breathing life into green

it’s every director/producer’s worst nightmare: you and your dp are packing a few things up after the last day of a rough shoot. the cast and crew have already gone home, and you’re making sure the pile of equipment you’re returning to the rental house tomorrow isn’t mixed in with her pile. she’s packing her very cool eclair 16mm camera into its case, dusting everything off as she goes. you’re looking around for your slate (which belongs in neither pile of equipment) when you realize there’s been a long pause between bursts of canned air. you look up just as the dp says

uh oh.

she thinks the magazine may not have been in right. for the whole shoot.

a quick explanation of what this means: the magazine is the part of the camera that holds the film. magazines are designed to fit right up against the gate, where each frame is exposed, and if a magazine is not in right, you could have a few problems: the film could get all jammed up and ruined (we were in the clear on this one), the film could be completely exposed (nothing but white frames) from light coming in through the edges where the magazine should attach, or the film could just be wildly out of focus.

welcome to the first minutes of postproduction on my first 16mm short, green.

i had wanted to shoot something in 16, to have a film that projects well to a large screen, and to get a feel for working with real film, the delicate, moody substance that it is. i was certainly getting a crash course in the latter.

fast forward a month, allowing for processing the film without transferring it to video, skipping out to ny for a friends’ wedding, checking every reel on the negative with a lightbox and loupe and seeing that we do have images (much celebration), finding a local post house that will do film-to-tape transfer for only 800 feet, and scheduling time at an edit suite to transfer the images from tape to a hard drive. finally it’s time to see these hard-won images, and…

uh oh.

two of the eight reels are completely out of focus. and these aren’t the relatively easy indoor shots, either. they’re also (mercifully) not the reels with our rottweiler footage. so it could be worse. but we are now missing a fourth of the footage from a precisely storyboarded project, including the first and last shots of the second sequence, and a key scene that wraps up the plot of the film.

if being missing a quarter of the film wasn’t enough, a lot of the good reels have smaller, but still noticeable, focus issues. i don't think you could show this on a big screen.

after a couple days’ despair, i think of a way to rearrange everything to create a variation on the same story with the footage we do have. and the focus issues with the good reels aren’t so noticeable on a computer screen. if i can accept the straight-to-the-net release (kind of a shame for a 16mm project), it just might work.

then i try to cut the footage together. i get real demoralized. i can’t stop seeing how this film should have worked with the missing shots. i even try using the crazy blurry shots, but of course they don’t cut together with the in-focus stuff.

fast forward ten months, allowing for a cast & crew dinner where i have to tell everyone about the footage, a few more attempts to rally and just cut the damn thing together, some good ideas springing up along the way, but most quashed by loads of demoralization. i can’t get past the missing pieces, and i seriously think about abandoning the project. but i really don’t want to be a quitter (funny how much i care about that). slowly, painfully, i cut the images together, using a brian eno temp track (who doesn’t?) and some foley pulled together from soundtrack pro’s stock effects.

then, in a burst of excitement about starting work on my next short, fraud, i realized, that i needed to finish green, and pronto. make it as good as it can be, bless it, and send it on its way. time to find the film i have, no matter how different it is from the film i wanted. last week a friend helped me transfer the location sound to my computer, and after a week of sound design and editing, i had something i could show curtis.

now, if you’re thinking, so you had something you could show your boyfriend, that’s easy—well, you don’t know curtis. i have a reputation for being one of the toughest critics among my friends and fellow playwrights/screenwriters, but curtis makes me look positively magnanimous. he's handed scripts back to me, shaking his head, with the words, "it's not your best work." so the curtis test is usually not the nerve-soothing ego boost most people get from showing works in progress to their sweeties.

but curtis agreed, it’s almost a film. i’ve got some tweaks to make, but it’s pretty much a rough cut.

i am so excited about this.

the quest for less (moiré): part 1, revver

here's twyndr on revver:

script frenzy starts in 3 weeks and i’m cheating already

the folks who’ve brought us NaNoWriMo (the crazy event that encourages writers to just jam through writing a novel in a single month) have announced their latest brainchild, script frenzy, in which—you guessed it—participants write a script in a single month. they’re open to screenplays or stage plays, and of course they don’t give a hoot about genre or style, but beyond that they’re kind of particular about what they want you to write during that month. no tv scripts, no movies of the week, no adaptations. of course they have no way to check up on any of these things, but those are their rules. also, you can’t start writing until june 1—you can do any prep work you want before then, outlining, background for characters, but no writing scenes.

so what horrible sin am i committing? i’m going to “do” script frenzy with Sky. in the last few months i’ve realized i need a complete rewrite. i’ve changed the circumstances of one protagonist, the habits and major characteristics of both protagonists, the through line with a love interest—there isn’t a written scene that doesn’t need to be ditched, and a complete redo sounds just right (knowing that i can later mine the old script for good exchanges & moments if i want). i’ve got a hell of a solid outline at this point—i just need a script.

now this is in flagrant violation of script frenzy’s no-adaptations rule. they’re really bent cranking out a brand new script and putting your current projects aside for the month of june. but the last thing i really need is another script on yet another back burner. so i’m cheating. or, more generously, i’m doing something different using their mechanisms to guide the process: script frenzy*, if you will.

here are my rules:

• i’ll follow their timeline and word-count goals (20,000 words, all in the month of june).
• i’m not going to use or even look at any of the pages i’ve already written. i’m not sure yet if i get to read my current script once more between now and june. i’m thinking i shouldn’t, but i’m also thinking that if i do it should be sooner rather than later.
• i won’t claim to have “won” script frenzy. ever.

build your own buzz

i’ve decided it’s time to get my first short, that's why you never drink red, out into the world for real. of course this means i have to figure out what i mean by “for real,” but for now i’m working with the general concept of “out into the world” and uploading it to different services and thinking of ways to direct traffic to it once it’s up somewhere looking decent.

first i uploaded it to jaman, which was recommended to me by lourdes portillo, a great doc director who’s in my jean shelton class. the jaman upload went through, no problem, and i like the idea of sharing the short with other filmmakers (jaman feels geared toward the film-fest/mfa crowd). but i’m not thrilled with how twyndr looks as it streams on their player. and since they’re using their own conversion tool, i’m not really sure how to tweak my upload to look better there. i filled out their form for people interested in “distribution” through jaman, which would involve a better quality picture, but until that’s fixed, i’ve flagged my upload private.

next i added a link from my myspace page to the copy hosted on blip.tv, which is the same one i point to from this blog. that one’s a no-brainer. not like my myspace page is flooded with traffic, but what can it hurt?

last night, i uploaded to ourstage. sometimes i’m so busy asking myself why not, i forget to ask why. i have yet to come across anything good on ourstage—maybe the random server just hates me, but voting between two really terrible shorts (and trying to define which is worse and how) gets depressing quickly. unless they come up with a way to improve the quality of what users see—and i don’t see how they can do that—they’ll never be able to retain voters. maybe that’s okay. what do i know?

as i’m typing this, the file’s being uploaded to revver. i’ve seen clips hosted by them that looked decent (most recently on film flap), so we’ll see how that goes.

next on my list: youtube? but if revver looks good, i might just focus on pointing to that one.