"Every picture has its shadows..."

Hello again,

Yesterday's editing was both productive and... uhh... let's say, "educational." All of these sessions are highly educational, in fact -- inevitably, really, since I start from a position of Knowing Very Little (the best position for learning, let's optimistically call it).

I think I will be a significantly more prepared director next time. Not only did teaching COMM 3201 (an intro to TV studio production) at the U help solidify a lot of abstract "book knowledge" I had -- watching students' varying degrees of havoc and success on their own shoots proved to me the true-life benefits of many pre-production elements (I'm in love with storyboarding now) -- but editing even just this one scene of "my own," even after only this one week, has been as good a lesson as anything I ever got in a class, either teaching or studying. Granted, if I didn't have the background I have, I wouldn't be seeing many of the things I'm seeing. And believing.

Take these shots, for example:

Here's me (with some of that ridiculous ice cream) (ignore the lack of proper aspect ratio, please - I don't know why the still image isn't coming out right). Notice the black T-shirt and the dark background (and my dyed-darker hair) and also how pale/ashen I am.










And here's Kevin (who also had dyed his hair, as I recall). Note the pink in his skin (absent from my palor) and the bright background, which is brighter at certain times (as the shot of me is also sometimes darker).

These images have to cut together - but it goes dark-LIGHT, dark-LIGHT. It's quite distracting sometimes. And Kevin's shirt is actually blue rather than green in some of the shots of me.

Even if I had been wearing a lighter color, the contrast jump would have been less pronounced. I think I thought that both of us having the same-toned shirt would be a good idea -- and in some circumstances, that would have been true. But not here.

At least, that's what I think today. Any comments? I am thinking that this can be somewhat fixed with color adjustment. Isn't that right? But that will be much farther down the line.

In any case, I will be much more aware of this sort of thing in the future. And I will also avoid shooting so much of someone's spiny BACK as we did of mine in some set-ups. There's like this big black bony blob taking up the whole left side of the screen in some of the MCUs of Kevin -- making the light-DARK contrast even worse in those cases. Arrgh! We adjusted mid-shoot, and many of the takes have only my elbow (as above), but once again, I will be more aware of this next time.

Also, we did not survive the 180-degree challenge, after all. Our master shot (the only shot that shows Davis Square) is backwards. D'oh!!

I thought maybe I could fudge it and cut from WS to MS of Sarah (there isn't a good M2 in the lot, unfortunately) as she *turns* upon sitting on the table -- but Pete watched it last night and he said it looks like suddenly I'm doing a little pirouette, so I won't be including that bit. What I've done, then, is cut the whole scene in MS & CU. I think the last shot of Scene 5 (where Bill fixes Marissa plate after she's returned from the hospital) is a MS of Bill at his cutting board, so it might blend well enough. We'll see.

Oh - and isn't it possible to flip the shot? Hmmmm... the movie marquee would be backwards -- but if the shot is fairly short, couldn't we just cut & flip-back the marquee? Hmmmm...

For those who recall this scene: for the sake of time, I'm cutting out several lines from the part where Sarah says, "I'm loud, I don't hide my tampons." Scene too long!

I wonder if I can cut the whole scene...

Anyway, I hope to get a rough cut of the entire Scene 6 today -- and move on to an easier task tomorrow (something interior with no FOOD).

On a separate note, it was nice to hear back from R.J. & Jack yesterday (day before?). I hope we all can start to re-connect here in the next few weeks.

Peace out,
Rachel

heyyy

I don't know what happened to my fonts there -- I tried to make the dialogue Courier and make Sarah's line small for quiet - but why didn't the seconfd half go back down to normal size??

Technology. Grunt.

pops and buScreecHes

Right. Well.

The 2-camera set-up we used for Scene 6 (Davis Square) actually proved very useful today. I took the video from one camera on Take 4 and the sound from the other. This worked remarkably well -- and it even synched up on the first "paste" attempt, which seems - still - highly unlikely, unusually lucky OR a function of Final Cut of which I've been unaware. So when I _look_ like I'm muttering "Bastard!" I sound like I'm saying it, too. We like this.

On Monday I did actually get to cutting a little. When I quit for the day in order to go to my brother's for x-mas eve dessert and games, I was quite sure it would Never Be Possible to make any of the sound work Ever (at least in this scene), because 1) there was SO MUCH TRAFFIC - Aarrghhh!!! - and 2) the mic under the table was so much louder than - uhh - the other mic, wherever it may have been. So as Bill and Sarah (Kevin and I) talk about whether or not she's "turning gay" and whether or not this would "bother" him, and the shot goes back and forth (from him to her to him to her to him, you see?), the sound goes like this:

SARAH
You honk sure whirr you screech don't vroom want ghgtm?

BILL
Yeah, honk pretty sure.

But not to fear! My point of saying all of this is to announce that - huzzah! - today I actually fussed around with the sound levels (is there an intuitive or historical reason that tool looks like the tip to a fountain pen?) to such an extent that I close out today rather, if I dare admit, HOPEFUL. That hope is augmented by my "discovery" of the existence of the "stereo spread" tool, which I think will also help.

Note to self: no exteriors in high traffic areas when the scene is intensely dialogocentric.

I'm not putting "dialogocentric" in the glossary because I made it up.

So, tomorrow is Pete-my-manfriend's 50th birthday, so I'm not sure I"ll be editing or blogging, but I may. I've got two sequences going -- one that will try to cut more of the scene out than the other. I"m eager to see just how short I can make the scene and have it still make sense and serve its "vibes are unreliable" purpose.

We shall see, we shall see.

Rachel

computer confusion

What did I do?? I've got way too many "capture scratch" folders - and other things, at various levels - some on the laptop, some on the external hard drive -- What on earth did I DO?? (not to mention that on Wednesday I seem to have "reconnected" some media to the wrong clips - so, for example, the file called "Larry on bed crying" is now directed to the clip of Marissa walking up to Bill at the hospital -- arrrrghhhh!!!)

This is one of the reasons I gave up and wanted someone else to do it -- Final Cut is _not_ "user friendly." Not this user, anyway.

I'm hoping to get a new (refurbished) iMac after the new year - I might very well see how iMovie does with this footage then. I hear that many people prefer the iMovie from iLife '06 to the newer one that will come pre-installed on any computer I buy. Comments anyone?

Arrrghhhh!!

Getting started

Well, I god a co'd, a bad, bad co'd. So I didn't blog or edit yesterday (students will be happy to know I did grade a little).

Today, however - ! Still snorfling and breathing through my mouth, but my break is already ten days in! Eek. So I'm on the move.

Kevin/Bill's scenes are first up because the dear man has been calling me regularly for five years "just to say hi" - and ask if I could please maybe send him some footage for his reel. Really I think he must be at the point of throwing darts at my picture (if I had ever sent him anything that had me in it, which I haven't). Who could blame him if he were? How much of a loser do his friends think I am, I wonder.

Aaaaghhh!!! Five years! Aaaaaaaa!

Anyway - on Wednesday I looked through all the clips I'd already uploaded from Scene 6 (Davis Square). Man, am I aggravating to watch - stop mumbling! slow down! move your hair! - but Bill had some good moments (when he could remember his lines and the darn audio-crosswalk-signal-for-the-blind wasn't interrupting him).

There are a lot of flares from passing car windshields -- are those fixable? I kind of think they are... ? I hope so. Fixable by who(m)ever I get to clean up my rough cut, not by me -- although I think I'm going to buy that Apple Store one-on-one service come January: I can go in for up to an hour a week and get someone to help me with something, Final Cut included. Yeah, dude.

An hour a week - like well needed therapy.

Today I will look for more of the footage of myself ("Sarah") - blah - to intercut with Bill. Hopefully I'll actually get to cutting today, too. We used TWO cameras this day (thanks to Cynthia Conti); I wonder how we did with ye olde 180-degree rule. Hmmm.

Yes, that day we had Greg Dancer, our DP, on one camera and Cynthia on hers; Jack Martin was doing sound, and Dan Cashmore was doing everything else, I think. Yes? Sound right? There's some neat footage of Jack climbing a city tree to get to an electrical outlet.

Right -- so I'll get to it, then.

Gesundheit,
Rachel

Ridiculous Ice Cream!

Hello! We are on our way again! Who's got the odds?

I have called this blog "Ridiculous Ice Cream" based on a note I made (now five years ago) while originally previewing/logging all the original "Seeing and Believing" footage.

Way back in the fall of 2002, I made a Preliminary Editing Decision List template (hereafter referred to as the PEDL) with a wooden ruler and a black marker, photocopied it several times, and turned on the first tape from Day 1 (Scene 6: Davis Square, "I'd like to invite you and your fascist roommate and her hunk of a boyfriend over for dinner sometime, but not if you're going to be all serious and angry and..."). Over the next year, I watched all 29 hours and made note after note after note about framing and usability, etc., hoping that at some point I would find a "real" editor to take the job over from me and pull our glorious endeavor together in a neat 100-minute narrative package. Alas, after a few hopes dashed over the first three or four years, eventually I gave up.

Then I participated in the "48-Hour Film Festival," this past June, and after helping out with the editing on that, began to think that maybe I... maybe I could just... maybe...

So, yesterday, looking at a month off from teaching, I took from the shelf the notebook that contains what eventually became more than 200 pages of PEDL notes. I made a copy of every page so that I could have one set sorted by tape # and one set sorted by scene #, and I sat down at my computer to look through Tape 1, reading my notes as I went. A few pages in, I saw, scrawled near the bottom of a "video" column, the words "ridiculous ice cream."

This was my log note to help me later with editing decisions: ridiculous ice cream.

It was not very helpful, but it definitely captured the essence of the issue. I laughed out loud, remembering our first day of shooting: the increasing heat (and traffic noise), the dripping green goo (then pink then vanilla-with-nuts) -- the continuity nightmare I created. My very first note to self for "next time" was basically, "ice cream in the summertime bad!"

It was certainly not the last mistake I made over those 29 days of shooting.

Looking at the phrase on the page yesterday, I felt that it captured more than just the literal less-and-less-frozen dairy dilemmas of that day in 2002; it seemed that there was something in it that spoke of low-budget independent filmmaking in general. Making a feature-length film for under $5000 (or under $50,000) _is_ ridiculous ("impractical" and "impossible" by so many reasonable standards), and it _is_ ice cream (yummy, sweet and also surprisingly nutritious, as treats go). And even though I knew I was going to have hair-pulling aggravations later because of the decisions I was making about the vanishing and reappearing quantities and the color and cone substitutions, I also knew we had to keep going. It was the first day of the shoot and didn't want to get bogged down or held up by a damned ice cream cone! Other things were more important.

The value of independent film is not to be found in any precision of continuity, but in its spirit of tenacity and its resourcefulness. Our ice cream might be ridiculous but at least its not a product placement!

And I might be five years older now -- no "might" about it -- we're all older, and I might be missing a couple shots here and there (something about Marissa waking up at dawn -- Hey, Chistine, still got that hair piece?) -- but AND I'm back at it, hoping Yet Again that before another anniversary arrives obnoxiously at the door of my guilty conscience, I will have something to offer those of you who gave so much to the Cause.

The first order of business will be to cut out as much of Scene 6 as I can -- it's five minutes long! Insane. I mean ridiculous.