It has been awhile since I posted here on the blog. I thought I would make good on attempting to post here once a week but much like the leftover milk from a bowl of cereal, time makes fools of us all. Meanwhile, I have been hard at working finishing up the short film I wrote about earlier, The Devil and Tommy Simpson (TDTS), and have begun to take some bigger responsibilities as an independent producer in my personal life. In this article I will discuss part two of my thoughts on the recent short that I produced with Tommy Simpson (-topic). If you would like to skip the reading, I would be thrilled if you would take a look at the video we produced below.
In my last post I talked about the difficulties in working in a no-budget production environment. It seems that the lack of personnel carries over in to the world of post-production as well. I have a history working in post-production as a sole editor, so when I decided to handle the editing for TDTS I thought it would be no sweat. My history and experience in post comes from working on web based deliveries with a few broadcast reality TV spots in between. What I ended up finding is that the amount of work I would take on was far more then I expected for this short. To top it all off, I thought I would take on the edit in Da Vinci Resolve using the ACES workflow. Resolve being an entirely new NLE to me outside of its color tools. This resulted in my work moving at a glacial pace, which caused me to go beyond my estimated timeline of completion on the project.
There is nothing more frustrating than wrestling with the technology that is supposed to help fulfill your creative vision, especially knowing that the software that would allow you to make the best use of your time is just a click away. However, I did see this project as a potential learning experience where I could flex new muscles in a way that I have been unable to do with projects that are strictly client based. It also turns out that the C200’s Cinema Raw Lite shows it’s true capabilities in Resolve by allowing the editor to edit directly off the .CRM files. FCPX handles the files by treating .CRM as ProRes 4444 and forces the user to adjust the camera’s settings through color boards and wheels. Thats not to say that one NLE is better than the other for C200 Cinema RAW Light, considering that ProRes 4444 retains the same set of data as the .CRM files, but there is something that truly feels RAW about the way Resolve handles .CRM. Not to mention the fact that Resolve opens up the ACES workflow which is truly produces the closest representation of the way the image looked in scene.
I could go on and on about the technical details of working in RAW and using an unfamiliar NLE with a workflow that is still in beta but I digress. The real content that anybody ever truly cares about or needs to know about is the story itself. What is it that the film is trying to say? Or at the very least; was it entertaining? As mentioned in the previous post, the screenwriting process for this short was put together in one day. Thats not to say that the project is any worse for the time I took writing it but it was all part of us being able to use the Belmont for what little timeframe was available. That said, after editing it over and over, I feel that I have begun to assign new meaning to what this film is all about. The inception was to produce a short that dealt with fustian overtones while paying homage to the work of David Lynch. Ill be the first to say that I am no David Lynch but I was thrilled by the opportunity to apply some of his techniques in a personal project.
One thing that trends with David Lynch’s films are the seeming lack of plot. He tends to push viewers to subscribe to their own interpretations of the happenings in his films and I think the same rings true for TDTS. That said, upon first inspection, there is no real traditional plot in the sense that there is an protagonist who overcomes the antagonist. There is merely just a person who is going through what the universe has imposed on him and when fate cries foul, he finds no reason to object to what life has rolled along. For better or worse, I think that is the weakest structural point to the TDTS. That is not to say that I did not know this information prior to signing on to the project, knowing that the entirety of it would would be driven by atmosphere and the space in between lines. I just think that in a conventional sense, some may not subscribe to what I was trying to put down in that sometimes stuff just – happens.
One thing that I could have been more on top of is getting more coverage and allowing talent to have more time in between their deliveries. I inevitably used the magic of editing (intrinsic to movie making) to create the awkward pauses that I had sought after during pre-production. It was lost on me that somehow during the actual production, I failed to instruct my talent to allow each other to have space in between their deliveries. I think this oversight was in part based on the fact that I was micro-managing more than I could handle. An issues that I am told is all to common on no-budget productions. Either way, I have since placed further emphasis on working more with the people on screen rather than crew who are behind the scenes (yay learning). Both sides are important but I would like to focus more on performance. With all that said, I am blown away by our lead actors and what they were able to give based on the information that was available. Brandi Giles delivered one of the greatest expressions I have ever seen when she grimaces with the charcoal black paste in here mouth. -topic was fantastic in that literally all his lines given in the hotel room were in conversation with the AD at 3 a.m. It was like he was talking to nobody and when it all came together the conversation just simply ‘fit’. Steven Heck looked gaunt as ever with his make-up done by Brandy Adams and played the night clerk as if he were out of a Vincent Price picture.
Almost every shot we made ended up in the final edit. I have no idea what that actually says about the production itself but I have never worked on a project with a borderline 1:1 ratio. The three shots that did not make it were two dana-dolly hallway shots and a hotel room full of extras. I had no problem cutting the hallways shots as they really just over extend the length of the film more than it already needed to be. I think I enjoyed the technical aspects of the shot more than what the imagery conveyed. However, I was conflicted in cutting the shot with our extras (featuring the great Randy Aguebor) where everyone stood around the hotel room for what was to be a Rosemary’s Baby homage. The shot was more than fine but I feel like the B side to the image was not strong enough to support the idea itself and I believe that was just poor execution on my end. Another case of trying to do too much with too little.
The final hurdle that I had to overcome was this foreign concept of sound design. While I am whole fully familiar with what it is and why it is important, I have never put together a bricolage of a sound so densely packed together. What started as filling in for lack of room tone (thats on me), turned in to me searching for every potential sound that could be identified in each shot, where at times I would be looking for the sound of the uncanny. The process made me further appreciate the importance of good foley while also making me lament the search for creative commons / free use sound banks that I could sculpt into bits of audio that sounded like something I was going for. The final missing piece to my audio puzzle was correcting the reversed dialogue that Steve and -topic where to deliver. This relates back to having insufficient time in working with the talent and explaining on how to preform their dialog in reverse. It is worth noting that all sentences in the film are palindromes which means the same thing backwards. The struggle was getting my actors to say a word backwards so that way I could reverse their backwards speech to reach that uncanny Black Lodge sound that I was looking for. We ultimately ended up going ADR on those two lines which was another journey into unknown territory for me. Overall I am pleased with absolutely how strange the dialogue turned out.
Now that things are wrapped up I have begun to submit the film to festivals. My goal was to submit it for Oak Cliff Film Festival and I have learned recently that it did not make the cut. I knew it was a long shot from the get go, after all, they show Sundance award winning films there and I have no delusion that this is not that. However, I have gone on to submit the film to a few other festivals in Texas to see what sticks. Part of the situation may be my inexperience in submitting films to festivals. I know that there is a certain art to festival submission but for the time being it is just myself working as my publicist. At this point, it is my goal to just have people watch the film. More than anything this project was learning experience and an opportunity to put something that I thought would be cool out in to the ether