The Last Post

So, that's it then.  Time to start wrapping up the blog having rendered a final print of the movie last night, foley and ADR and all the special effects in place. It's looking a bit of alright! I'll probably jott down a few more ideas here after I've had some feedback on the film, you know me, I like to think in type so there will probably be much more to write about:  the release of a film is nothing like the end of a project.

I'm too close to it right now, I've recently spent a lot of hours hammering it out.  But it's inevitable that viewers will cast new light on it for me because there will be things I'm either not looking for or can't see any more and it takes an audience to spot something that you didn't think you meant.

I recently went to a screening for a film in which I acted.  It being over a year since I actually did the job, I could barely remember the story and so I enjoyed it immensely. I'm not one of those people who hates seeing himself on film, anyway. (Well, see below)  More importantly, there were things about the character I played that I didn't know about.  Things therefor that I couldn't have deliberately performed.  Seeing the character set against others revealed facts about him that I was oblivious to when I was working on him. Turns out he was a bit of a bastard, and I thought he was nice!

I brought that up with the director and he admitted he didn't want to tell me too much for fear of it influencing my performance.  That's the way in life too, isn't it? Because we only ever see the scenes that we live in, we are so often unaware of the way our actions and our emotions impact upon others it's a wonder we manage to conduct any kind of effective relationship.

I'm rambling a bit - emotionally knackered - this last month has been a tedious lot. I don't like sitting at a desk long, it makes me cranky.  The endless photoshopping and rotoscoping effects, compositing final images and reassembling the process shots  I mentioned in the previous post has taken it's toll.  Sixteen shots containing some kind of digital effect, would you believe?  This was supposed to be a very simple little film!

Now that I'm a little ahead of schedule as far as screening goes, I'm going to take a week or two off from looking at any of it to see if I can come back with a clear head and an open mind. That means I'm not showing it to anyone quite yet.  Who knows. There may still be a director's cut to do!

Of course I'm desperately looking forward to people's reaction, if only.to have them tell me what I might have missed.

Not quite there yet

People who make films are supposed to like David Cronenberg, so it should come as no surprise that I praise him.  Having done a hard day's editing, I turned on the television to escape from films for an hour or two, and when Channel 4 suggested I watch "History of Violence" I have to say I wasn't keen.  But what a film!  It is moving, vicious, funny, harrowing, sensitive and so so beautiful that I was captivated before the first cut.  I mean, HOW does he do that?! I guess the answer to that lies somewhere in the 35 industry awards that the film gathered, but I know it got me going before he'd even put a pair of scissors to the thing.
 

If you could only see the workings under all this

I suppose that demonstrates the power of a good establishing shot.  Today has been spent, appropriately, on finalising my own establishing shot. It has been a big effort, three interacting layers; two of animation and one motion  background and it all took a surprising amount of time. Remember, I've already shot everything here!

  It's actually a pretty satisfactory result to my eye and not far off the original storyboard but it left me wondering if it wouldn't be better just to build bigger sets in future and get it all in one take.

For the rest of it, the film exists as a rough cut right now, rendered at 9pm today  - I guess that makes the deadline in a manner of speaking.  All the time, I'm learning new things about the process. I have assembled and disassembled shots so often and I've filed frames into so many different folders that the chapter I wrote on data wrangling six months ago is starting to sound naive and blindly optimistic. 

The management of data is such a crucial thing on a project even this small.  It's all very well your frame-grabber knowing where it saved the raw file for frame no 172 of that sequence you did last May where the woman turns and smiles, but if you need to get into that file yourself to rub out a bit of rigging or a fragment of registration mark using some other software, it could take you so long searching through stack after stack of "dot ORFs" that when you find it you've totally forgotten what you wanted it for.

"Poppylands" exposure charts:  now mercifully redundant

All the time you're editing and manipulating frames you're trying to keep the quality and resolution as high as you can - so much will be lost to compressors downstream that it will make you cry!  I had a moment of concern when I watched an assembly and two of the shots appeared to be out of focus.  This was because I'd accidentally asked for Mpeg quality in an early generation long before I imported the clips into the editor.

One day there will be a full featured stop motion management package that will take care of everything for me in all circumstances, but I haven't found it yet.  (Things are getting better - I once had to write a very complicated spreadsheet to keep track of a production)  However,  I'm still depending on eight - yes eight - separate software packages for this post production, so it's vigilance, diligence and an anally-retentive attention to detail for me for now.