Taking a Night Off

Well, I think I've finished Scene 5, the fainting scene. We'll see what happens when I look back at the renders this evening. I had to stop the rendering and shut down my PC at 3AM last night after waking up to a severe lightning storm; I always unplug the PC during lightning storms, just in case. Got it started back up again this morning, so it should be done when I get home.

I don't really plan on working on the movie tonight. I have to transfer the trailer and two of the commercials to DVD for Grasshopper's (of "Robot-Ussin" Fame) Urban 2 Suburban Film Festival, which takes place this Sunday. Then I'll be forced to sit on the sofa, drink beer, and watch a movie, and possibly an episode of "The Greatest American Hero".

If I don't take a night off here and there, I'll burn out, just like this kid I knew in high school did. He worked really hard and got straight-A's in our AP classes, and then one day he had a nervous breakdown and had to leave school for about three months. When he came back he was heavily medicated, and was never quite the same. Last I heard he was working at a gas station. So, I guess the point of the story is that unless I take a break now and then, I'll end up working at a gas station. Yep.

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Here is the next set of color correction pictures. This is a frame grab of Alexander (played by Scott P. Graham) from the final scene in "Corporate Zombie".

Before

After

We shot this scene in an office building with the typical fluorescent lights overhead. Since it was impractical for us to replace all of the bulbs in the office, we ended up with a green tinge in most of the shots. Frankly, the "before" shot looks like crap. It's a sickly green and is also underexposed. So I fixed the green with the DFT 55mm Fluorescent plugin, adjusted the levels to correct the exposure, added diffusion, letterboxed it, and applied my "two-strip technicolor" recipe to it. And now it looks nice.

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Vote for "Robot-Ussin", directed by Nikc Miller of Better Hollywood Productions. His movie (which Tracey and I helped out with) is one of 5 finalists out of over 1,000 entries. If they win, the film will screen at the SXSW Festival in Austin, which is one of the bigger festivals in the US. Nikc helped out a lot with "Livelihood", filming zombie commercials, recording some music, and acting as "Buckets" in the Rock Zombie section. Whenever he gets into a festival, he always mentions us in his interviews and Q&A's. So a vote for him is a vote for "Livelihood"!

Ryan

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Addendum:

It seems that the aforementioned death of Francis Xavier was a hoax, used to promote his horror TV series that was screening at The Charles. I'm all for new, exciting, and daring publicity stunts, but this seems like an awfully cheap and cruel way to get people to attend your screening.

Apparently, he has a history of these sorts of publicity stunts. I have to say that I agree with the author of the linked page. When your publicity stunt overshadows your movie, that's bad, especially if people react negatively to your stunt. All press is not good press, and there are a lot of people who will judge a film based on publicity unrelated to the content of the film. Just look at the "Bennifer" fiasco. I think "Gigli" tanked solely because of that negative publicity (it was a decent film, whereas I'm pretty sure "Jersey Girl" tanked because it sucked). And I'm sure Tom Cruise also isn't helping his box office by acting like a dipshit.

What I do know is that this stunt is quite a turn-off for me, both as a filmmaker and as a potential ticket buyer. My opinion of Francis, and consequently of his films, has dropped quite a few notches.

Ryan

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

Not Much Progress

Well, even though I worked on the film from 6:30-10:15, I didn't get to Scene 6, and I didn't even finish Scene 5. Instead, after watching all of the completed renders, I decided to scrap the film look I'd been using for "Mother In-Law Zombie" and use another, similar one. Everything in the first set of renders just looked too washed out and flat. The new look has deeper blacks, and better color.

As a result of changing the look, I had to go back into each scene to make sure that the color correction on all shots still looked good. Some shots required minor tweaking. I also put a noise reduction on a bunch of shots in Scene 3 after noticing that the gamma boosts I'd applied created too much grain.

Regardless, it seems to look great now, and it also seems that this new film look will allow me to work more quickly, because it is more flattering to the lighting and color scheme we used in this section of the film. As a result, I won't have to spend so long making each shot look good.

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I'm thinking of posting "before and after" stills from the film. Just so everyone can get a sense of what the color correcting is actually accomplishing, and so everyone can understand why I'm spending so much time on it.

If this is something that you think would be worthwhile, let me know.

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In a sad bit of news, I just learned that Francis Xavier, a local filmmaker who seemed to be on his way to bigger things, died in a car accident in NY.

It was Francis' movie, "Barry's Gift" that played at the networking event at Gardel's last week, and I'm sorry now that I didn't get a chance to see his film and meet him there.

Things like this remind you that death can happen to anybody, at any time. I'm sure Francis had a lot of movies left in him; the fact that he won't have a chance to make those movies because of a completely random event is tragic.

Just a few weeks ago I was telling the Bennett Brothers and Nikc all of my ideas for future films, "Just in case I die". But, if I died before "Livelihood" was finished, would anyone be able to finish it in a way that I would be satisfied with?

Ryan

Bad Dreams

I exercised again last night, so I didn't get started on the color correcting until about 7:00PM. Spent some more time trying to fix the grainy shots from "Corporate Zombie", based on some research I've been doing on noise removal. We'll see how the renders turn out.

I also fixed up some more shots from the first scene of "Mother In-Law Zombie". The first two shots just weren't doing it for me, and since they're the first two shots in that section of the movie, that wasn't a good thing. So, I replaced them with different shots that I liked better.

Spent some more time on Scene 5, which is a night-time scene where we find out that Vida (the Mother In-Law) has come back to life. I'd like it to look creepy, but we didn't light it that way (we lit it flat). So I'm using a plugin that lets you put light patterns in the shot in post; it's pretty cool, and seems to be doing the trick by giving a blue moonlit glow to the highlights, and also putting some subtle but weird lighting patterns on faces and shadows. I also experimented with some shots where the protagonist faints; I duplicated the shot and faded in and out a color burn as the shot shudders and she swoons, resulting in a "Fight Club"-esque effect.

I didn't stop working on this scene until about 11PM. I've found that whenever I work this late, I have an entire night of dreams about whatever it is I've been working on. This is extremely annoying; in my dreams last night I was color correcting the same shot over and over and over and over again. Usually I'll wake up and be annoyed about it, and try to convince myself to dream about something else, but I pretty much always just start having the exact same dream again. The same thing happened when I was editing. It doesn't make for a very good sleep, and I end up being tired for the entirety of the following day.

Tonight I hope to finish Scene 5, and possibly Scene 6, and then get a better night's sleep.

Ryan

The weekend

This weekend:

Friday: Practiced with the Dirty Marmaduke Flute Squad. Fixed a few shots that were messed up in Scene 1 of Mother In-Law Zombie, but didn't get much done other than that.

Saturday: Started work on Scene 2, but had to stop at about 3PM to get everything hooked up and packed for the show that night. Great crowd at the show; there were a lot of people who'd never seen us before, so hopefully we won some new fans. Had some minor feedback problems at the beginning of the set, and my guitar string broke on the first song, but there weren't any show-stoppers. Tracey videotaped it, and on watching the tape back, I think we gave a good performance. My drumming is definitely improving, which is nice, even though I sweat like a pig in that tux. I think I'm going to have to take off the jacket midway through the set next time. Next gig: Headlining on July 28th at The Mojo Room. After that, August 6th and the Hondance Saturday Do-Over.

Sunday: Was finally able to work for an extended period of time. Finished color correcting scenes 2, 3, and 4, and got about halfway through scene 5. They're rendering out right now. Fairly painless so far, although I'm dreading the "flying plates" sequence towards the end of the film, which will involve rotoscoping out the wires and nuts that suspended the plates. I think I got most of the wires out for the rough-cut screening we had in April, but I didn't have time to get to the nuts. So, that'll probably take a while.

Ryan