been said over and over, and it continually proves to be true. I've got two things that have come around that prove this point yet again, leaving no doubt in the mind to how life makes your plans for you, no matter how hard you try to do it yourself. And from a second ironic perspective, they both have to do with my movie.

I was going to work to submit a rough cut of my film to the Barebones Festival on the 16th, which was Tuesday, but a couple of things prevented me from doing so. The first was that I wasn't comfortable with putting it out to be judged yet since although I have the shots I need, I hadn't cut them in yet, and the sound was still a mess. The second, and more amusing, reason I couldn't do it was because I couldn't afford to. While that's not necessarily funny, it plays into the amusing part. 

This film is what's referred to as a "no budget" film in that it literally had no budget to shoot it. Some might think that means I only spent a couple hundred bucks on it, but no kidding, I spent almost nothing on it. I bought tapes for $20, built a steadi-cam rig for about $10, and developed a picture for $2. This means the up front cost of this movie was $32. The other equipment used I got from other people or The Engineer got himself (and to be fair, he did get a nice little sound thing for his laptop to record the sound on). The entry fee for the festival was $55, meaning that the entry fee was actually more than the cost of my movie. Isn't that funny?

The second thing that happened recently concerned my working through the shots I had gotten that I needed to fully complete it. I was off the last couple of days for the birthdays of both The Socialite and Sassy Pants. I like to take everyone's birthdays off, and while the first of the year didn't work out too well, I finally got to take off the birthdays in the last part of the year. Well, one of those days was spent with everyone as school was still out due to ice, but Thursday was a regular school day. This means that I was going to be all by myself for the middle part of the day since The Queen substitutes at the preschool that Sassy Pants goes to. 

She asked me what I was going to do with all that time I had to myself, and I declared that I was going to finish my movie. Well, the whole time wasn't to be mine, to be sure. I got to take The Socialite to lunch for her birthday (a real treat, since I usually work), I saw the Queen at the preschool, attended the Socialite's Christmas (sorry, holiday) party, and I had to get something for the Queen for Christmas without her being with me. In the end, I had no time to work on my movie at all. I spent a few minutes on it trying to remove the extra crap from the footage that I couldn't use, but I didn't get much of anywhere on it.

This is not to say that my days off didn't go well. I enjoyed my time with the family, and we did our best to make their birthdays fun with what we could do. They each picked where they wanted to eat dinner. They were each the VIP for the day, which made Rock Girl withdraw quite a bit since the focus was not on her at all, and she'd been out of school for five days by the end of it. On Thursday, she apparently relished the peer to peer conversation and was quite a bit happier at the end of the day.

And of course, they thoroughly enjoyed all the movies watched on Wednesday. We watched A Bug's Life during the day, but that night, I got to surprise them with Wall-E, which I've checked out from the library. They really enjoy that movie.

Did I ever get to work on my movie? Oh yeah. About ten last night, I sat down to work on it. I went to bed at two...but it's a lot closer to being done.

A Rough Cut

Well, I completed a rough cut right on schedule when it comes to getting the raw footage to an acceptable level. It still needs some sound balanced and I've got some gaps when it comes to transitions, especially when it comes to time transitions between certain scenes. My plan was to get some road shots and some scenery of Broken Arrow to fill some gaps to indicate some time has passed. 

I also need another shot that I won't discuss at the moment since it would totally qualify as guerilla filmmaking since I'll need to get a shot of a certain situation that people would not be entirely comfortable with if they knew they were being shot for a feature film. In the final product, even if they saw themselves, they wouldn't have a clue. It's also a shot in the dark as to whether I'd even be able to get such a situation, but I'm hoping I get lucky...and if you knew what I was talking about, you would find "lucky" to be quite the morbid thought.

Once I get those shots down, I'll have a complete cut ready to go for both the sound balancing and the music writing. I still have a commitment from Farmer, who is my composer, so that's still a go, and The Engineer is practically chomping at the bit when it comes to engineering the sound.

I did have to move from Moviemaker to Pinnacle since Moviemaker couldn't handle some of the more complex sound things that I was doing. Pinnacle worked like a dream since it works frame by frame as opposed to fractions of seconds like Moviemaker does. Some elements were more difficult to use, especially in the sound category. Pinnacle can't just mute a sound clip, like Moviemaker does. You have to actually adjust the volume before and after the clip in question. But on a brighter spot, clips and their sounds all move together when you do anything, so if I had syncked the sound in Pinnacle, I could have cut anything anywhere and everything would have moved together. I don't know if that made sense, but it was very cool. It made the cuts in the complete movie file a lot easier.

The picture part is almost done, but unless I get those shots by the weekend of the 13th, I won't have a full rought cut ready by the 16th deadline for that festival I was going to try and get into. I really need to read some more info about that to see if I can even afford it. But we'll see how things go.

Some Sound Success With Some Oddities

Well, there's been some ups and downs here and there with the sound and video. I had taken some of the video off the tapes from Day Two to get some of the pick up scenes we did, and had a listen to the sound. It sounded like it was blasting out the speakers! I turned it down, and tried to turn the sound down in Soundbooth, but it didn't help. I let the Engineer know so he could look into it.

Then, out of curiosity, I tried to load the sounds into Movie Maker, but the program said it didn't have the codec to play it. Wait a minute. It's a wav file. Wav is a Windows media type. It would be only logical for a Windows program to have the codec built into it. After all, the original wavs loaded in. However... Those files were originally aif files, which Movie Maker was unable to load, and for day two, the Engineer saved the files as wavs instead of going through the aif step. It's possible that they're actually aif files since both Movie Maker and Soundbooth perform the way with them. I can save these as wavs from Soundbooth, but Movie Maker still won't load them. 

Well, over the past few weeks, I'd been messing with Pinnacle, and so I tried to load the sound into it. That worked which brings me forward to where I am now. I figured out how to get an uncompressed audio file out of a completed avi file. I found I could load the avi into Soundbooth and then save the audio as a wav file. It can be worked as an audio file and then reloaded uncompressed into Movie Maker and align with the original video file perfectly. This means I am free and clear to start editing which I did.

I've only done a few scenes so far, but I've found an odd issue with Movie Maker that I've worked around so far. It seems when you cut a bit of the video and move it to the audio track, and then mute the audio from the original video during that time frame, it mutes the audio for the rest of the file. Weird. I managed to work around it for that file, but I'm not only unsure what causes it, but I don't know what I'll do if it happens again, and I can't get around it. Pinnacle, I've found, is interesting enough, but as I'm unpractised with it, I don't know if I want to really experiment with a new program in the middle of a film. I know I'm going to use it for some advanced features, but I was hoping for my comfort zone for the first pass.

I'll see how it goes. For now, Movie Maker is doing okay. I guess I'll see how it goes.

Principal Photography Done

Ah, we got it. At 1:30am on the morning hours of the 2nd (which thanks to daylight savings time, means we get home by 1am), we completed principal photography on my movie. Now is where the real fun begins (and the real magic happens). Of course, I'm a little shy on hard drive space, so before I can load up the 2 hours I got on Saturday, I have to cut together the footage I got on the 18th.

Not that this shoot was without its shortcomings, but my experience from day one helped me get through day two with fewer problems, so my 2 hours probably has more usable footage than the 3 1/2 I got on day one. Of course, it seems that some people have difficulty learning lines still which created additional frustration among the cast, and I think he was feeling even more this time around. While I expected issues, the tension rose as the shoot wore on. However, I'm hoping that the multiple takes of his lines will yield enough to make him look like a solid upstanding amateur.

Some things that went well, though, had to do with my desire to rehearse the scenes first and walk through it without the camera in hand. It allowed them to solify their lines and actions, and allowed me to see where they wanted to be without forcing them into a hole within the lens. We did that for Scene 33's reshoot, and I managed to get a single take that I think I'll use uncut, since I enjoy one shot takes.

We will likely have sound issue with the outside shots, however, since we got all kinds of miscellaneous sounds out there that can't be cleaned up such as wind, dogs, church bells, and traffic. Yeah, the pickup on the Engineer's mike is so good that he was getting traffic on the expressway at least a half mile to a mile away. We'll have to get everyone together in the room that we did our initial read-through in to re-record a lot of the outdoor sound. I really hope that goes well, as one person did not like acting along with a recording of another part that needs to fit together seamlessly in a single uncut take. I can only imagine how she'll do trying to re-act with herself.

Now the issue is getting an NLE that I can use easily enough and has enough features to warrant bothering with it. I'm still syncking up the sound in Windows Movie Maker and I plan on doing the rough edit in it, but need something more robust to make it look consistent in color and sound, as well as doing some minor effects on the video here and there to either clean up some pixels or lower the light to make it look darker. That sort of thing.

It's kind of a long road, but there is a festival deadline on December 16 that I want to make if I can. So we've got to get this sorted out as well as finding a way to either extract the sound from the final video or it'll need to be worked before hand, which is kind of silly since why work 6 hours of sound when you're only going to use 90 minutes of it. Haven't got it all worked out yet, but we're going to have to soon cause I want to get editing here.

Reviewing Day One

So I have been watching the footage I got from October 18 on my movie. I got the sound files from The Engineer, and it turns out that Windows Movie Maker, which I'm using for the initial cut until I can track down a usable Non-Linear Editor for some color correction and better sound editing feature, doesn't allow the use of the files that he created. Adobe Soundbooth will open them, but not save them as wav files for Moviemaker to use.

I've found I can save them as MP3's, but that creates yet another problem. Turns out those compressed sound files also compress the time at a rate of less than a quarter second per minute. Not significant for a music file you play on your iPod, but when you're trying to align the sound to your uncompressed video, it makes a huge difference. The Engineer turned around and was able to resave the files as wav files, so I was able to retain the uncompressed sound for aligning it to the 3 1/2 hours of footage I got from my 15 hours of shooting on the 18th.

I'm praying I can cut most of this together to be some kind of coherent movie, but it's a little daunting at this point, especially all the pauses and "line" requests during the cuts. I was a little "Ed Wood-ish" in my shooting style in that most takes only have one take to them, so if something doesn't work, I have to cut away to another take to cover the mistake. I'm hoping I don't have to do it too often.

I did get ahold of one amusing story from the shoot, though. The Engineer had set up the sound for an outdoor shot, and placed his laptop (that was recording the sound) on the hood of his truck. Well, he moved a little too far away from it or something, and that's how you get a Mac to crash. It hit the ground and popped several catches on the case, besides shutting it clean off (yeah, that sound file didn't come through, though I did get the crash on the camera's sound). He snapped it back together, turned it back on, and proved just how sturdy that Mac was. It worked fine the rest of the day and still does.

Of course, from that same scene, I discovered my amateurish blocking of the scene. Scene 33. It was such a mess that the footage I got is completely unusable. I cut together a hasty version of it to see if it would even remotely work since not only was the blocking a mess, but the lighting was awful as well in several takes. Yeah, it'll be something we'll have to redo this coming Saturday.

The only other question mark we have to work out before I can start editing is how to extract the soundtrack once the film is done. So far we haven't figured out how to get an uncompressed audio track out of the movie file. So at this point, nothing is edited. Have to figure that out before I can cut on it.

Making A Movie

This last weekend was the beginning of the culmination of years of work for me. Since 2001, I've been practicing the art of screenwriting, following my work on musicals and plays. Well, screenwriting has stuck with me the longest and to date, I've written some 60 screenplays, teleplays, and shorts. I'd taken one of my features and decided to shoot it myself. It is a no-budget script with five people and one location: a house. It's a straight drama with no effects and lots and lots of dialogue. For having no money, it's perfect.

The plan was to shoot the entire 80 page script in a single day starting at 8am and going right through till 11:30pm. I had every shot planned and every scene timed out to the minute. I had plenty of tapes; the Engineer was running the sound; we had bright lights to make sure we got a good picture. It was perfect.

Well, almost. There were a few things I failed to take into account. First and foremost was my own inexperience. After all, I was undertaking the mammoth task of shooting this thing. I'm the director, producer, and cameraman. There were no assistants of any kind. This inexperience lead to some blocking issues, some weird shots, and extra time take trying to figure out the real life versions of what I saw in my head.

The other issues concerned the actors themselves. I failed to allow for something I can only refer to as "diva time." This would be the time that actors use to primp themselves into what they feel is presentable for the shoot. Understandable completely, but one didn't start doing this until I said, "Let's go." They almost completely failed to be on time for most of the shots, and then there was the matter of knowing their lines. Most of them knew their lines just fine most of the time. There was a couple that nailed almost every one. Some needed prompting the first time through a scene. One barely survived two lines without needing help...every time. This latter one caused some frustration (which I contained exceptionally well) not only from me but from the rest of the cast as well. And I'm not saying anything here that I don't suspect he knew already...

So, with all this, we got through most of it. There are quite a few scenes we didn't get to, but fortunately, the people who allowed me to use their house are allowing me a second day on November 1st to finish up. According to my schedule, it's only the evening, so it won't even be all day that we shoot. I'll send out a schedule revision later, but it's mostly night scenes anyway. I'll also go through what I did get shot to see if anything need to be redone.

Anyway, it is exciting, and I can't wait to get editing on what I have to see how it turns out.