Like a Thief in the Night

Welcome to your Monday morning update. A lot's been going on, and I'm done up through scene 23 now. As I mentioned in the last post earlier this week, I'm not sure whether I'll be keeping Scene 21. I went ahead and edited it all together, and as I feared it is definately the weakest scene in the film. Unfortunately, it is pretty necessary to the story, so ditching it is kind of tough. It's referred to in several later scenes, and not having it in the movie may be confusing. On the other hand, it's pretty easy from those later references to guess what the scene was about. Bleh.

Scenes 22 and 23 present special problems. Both of them are fabulous scenes, but there is going to be a lot of color correction work. Scene 22, the truck scene, came out remarkably well, even smoother than in some professional films I've seen. Quite astonishing, considering how we did it:


The main problem is that the two angles were shot on different nights. We filmed Leland's angle first, and by the time we figured out how to make the scene work right and got a couple good takes, it was after midnight. Aaron had to work or something the next morning, so we did his shots a week later. By then, we'd figured out the whole process a bit better, and so his shots ended up with better lighting. The problem now is making them match, which I believe is definately possible, it'll just require some long nights spent fiddling with the color correction tools.


The next scene, #23, was a blast to shoot. Billy delivered his heavily improvised comic monologue a dozen times, each time adding further embellishments until finally the tale of Alex's roommates involved school busses, nuns, and "donkey ass clown porn," whatever that is. I didn't end up using any one take of this rant, instead mixing and matching the best parts from different takes. The end result is a scene that I find funny, and I consider that a good start. In any event, the unused outtakes from this scene are going to make a fantastic set of DVD features.

Like Scene 22, this one needs a lot of color correction work. I'm not sure what we were thinking, exactly, but the way we used gels got us a blue Leland and Aaron and a red/orange Billy. I've started to think that on future movies, we should just avoid using lighting gels at all, since I have the power to give things a blue tint in post if I decide I want to. Actually shooting the scene bathed in blue or red light really kind of limits the options, because I have to try to un-colorize it before I can do anything else to it. This is usually possible, it's just a major pain in the neck. These shots, like the ones above for Scene 22, are the un-color-corrected ones, to give you an idea of what needs to be done:


Next up: Scene 24. O'Niell's. I've heard that since we shot this scene, both O'Niell's have gone out of business, so watching this movie will be like a trip back in time. Crazy huh? Well, at least we got in while it was still there. O'Niell's was a damn good bar and I'm sorry to see it go. I hope Rob O'Niell finds a way to reopen somewhere new or at least start up a new business of some kind.

Anyway, the O'Niell's scene is the single longest one in the movie, so I don't know how long it'll take me to get it all put together. Fear not though, I fully expect it to be finished by next week's update if not before. I'm still deadly serious about getting this thing cut together ASAP.

In other news, I finally got around to completing a shot I'd wanted ever since we filmed the scene originally. In Scene 4, when Clint goes into the job interview, he posts a "roommate wanted" flyer on a bulletin board. But we don't really get a closeup of the flyer, and I worried that people who weren't paying close attention wouldn't understand what he was doing. That, and I think it's neat to give people a chance to read it. So here's the new addition, and you can tell me how closely you think I was able to match the bulletin board detritus, and how well I was able to impersonate Leland's hands:

(keep in mind, this will be cropped to 16:9, so you won't see my hair lurking at the bottom of the frame. Oh, and needless to say, the bulletin board pages I whipped up are not the exact same ones that were actually there, since I have no way of remembering that. I just tried to make similar pages... the content of these pages can be considered one of the 'easter eggs' of the film.

Thanks for reading, and see you all next week!