Color correction is a lot like sound design: it is often ignored, but when ignored reflects poorly on everyone involved in a production. Color correction can give you control over the texture, tone, color and clairity of a scene. If done properly it can can completely change the nature of a scene. When done bad is just trying to make things look “cooler.” In that case everything just ends up looking like a poorly shot episode of CSI.
Jed Smith, the person who has been The Last Quest’s post production wizard decided to post a blog entry showing the color correction before and after for each scene in our short “The Hot Dog Cycle.” I was amazed by how the slight tweaks Morgan and Jed worked on, made all the difference in some of the scenes. It is pretty interesting, check it out.
Tags: Behind the Scenes, Production Notes, The Hot Dog Cycle
This Sunday the Seattle Times did an article on STIFF, the festival The Hot Dog Cycle is playing in. They used a picture from the film.
We also now have a facebook page for the STIFF showing.
Tags: Brad, Film, film festival, Morgan, seattle true independent, The Hot Dog Cycle
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So SIFF and STIFF both have our films up on their respective websites. “It’s in the P-I” and “The Hot Dog Cycle” are both such different movies that fit so well for the festivals they are in. It is crazy that something we made has this life outside of us. It is now something to be marketed and watched by people who may not necessarily have any relationship to us. I am dually excited and scared by the prospect of some random person watching these things we all thought was a good idea to make months ago.
A screen grab of the webpage for our short "It's in the P-I."
A screen grab of the webpage for our short "The Hot Dog Cycle."
You can and should go to both of these screenings as these movies worth seeing on a large screen with other people around and we’ll be there!
Tags: accepted, Brad, Common Language Project, Documentary, Film, film festival, International Documentary Challenge, It's in the P-I, Morgan, seattle true independent, The Hot Dog Cycle
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From the email they sent to us…
Congratulations on being accepted to Seattle True Independent Film Festival! We’re really looking forward to this year’s festival and we’re glad that you’ll be a part of it. Below are some festival details and a list of things that we’ll need from you beforehand.
The festival runs from June 5th through the 14th. We’re still finalizing our program and will be sending out the screening dates for all of the films within the next week. It’ll probably be around 2 weeks or so before tickets are available for purchase. We’ll send an update with firm dates once that gets worked out. ..
STIFF will select the winner of our festival and present that filmmaker with the Grand Jury Award. The winner will receive a 1 hour meeting with a Hollywood Video acquisitions executive (travel not included).
Grand Jury Award
The award ceremony will be on Saturday, June 13th at 6:15 PM. There will be some films shown after the awards. You will get in with your filmmaker’s badges and we’ll have some tickets available for purchasing as well.
Press contacts
We will continue to hound the local press (in a good way) but you are welcome to reach out to them as well to promote your screening. We’ll be sending out another email with a list of press contacts before long as well.
Q&A’s
We love them and so do our audiences. If you and/or someone close to the film could do a Q&A after the film that would be great. Our audience loves the interaction with the filmmakers, crew, and cast and we feel it’s a big part of the experience for everyone. Just look for one of our crew or volunteers the day of your show and we can work out the details.
Badge Info
Each filmmaker will receive a pair of all-access badges.
Tags: accepted, event, film festival, june, seattle true independent, The Hot Dog Cycle
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Once you have shot a movie the work is far from over. There are hours upon hours of watching, re-watching and re-re-watching of what you have shot and figuring out how to make sense of the madness that is raw footage. Editing is a special skill that few people have the proper amount of respect for. The Hot Dog Cycle editing period lasted far too long as all of the steam that we built up in finishing production did not carry us through. Things like life, love and the ever present pursuit of money got in the way. From the time we had everything shot till when we were picture locked (when the editing is completely done) was about seven months. Here is scene 1 in picture lock:
After picture lock there was still a ton of work to be done. We had to compose the music, color correct the picture, record the narration, add all the sound effects and add the computer graphic hearts that the script called for. This process went a lot faster. From the time the picture was locked till we were completely done with the movie was only a month. Our computer graphics and color correction was done by an artist in San Francisco, Jed Smith. We physically mailed him a hard drive with the footage on it. He did all of his work at his home all of our correspondence took place online. He then sent back the finished files on the drive a few weeks later. For the music Morgan composed the music in his home studio with help from our sound designer Kelsey Wood. As Morgan worked on the audio Kelsey did looping (re-recording of actor’s line) with myself and the other primary actors. Our final audio mix was done at the audio studio Bad Animals. This was an amazing process that warrants its own future blog post. Here is the final sequence:
So this is the final blog post for this particular exercise. I hope the class got something out of these posts. I had a lot of fun writing them.
Our cast, crew and friend screening for The Hot Dog Cycle will be happening later this month. This weekend The Last Quest will be working on a Documentary Challenge requiring us to make a documentary film from scratch in all of five day (exciting!). Also our distributor Cassidy Dimon has agreed to write a blog post about distributing short films in the next couple of weeks… So yeah come back every once in awhile and see what is happening here with us.
Tags: Behind the Scenes, Brad, Scene 1, The Hot Dog Cycle
So now you have planned it all out and know exactly why its there and what it all means. So now all you have to is to simply cast the actors, lock down the locations, get your crew together, meet with the heads of your departments discussing what you you want from them, rehearse (hopefully), and figure out all of the logistics of each shooting day. But none of these things are simple. They are all things that go after the animatic and before you roll film (or video in this case) but are utterly important. Film making is really about the three P’s (planning, planning and of course planning) and collective inertia. Your job as the producer or director is to get the ball rolling through your enthusiasm and love for the project. All of the aforementioned tasks are things to inspire confidence with the people you work with so when you ask them to do their job even if they don’t see the forest from the trees they know what they can give you and they do their best. Your job really is to inspire people to have the confidence to do the best work they can for whatever the job is. I could try to communicate the nuance and further manushia of each of these things but really that all comes from just doing it time after time. You learn how to make movies by making them. Sidney Lumet in his book Making Movies says that making your first film is justification in and of itself. The best thing to do is to just try to make it, suffer the consequences and learn a ton from your failures… cause really you do one movie to learn how to make the next one better.
So production for Scene 1 of The Hot Dog Cycle… It was a particularly brutal shoot. I have struggled to find enough pictures and/or video of that shoot to show you what it was like but there is little to none to be found. So here is an interview I did just for this blog conserning that shoot. It is long (eight whole minutes) so be warned but I hope it is of interest to whoever is reading this.
Here are the four (!) pictures we captured from that day:
Tags: Behind the Scenes, Brad, Scene 1, The Hot Dog Cycle
Now that the script is done and we had finished a shot list, we still had to figure out exactly how to actually shoot the movie. There are many options for this, some people use storyboards, some stick with shot lists, but we decided to do an animatic. This is a movie you make for your own reference. It is similar to a painter who sketches their subject before beginning the painting. You don’t want to waste paint when you don’t know what you are doing yet. This is the same with video which, instead of wasting paint and one person’s time, it wastes the time of the actors, crew, editors and anyone else doing work on the film. The animatic should serve the function of letting the film maker know what works and what doesn’t in their current plan. If there is a problem the animatic will show you what it is. The problem can then be corrected before shooting begins saving time and resources. Another thing that the animatic helped us to solve was in location scouting. This scene in the animatic shows how epically beautiful and scary the Aurora Bridge is. I didn’t want to shoot here thinking the logistics of dragging a large crew onto that bridge and shooting for a long time would be too difficult. But shooting the animatic on this bridge showed me why stylistically we had to shoot there. The Aurora Bridge is the only bridge in Seattle that effectively communicates the alienation and menace that goes along with our story. Shooting the animatic in this location also made it so we had a plan for the shoot… but that’s for the next post.
Here is Scene 1 from The Hot Dog Cycle in animatic form:
Our next blog post will talk about production and editing.
Tags: Behind the Scenes, Brad, Scene 1, The Hot Dog Cycle
When Shakespeare wrote his plays he left out descriptions of costume, actions and even settings. This is why Shakespeare’s works can be set at anytime or place and the characters can be dressed in whatever fashion the production deems acceptable. When being taught screenwriting it is much the same. You only give the most essential of information. The reason for this is to leave the interpretation of what is happening in the script up to the director. The director needs to create their own images associated with the story that the script reflects. This is what directors usually mean when they reference the word “Vision” when talking about a film. So how does the director translate their vision into actual shots that the Cinematographer and crew know how to set up for?
A shot list.
This is a list of the shots that need to be captured in a particular location. Each shot should include shot framing, actor’s actions and any camera movements in the shot. A good shot list is like gold for all the people behind the camera. It is the blueprint for all production work.
Here is the shot list for the animatic of The Hot Dog Cycle:
Our next blog post will be watching our animatic.
Tags: Behind the Scenes, Brad, Scene 1, The Hot Dog Cycle
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