Over the River and to Editing I Go

I live in Orange County. Where I am editing with Bill is in Burbank - over 50 miles from where I live. This doesn't bother me much because of two things: 1) I like to drive and 2) the price of gas has gone way down. I love living in Orange County, but it does sometimes make my movie making a bit of an ordeal; I have always conquered it but occasionally the commute gets on my nerves. This was one of those weekends.

It doesn't rain very often in California, but when it does everyone freaks out. I am a native Californian and it makes me mad that people can't seem to drive in the rain. The most annoying part is that I hit the worst traffic when it wasn't raining! I ended up 20 minutes late to editing on Saturday because of the traffic.

When I left editing on Saturday the rain had stopped and created an incredibly beautiful sunset. It was a much needed visual because I spent most of the day watching the two hours of footage we shot on the last day of shooting; it's not that I was upset with the footage, I just spent far too long looking at the same images over and over again. I even went home and kept working but going over my script with a director's eye to try and solve the two hours of footage that Bill and I still had to whittle into a scene on Sunday.

On Sunday it didn't rain on my way to editing, but I still ended up with traffic problems! For reasons not apparent to me a CHP car did a round robin and stopped traffic in all lanes when only the right lane needed blocked - you see I could tell this because I was only the second car back from the traffic stop. Seriously, was that nessecary? But I somehow still ended up getting to editing on time. This was a good thing, because Bill and I finished Angela's flashback today! The film is now over 70 minutes (and we're not done yet) so we are safely in feature terroritory! Woot! There was no traffic on the way home.

As much as my brain always feels overloaded when I leave editing, I always start to miss the movie once I'm home. I really want to see the finished product on End because I truly hope that it is going to be worth it.

Aha!

So far everyone on the production has had an “aha!” moment when they realize why Alan took David’s calendar in the script. It’s a beautiful, seemingly insignificant piece of dialogue that doesn’t catch you as being in reference to something until repeat viewings. I thought at this point all of the major crew and cast had their moment.

Bill had his “aha!” moment on Saturday during editing.

I laughed.

Learning Curve

When Christopher and I set out to make End we knew it was going to be a learning process. I remember telling him that success or fail, just making this movie was going to make us better filmmakers. Ever since those words came out of my mouth that has been slowly coming true. I am learning a lot.

The first thing I learned is that with a brilliant cast and crew I can accomplish a nearly impossible production schedule. We had some issues, and some fun things to deal with in post, but we did it.

Now that we are in post production I am learning that making a feature film is not all that similar to making a short film. The biggest difference is time – not the length of the film itself, but how long it take to put it together. There is just so much more to deal with and it’s hard to take that into account until you are actually doing it. Let me tell you post production on a feature takes a long time. It’s suddenly become clear to me why post production staffs are huge and why it takes such a long time to finish a feature – even on our budget. I can’t wait to see the finished product but I am going to have to wait. That is the hardest part of post – waiting for everything to finally be ready to pair together into a complete form.

I am also learning that music is a great thing but another layer that takes lots of time and patience. We have not found a composer yet, but those we have been talking to are great sports and seem to be genuinely interested in this film. That is always a good thing to have in a potential new crew member. Again, for a short film music is so much simpiler.

However, despite everything I am learning, even the painful things (like drywall is much more fragile than you think) I believe End is going to be a film worth making and watching. I am excited for the near future when I can show End to all those that worked so hard on it and begin the next and final step.

Glitches & Other Fun

I haven’t felt this busy yet idle since college. Being in post production is interesting; I’ve only been in post on short films and student films before and this whole feature film thing is a whole different creature. I think I’m keeping my stress level bottled up pretty well though.

One of the funnest things about post production is the technical glitches that always seem to happen and they have been happening to us. Nothing earth shattering has happened so far but glitches are always time consuming; things that sound so simple like backing up footage on digibeta’s and capturing footage become huge hurdles without you expecting them to. There is nothing more frustrating than spending hours capturing footage and quitting for the day to then come back the next day and discover that your hard drive has dumped everything that you worked so hard on capturing the day before. Because of a stupid technical glitch you spend hours doing the exact same thing you did the day before. This is why I do not envy Bill. Bill is my hero.

Whenever technical glitches start happening in post I just remind myself that this would be happening to any filmmaker no matter what their budget. If we shot on film we could find out that part of the negative got scratched or it was accidently pushed or pulled a stop or two while being developed or any other of a million things that could go wrong.

I’ve been very good at pointing out the obvious recently so I have this little nugget of wisdom: all phases of production are tedious and hard no matter how much you enjoy them. What I have been telling my post production crew is the production philosophy I live by. Deadlines are great; but at this phase in our careers it is more important to make sure we have a well made, great project to show than rushing through everything just to make a date. Deadlines come around again, but if we take the time to make sure End is the best possible movie we can make it, then every pain, sleepless night, fit of laughter and technical glitch was totally worth our efforts.

The Forgotten Story

End - Daniella & Dave
Originally uploaded by mrbosslady

I sat down today and realized I had never written about the day the police showed up on set. I think I should write about it before it gets glossed over in the annals of time and forgotten. This was too scary and funny to be forgotten.

The day was August 23 and we were cooking through our schedule. I mean it, time was our friend. We were shooting a scene in the foyer/front porch of the house. The scene is pretty simple, the characters pound on the door and get let inside and the only real issue is how many characters have to be inside that foyer – 8-11 principal characters remember. No matter how you slice it that is a lot of people in one space and then factor in that there is always 5-9 crew people stumbling around as well. We got to know each other real well.

Despite our space issue everything was pretty good. Our only genuine difficulty seemed to be where we placed the light outside; the cord was right by the door frame and thought it was gaffed within an inch of its life more than once actors would snag the cord or the light and it kept trying to plummet to its doom.

Like I said, a group of actors were staged outside the house and pounding on the front door yelling to be let in. We had to do this quite a bit because the scene required a lot of coverage. After one take we opened the door after I yelled cut and I heard an actor laughing and saying the police are coming. I laughed too, it was funny – police interfering with the walkers. Funny ha ha. Then another actor said it again – the police are coming.

That’s when I realized they weren’t telling a joke. The police were coming up to the house.

My brain went into panic mode. Less panic than when we broke Susan’s wall, but still panic. I bolted out of my director’s chair and made a bee-line for the door shouting for Christopher – who couldn’t hear me because he was hooked to the boom with noise canceling headphones on. I think someone kicked him so he flew down the stairs and followed me out the door where we met about four uniformed officers with hands on their guns.

This is where it gets funny.

We had thought to warn all the neighbors on David & Susan’s cul-de-sac that we were filming and would have a fake rifle on the balcony, etc. – neighbors even asked us questions and wanted to be kept up to speed on the progress of the film once it’s done – but we forgot about the neighbor’s behind the house. These neighbors never even crossed our mind.

Evidently, a retired officer lives on the block behind David & Susan and when he heard all the screaming and pounding he assumed someone was breaking into the house and called the police. So the police came and barricaded the street and made their way down to our set because they thought we were doing something illegal. I can’t even imagine what they thought when they saw a bloody crow bar, shovel, etc. being wielded by the actors.

Luckily Chris and I have experience with law enforcement to cops don’t make us nervous like they do most people. The situation was easily diffused, but it was scary for a little while there. They totally could have been morons and tried to make us shut down for the day. The good thing for us is that the cops found the situation funny.

OPD might deserve a thank you in the credits.