Slight Change of Plans

More exercising last night. I'll probably have to stop for a few days, because my back is starting to hurt again.

Got started on the movie at about 7:30PM, and worked until 10:30PM. Spent the time fixing up the re-renders of Scenes 1-5 with the new film look. Some things were too grainy, some things were too bright, etc, etc. Also worked more on getting a good look for the fainting segment, and I think I finally got it right. When she walks into the room, it's fairly warm and saturated, but when she turns her head and her facial expression changes (when she sees that Vida has come back to life), the saturation and warmness fade down, and it almost looks like the blood is rushing out of her face. I think it's pretty cool.

Here are the first set of color correction before and after pictures. I just grabbed a random still; this is Roger (played by Lewis Smith) and Vida (played by Michelle Trout) from Scene 3 in "Mother In-Law Zombie".

Before

After

As you can see, one looks like video, and one looks like film. For this shot, I've letterboxed it, adjusted the levels, desaturated it, and then added a bleach bypass and a warm tint. What you can't see is the film motion, which changes it to a film speed of 24 frames per second, as opposed to the 60 fields per second that normal video runs at.

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There has been a slight change of plans in the way I'm going to be finishing the film. The Hondance Saturday Do-Over is coming up on August 6th, and I'm going to be screening a "teaser" section of the film there. This will most likely be the first third of the movie, up to the scenes in each section where the characters come back to life.

As a result, once I'm done working on Scene 5 for "Mother In-Law Zombie", I'm going to stop working on the color correction and move on to the sound fx and music for the first act of the movie. I think ultimately this will be a good thing, as it'll give me a sense of how long it's probably going to take to do the music for the movie, and whether or not I'll need to take time off of work in early September to get it done in time for the premiere. Hopefully this preview will also drum up some more excitement for the film, but at the very least I'll get to see how an audience reacts to the film, and see if there's anything weak in the first act that needs to be tightened up.

Ryan