bagged, tagged, and submitted

it’s tuesday.  i’m still pretty tired.  i know that, if i’m this tired, the director and dp are lucky to be moving.  another 48 hour film project has come to a close.

here’s how it went down in case you care…

friday after work we gathered at motke’s house and brainstormed a little while waiting on bobby to call with the gnre and required elements for the film.  once bobby called to let us know that we had the genre “film de femme” and all the elements, we started brainstorming for real. 

i just want to take a second and say that “film de femme” is a fantastic genre.  it not only allowed us to showcase the amazing actresses that we had on the team, it allowed us to pretty much pick any freaking genre we wanted.  we were very happy with that.

anyway, we brainstormed and brainstormed and came up with a pretty great idea involving some killer realestate, a young doctor and her husband the electrician.  it’s really kinda twilight-zone-esque.  then the writers adjourned to the upstairs, the actors and actresses peaced out, and the production team had a short meeting.  and then i went home. 

out at the house, evan, who had not gone to the meeting, had worked out some theme music which was amazing and which we ended up using.  it’s the only music in the movie and it’s awesome.  we then spent a few hours playing with audio to get ideas.  and then i went to sleep.

at 7 the next morning, we all arrived back at motke’s house to eat breakfast and prepare for filming at 8.  that’s when we could get into the house that we were using as the set.  many many thanks to the fellows who let us use their amazing house.  it was perfect.  at 8 we began filming the outside scenes… at 8:30, ALL THE NEIGHBORS STARTED MOWING THEIR LAWNS AND TRIMMING THEIR HEDGES.  which means, of course, that it was impossible to get clean audio.  there were also lots of cars passing and planes flying overhead as well.  which means that, though i swore that ADR could kiss my ass this year, we had to dub two scenes.  even so, it was 6 lines instead of six minutes of ADR.  i can live with that.  once we got inside the audio was much better.  filming proceded at a slow but steady pace and we wrapped up about 8 o’clock… which was good because that’s when we had to be out of the house! 

back to motke’s house to get some dinner (which was fantastic, thank you craft services!) and then out to memphis (my house in bellevue) to start post-production.  once at the house, the film team sat down and started cranking out video and i peaced out to get a little sleep.  five hours later and they were still going at it, but they had something for audio to work with, so we got started on that.  then the actors showed up for the six lines of ADR that we had to do and i took off to run sound for church.

to any of you who talked to me at church this past sunday, i wish to extend my sympathies.  i was running on caffiene and adrenaline and not much else.  i’m not entirely sure what i said or how i said it.

i drove back to the house where evan and motke had finished the ADR and started putting together the soundtrack for the film and the video team was still cutting and splicing and whatever else video people do (i don’t know a thing about video – they could be waving wands and dancing circles around the computer and i would just assume that they knew what they were doing). 

and… well… that’s pretty much where we stayed for the rest of the time… everyone in their spots just cranking along at their job as hard as they could.  it got tense there at the end, of course… we had some last minute technical issues and it got down to the wire.  i broke 110mph in my little truck trying to get from belview to jj’s market in 15 minutes.  i made it with three minutes to spare.  because i’m awesome.  sadly i screwed my fuel economy sideways doing it, but hey, what’s art without a little sacrifice, right?

i’ll have more info about screenings at the belcourt later.  but for now, what you’ve all been wating for…

“safe as houses”

a quick note though… if you are going to watch this film on your computer (which i would assume, since this is a link to a website) please do so on a computer which is hooked up to a decent speaker system that has a subwoofer.  you’ll miss so much if you don’t.

that is all.  enjoy.