Y'all, I'm Pro

So, I've been feeling pretty good about the movie and, by extension, myself.

And then I was reminded that it's never a good idea to feel good about myself. By the abrupt and unpleasant realization that I evidently do not know how to use a head-cleaning tape. Someone who I saw vaguely as an authority figure in highschool told me that you should run the whole head-cleaning tape frequently, the whole way through (around 5 minutes) , and then rewind it. And for some reason I never bothered to check and learn that's about the absolute last way that you should use it.

Head-cleaning tapes are very abrasive, so you are actually supposed to run them infrequently, for about 5 seconds, and throw out the tape once you eventually get to the end, which, incidentally is way more intuitive when you actually think about what is happening and how the equipment works.

So, I've been randomly wearing out an important part of my camera, because I can't pay attention to what I'm doing.

Go. Me.

On the bright side, as I maybe(?) mentioned, even though there is still a whole lot left to do, I can now actually see the end of this project in a very tangible, non abstracted, very movie-like kinda way.

Help Me If You Can...

Because this one section is. not. go.

Do the drugs and dance go back to back? 20 minutes apart? 30? When does the freaking bracelet scene happen? Gr.

On an unrelated note, some stills from the reshoots:

It's like, that one sequence in The Hobbit where they all chill at the horse dude's house...

I think I have discovered my problem with updating here, and, as promised in the title it is exactly like The Hobbit (the book, not the animated feature which is, incidentally, my Favorite Movie Of All Time and doesn't contain said sequence, probably for the reasons I will outline below.)

But you know how in The Hobbit there is that the brief section where after they get rescued by the eagles they all rest in the house with the dude with the horses and dogs, and they all have to let their belts out a few notches because they are finally getting enough to eat? (Obviously I pretty much don't). And it's a relatively long while in the story itself, but, unless I'm horribly confused, Tolkien doesn't spend much page time on it because everything is going well, so it's totally boring?

That's kinda been the problem with this movie. In terms of what's been going on on-set I don't really know what I can say that's terribly interesting... Describing shooting would pretty much look like this for every single day:

We were a little behind schedule, the actors were all terrific and don't seem at ALL like they belong in silly indie films, and Peter was indispensably awesome/awesomely indispensable. At some point in the day, we all felt either a little or a lot burned out.

Describing editing is even worse:

I stared at the screen, and frantically hit hot-keys in an attempt to will a cogent structure into being. Then, I freaked out over the fact that the politics aren't coming through clearly. Then, I got really excited when an actor perfectly synched up with a music sting. Then, I decided that I needed to A. add more scenes B. add random archival footage or C. seriously consider adding animation. Sometimes I edit scenes.

Lather, Rinse, Repeat.

Although from my perspective there is plenty going on, there's not the kind of drama that I can easily write about, for the most part it's been a smooth (if overly extended and overly ambitious) little project.

So I don't really know what to do about this little blog. I do want to blog more, but I'm thinking of switching to a more general film-related blog that is more general and less project centered. We'll see. I'm getting close to the point of putting up an actual webpage for Sheila so I'll probably wait till then before making any changes here.

Until then, (my dear, like, 2 readers) keep an eye out for my little-less-then-month-on-average updates here!

RE-SHOOTS!

Ah, the dreaded re-shoots are. finally. getting. DONE!! Muy exciting :D

I don't think that they will be completely done by this weekend, but I feel optimistic that they will be shot, synched, and edited pre-break. Which means, accept for the faux-vlog and photo footage we'll have a pretty final draft going.

I'm almost on schedule! YAY!

Updatesville

Yoha...

Canary, possibly the only person who checks this blog, told me that I have not wrote here in forever. Something new and different...

Soo, updatesville: I am done with the rough-cut with my footage, and the re-edit of that rough-cut. Through this process, I've decided that I want to add a pretty substantial set of scenes in order to clarify the lead's relationship. So I'm currently writing new scenes, and we'll shoot them (hopefully) the next two weekends.

From there, the next/last major thing that I need to do is edit the historical footage into a docu/visualartsy thingamagig -- accompanied, most likely, by psuedo-vlogs with Sheila and Tommy.

The two less-major things that I need to do are a mini-photo shoot, and finish the dance scene, and of course do color and sound sweetening.

 Yup, so that's the update. More soon...

Whoot!

Well, I have evidently failed at blog again. But, I did manage to get all the scenes I had rough edited! Unfortunately, rough means very rough, but that still means that I now get to work on a very satisfying stage of editing. So, yay. I might try to post here once a day, cos otherwise I forget this exists. Yup. that's my exciting story. 

Aaaand, now for some amazing pics of Canary and Peter!

Is It Wrong?

If I use a take just because I like Canary's hair in it?

To Be Approximately Precise...

I've rough-edited around 56 scenes and I have around 24 of the footage already shot left.

This thing has too many freaking scenes.

Working on this sequnece was a lot of fun though.

The Long and Winding Edit...

I've known a handful of people who can edit films quickly and well. I'm kind of horrified by them.

Here, for those of you who are curious is my exxxxxtremely professional editing workflow. PResented as a photobooth journal in sepia!      


1. Edit a rough cut. (I'm currently about halfway done with this) This is I take the footage, chop it up and make scenes out of it. After this is done it will (optimistically) sorta resemble a movie, but in the way that teenagers sorta resemble adults: if you don't know better you could be fooled into thinking that you were looking at the final product but you just reeeally aren't.

2. Do a sound mix-y - music-y - type-y edit. Wherein I get an actual cut.  For me the logic of scenes/sequences etc is based as much on sound as image so this is the stage that typically feels like things are actually coming together.

3. Color-correct and sound-sweeten. Try to make everything seem pretty. Or at least, like better. I'm currently ridiculously nervous about this stage because I really don't know how to do either of these things. I'm hoping that if I just believe hard enough, the color-correction fairy will appear in the middle of the night and do it all for me.

There is also a chance that somewhere in there I also have to shoot some extra coverage and an eensy scene or two, but I'm not admitting anything.

But I'm not super excited about it.





So, yeah. In retrospect this is probably mostly just interesting to me, but there you go. My goal is to have the rough-cut done by the end of the month, and the project completed by early May.

Or, if that is too ambitious, before the world ends in 2012.

Peace!

The End Of Filming

So, the end (by which I mean second half because that's when I stopped writing) was...

Um...

Either remarkably boring, or stressful enough to make me largely repress the memories. I know that it was hot, and that I had to make the actors wear coats at times because it was supposed to be winter (evidently in hawkland deciduous trees are fine with Colorado winters), and I remember at some point a homeless man tried to convince us to make movies where kids from various cultures dressed up in their national garb and dance.

So in lieu of actually trying to dredge up memories which I am going to assume are buried for a reason I am going to post a few bad low res NON-COLOR CORRECTED stills of the footage thus far! These are from some of the scenes that I've edited, more will come as I continue to edit...

Also they aren't color corrected.


(also, in addition to being grainy I think these ended up stretched. Sorryz!)

For those of you who are wondering, the aspect ratio is on purpose. More on that later ;)

Land of 1000 Dances (Edits)

By Wilson Pickett!

Evidently it's been something like four months since I have written on here, so it will probably be a miracle if anybody reads this. 

Epic fail.

This is at least the third movie that I've done this with. I start out with a sincere intent to document every moment, then I get really really tired in the middle of shooting the project and am completely unable to deal with anything pertaining to the movie by the end of the day.

Sheila is now done with primary shooting, although we still need to get some pickups and location coverage (and possibly a scene or two but I'm not admitting to anything.) I'm now in the fantastically awesome editing-the-rough cut phase which I am highly optimistic will be more conducive to blogging.

I'll talk a little on how shooting wound up and where the rough-cut is at now next post.

Which will hopefully be in less then four months.

Peace Out!

~Hawk

Knock on Wood

Today was a very long day. As I type this my eyes are glazed, my fingers to uncertain to type without making constant mistakes, and my brain is a mushy pile of... mush.

But I am riding pretty high. Today was the first day we didn't do primarily interiors and I discovered that we move at pace that definitely slower, is at least comparable to what we've been doing with interiors. Meaning, that (and maybe I shouldn't say this and risk bringing a terrible jinx down upon my head) um, where was I? Oh, yes. I'm pretty darn sure we're going to finish this film. 

That was always my biggest fear with this project- I don't have a safety net if shooting falls through. If I don't get almost all the footage we need, this is screwed. And, yes I do know that in editing I'm gonna look back and swear shooting was the easy part. I'm fully anticipating and prepared for the computer headaches, the unending quality post production has, and of course that little thing where this is about ten times longer than anything I've ever made before.

But production is the dangerous part. It's the part where things go wrong, where things fall apart and projects don't get finished. And obviously that could still happen, but I don't think it will. As huge as this project seems, for the first time I can really see how we are going to make it to the end of shooting. And that, my friends, is grand.

The Easy Part

Shoot big scene today! Is yayness! 

Tragically we went half an hour over... This has happened at least once before, and I'm getting concerned it's becoming a habit. Buuuuut, we got  a very very big scene done today, and I'm optimistic it'll turn out swell. I'm a little nervous about the technical end, perpetually so in fact. It's because I'm working the camera, and that just isn't my area of expertise. But le actors nailed it, hard. We are almost entirely done with scenes in the apartment. That's the good news. The bad news is those were the easy part...

One Week Down...

How many to go? We started production last Monday (06/22), and we've done 3 days of around 6 hours, and 3 days that were less than that. We are making solid time, not jaw drop beautiful time, but certainly not bad. This past week has blurred together in my mind... From now on I am going to update after every shooting day when things are a little more fresh in my mind. But some highlights:

1. My cinematography is unbelievably sketchy- so far there have been 4 people working the camera and setting up shots, depending on who can make it on what day. I actually do think this is going to turn out alright. Think/pray, because frankly this is all kinds of wrong. 

2. I haven't loaded and watched all the footage that we shot yet, but so far everything looks good. Some looks even better then I thought it would.

3. I have to find a better way to mark my sound and visual tracks for synching, cos the way I've been doing it takes for flipping ever. And is really really frustrating.

Yup. That's it for now... More soon!!

Peace

The Kindness of Strangers

So this week has been largely devoted to the fun and challenging task of getting that last little "oomph" I need in terms of start-up funds for this project. In addition to asking all my friends to kick in a buck or two (a HUGE thanks to the wonderful non-strangers who contributed) I've been contacting local businesses to see if any were interested in donating/small-scale sponsorship in exchange for marketing love. I thought that this was primarily going to be an exercise in form. I was wrong. 

People pretty much rock.  

More on this later, but a have definitely learned a couple of things this week.

1. If you have weird/outside the box ideas don't be afraid to try them. You may waste a little time, but you may get some results.  And any results are great results.

2. If you are going to do fundraising at all, give yourself enough time to do it. I didn't give myself quite enough time. It's a bit of a bummer. 

Moral of this story: I am extremely grateful to everyone who is contributing to this project, be it through talent, generosity, or simple well-wishes. Without your support I would just be sitting alone in room with a camcorder filming my toes and trying to call it "art."   

Thanks to all the beautiful people spreading the love!

Peace Out!

Ask me about the gender binary...

Or really, ask Tommy. Because to some extent I'm worried that I pretty much failed at addressing that part of my story... This is a mistake that I tend to make a lot in story telling, I forget to give my readers or viewers the context that I assume but they might not be familiar with. I don't want to be obvious or to beat people over the head with points, I really do try to be subtle. But when I'm not careful, "subtle" becomes "lost."

For example, what the heck am I talking about right now? My second primary character, Tommy, is supposed to be a "gender anarchist"... or at least a subverter. He cross-dresses for political not fetishistic reasons. He isn't transgendered, just a little gender-queer. 

Well, isn't transgendered depends on your definition of the word... Tommy does not identify as female, so he isn't trans in that sense of the word. Authors such as Riki Wilchins have encouraged people to look at transgendered to mean transgressively gendered, a rather broad and provocative paradigm. 

Gender as a binary - male/female - is a deep and important part of our culture. We hold it to be a self-evident truism, when in my opinion it deserves some very heavy scrutiny. On some levels this is starting to be deconstructed in a major way - for example most people have started to differentiate between "sex" and "gender." On the other hand I wonder if ways in which we are deconstructing is always useful. To take the above example, people tend to think that "sex" is a biological reality, "gender" is a more flexible cultural construct. While I'm not convinced that I completely disagree with this perspective, it is an over-simplification at best. When we say that sex is biological and binary what part of biology are we referring to? Anatomy? Hormones? DNA? These different aspects of biology don't always match up. At best a biological binary is a human likelyhood, not an absolute. 

Okay, I'm pretty much rambling now. Long story short, I believe in a multitude of gender experiences, from biology on up.  Tommy as a character is designed to challenge some of the "trappings" of gender through visual juxtaposition, and political camp. But as I said at the beginning, he isn't quite where he needs to be for this notion to be clear on camera.

If anyone has any favorite drag/camp/gender subverting movies or art I can hit up for inspiration I'd love to hear them. : )

If you are interested in an actually coherent version of what I was talking about above please check out Kate Bornstein http://www.katebornstein.com/KatePages/indexkb.htm, or Riki Wilchins, http://books.google.com/books?id=RysbAAAAYAAJ&dq=inauthor:Riki+inauthor:Anne+inauthor:Wilchins&ei=j-QmSrDVHZCGkAT2sLTaCg&pgis=1 in my opinion two of the most accessibly intelligent authors writing in this area.

Things that you remember

I am make a rough draft of a shooting schedule! I am alarmed at the size of this freaking thing! I am listening to Sounds of Silence and pretending to be Benjamin Braddock! Minimum of 7 different 10 hour days to film, and probably somewhat more...

Soooo, I'm just not thinking about that anymore today. Here is some random concept-y ish images I'm jes pulling off of ze internets... These are the things that you remember/know about the 60's/70's. If any of these images are remotely foreign to you  I would seriously reevaluate what you are doing with your life ; )

Concept Pictures

1. Sheila is soooo not cell phone savvy. Sure they seem just like those communicator dealios from Star Trek, but Kirk made it look so easy. Oh well, no twitter no cry.

2. Don't help the homeless... Boulder has some problems with it's homeless population. I don't mean that the homeless are particularly numerous or hostile here. I mean that we just don't want them. Our begging laws are semi-draconian and every time the homeless shelter tries to move anywhere the nearest neighborhood complains. In the meantime we power down our fair-trade vegan lattes and god help you if you forget to recycle. The song "Easy to Be Hard" from Hair was written for my town.

3. "Beatniks and politics, nothing is new." 

4. Hippies will evidently pray to anything. In an earlier draft of the script I had a sort of mini-arc where Sheila thought she was turning into Shiva. That got mostly dropped in the current incarnation, but I still have several scenes where she is rubbing ash all over herself.

5. I have a long and involved dance sequence. It is also a dream sequence. Sure, no one does either of those anymore... But, um, it's an homage. Yup, definitely not something I would put in any other movie. I'M BEING HOMAGE-Y NOT WIERD OKAY!

6. Sheila may spend a little too much time at the begging of the movie huddled up asleep. But look! Her sweatshirt matches the flowers!

7. The economy is bad news man. No one should have to spend 8 hours a day asking strangers if they have a minute to save the children. That's okay... Sheila manages to turn her campaign job into a slightly better paying internet guerilla job. And play spy vs. spy with the Boulder Obama campaign's other top guerilla while she's at it. 

8. Sexualized advertising can be a little shocking. But it's Sheila's fault right? She believed in the sexual revolution.

9. Tommy getting into the dragz. Tommy isn't a transsexual, he's just into gender subversion. Or something. Who knows with kids these days? Aaand, who can guess what movie this picture is inspired by!

 

10. What does change mean to you? Sheila's had enough change for the time being, but she's working her butt off for Obama anyway... 

11. Sheila and Tommy spend a lot of (okay, fine, maybe too much) time sitting around in coffee shops having faux-intellectual discussions about nebulous social-studies issues. Hey, they say to write what you know.