So I believe it was our intention to blog quite a bit more concerning this whole five day International Documentary Film Challenge thing we just got through doing. Not to make excuses, but shit got drastic. The movie was good enough that we put more time in energy into it than it probably warranted. The final title was “Its in the PI.” It concerns itself with the plight of Seattle’s Post-Intelligencer, Seattle’s oldest daily newspaper. It came out much better then anything else I have worked on that could call itself nonfiction, but it took a toll on all of us. I was glad to work within this new entity “the Something Factory.” It is the melding of the Common Language Project, The Last Quest and some of our other awesomely talented friends. It was great to work with people who put as much passionate obsession into their work as I do. Here is the logo I created to go at the end of the credits:
So anyways I am posting this on the blog to let you know why nothing was posted for the last few days and to also let you know that Morgan and I are going to do some video podcasts for ya’all in the next few days doing a breakdown of a scene from the movie.
Alright well it is 4:15am and I go now to be unconscious.
Tags: Brad, Common Language Project, International Documentary Challenge, Morgan, Video
Dear reader,
The Last Quest has entered the International Documentary Challenge with the members of the Common Language Project.
We brainstormed on Monday about the possible ideas we had for the competition. Here are the genres they provide and our top candidates:
1st person:
The story of my parent’s relationship. It is quite a touching story, filled with thrills and chills. To sum it up they have been married for 30 years and still make out all the time. It was love at first sight but my mom was married and my dad didn’t want to have even a steady girlfriend.
Art
Our friend Cat knows a guy that is involved with a group that does things like:
1) Get these huge machines from Boeing that spit electricity at things at amazing voltage.
2) Shoot this electricity at quarters.
3) Give these shrunken weirdo electricity quarters to friends.
Biography / Character Study
Aurthur Wright has a public access show about getting healthy. He works out for the first 1/2 of the show and then cooks a delicious healthy mean for the second half of his show. He also weighs 350 lbs, is active in the Black Vietnam Vet community and has had a tracheotomy.
Experimental
Janet also has a public access show. Her story is twisted and crazy and wonderful. She used to export Washington apples to Japan from the Bahamas. She is now a private dectective and she describes her clients are “eccentric.” We were going to interview her about her life and then make a video mosaic similar to The Tracy Fragments.
Historical
Our angle to this was a history of a relationship. We were going to use my parents again.
Music
“Morgan proposes to Carolyn Mark.” It’s true, I love her. To the point where I would go ask her to marry me. In Canada. While someone was filming it. Actually I think that’s the only way I could get up the nerve to do it.
Nature
Had you any idea there was a group of people that got together to “fancy guinea pigs?” Katie did.
Social Issue / Political
We were going to do a story about the PI closing. It is going out of buisness in the next week or so.
Sports
We were going to make a documentary about Bike Jousting.
They give you two genres (pick one), and a theme that you have about 5 days to make a 4 – 7 minute documentarty about. We drew Musical and Historical. The theme is Fear / Hope.
Thankfully we decided not to drive to Cananda. And I don’t have to ruin my life and ask Ms. Mark to marry me, out of the blue, with no hope of her saying yes, pissing off the girl I’m dating and bringing my tender ego (recently bolstered by exercising and heavy vitamin intake) to new and exciting lows.
We also decided not to do the history of my parents relationship. The PI story was just too hot and timely. And also four of the people we are working with are or have been journalists and they feel strongly about the topic.
So they went today and had three half hour long amazing interviews. The rest of it might be a little difficult to come together, I’m editing and producing this one, so I’ll give you an update when I have one…
Love,
Morgan
Tags: Brad, Brainstorm, Common Language Project, Documentary, Film, Genre, International Documentary Challenge, Morgan, Video
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
0