Archive for September, 2008

I upload the HD version of the trailer to vimeo.

I guess the quality is better, not sure. Still trying to figure out this whole H.264 compression thing.

Click the pic to see it:

All the rough cuts are done, and there’re only 3 missing scenes, and that will be rectified very soon.

Apart from the technical experience I’m picking up doing this project, here are a few things I’ve learned:

1. Never, EVER, record audio when there are locusts present.
2. I can’t act.
3. Dave and Chris, can act – well. And are hilarious!
4. Shooting in 1080i is awesome. So much room to work with to get rid of that pesky boom mic that keeps coming into shot.
5. When you write “INT: Dining Room. Night” you sure as hell better film at night.
6. No matter how hard I try, I can’t make any part of my house look like my parents house.
7. Adobe products are awesome, however, windows still sucks.

Eh, there’s probably some other stuff about working with a camera and boom mic and other useful stuff I’ve learned too, but those are what stand out.

Funny little side note to this project: A friend of my wife and I is also currently working on a Star Wars Fan Film. Michael Mergenthaler is playing Darth Garin in “Star Wars: The Forgotten”. Check out their site here.

For a quick glimpse at Michael’s character, scroll to the bottom of this page.

Hey Merg!

Well, as predicted earlier this month (or was it this week?), my job is sending me out to Vegas again from Oct 5th to Oct 16th – the red-eye flight, meaning I’m really gone until the 17th!

For anyone reading this blog for the first time, I know if sounds strange to be complaining about getting a free 12 day trip to Las Vegas – Long story short, it’s the 6th time I’ve been there in 18 months, 5th time to work – not so fun anymore.

So this will inevitably delay something. I’m not sure what at the moment. I fear the filming of the last scenes in Orlando, but I still hold some hope they will be done before then.

I’ll see if I can at least get a blooper reel together – those don’t need much refining.

I’ll keep ya posted, as usual.

Here’s the trailer on the front page now. It was kinda hard to find on the About page before with it being at the bottom and a completely black screen.

Click on the image to launch the trailer.

There was a point in the PA shooting that we moved from inside to outside and forgot to turn the indoor camera filter thingy off (scary technical terms, I know).  So there’s this odd blue tint on some of the footage, a handful of scenes before we noticed it was still on.

My first thought was, “big deal, it’s just a fun project with friends, who cares?”

My second thought was, “Ya know, I never really tried to play with color correction in After Effects before, this would probably be a good base to start learning on.”

So, after some quick toying around, really not that long, like 15 minutes or so, I started to see some dramatic results. With some more time and patience, this color correction thing could be pretty darn cool. But enough playing-  gotta continue editing and see what’s still missing.

Until then, here’s an example of the color correction results:

This is a quick explanation for anyone that’s stumbled on this site that isn’t involved with the project.

As you can see in the website header, this site is called “Fan Film The Movie”. But often in posts, there’s another name that crops up entitled “Fan Film The Series”. So that may lead to the question, what exactly is this, a movie, or a series.

Well, it’s both. In its original form, Fan Film is a 6 episode web series. But, during the editing process, we’re also cutting a Fan Film the movie. A faster paced, whole story at once type of thing with half the run time.

No real reason other than being able to share the 2 formats. Both have the same story, only the web series has more scenes and an over all longer run time than the movie. The series is the project that is being edited first then the movie built from that

So the original intent of this project, and I supposed this site, is for “Fan Film The Series.” Guess I could change the headers – I’ll get to it sometime.

UPDATE:

Just to make matters more confusing, I’ve changed the header to “The Series” for now. That’ll probably change. No plans on it, but I rarely know what I’m going to do – ever.

The Sunscreen Film Festival in Clearwater/Tampa Florida posted their submission form for the 2009 Festival this month.

Oddly enough, no Fan Film category like last year. Hmmm. Dang, guess I can’t use that whole 40 seconds of Star Wars music I put in the opening.

Gotta keep editing – only faster.

Damn you locust!

Those damn Locust, or whatever they’re called that are all over the early morning filming tapes are creating havoc and delaying the episode releases. Oddly enough, within about 3 minutes of starting this project I didn’t notice them – guess I got used to them. But now that I’m editing the multiple angles together, it’s really noticeable when one angle has them at their apex, and the next angle they’re completely quite. I’ll find some way to deal with them.

The (really) rough cut the pilot episode of the Web Series version is uploading now. A few points about the episode

1. There’re 2 necessary scenes missing. One is of the exterior of my house. Weather permitting, I’ll shoot that tomorrow. The other is Karen’s intro interview (see the previous post)
2. My kitchen sucks for audio. The shoots of my interviews in my kitchen are terrible audio wise. Well, performance wise too, but that’s a different story.
3. I’m still working on the best compression options, and this one’s another test so some of the footage (particularly the text graphics) is fuzzy. But readable, not the big a deal for the pilot.
4. And finally, I either missed a couple of exposition scenes I needed for the opening episode, or I possibly shot from the wrong script. Either way, there’s some story missing – but luckily it’s all Orlando based, and all with me and my wife’s characters. So it’s easy to film and fit in, and I don’t have to wait for Gregg to come to Orlando to visit to get it done.

So it’s coming, warts and all.

Stay tuned.