So, it's in the can. We have wrapped up principal photography on That Thing. Heh, always wanted to say that, corny as it is. Over a year and a half since we began, stretching out fourteen actual shooting days over that time. Though that's not including the two canceled shoots due to bad weather. Twenty four tapes are sitting on my shelf, each with almost an hour's worth of stuff. So it's done.

It really didn't really kick in for a few days. Saturday was the last shoot, and it was so cold. Of course some crazy hyped up storm was making its way towards the east coast on the day we were trying to wrap this up. We were well below freezing, and while that doesn't phase me much since I actually enjoy the cold weather, I always forget that others aren't so tolerant of low temperatures. Definitely slowed us down, as trying to memorize lines while shivering was more difficult than anticipated. The chase scene helped to get the blood pumping, but by the end of the day we were still half an hour behind, a bad thing when you're racing against a sun covered by clouds. But after a long day, it got done.

I proceeded to sleep for about sixteen hours. Then I got up and did nothing much to celebrate, just wandered around the Hudson shore on the west side of Manhattan, with nothing but fresh white snow on the ground for as far as the eye can see. Since then I've captured the rest of the footage and slapped together a quick trailer, and only now am I bugging out over finally finishing this movie. Maybe it's the whole seeing a year and a half of your life flash by in about sixty seconds that does that.
On a side note, there's something very enjoyable about cutting a trailer. I don't think there's much else in terms of video that's more... purely visual than piecing together a trailer. You got twenty something hours of raw footage and you have to find these tiny snippets of emotion that say just enough, and find order amongst this chaos. Every frame really counts, since in a minute you only get to have a little over a thousand of them, after titles and such. Cut one frame too many, and the shot becomes garbage, saying nothing and instead only being. Not to mention the goal is to grab someone's attention, gotta come up with something out there to do that nowadays.

Anyway, yeah, over the course of editing the trailer and afterwards, I think I've watched those sixty seconds at least fifty times by now.  Like I said, I'm flipping out. It's actually done. It's all there, I somehow got all these people to do this? And I created this thing out of nothing, and... yeah. I'm just glad to have it done. Too often I start something and never finish, but here it is.

I'll start editing for real next week, so much work ahead. But the hard part's over.

The Reshoot

Reshoots usually aren't a good thing when you're trying to make a movie and are pressed for time. I think that goes without saying, but hey, that's the situation I just ran across. Pick-ups are one thing, technical foul ups are another thing altogether, but asking for a reshoot on an entire scene of your cast and crew just because you weren't pleased with how it looked the first time usually isn't cool. But hey, that's the situation I just ran across. And I think, I hope it was the right choice.

This ain't the first time I've run across asking for a reshoot. Come to think of it, every 'major' production I've done (major being the two shorts and That Thing I'm working on right now) has involved a reshoot of some sort. The first one, Green Monkeys,wasn't too bad, since it was the first. We were so far ahead of schedule it wasn't too big a deal. We tried shooting the majority of it in a studio set, and when I looked the footage it was obviously overkill. Sure, we got to use the school's fancy cameras and microphones, but it just didn't look real. It felt very... off. Ended up reshooting the whole thing with a shitty hi-8 camcorder, and had to redub all the dialogue because it would have sounded awful otherwise. Looking back, I think it adds to the charm, and wouldn't have it any other way. It was the right decision.

The second production, Electronic Pinata, the reshoots were mostly for technical reasons. Decided to shoot on film of the Super 8 variety, and we had to reshoot one scene three times because of various problems related to that. The first time, I think I screwed up the back focus on the camera or something, because every shot was running into various levels of being out of focus. A bummer, to say the least. Passed if off as a test to the actors so they were mostly cool with it, but we did it again, and this time when it came back from the lab a lot of it was scratched up, and not in the quaint old time film-y look. I believe the problem was narrowed down to an expired case of film. And so we shot it again. Had no choice.

It all worked out in the end, but there's always that fear when you start dialing those numbers to your actors' cell, that they'll be outraged and refuse to work with you again. Especially when you got no money to pay them, you're basically asking them to further waste their time because of your fuck-up.

Which brings us to yesterday, reshooting one of the scenes in That Thing. The reasons for doing it over? A few, the major one being the same problem I had with Green Monkeys. It didn't feel real. The location felt empty, too much hand held footage that felt amateur, and too many shots in general that I thought distracted from the important part of the scene, that this couple was on the verge of splitting up. To rectify that, we just moved to a different room and locked off the camera to do the entire scene in one shot. A bit drastic but I think it was the right choice, though I suppose we won't know until the movie is over and done with and we get to see it in context.

There was one side benefit to this, I think the acting improved dramatically. Perhaps it was because we were doing the same scene over and over for two hours to get a solid take. Or the fact that having the whole thing in one take forced the actors to step their game up. Or maybe  it was a combination of the two, but the result was that it felt real. Where as before I was worried about the scene being a poor introduction and giving off a bad impression, now I'm getting the vibe that this crazy movie thing might actually work out.

Only one scene left to shoot, then it's all in the can. Lookin' forward to lifting this weight off the shoulders.

Four Years Later...

Dang, took that long for me to get around to this? Heh, since I made that first post a little over four years ago I think we've seen the mainstream rise and subsequent fall of what is known as blogging. Most normal folks seem to have given given up the drawn out sentences and paragraphs for social networking and brief farts of words encompassed in the hip new brands like Facebook and Twitter. Even MySpace is so last year. But hey, I remember back when we had to piece together shoddily written html in a text editor along with gaudy animated .gifs, only to upload it to Geocities or some other relic of the free webpage hosting days that are now long past.

I guess I'm not saying anything you don't already know. I'm just wondering aloud why do so many of us feel the need to broadcast what was once considered the mundane happenings of everyday life? Perhaps we know that we are easily amused by peering into the lives of others, and like the idea that someone else out there might be giving us that same sort of attention? More likely, I'm just looking way too closely into it.

Oh well. I could never figure out what to write in these "First post!" sorts of things. I suppose I could just say hello, however that comes off as plain and pedestrian. I could tell you what I intend to write about in this blog, but that almost seems pretentious to me as I'm not really the type to plan too far ahead. So I guess I'll just thank you for making your way through these mutterings I typed up, and hope I didn't scare you off from stopping by again in the near future. Because there is some (what I like to think is) cool stuff ahead. Hopefully I won't keep ya waiting too long.