A Bad Rack. . .

This scene 10 is really beating me up. I've gotten a little further in it, but run up against a pretty daunting continuity break. The scripted dialogue goes from the shot on the left to the shot on the right, without anything in between. The guys walk off to the right of the camera, and then the takes for the next bit start with a closeup of Leland, without any transition. This is a tad problematic.



I can't remember what my logic was at the time; I think it may have been for Leland to walk in from the left in that closeup shot, because he does this in some (but not all) of the takes. However, on viewing it now I'm not sure this can work, because it means that Aaron just disappears and Leland starts talking directly across the table, while he would still presumably be walking around it. It may have made sense to me at the time, but it doesn't feel right to me now.

I have an idea for how to handle this, and take care of another issue as well. Because of continuity and blocking concerns, we didn't have the guys shoot a lot of pool while they were saying their dialogue. We filmed a lot of "random pool shots" especially with Aaron, so that I could splice them in somehow. I didn't know how that would really work, but now I'm thinking I could use some of those shots to show the game continuing.

Because that shot of Leland was a closeup, we have really good audio of him, and a lot of what he says in this part of the scene is long, almost monologue style stuff. For example, the first thing he says in the closeup shot is:

CLINT

Say I get a great job here, and work really hard and get promoted all the way to the top. I'm still in Albuquerque. What's the view like from the top of a piece of shit? People in the outside world - the real world - don't even want to step on you.

That's plenty of talking time to put in a shot of Aaron taking a turn at pool. Depending on how he's facing, I might even be able to put Aaron's reply in there and move into Leland's next bit, just by pasting the audio from the closeup over video of the guys taking turns at pool. I'm thinking that this'll allow me to use this shot, which I really liked but which I wasn't sure how to fit into the sequence:



Of course, getting this to work successfully is going to be a bit tricky, since at some point I'll still have to find a way to return to showing the actors speaking their lines. I suppose it might make for an interesting artistic statement to have a scene in a movie where you never see the lips of the actor who's talking, instead focusing on the other guy or whatever, but I think it would just give away the fact that I'm a terrible scene planner in this case.

I also discovered a new problem (yay!) when going over the footage we recorded near the very end of production, when we went back to the Anodyne to get a part of the scene that we'd left out the first time. When we went back, we didn't have the luxury of telling the whole place to shut up. Nor did we spend the same amount of time and energy setting up our lights and stuff. The lighting turned out okay, but the sound. . . not so much. Most of the sound in this scene is really nice, the actors' voices are nice and clear and there's almost no background chatter. In this one shot, however, the rabble is very loud. Not loud enough to drown out the actors, but loud enough that I doubt there's any way to get rid of it. Either the rest of the background chatter will have to be made to match it, or we'll have to devise something really creative...

The good news is, I'm almost to the Scene 11 "job interview" cutout, which I know will be the funnest part of editing this whole sequence. Tune in next week to see how far I get with all this. . .

The Return of the Editor

Well, I'm back.

I know it's been three weeks now without an update, and I apologise for that. The trip to Albuquerque was a lot of fun. I got a lot accomplished and saw a lot of good friends. There was a very enjoyable Super Bowl party and a lot of good New Mexican food. You never realize how good green chile is until you leave the state. It's something I always look forward to when I come back to visit.

Now then, on to the movie news:

I got some small shots accomplished while I was in town, and although I still need a few that I didn't get, those can wait til next time. The most important shot I did was a re-do of the "empty room" shot in Scene 2. Those of you who read the blog may recall that there was a slight continuity problem with the previous shot:

Originally, I had wanted a single wide angle shot to cover this part of the scene. The camera would have been located in the far corner of the room, near the ceiling, and would have used a wide angle or even fisheye lens to capture both Leland and the empty room at once. This didn't work out for a vareity of reasons I don't even remember now; somehow, when the room was empty, Leland wasn't available, and by the time he was available Sean and Wes had already started moving in, or something. It doesn't matter much, because I never found a lens with a wide enough angle to actually accomplish the shot I had in mind.

So instead we settled for the idea of having a shot from Clint's POV as he looks into the room, bookended by a reaction shot, as you can see above. However, as I mentioned, Leland wasn't available at the same time the room was empty, so these were filmed on totally different days. In fact, in the picture on the left, Leland is actually looking at Wes' bed, computer, bookshelves, etc. The problem was, we remembered to properly light the reaction shot, but not the POV shot we did when the room was empty (right picture). I tried adjusting the colors in Avid to try to match it, but it just wasn't happening. Because it was so dark when we filmed in there, the camera recorded a lot of low-light noise that really looks terrible when it's brightened up.

So, I really needed to re-film this, and while I was in town this week I discovered that a friend of mine happened to have an empty bedroom that would work just fine for the purpose. Fiddling with the white balance and with a little color correction in Avid, I managed to get them to match up pretty well. Compare the difference now:

Those of us who actually know what Wes' room looks like will realize that it's not the same room, but it should blend in well enough in the movie to get the point across. It's only on the screen for a handful of seconds anyway.

Now, I posted this particular frame to point out the couple of continuity errors that do exist in this new shot. For one thing, the light switch is different. I'll probably solve that by actually cutting the clip at a slightly later frame, so that it doesn't show up in the POV shot at all.

Then there's the window, which is different than the windows at the actual house, and through which you can see part of the brown stucco of my friend's house. I'll probably leave this in. I figure it's a small price to pay, especially considering it'll only be in the movie for a couple frames. I figure most people who aren't familiar with the actual movie house won't really notice, and anyone who does gets a lollipop (not really).

Another small error is that the floor in this room is carpeted, whereas the floors at the real movie house were all hardwood. Again, I doubt anyone will notice, especially because we don't see the floor much in the rest of the house. Finally, the door to the closet in this room (which you can't see in the above pic) is painted bright yellow for some reason. Not really a continuity error since we never see the actual closet door elsewhere in the movie, but might seem a tiny bit odd. Eh, screw it.

Another shot that I needed that I never got for some reason was a close-up of the gas gauge in the big orange truck for scene 1. I wanted to include it at the very beginning of the scene to help explain why Clint and Andy suddenly pull off to the side of the road and start walking. I dunno why I never got it during production, since I had access to the truck at all times, but I have it now, so whatever. In retrospect, though, maybe I should have cleaned off the plastic in front of the gauges:

As far as news on the movie goes, that's about it. I haven't had a chance to do much more on Scene 10 this week since I've been starting school and whatnot. I also had a side project dumped in my lap this week that took up my "editing time"; my Uncle wanted me to back up some video from his 40th high school reunion to DVD.

I've done a couple VHS -> DVD transfers before (all legal, btw) and it's not that hard, but it takes up a lot of CPU time and I can't really work on the movie while the editing machine is chugging away on it. It's kind of depressing work, though, because the quality of VHS video is so utterly craptacular, and even with my vast arsenal of software and skillz it can only be cleaned up so much. Bleh.

Speaking of video quality, we made a big boo-boo on Land of Entrapment that I'm still kicking myself for. Can't do much about it now except forge ahead, but I've definately learned my lesson for future projects.

While I was in Albuquerque the past week, I spent some time filming about 3 hours of documentary-style footage of the Albuquerque "car culture." Back when I lived in Abq, I used to hang out with a lot of guys who were into street racing and car tuning. One of my buddies from those days now owns a shop in town, specializing in turbos, superchargers, and precision tuning for really fast cars. Some of you may remember Sean, he auditioned for the role of Clint. Anyway, his shop is called Solid Technology if you want to check it out.

I spent a few days hanging out with him and filming. It all started because he wanted some video footage for his website, so I'm going to be putting that together in the near future. But for me, it was also an opportunity to experiment a little with the camera. One thing I'm really not happy about in LoE is how static the camera is. For this movie, it's actually okay, but for a lot of future projects I think a much more mobile camera is definately in order. For example, I have some ideas for a movie centered around this same car culture. . .

Anyway, one of the other things I experimented with is the camera's 16:9 mode. Back when we were just getting started with production, we were trying to decide whether to film in 16:9 or not. Before the matter could be investigated thoroughly, we had to rush to get the first night of filming done at the computer pod. When we looked at 16:9 mode through the viewfinder and on the preview monitor, it looked squished horizontally, and we didn't know how hard it would be in post to widen it to the correct proportions. Also, we liked the 16:9 guides that were available in the 4:3 mode, since it allowed us to see where the boom mic was relative to the action. So, we ended up going with the 4:3 aspect ratio.

After I got Avid and started messing around with stuff, I discovered that 16:9 mode is actually really easy to work with. So while I was filming this car guy stuff, I tried it out. It turns out to be not only easy to mess with in editing, but produces a much nicer picture. Someone please slap me.

So the lesson here is, next time we do a movie, it's 16:9 all the way. I'm not even sure I should post about this in the blog, because any experienced digital video gurus are going to think I'm a total idiot for not realizing this at the beginning, but oh well. If this blog is to serve any purpose in the future, it's as a record of my screwups. Cheers!

One last news item. After driving all the way to NM and back safely, I manged to get into a wreck on Saturday less than a mile from my house. 0.7 miles, to be exact, if you believe Google. This faithful friend has served me well on many long journeys, and I wait in anxious anticipation for the ruling of the dark-robed claims adjuster who will rule on its ultimate fate. Thankfully, it was entirely the fault of the young lady in the red mustang who turned left at an intersection while I was trying to cross it, so I should be getting some good insurance monies. I only hope it's enough. . . :'(

That's all for today, folks! Look forward to some editing progress next week!