One, Two, Seventeen!
Well, I'm happy to report a lot of progress this week. The rough cut's now up to seventeen minutes and three seconds! I just finished Scene 8 a few minutes ago. This length will definately change by the final cut of the film, since there are a couple places where I don't have some shots I need, and I may alter the opening titles a bit once I get some more desert footage. But it represents progress nonetheless!
I thought I'd post a picture to illustrate the problems I mentioned before about scene two. Since these bits were filmed at wildly different times, the lighting doesn't match up at all. The difference is that we didn't light the empty room when we filmed it. Big mistake, as you can see:
So, somehow or other, this'll have to be re-shot. The shot of Leland is fine, we just need an empty room at least superficially similar to the other rooms in the house. On the plus side, we never see the room in any other shots in the movie, so it can be any empty room anywhere so long as the paint color is similar.
There are a couple other issues with some of these early scenes, but we probably won't re-shoot any of them. For example, there's this shot in scene three. We tried to use blue gels to enhance the "computer monitor's point of view" aspect of this shot, but unfortunately the actors came out rather darker than the background:
Due to a capricious twist of fate, a lot of these early scenes were the ones we had the most technical difficulties with. For example, for most of the filming of scenes 2, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 21, I was the only crew member. I worked the camera, set up the lighting, and recorded sound. Oh, and we did all of those in a single day and in a terrible rush. Needless to say, they came out mediocre at best. In fact, when I get to scene 21 I'm going to give serious thought to whether or not it can be cut completely, because everyone is out of focus in every shot! Sigh.
Scene 4 was the easiest scene yet, because there's only one shot in it. It's the scene where Clint posts a "Roommate Needed!" sign on a bulletin board and then goes into his job interview. Scene 5 was also only one shot, so it was just a matter of choosing which take to use.
Scene 6, which is supposed to be a series of shots depicting the last happy night of Clint and Jessica's relationship, is going to be a little more complicated because I don't have all the shots I need. Well, more than that, I don't even know exactly what I want it to be. Since it'll probably be set to some kind of music, I may wait until I get some music picked out to help me visualize the shots. For now I just tossed together a shot of Leland and Anna on the couch watching TV and a time-lapse shot of an Albuquerque sunset.
Scenes 7 and 8 turned out to be the toughest I've had to deal with so far. Through some creative editing, I was able to get them done, but the time constraints and my technical incompetence really show in these two, especially 8. We just didn't have the coverage we needed there. As a result, there are a couple of random cuts to Davis (Richard Boehler) playing his video game that cover transitions between takes. A bigger problem is the recorded sound in all these scenes; since I didn't know what I was doing, the sound ended up way too loud and some of the louder lines got distorted. I'm not sure if there's anyting we can do about that, but I really hope there is.
Next up is Scene 9, a scene which looks like it'll be hard to edit for exactly the opposite problem; we have a LOT of coverage of this one. This is the scene at Roosevelt Park that we had to do some re-shoots of. Between the two days of filming, there's about an hour and a half of footage for this scene.
In quasi-related news, I finished the Leadership class for my MBA this past week. A couple of you may remember me asking you to fill out leadership surveys about my leadership style and such. As I expected, I came out with good scores in the "Inspiring a Shared Vision" category and rather dismal in some of the others.
Among the questions I did best on were "Seeks challenging opportunities to test skills," "Finds ways to celebrate accomplishments," and "Appeals to others to share dream of the future." The three I scored worst on were "Makes certain that goals, plans, and milestones are set," "Expresses confidence in people's abilities," and "Is clear about his/her philosophy of leadership."
In a way, having this class immediately after making the movie was suspiciously providential. It gave me a good chance to reflect on the experience and put things into perspective using prominent leadership theories. I think part of the problem is that I'm not really a leader by nature; I'm pretty introverted and task-oriented. In other words, I'm much better at doing things by myself that don't involve dealing with people.
As a result, I'm not used to having to express my plans and ideas to other people. Like when I'm thinking about writing a novel, I don't really need to lay it out for anyone else, I just work it out in my head. I'm also not a planner by nature, I prefer to figure out things on the spot. On the other hand, I feel that I was able to handle crises pretty well. I'm sure plenty of people would disagree, but I'd point to the fact that we did in fact get the filming done despite a host of crippling problems. But nowthat I have a much better idea of the sort of planning needed for afilm project like this, any future projects I'm involved in will be meticulously planned.
I realize that I'm not as good as I should be at encouraging the people around me who need encouragement. This tendency caused a lot of pain and frustration for some people on this project, and I'm humbled by the fact that any of them have been able to forgive me.
I thought I'd post a picture to illustrate the problems I mentioned before about scene two. Since these bits were filmed at wildly different times, the lighting doesn't match up at all. The difference is that we didn't light the empty room when we filmed it. Big mistake, as you can see:
So, somehow or other, this'll have to be re-shot. The shot of Leland is fine, we just need an empty room at least superficially similar to the other rooms in the house. On the plus side, we never see the room in any other shots in the movie, so it can be any empty room anywhere so long as the paint color is similar.
There are a couple other issues with some of these early scenes, but we probably won't re-shoot any of them. For example, there's this shot in scene three. We tried to use blue gels to enhance the "computer monitor's point of view" aspect of this shot, but unfortunately the actors came out rather darker than the background:
Due to a capricious twist of fate, a lot of these early scenes were the ones we had the most technical difficulties with. For example, for most of the filming of scenes 2, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 21, I was the only crew member. I worked the camera, set up the lighting, and recorded sound. Oh, and we did all of those in a single day and in a terrible rush. Needless to say, they came out mediocre at best. In fact, when I get to scene 21 I'm going to give serious thought to whether or not it can be cut completely, because everyone is out of focus in every shot! Sigh.
Scene 4 was the easiest scene yet, because there's only one shot in it. It's the scene where Clint posts a "Roommate Needed!" sign on a bulletin board and then goes into his job interview. Scene 5 was also only one shot, so it was just a matter of choosing which take to use.
Scene 6, which is supposed to be a series of shots depicting the last happy night of Clint and Jessica's relationship, is going to be a little more complicated because I don't have all the shots I need. Well, more than that, I don't even know exactly what I want it to be. Since it'll probably be set to some kind of music, I may wait until I get some music picked out to help me visualize the shots. For now I just tossed together a shot of Leland and Anna on the couch watching TV and a time-lapse shot of an Albuquerque sunset.
Scenes 7 and 8 turned out to be the toughest I've had to deal with so far. Through some creative editing, I was able to get them done, but the time constraints and my technical incompetence really show in these two, especially 8. We just didn't have the coverage we needed there. As a result, there are a couple of random cuts to Davis (Richard Boehler) playing his video game that cover transitions between takes. A bigger problem is the recorded sound in all these scenes; since I didn't know what I was doing, the sound ended up way too loud and some of the louder lines got distorted. I'm not sure if there's anyting we can do about that, but I really hope there is.
Next up is Scene 9, a scene which looks like it'll be hard to edit for exactly the opposite problem; we have a LOT of coverage of this one. This is the scene at Roosevelt Park that we had to do some re-shoots of. Between the two days of filming, there's about an hour and a half of footage for this scene.
In quasi-related news, I finished the Leadership class for my MBA this past week. A couple of you may remember me asking you to fill out leadership surveys about my leadership style and such. As I expected, I came out with good scores in the "Inspiring a Shared Vision" category and rather dismal in some of the others.
Among the questions I did best on were "Seeks challenging opportunities to test skills," "Finds ways to celebrate accomplishments," and "Appeals to others to share dream of the future." The three I scored worst on were "Makes certain that goals, plans, and milestones are set," "Expresses confidence in people's abilities," and "Is clear about his/her philosophy of leadership."
In a way, having this class immediately after making the movie was suspiciously providential. It gave me a good chance to reflect on the experience and put things into perspective using prominent leadership theories. I think part of the problem is that I'm not really a leader by nature; I'm pretty introverted and task-oriented. In other words, I'm much better at doing things by myself that don't involve dealing with people.
As a result, I'm not used to having to express my plans and ideas to other people. Like when I'm thinking about writing a novel, I don't really need to lay it out for anyone else, I just work it out in my head. I'm also not a planner by nature, I prefer to figure out things on the spot. On the other hand, I feel that I was able to handle crises pretty well. I'm sure plenty of people would disagree, but I'd point to the fact that we did in fact get the filming done despite a host of crippling problems. But nowthat I have a much better idea of the sort of planning needed for afilm project like this, any future projects I'm involved in will be meticulously planned.
I realize that I'm not as good as I should be at encouraging the people around me who need encouragement. This tendency caused a lot of pain and frustration for some people on this project, and I'm humbled by the fact that any of them have been able to forgive me.
posted by 505 Films at
1:06 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home