Countdown to the first screening...

Well, I see it's been a long time since I've updated this.

The film is nearly done. Danny Zott is putting the finishing touches on the score. I'm satisfied with 99.9% of the cuts. There's one that I still want to tweak. Rich Cox and I will have to sit down and do a final sound mix, compress some stuff, etc. I've got to touch up the credits and pick a final font for the title. And that's it.

If all goes as planned, it will premier Dec. 19 at the SC4 Theater. Then, if Dutch from GKC comes through, we will hopefully screen it at the GKC movie theater at the Birchwood Mall. The same movie theater that I've watched so many movies at, including the rereleases of Star Wars. That'd be surreal as hell.

In the last month I've grown entirely sick of "The Killers" at one point. After spending almost every day working on it, thinking about it, for 3 straight months, I had to get away from it. Todd and I went to Chicago, which was an adventure in itself. And even then, I couldn't get away from it, as Zarlo, whom we went to visit, wanted to watch it.

Some random thoughts on various aspects of the film:

The score - This has been the most difficult part of the entire thing for me. When I wrote it, I didn't have anything in mind, I tried to keep it a blank slate. At the time of writing the screenplay I was listening to a lot of Radiohead. Actually, when I wrote it last December, I was only listening to Radiohead. As we started filming it, Radiohead was still heavily in the playlist but Tom Waits started to infiltrate. Wilco found its way in my playlist as well. During editing, those 3 were heavily influencing me as well. I watched a lot of Jim Jarmusch's films at the start of editing. In fact, at one point, when I was really unsure about how to proceed with the opening sequence and what to do (before I even came up with and wrote what is now the first scene) I sat down and watched Down by Law twice. That had such a huge influence on me. I don't know if it shows (it probably does, although I think it shows more subconsciously in the running sequence, it's almost a reverse of the opening tracking shots) but when it came time to put temporary music in, I put in "Jockey full of Bourbon" during the walking/introduction to Nick Adams sequence, knowing full well that it would be replaced. I added "Goin' Out West" from "Bone Machine" to the running sequence, and of course "Come on up to the house" to the final scene. In hindsight, this was probably a bad idea. While it was the closest to what I had in my mind, it was also improbable to repeat or imitate and presented an extremely unfair challenge for anyone who would score the film. So when Danny gave me a rough cut of music it, even though I liked the music on its own, it didn't have the same feel as the Tom Waits did. Of course it wouldn't, Danny and Tom Waits are so far apart, but in a good way. It took me a while to grow accustomed to what Danny was doing for the movie, and after we talked about it, he actually tried to incorporate a little bit of Tom Waits' "dirtiness" into some it, while still keeping it distinctly a Daniel Zott piece of music. I think what he's got thus far is great, and I really think the only way I could find something that I would like more would be if Tom Waits himself would somehow take an interest in a film that was shot on a budget of about $100 and score the entire thing for me, something that's not bloody likely.

The other interesting thing in terms of the music that happened occured when I put in "temporary" music to submit the film to the Ann Arbor Film Festival. Todd and I searched for some interesting open source songs from archive.org, a place for all things public domain. We came upon a Louis Armstrong song, "Lazy River" that I just threw on top of the walking/introduction to Nick Adams scene to have music there. It was only when we watched the film afterwards, that we realized just how perfect the music fit. The way things happened on cuts, how it tied in thematically, etc. Just pure happenstance. And from reading all sorts of interviews with Jean Renoir, Fritz Lang, Orson Welles, Charlie Chaplin, etc. I came to realize that this sort of thing does happen and its the good filmmakers who take notice of it and accept that sometimes chance is more perfect than anything they could come up with and to run with it.



Pacing/Cuts - I ended up cutting 3 scenes from the film: Ed's scene as Cab Driver in the diner, Nick Adams leaving Ole Andersson's apartment and Nick Adams hailing and driving around in a cab after he leaves the apartment.

Cutting Ed's scene was the most difficult, as it was short and Ed was hands down the best of the walk-on roles. The reason I cut that season was 2-fold. First, pacing. The diner scene was already running a bit long. I could have cut the Angry Man scene or Rich Cox's scene. Cutting Angry Man scene would've left no comedic relief from the tension of the entire hostage situation in the diner, and as Hitchcock has taught me through his work, you have to give the audience a little breather or else you'll suffocate them and they won't be willing to go along with you for the rest of the film. Cutting Rich's scene would've been problematic in transitioning and cutting from the previous scene, so that option was out as well. The second reason I cut Ed's scene was that it allowed me to get rid of a problematic close-up shot of a clock and to cut out some extra lines between Max and George that didn't really do anything to move the plot along. If anything, they caused confusion ("you're friend Andersson's not coming" says George. "We'll give him another 10 minutes" says Max...to which they give him either 5 more minutes or 15 more minutes, depending on how I cut it). I tried to avoid any and all close-ups in the entire film. The closest thing to close-ups are some tight shots of Nick Adams during the running scene and the close-ups of objects that open the film. Other than that, there are none. There were a few reasons why I decided not to shoot in close-ups. The first, is that it exposes your actors, and with amateur actors I felt that would've been unfair to the actors and the characters they're portraying. The second is the message that a close-up sends to the viewer. It says "THIS is more important than whatever else you've seen" - and there's not one single thing that I felt should've delivered that message once we got the film rolling, except for the exhaustion on Nick Adam's face when running.

Cutting the scene with Nick Adam's leaving the apartment and the cab scene were much easier. For starters, they were rushed when we shot them. I found a way around some continuity problems, (which will make it on the eventual dvd and probably on this blog when I have a chance to encode the scene) but it just didn't do anything for the narrative. Even if we had spent an entire day shooting these 2 scenes I still think I would've cut them. The only thing the scenes did was to move Nick Adams forward in time and space, and through the miracle of montage and edit you don't have to worry about that, a fade can do the same thing in less time.

Some of the other cuts that I made were minor in nature. I cut off about 15-20 seconds of Emily (Church Mom) trying to make small talk while Jim (Max) smoked his cigarette ignoring her. Again, the diner scene needed to have the pace picked up a bit, and while she had some great nervous improv lines I had to cut them for the greater good of the film. The question then became where to cut. It came down to 2 choices. We cut back from George cutting ham in the kitchen to her telling Max "Boy...I'm really running late for Church...Do you go to church?" or straight to her asking him "Do you go to church?" At first thought, I wanted to cut straight to the "Do you go to church?" line for pure comedic value. When she enters the diner one of the first things she says is that she's running late for Church, and I thought it'd be funny to drive home the idea that she's this church mom, by her just asking this complete and total stranger if he went to church. Had the inflection in her voice been different, I might've gone with that, but as it stood, it felt odd and awkward. So I started with the previous line. As it stands, just about every one of her lines is about church, so she's still the super-crazy church lady, she's just not a total creeper about it.

The walking/introduction to Nick Adams scene has undergone a lot of minor cutting that amounts to a major facelift. As it stands now, the scene is 3:33 long, and that's how it'll be in the final film. The first cut of that scene was about 6:45 long. The scene has the same exact meaning and everything, the only thing that's different is that every shot is shorter and a few shots have been removed entirely (ones that I either didn't like, there were issues with the camera being shaken by the crazy fierce wind blowing off of the river, etc.). It's funny, cause when I first emailed the scene to Jim and Cliff they both suggested I try and get it under 5 minutes and I thought "how the fuck am I going to do that without butchering it?" but I've learned a very valuable lesson: if something needs to be cut down for time considerations, you can always find a way, if you're careful, to do so without butchering the essence of the scene.

Many more thoughts on the film, life in general, changes, etc. but for now I need sleep

Ugh.

So, so much has gone on, been updated and worked, changed, moved on, progress, step forward, step backward, side-step, tango, salsa, chupacabra, since I last wrote.

Too tired to get into a full update right now, but we've shot the first scene and it turned out pretty good, a lot of people like the lines, the dialogue, etc. and I wrote that from scratch, that's not Hemingway's stuff. It took us twice as many attempts as I had thought it would be, but it's done. Sort of. I might want to reshoot a single inside shot or two, but that's simplicity.

Then I spent a marathon sound editing session last week with Rich Cox, in hopes of getting it ready for submission to the Ann Arbor Film Festival, which had a deadline of Saturday to be submitted. I got it in on time, although with temporary music, because none of the composers had their score finished.

Which has been a whole different headache. Part of the problem is me, I keep changing my mind about what kind of music I want. When I started, I heard something very Tom Waits-y and as poppy as Wilco, but not further. Since then it has morphed and developed into something very strange and I don't know what I'll get. But I met with Danny Zott tonight and I think he's got a pretty good handle on it. What I heard thus far gave me a good impression, although there's one song that I'm going to have to really give a second listen too, because its such a departure from everything I've tried in the scene (the walking scene) before.

Lots of personal changes and going through various stages of becoming a reclusive werewolf in an attempt to get the film done and trying to maintain some sort of humanity that I've managed to hold on to thus far. Oh and we've got a black president. Yeah. That'll be pretty awesome. I think. We'll see. Here's hoping.

Mission: Get Music Rights

I have a new mission. I got too antsy waiting for my composers to give me something to cut the final scene to and I started playing around. I think I just made it impossible for anyone and everyone who attempts to score this scene to match this, in my opinion, perfect mix.

So of course, I'll have to try and get the rights to it. I don't know how much that'll cost or if I'll be able to do it. New mission though. I'll end up spending more money on the music clearence than I will on the rest of the entire production! Still, watching it the first time with the sound, gave me goosebumps.

There was another neat little coincidence that occured when I was just throwing some Tom Waits songs that I thought might provide an interesting sound, onto the timeline to see what happened. I put "Little Box of Poison" over this long static scene and it gave the entire thing new life...instead of being this threatening rattlesnake-pit feeling it became a tango between George and Max...

Interesting how music can change the mood.

I've got the entire opening sequence planned, both in what it will be and how we'll shoot it. We're going to shoot some images of things in the car and I want to try and do a montage of images to build a mood even before we see Max and Al. By the time we get to Nick Adams, hopefully the audience will be wondering "what's it all about?" We'll see.

Update

Getting close to having a solid cut. Need music score for the running sequence, the taxi cab sequence and the shaving sequence. Need to shoot the opening. Gotta email Jim and Micki and find out when they're available to do so.

Gotta start working on the audio mix this week. Lots of work to do on that I fear. Just getting levels, a consistent "white noise"/background noise level throughout and then adding the sounds of whatever else I want (such as refrigerator's kicking on, street noise, buzzers, birds, etc.)

Nov. 15th is the deadline for the Ann Arbor Film Festival, that's my target date.
December 14th is the deadline for the South by Southwest Film Festival. How awesome would it be to screen at one of the biggest baddest film festivals around in my first 3 months being in Austin?

That's right, I got accepted into UT. Now I just have to figure out how to pay for it. Yah that'll be fun.

The weather has been kicking my ass and then rubbing it in my face. Wet and cold. Fuck. Need some sleep, that won't be interrupted by spasming muscles and shooting pains. Nor weird fucking dreams, although I just finished watching the entire Disc 1 of the Complete Quay Brothers Collection, so good luck with that.

The score...oh boy the score...who the fuck knows what's going on with that. We'll see what Sadat comes up with tomorrow. Hopefully Bob and Danny send me something soon too.

I need to secure some funding now. I shot the film on a shoestring budget but each film festival is about $35-$55 to submit too. I've also got some ideas for DIY distribution and all that jazz that might try and break the mold. We'll see. In the meantime, money makes the world go around and pretty soon we're gonna spin off our axis.

I haven't slept a wink

Couldn't sleep. Just the thought of those shots not working kept me up. I finally gave up trying to fall asleep, got up and have been tweaking for the last two hours. Got it working pretty good. I have a rough cut of Scenes 1 through 4. Scene 5 (running scene) will be nearly impossible to get anything close to what I want until I have music to go with it. I've started to think about maybe some old negro spirituals or gospels or something. I don't know. Lots of ways to go.

Scenes 1-4 (without the rest of Scene 1 which we have to shoot soon) total 24 minutes and 58 seconds. That may or may not go down depending on what kind of cuts I make to what I've got now. Most of what I'd likely want to tweak is untweakable because of the lack of coverage, which is a result of a lack of time, which is a result of a lack of money, which is the result of a lack of an executive producer, which may be a result of the poor economy. This being my first film is also a definite factor. Minor tweaking, cutting a few frames here, extending a few there, etc. will of course happen. What all this means, is when I finish with the intro, it will be about 27 minutes long from the first image until Nick Adams leaves Henry's to try and save Ole. The running scene will be anywhere from 70 seconds to 5 minutes, depending on the music, how the clips come together, etc. There are 3 more major scenes, each will be about 90 seconds long, left. There's also the cab scene, which I can make short or longer. All in all, the film will easily be pushing 35 minutes, maybe closer to 40ish. Not too shabby.

I need some fucking sleep.

Weary progress

Breaking the scenes up into beats, and editing on those beats, has helped make significant progress in the last 2 days. In fact, the entire first part of the diner scene, up to when Al takes Sam and Nick to the back, I have almost done. I screened that and the intro scene (which makes up the first 15 minutes total) for Todd, Kayte, Sadat and Emily tonight and everyone really liked what I had thus far. I was so excited that I came home around 11:30 so I could continue working...which is where I ran into issues.

The scenes after Al leaves have presented a tricky problem after working on them tonight. Some of it came together pretty good, but some of it isn't coming together as easily. The problem is, that there's only 1 angle of George and 2 angles of just Max. What I've found, at least in the part that is giving me problems, is that I need to rely on a long take and at the very end of the take, there's a missed line, but I can't really throw to another angle at an earlier beat because there isn't another angle with the appropriate coverage of the essence of that beat (George's reaction). I played with it for 4 hours straight tonight, and I think I need to step away until tomorrow evening and look at it again.

One thing that looks like I'm not going to be able to use, are those cut-away shots of Al in the mirror, with the light coming down. Maybe it's just me but they seem too disjointed when I cut to them without any sort of way to make clear where it's cutting too. It's unfortunate but I'd rather not use it if it's going to cause some confusion, even if it is a cool looking shot.

I've got some ideas for the intro now that I'm pretty psyched about and think they'll work perfectly for what I want to establish. It means another day of shooting, when we can get some good weather and schedules work. I think we're going to use Todd's Volvo (Swedish car used to kill a Swede..ha) so we just have to figure out how to rig a camera up on the hood. That'll be fun.

I need some sleep...I've been so wrapped up in editing that I've neglected my online creative writing class work this week, which I hate doing, and a whole slew of other stuff, including having Billy Wilder's "Ace in the Hole" paused in my dvd player since Sunday night (at this point, I'll just have to restart it, and I'm only 30 minutes into it anyway). Gotta get priorities in order, and while this film is #1 right now, I can't make it the only 1.

Finally, while nothing is set in stone yet...I think I'm going to aim for having a sneak preview screening the day after Thanksgiving. By then not only will the film be cut together, but that'll be plenty of time to do audio work, get the score done, match the contrast and brightness of all of the shots in succession, etc. And while it won't be the final, final cut, I think it's a pretty good idea to screen it in front of an audience to get reactions, see what works, what doesn't, all of that jazz, before I finish. Although, knowing me, from reading Kubrick, Welles, Lang and Hitchcock interviews I have a feeling I'm going to do the same thing they all did: obsesss over every little detail, tweak, or think about tweaking, little things here and there, up until the first real screening and in Welles case, in the middle of a screening.

Worky work, busy bee

What a strange thing life is. Sometimes, no matter how things seem to change, they're really the same. Tonight, Sadat had to be rescued from the Raven and while I was waiting for him to finish closing up, I played the new Far single for him on the computer there. As I was sitting there, watching him clean up some stuff it hit me: 10 years ago, possibly to the day, who knows, we were doing the same exact thing. I would always hang out and wait for him to get off of work. Usually it was at Spencer's Gifts. And we would listen to new music, and 10 years ago, the last Far album came out (1998 - Water and Solutions) and now there's a new single (after the band has been broken up for like 9 years). Sadat's still working somewhere and I'm still in town to be around waiting for him to get off of work. Strange times. But it'll be coming to a close soon. Austin is calling and it's time to answer and move on.

Afterwards we went to Le Club Roche and played some pool and Todd was there so we discussed some things. I've been emailing Cliff and Jim Frank back and forth about some ideas for the introduction scene. After swapping emails, I cut up the scene a little more on Saturday and trimmed a minute from it without causing too much jarring disorientation. Now I have to decide how I want to set it all up, if I go with my original idea of 3 street corner shots of random traffic before we get an external shot of the flower shop, or if I want to introduce Max and Al earlier and if so, to what extent. Still trying to figure this out. Hmm.

After I got home I started editing again. I've been giving it some time to settle in my head after watching Scene 4 clips the other day and I was able to figure out right away which ones I wanted to use, so for the most part (beyond sound editing, and the possible trimming of a few frames here and there) this might be what goes into the final cut. I'm not planning on uploading every scene as I finish it but I want to show a little of the progress.

What I ended up doing, is breaking the scene into beats. There are certain mood shifts and volleys of dialogue and attitude back and forth and I tried to time each cut so that each beat and cut is one of those mood shifts. When I did that, everything seemed to fall into place, as far as where the cut should go. Now, when other eyes see it, will they see the same? I don't know, but I have a cut that I'm pleased with right now and we'll see how I feel tomorrow and next week and tweak from there.

I've got some ideas for a really short film, like 7 minutes long and mostly dialogue that I can only do if I can find the right actors for the 2 parts. I've already got someone in mind who would be absolutely perfect for one of the roles, but don't know anyone who would fit this second part. Then there's the matter of convincing the first person to do it. Writing it should be fun, adapting and modernizing an 18th century play. And there I've given away one too many hints.