As we're working on the rewrites for our Thanksgiving shoot, and looking at options for trailers, we're also working on finalizing the music used in the film. As we were doing our rough edit, we used classical music as temp tracks. And now we're replacing those recordings with royalty-free/copyleft/public domain recordings of other classical pieces.

"But isn't all classical music in the public domain already?"

Well, yes; but not all the recordings are in the public domain. Companies like EMI own the copyrights on certain recordings, and you get hit with the same kind of licensing fees that are involved when you want to use contemporary music.

However, there are some copyright-free recordings available, if you know where to look. And where we decided to look was Musopen, which provides free recordings of public domain music. It's in the same Utopian, Collaborative, community-focused idea behind Wikipedia and, heck, the Internet in and of itself. It's a marvelously useful website, with a variety of recordings available.

If you need to find a free recording, or if you're someone who's interested in making a recording for this project, we highly suggest that you check it out.

The other thing we've been doing is some (very rudimentary) audio mixing. We're still not sure as to the usefulness of all the bells and whistles, and we still have a lot more ambient noise than we want. But it's all room noise, not camera noise; it's very, very, very important to have (and we're very, very, very glad that we have) a microphone that is not mounted to the camera. Our mike only has a six foot cord, but those six feet make a world of difference.

And, oh yes, we're also doing colour-correction, which is a fairly tedious bit of business, but important. Here's a couple of examples from the exhausting "chicken scene".

Here's a couple stills from the original footage:





As you can see, both of these images have a distinct red/orange glow. That's not necessarily a bad thing-- but it doesn't match the footage shot in the previous scene, which took place in an adjacent room and was intended to flow right into this one. The sudden change in colour temperature is a bit jarring.

And so we fiddled with the colour correction feature on Adobe, mostly confining ourselves to a slight adjustment of the Red Gain, and what we ended up with was this:





Colour correcting has, in the past, always sounded like some tedious process without a whole lot of value-- "so what if a shirt is a little bluer here than there?" But having seen some of these results, I've got to say-- it's still tedious, but highly useful and important. Anyone who takes their filmmaking seriously should devote some time to colour correction/timing.

==Tom & Mary

A few days ago, we finished assembling the rough cut of The Man Who Loved; the film clocked in at 80 minutes. We watched the rough cut together, and then watched it two days later with Adrienne (Jacob has since gone back to school).

We're all very happy with the film, but we quickly realized that the ending does not work. It strikes the wrong note, it's too cut-and-dry, and moves too quickly.

Through out production, we've reconcieved and rewrote and reshot and rearranged things. Much of the film unfolds in long, tense sequences-- scenes that run 10 minutes, 12 minutes, 8 minutes, so on. (Scenes that, I might add, don't seem to drag, either.)

But the ending is still composed of miniatures: a thirty-second scene here, a minute long scene here. It's wholly at odds with the rest of the picture. It also feels somewhat underwhelming. Earlier sequences have some bite to them-- they have "teeth". The ending feels genteel by comparision.

It's not that the ending is bad, per se; the film, as a whole, still works. But we can see that the film can and will work much, much better with a new and improved ending.

The problem this poses, of course, is that Jacob-- our leading man! our title character!-- has gone back to school, many hundreds of miles away. He'll be coming back for the Thanksgiving Weekend, which means we'll have to reshoot at that time.

And so, we've got two months in which the film is, for all intents and purposes, on hiatus. Two months in which the film exists in a strange limbo place between almost-done and done. Which also means there's a damn good chance we'll be missing the early winter festivals.

Ah well. It's better to make sure the film is good, regardless of timing issues.

More film stills.

We're 99% done with shooting-- maybe. There's one more scene we have to shoot for sure, and since we still have our leading man for another week or two, we'll see if we can think of anything else to shoot. Might as well use the time we have.

The whole production's moved at a very smooth pace. About the biggest problem we had was in casting the part of Sue-- a small but, we thought, vital part of the film. Just around two weeks ago, we found her. Or so we thought.

When she auditioned for the part, she wasn't great, but she would do. With a few rehearsals, she would have done an admirable job of bringing the character to life. And, in truth, after a few rehearsals it was apparent that she had improved greatly. You can probably tell from the use of past tense that things haven't quite worked out.

There were a few early warning signs. First of all, she had an extremely erratic work schedule that we had to plan around-- making changes at the last minute, et cetera. In the past, we've tried to work with extremely busy persons, and more often than not, they end up bowing out because their schedule is too hectic. And it's hard to blame someone; after all, they're only getting paid in home-cooked (or pizzeria-purchased) meals. Paying gigs come first.

But there was also a strong sense of disconnect. She would say a line; we would give her a direction because we thought the line needed work; she would say the line exactly the same way as before. We went through this cycle three or four times before we got a different line reading-- one which wasn't precisely what we were looking for, but worked just the same.

And it wasn't just that we had trouble communicating, it was that at times we weren't even speaking the same language. Let me give you an example of what we're talking about.

Last year, we created a "zombie sitcom" for Youtube called 'Ned and Sunshine', which is a whole 'nother story in and of itself. But while we were casting that series, we auditioned an actor who didn't know what zombies were. He was very confused-- and perhaps a bit offended-- when he explained it. And we knew at that point that working with him, on that project, would be impossible-- that he just didn't 'get' the project at all.

We had much the same feeling with this actress.

We had to rewrite an entire scene-- the big Duck, Duck, Goose party-- when she failed to show.

On the night of the final rehearsal before shooting her scenes, we got a call from Jacob-- our lead-- to let us know that she had let him know that she would not be able to make it. The reason? She wanted to stay home and watch "Who Wants to be a Superhero?"

Now, we love and respect Stan Lee as much as the next person, but it was a bit too much. And so, after a lot of discussion, we decided to fire her.

Now, with only two weeks left before Jacob-- who is in every scene-- went back upstate to college-- this left us with one of three options. Option one, which had proved damn nigh impossible thus far, was to recast the part.

Option two, which was untenable, was to stick with the flaky actress in hopes that she wouldn't screw us over when it came time to shoot, and that she would be adequate at that time.

Option three was to cut the part entirely, which would necessitate the removal of nearly fifteen pages from our already-thin fifty-eight page script. This would bring our runtime down from eighty-to-ninety minutes closer to seventy minutes. Which, when working from forty-three pages of script wouldn't be bad. And that's what we decided to do. (Sort of.)

But wasn't the part vital? Well, yes and no.

Yes, the part was vital to the script of The Man Who Loved. She served as a counterpoint and foil to Sarah; she was a threat to the marriage, not so much sexually but in a more subtle, platonic way; she also soldiered some of the more didactic material. So, the script of The Man Who Loved could not function without her.

But the film is a different story. The film seems to be getting along quite nicely without her.

Though she's not completely gone. She's mentioned briefly and appears as an off-screen voice, provided by camera-shy cutie Mary Russell-- one half of the directing team. So, I guess we did recast the part in the end.

The script and the film are two different beings, two different versions of the same story. There are a lot of similarities, but also a lot of differences-- in tone, in content, in theme and emotion. As the production-- and, indeed, the rehearsal, casting, and editing-- process unfolds, the story takes a new direction. That's the wonderful thing about working in a collaborative form.

Painters use oils or watercolours; writers use words; musicians use notes. But a filmmaker writes in faces, bodies, details, expressions: a filmmaker writes in life itself, in souls. And so a film will always be a living thing, while a screenplay will always be words, margins, and page numbers.

I guess my point is, sometimes you don't need that one scene or character upon which you thought everything hinged. When you can't get that shot or scene or line or character the way you want it done, you have three options--

One, go with the mediocre version. This violates the Howard Hawks definition of a good film: "three good scenes and no bad scenes".

Two, don't finish making the film. But remember, "the worst film ever made is the film that's never made."

And three, work around it. Film, like politics, is the art of the possible. Do what you can with what you have.

Today we had a big shoot-- one we're still in the middle of, though we're taking a couple hours of break-time. We shot what was promoted to everyone involved as "the Duck, Duck, Goose scene"-- only to cut out the actual game of duck, duck, goose that would have served as its central set-piece.

To make a long story short: we got everyone seated to play the game, and that's when we found out that the room-- the biggest in the location-- was far too small in which to play, let alone film, a game of Duck, Duck, Goose. This revelation-- coming after five grueling hours of shooting with the largest cast we've ever worked with-- almost ruined our day.

Then we cut it out, and though we won't know until we actually edit the scene, it seems to work just fine without it, though we're a little worried about the film's runtime after cutting such a major chunk out of it.

We should have a trailer and some clips soon. Stay tuned.

The problem with a blog, of course, is that you've got to keep up with it. :-)

So, to be brief:

Production's moving along at a brisk pace. We are 72% done with shooting. We have a major shoot coming this Saturday and-- if all goes well-- that should bring that percentage up to 86.

We had a casting mishap-- our ultra-secret guest star fell through-- but it looks like we've found a replacement, just in time; it also appears that we've found a Sue.

Editing is moving along slowly but still at a decent pace.

We will be giving you a more detailed look at the editing and production process, and will probably be providing a trailer soon as well.

We had two shoots over this weekend-- a small one on Friday, and a big one on Sunday. Both went pretty well, but Sunday was difficult-- cramming four people into a tiny room with seven-hundred and fifty watts of lighting on a very hot day is not our idea of a good time. But we stuck it out, we got done what we had wanted to get done, with a miminum of fuss. We are now 33 % done with shooting.

Here's a couple of stills to whet your appetite:

The film's looking great and production's going smoothly. We've never had a project move at such a nice pace without any real major difficulties. Part of us feels blessed; the other part is waiting for the other shoe to drop.