Nearly two weeks ago I was notified that Treasure Hunt was accepted into a festival. In those two weeks, the festival has neither returned my emails or made any updates to their website. As such, I have to assume it was either a scam to make money off credulous indie filmmakers or it’s being operated by total incompetents (really, is there a way to tell the difference?). I may be surprised and they’ll suddenly emerge from the darkness, but I can’t see there being any value in getting excited even if that happens. If the festival is so small that it can’t be competently managed, is it even worth telling anyone about?
On a only tangentially related matter, the festival notification did light a small fire under my butt to experiment with the day-for-night on the flick. Since I know, biologically, most people see in black and white at night (rods vs cones, doanchano), I figured I’d try that and see what happened. Well, it seems, actually getting my editor to make the footage black and white is a PITA. However, I could reduce the saturation level to 1 (not zero, though) easily. Then, after adjusting the brightness, I felt I was able to quickly achieve a look I could be happy with. Those damn brilliant blue skies are gone and I feel it’s reasonable to think the scene is being illuminated by a bright full moon.
With that settled, now I have to learn how to adjust the audio levels. There should be an equalizer plugin that I can use to ‘roll off’ the sounds that are above and below normal speech. Then there should be a way to adjust the various audio (dialog, music and background) so they all fall in the ‘sweet spot’ where it’s easy to hear without being too loud or distorted. Supposedly, there’s a way to do this in a semi-automatic way, so I don’t have to spend minutes on each sound clip (there are probably over a thousand), but that’ll require research and experimentation.
So, with that momentum, I aim to rework the feature as well as the trailer. Then I’ll revisit the whole disk authoring debacle. I think I’ll feel more motivated at that point, since I believe I’ll have a reason to think it’ll be feasible to try and find actual paying customers. Timing, though, is probably early next year. The day-for-night went quickly, but I expect the audio to take a lot longer (most of the movie isn’t day-for-night).
