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
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
This is Brad here to say hello! So the site is up there are sections still under construction but for the most part the framework is up and we are here to stay. The Last Quest Blog will hopefully be a good place for fellow film makers and fans of the film making process to see how a group of people in Seattle have figured out how to make images move.
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