The 13th Post

So yeah, I suck. Not only have I not posted the last two Sundays in a row, but now that I finally am posting I have nothing to report. Well, maybe not quite nothing, but not much. Mainly I thought I'd post because, according to the site's web stats page, people are still coming to the site. I don't really have a good sense of who is coming here or why, since nobody ever writes comments or sends me e-mail about the site. It could be that nobody who actually worked on the movie ever comes here. At any rate, whoever you are, sorry I've been slacking lately!

First off, I want to assure you, dear Readers, that I have in no way wavered in my commitment to editing this movie. Part of the reason I'm not making much progress is because I'm taking three classes (graduate level) this quarter and they are demanding a lot of my time. Another part of the reason is that in the last few weeks, I've been working on a business plan that, if we get some venture funding, will provide me with a job after I get my MBA this May. The last part of the reason is that I'm lazy.

If this business does not take off, I'll have to look for something else. I only have like 6 months after I finish school before the student loan collectors start coming around to talk about my kneecaps, so one way or another I gotta find something. I have a few leads, though, so I'm not worried.

The main question that a lot of my friends have is whether or not I'll be moving back to NM. Honestly, I don't know. I'm not specifically opposed to that, but neither am I specifically opposed to taking a job in Singapore, so that's not saying much. I do feel like much of my social life is there in Albuquerque, but Abq is such a "been there, done that" kind of place for me at this point. We'll just see what happens, I guess.

Speaking of coming back to Abq, however, I am planning to be back in town in a couple weeks. I have a week off between quarters, so I'm flying back. I'll be around roughly from the 10th to the 18th. I say 'roughly' because my dad wants to go on a camping trip for a few days, so I don't know for sure when I'll be off doing that. I do have several things to do while I'm in town, but if any of the movie cast/crew want to hang out, drop me a line and I'll make some room.

After being in town that week, I'll come back here to Cali for my last quarter. I'll only have one class, and while it is supposed to be the hardest class in the program (being the capstone class), it's only one. My intention is to really hit the movie editing hard during that quarter, and hopefully have a finished rough cut by May when I graduate. Over the summer, I'll start getting help with the rest of the post-production stuff. I'm hoping to get the movie done and have our premiere sometime in 2005. I can't promise when, exactly, so it may be more than a year after the end of production before everyone gets to see it.

Anyway, sorry again for not having any new progress to report. I promise (and I really mean it) that things will pick up big time after this school quarter is over. I'll try to update on Sundays as usual, but I doubt I'll get much done until these three classes are finished. Tell you what, mark your calendars to come back here on Monday, 25 April. At that point this quarter will be over, I'll have visited Albuquerque, and been back in Cali a week with only one class to go to. I'll definately have some good progress to report then, as I begin an all-out assault on the editing process.

Self-imposed Slavery

Yeah, yeah, I know. Sorry for no post last week. I've just been really busy the past few weeks. Last weekend, my dad was here in California for a visit, so I was busy with him and spaced the update. . . but as I hadn't really gotten anything done, it wasn't a big deal.

Then last night I didn't get this post up because I was working on a paper due today. I had to write a 20-25 page paper on a case study about Outback Steakhouse, and I didn't even start working on it until last night at 5 p.m. I worked on it til 4 or so, then got up at 9 and finished it at 2 p.m. today. It ended up being 31 pages long; 27 pages of text plus a cover sheet, table of contents, and two pages of exhibits. Yet another example of how I wait until the absolute last minute and then fake my way through things. Come to think of it though, a steak sounds pretty good right about now. . .

Anyway, this week has been a lot more productive movie-wise, and I'm happy to report some real progress. I finally forged through the pool hall scene, and it wasn't as bad as I'd feared it would be. I ended up not using any of the real artistic shots, though, which is a little disappointing. I just couldn't fit them in - the continuity wasn't there.

So, what we are left with in the meat of the conversation is this somewhat lopsided conversation:


For whatever reason, we didn't get a medium shot of Leland during this part of the scene, nor did we get a closeup of Aaron. So, we're left with this. It doesn't really look so bad in the film, I just would've preferred to have two shots like Aaron's. Ah well, that's what storyboarding is for.

It was during the cutting of this scene that I (re)discovered a serious problem: Leland skipped a line! I remember we knew about this during the shoot, after we'd already filmed Leland's closeup. The pressure was on, so we didn't go back and re-shoot it. I kinda regret that now, but as it turns out, the scene works okay if I just cut out that line and Aaron's response:

ANDY

What I’m saying is that if you go off to Japan or New York or someplace you'll never be the boss. You’ll be lucky to find a job kissing someone’s ass.

CLINT

If nothing I do in my entire life has any effect on the world, then what was the point? I’ll just be another random peon. I want to be someone who matters.

ANDY

So you never cure cancer or become a movie star or a Wall Street player. So what? Do you have any idea how many people move to the big city every year saying stuff like that? Do you know how many wannabe actors are working at gas stations in Hollywood, hoping to be noticed? How many wannabe CEOs are working in mailrooms in New York City? Screw that action, man. That’s self-imposed slavery.

ANDY sinks the nine ball. CLINT thinks over what ANDY has said while he racks the balls.

CLINT

So, you seem to have a lot of opinions on this. Haven’t you ever thought of leaving Albuquerque?

So, on the one hand I'm disappointed those lines won't be in the final cut. That was really supposed to be the meat of the whole conversation. On the other hand, though, the lines were a little hokey, and I think the rest of the conversation gets the message across perfectly well.

Last update I mentioned the little sound issue we have with the part of the scene that had to be re-filmed at a later time. Since this second time we couldn't tell everyone in the bar to shut up, there ended up being a lot of background noise. I have no idea how we can deal with this, maybe one of you audio gurus can give me some hope (please?). I thought I'd post this screen cap so you can see how different the graph looks:


On the plus side,the visual aspect of that shot matches with the rest of the scene perfectly, so it won't be any trouble at all that way. Just gonna have to figure out that damn sound. . .

The best part of this whole pool hall scene was the job interview bit. I spent an hour going through all the takes we did, and having myself a pretty damn good laugh. We were downright slap-happy by the end there, but I suppose that's okay. We were just so damn glad to be done. Here's some stills from the completed scene:



I ended up using the fifth take we did with Aaron, as well as a little bit from the fourth. So yeah, we probably didn't need to do thirty takes of that. I put Monica's bit together from parts of her tenth and eleventh take, so it's just as well we did fifteen of those.

Those of you who were there (and were paying attention) may notice that I used one of the shots of Aaron before we moved a potted plant to cover that wacky light effect on the upper right wall. I figured screw it, that was the funniest take so that's the one I used. Nobody's going to care, I don't think. I just hope it doesn't distract too much from the image. This frame is from the part of the scene where Andy is just staring blankly at the secretary after she says "your english is very good!" Aaron kept that exact pose for like five seconds. He's so still that it looks like I just replicated a single frame for several seconds, so I used a part of the shot near the end where he blinks once. I'm still laughing about it as I write, it has got to be the funniest part of the whole movie.

So, now that that scene's out of the way, I've moved on to another challenging one: the "breakup" scene. This is the only scene that was re-filmed in a different location. As some of you will no doubt remember (with a shudder), this scene was first filmed at the computer pod at around 4 in the morning after a long, long night of marathon filming. Not an auspicious start to our little venture. The fact that everyone was completely dead on their feet wasn't really the problem though. It was the boring composition. I just didn't like the flat, boring walls of the classroom:


The scene actually came out okay, if a little less energetic than I wanted. I decided to re-film this in order to get a little more motion and emotional energy in it. I also wanted to break out of the cramped indoor feel that a lot of the scenes in this movie have. I don't know how we did it, but we managed to film a movie on all kinds of amazing locations, and made it look like it was filmed in a small studio. Bleh. So I wanted to go outside with this.



I may edit the original filming of the scene together too, as like a DVD feature or something, but mainly just to see how it looks. Who knows, maybe I'll still end up using it. I doubt it, though; I like the outdoor setting a little better.

This scene doesn't have any big continuity issues or problems that I'm aware of, other than the fact that the lighting kept changing on us as clouds went by overhead. Hopefully that can be mitigated with careful editing, however. I'm hoping to get this scene done this week, if I can find enough time, and then I'll finally have reached the fun part of the movie: the date with Riley. That should go a lot easier, because for most of that shoot we had a lot of crew and sufficient time, and set up our shots well. Keep coming back here for updates!