sound mix, color correction for Premiere in Austin

Just in case you haven’t heard:  Stomp! Shout! Scream! will have its world premiere on October 21, 2005 as part of the Austin Film Festival and Screenwriters Conference.  Visit the festival website for tickets and screening info.

Another part of film making is trying to get people to come see your film.  Newspapers and other press outlets are the best resource for letting people know the details.  It makes me feel like a pimp, selling my product, but I spent the last week working on press releases, credit lists, a “statement of the director”, formatting news articles, etc., to put in the first official press kit.  All that stuff is on the Media page on stompshoutscream.com.

Post-production on the film took a couple of major leaps forward this week.  It’s at this stage that you go to the experts and hope they can perform those miracles you always hear about.  Director of Photography Evan Lieberman and I supervised the final color correction in Cinefilm’s Spirit transfer suite. Due to the usual time and money constraints of indie film making, we had to shoot several scenes at the wrong time of day.  Colorist Ron Anderson worked his magic and fixed all the problem scenes, plus greatly improved several scenes that were already looking good.  Now Stomp! Shout! Scream! looks absolutely fantastic.  I can’t say enough about Evan, the extremely talented crew he put together, and Ron’s expertise that combined to get this film looking as good as it does.

Michael and Juan at Soapbox Studios put in a Herculean effort over the weekend to finish the sound mix for the movie.  Once again, there’s nothing like going to the experts and getting them to work their magic.  Everyone involved in the sound mix commented about how we picked one of the hardest possible locations to get quality sound—- the beach, at night.  One long dialog scene has waves, a generator, and RF interference competing with the actor’s lines.  Michael was able to EQ the voices just right and make the scene, and the whole movie, sound better than I would have ever imagined.

Maybe they’re just being nice, but everyone who has helped on the film says that it was great fun to work on.  I started this whole project to have fun with the creative people I know, not because I wanted more work.

Principle photography started one year ago this week. I never thought it would take this long or be this hard, but seeing the color-corrected images finally married up to a pristine sound mix sure feels good. I am really, really looking forward to Austin.

Here's 3 shots taken from Day One of shooting, one year ago today.

Eyemo Camera, Day 4 recap

There’s a few shots that we didn’t get during principal photography. In the script, Theodora and Hector go on a ‘Viva Las Vegas’-style love montage that starts with them on a roller coaster and continues through their day of fun and frolic. It’s an important shot because it’s a turning point for Theodora’s character. It shocks her out of her malaise. Or that’s the theory. Anyway, we didn’t have time to find or shoot a roller coaster during our full production, so I got Claire, Travis, Melissa and Evan back together to grab a couple of pick up shots last Sunday.
We used an Eyemo camera, which is a World War II era camera that’s tiny and virtually indestructible. It’s like a little iron crate that shoots 1,000 feet of 35mm film at a time (about a minute)—perfect for a little guerrilla film making. Here’s some pictures.

Here’s another recap from the shoot:

DAY FOUR (Thursday, October 7)
Location: Fabric Warehouse / The Police Station


This was one of our more relaxed days. That’s a remarkable statement, considering we had to shoot over 10 pages of dialog-heavy script. The only location for the day was the police station interior located in the fabric warehouse where we’d been shooting the day before. We decided to proceed as if it was a 3-camera TV show— that is, light one end of the room and shoot in that direction all day. Eliminating the need to ‘flip the room’ (moving all the lighting and camera equipment to shoot reverse shots) was the only way we could get all of our pages done in a 10-hour day. It seems to have worked. We got everything done thanks to the hard-working crew. I can't say enough about the crew and the actors. Not a flubbed line all day and spot-on performances by everybody. And the film transfers look great—just like a police station in a 60’s film.

I have one more story from the doctor’s office location. Actor Jonathan Green, who plays scientist John Patterson, has a long, ridiculous monologue (complete with flashback) where he tells the story of how his parents disappeared while doing research in the Florida Everglades and how he’s been chasing the Skunk Ape ever since. Zeke, the boom operator, got the giggles and kept cracking up during his speech. He whole job is to be really quiet, so we can get great sound, but he couldn’t keep from laughing. I think he broke just one take, but was stifling laughter every time, which infected the whole crew. That’s definitely a tribute to Jonathan’s ability to delivery the speech in that 1950’s scientist seriousness without it being too flat or emotionless. Brilliant. And encouraging.