I captured the raw footage. It ended up at 1:21. That's hours, not minutes. A lot of footage for a short film, but less than the 1:30 I thought I might be dealing with. Well, I guess it's in line with some of the other films we've made. AGTC had about the same, and most of our films end up breaking across two tapes. However, it's the kind of sloppy shooting, camera always rolling style that gives us so much footage that drives you crazy when you have to deal with the huge files. Of course, the other side of that is shooting only when actually doing a take, which is nice and clean, but robs you of having cool extras and behinds the scenes for extra features. Oh, well.
Over a couple nights, I cut through the footage twice and now have it down to around 25 minutes. Again, compared to other films, where we usually have around 8-12 minutes of good footage to work with, this is a ton of footage, and a lot to put through my typical post-production process of deartifacting, deinterlacing, color correcting, etc, all in high-quality, massive-storage-requirement files. Fortunately, I do have a lot of space right now. The next step is to resequence some of the shots that are out of order.
Honestly, I am a bit lost in this footage. I have the script, but it is 90% voiceover. I know we were shooting scenes that matched with sections of the script in some way, but I'm not clear on what that was. This is the downside of not having a real screenplay. The upside is that we never would have shot it if we were waiting on a full screenplay, and we wouldn't have been as adventurous with the shots we got. I pitched the script back to Jeremy to see if he could remember what shots went with what thoughts.
Oddly enough, I decided to pull up an MP3 of the song from Wong Kar Wai's BMW Film The Follow. I was editing to that, and the ethereal music really opens up a lot of editing possibilities. With that music, it wasn't so strange to see jump cuts, and cuts that repeat the same action from different angles. The trick is going to be finding music like that (not sure, but I think it's got flute, bass, and Portugese vocals) that we can use for this film.
There is also the issue of how we will approach the voiceover. Hopefully, Brock's brother Chase can refine our translation and assist with the pronunciation. I'll probably end up voicing it. Then there is the English, gibberish English, gibberish Chinese, and maybe even a real Chinese speakers voiceovers. And the subtitles. I'm going to need new DVD authoring software just to put all of it together.
2 comments:
Sounds like a challenge!
I thought to myself, "who came up with that title?" I searched the archives to find it was one of my suggestions. Strange how you forget things. I had absolutely no recollection until I looked it up. You guys should've went with "Dr. Smellgood..." ;-)
Gabe, for once your insanity paid off (c'mon, "hey, hey, the dead man got away!" as a tagline for Rendezvous!?). "Days of Being Wrinkle Free" was all you, and it sets the right tone. Wow, that was the "Let's Go To The Video Tape" post of long ago. The title "Tim Nm, CPA" came out of that post as well.
Me and Micah have spent many nights now staring at the footage and trying out different music from productiontrax.com. After listening to probably 500 different tracks, we haven't found the perfect one (except for "Unicornio" the song from WKW's "The Follow", which is great). We found one that was close. I'm going to personally contact some of the composers we've used for previous films (Ray Nardelli, Victor Spiegel, Simon Brewer), send them a copy of Unicornio, and see if they have or can come up with something similar for me.
Man, this film would be perfect for the Inspiration Film Festival (free to enter, $5,000 cash prize for the top short), but I'd have to get it in by March 7!
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