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.
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!
“I’d like to invite Bradley Hutchinson’s IT’S IN THE P-I to be screened as an official selection of the 35th Seattle International Film Festival (May 21-June 11) to be shown during the Short Film Weekend (May 29-31, 2009). All of the shorts will be screened at the new state-of-the-art SIFF Cinema where all formats are brilliantly projected. SIFF is also a recognized Oscar™ nominating Festival.
The Seattle International Film Festival is the largest and most well-attended film festival in the United States with 150,000 attendees expected in 2009. SIFF screens a wide selection of the best new international features and documentaries over the 25-day festival, presenting more than 400 films from over 50 countries. With extensive local, national and international media coverage, the Festival has emerged as one of the country’s most accessible and highly publicized film events.
We would be honored to present your film in Seattle and look forward to receiving your confirmation of its availability. Of course, if you have questions or require additional information please contact me.”
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.
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.
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