Mitusents

Over the weekend I became totally overwhelmed attempting to restart the momentum on editing my flick.  It seemed everywhere I looked I found more and more sound files.  Almost all with the same meaningless name (e.g., MONO-<some number>.wav).  I was sure I had duplicates, as there were several times I was too rushed to ensure I only copied the new files off the storage media and just copied everything, but I didn’t think they were of this magnitude.  That really bit me on the ass!

Being a programmer professionally, I eventually decided to write a series of scripts to help me find and locate the replicas.  That took a number of hours, but eventually I was able to find the original collection of 530 audio files and match them up with the written records I got from the sound guy.  I now feel 99% confident I have all the sound files.

Of course, the ones I have all have the meaningless names, so my next effort is to find out which ones the sound guy has already gone through to rename with the appropriate information.  I know he hasn’t got them all, because the second scene isn’t in his renamed collection.  One of the primary reasons I stalled so quickly when I finally started editing.

So the weekend wasn’t a 100% failure on my part, just, say, 99.9% failure.  Hopefully this week will be different and I can get momentum to move into next week, when we’re on vacation, and still achieve my goal of having the next version done by the end of the year.

I’ve been communicating with an experienced editor and he’s agreed to give it a once-over once I’ve recut it.  He’ll then let me know if he can help out in such a way to fit within my budget (which, frankly, is nigh on zero at this point).  It’ll be a little tricky getting him all the data files and I might go with sneakernet rather than attempt to upload it somehow.  Hopefully we can come to an accommodation and he can at least do the color correcting, to ensure the night scenes all look like night.

I’ve got the feedback I was looking for for my rough cut.  There was a lot of overlap, which will make some decisions easy.  There were differences, of course, which will take more time to sort out.  But I feel good that there’s a consensus that I’ve achieved my goal of having something watchable.  I’ve lost perspective now, so can’t judge any longer, and really appreciate the extra set of eyeballs.

I need to settle in and begin the second round of cutting.  Well, not a whole lot of cutting, more about tweaking.  This time audio is king.  I need to get rid of the camera audio for the whole thing, which means syncing up likely several thousand little cuts with their audio (sigh, just typing that makes me tired), then I need to put in background sound (e.g., crickets chirping during the night scenes, party sounds during the party scenes, etc.) which will greatly add to the verisimilitude.  Then music to set the mood.  Then, my next nemesis, color correction.  I may send out my next cut and wait for feedback before I start color correcting.  Fear of the unknown…

I was hoping I could jump back into editing after having taken the time off whilst waiting for the feedback, but am finding myself reluctant.  My intent was to have a second cut done before Christmas, now I think I’ll make it for the New Year.  I hope I can start the process before then and have some momentum developed.  Stupid brain.

After a very long couple of weeks editing my movie, I finally have a rough cut done.  It is very rough, with some rather rude elements stubbed in and other experimental attempts I doubt will make it to the final cut, but it has everything done except the singing scene.

This morning I was going to rework that scene, which I put off initially because I was bogged down too much with it, but my brain is fried and I can’t make any decisions any longer.  I plan on at least a week off before I look at it again, hopefully then I’ll be able to make some progress.  It’s only around two minutes, but it totally messes with my mind.

As my sound guy / mentor said would happen, I got to the point where I hated everything and everyone.  While the vast majority of the scene had several good takes and it was a matter of trying to choose the best among several worthy options, I had one scene were I felt everything sucked.  Every angle, how the camera was set up, how the actors handled their lines, the lighting, everything.  It was a matter of finding the least bad bits and attempting to stitch them together in the least offensive way.  I even had to drop some dialog because I couldn’t find any combination of sights and sounds that I felt would work.  The lines weren’t fundamental, thankfully.

But that was one scene out of nearly 80, and while there were several takes ruined by the camera boom or microphone being in frame (and, in principal, those elements could be excised), there were others that allowed me to easily work around.

The finished render came out at a bit shy of 68 minutes, so in this case, 84 pages worked out to around 48 seconds per page, as opposed to the supposed standard of 60 seconds/page.  That’s considered a very rough guide anyway, with probably more exceptions than anything, but that’s what the industry looks at.

I’ve sent links to the rough cut to a handful of people that I feel can look past the inconsistent audio and crappy singing scene and will wait for their feedback.  No doubt I’ll be cutting some elements and they may have suggestions for better ways to handle others, so I expect to make significant changes, but I don’t believe they’ll be draconian.  I also sent the link to some musicians for their thoughts.

I still have yet to learn how to do color correction, or making each take visually look alike.  I also have painfully blue skies during some of the night scenes that need addressing, which I believe color correction will help, and I have a couple of small insert shots to take yet.  I also have a scene I didn’t put in because when I started to cut it together I realized I hadn’t filmed enough.  Fortunately it’s something I could film myself, but unfortunately, all the leaves have dropped off the trees, so it might not look good.  I’ll see if anyone misses it.

It will probably be January before I start to close in on a final cut.  First I need to lock the picture, which won’t happen until I’ve received and incorporated the feedback from the rough cut.  Then I need to polish the audio, which I fully expect to be almost as much of a PITA as cutting the video together.  Then color correct.  Then add Foley, which is the background sounds you take for granted (e.g., the sound of people walking), ambiance sounds, like birds and crickets for outdoor scenes and top it all off with music.  I got a lot of work left to do and am still struggling with some of the most seemingly trivial things using the editor (it took me days to finally figure out how to adjust the audio volume for each clip; by then I was too tired to do it).

I feel pretty good about movie making and am planning on doing the first draft of my next project over the Christmas holiday (a horror concept, since horror is one of the rare genre with a reasonable track record of getting distribution with small budgets and no names).  But any future projects have to fund themselves, as the boss (wife) has made it adamantly clear she won’t be using our retirement to finance any further projects.  So it might not get past the script stage, as if I can’t find investors in my nascent production company, I won’t be creating the LLC for the horror flick (there are good reasons that Hollywood accounting is so arcane, though that does make it easy to abuse).

I’m pretty happy with the editing I’ve done so far on Treasure Hunt, having reached page 56 (out of 84).  I haven’t rendered what I’ve done so far, but the editing software says it’s running a bit past 49 minutes.  One minute per page isn’t working out terribly well. If this ratio keeps going I’ll wind up with 73 minutes (exclusive of any begin/end credits), but I don’t have any particular goal for length, just want something that flows easily.  I feel even better about my self-imposed goal of having a rough-cut done by end of next weekend, though there are two scenes that, together, have over 60 takes, which will no doubt take a good bit of time to sort out.

I’ve decided to put off reworking the singing scene until I’ve got the whole rough cut done.  I’ve already decided to rejigger a few of the earlier scenes anyway, given my increased experience.  I recut the library scene I did earlier, going from 2:53 down to 2:22, without sacrificing anything, just as John said I could.  No doubt he’d cut it still further, but then again, he’d do a completely different movie from the get-go.

I’m getting a lot more comfortable with the editing, but still don’t feel called to it at all.  I do feel I’m learning about lost opportunities, though, and believe it’s just the thing to be sure I get more little shots on any future projects.  But even if people judge I have some talent for editing, I don’t know that I’ll ever do it again.  Besides, I feel having another set of eyes on the material, not to mention someone with more patience (and passion), will lead to a better product.

I finally managed to make the behind-the-scenes page I promised earlier (better late than never, eh?), you can find it here.

Back to work…

Not to say there haven’t been wrinkles, of course, but I spent the better part of yesterday doing editing (more below) on the flick and got to around page 13 (about 11 minutes on-screen; if this ratio holds, then the finished product will be a bit more than 70 minutes), which, when combined with the library scene I already cut together (to find out if I could edit at all) means I have probably 16 pages done with the rough cut (a fairly slavish following of the script), or perhaps close to 20%.  This gives me some confidence that I can have a rough cut done by Thanksgiving.

So what changed?  Well, I thought, Friday night or Saturday morning, I’m also able to do cuts with the mouse as well as the keyboard, and it was the keyboard that was giving me fits. I decided to see what I could do with the mouse.  It turns out that the mouse works fine, at least on the computer at our Virginia house.  I was a little worried that might not work back in Maryland, so brought that computer home with me (it’s also newer and faster (and, I believe, with more RAM and CPUs), so I’ll probably swap computers anyway).  Stupidly, I also brought the portable drive and the original media home with me, which means everything is in one house, just waiting to burn down.  I’ll feel better next weekend when I actually have backups again.

But it was not all peaches and cream (what does that even mean?).  I was making steady progress until I got to my ‘inciting incident,’ which includes singing.  Ahh, the singing.  The advice I got was to record the singing ahead of time, then have the actors lip sync to themselves as they acted it out, listing to the recording of themselves (we picked one person to be the ‘master’ the others sang to).  Recording that turned out to be… problematic. On several levels.  Though, I felt at the time, we finally got what was needed.  Yesterday I tried to overlap the four actors singing.  While there are certainly portions that sound OK (and keep in mind, this is OK to someone who’s half deaf and has tinnitus), much of it was terrible.  It might be possible, with someone who has a lot more patience than I do, to align the singing, alter pitch, etc. and make it sound good (the number of options is almost scary), but I gave up after a couple of hours and basically stubbed in something I can come back to later.

That sucked a lot of energy out of me, though, and I wasn’t able to develop any more momentum for the day (I’d spent at least 8 hours, probably closer to 10, by this point), so I wrapped it up.  I did, though, do a test render of what I had up to that point and, if I do say so myself, it was rather watchable.  Still with the camera audio and it’s annoying hum (I started to align the separate audio, but quickly got exhausted trying to get things to match, so (re)decided to cut the whole thing together visually then go back and do the audio), but not too bad, I felt.  One friend also remarked that she felt it was ‘watchable,’ which is the bar I’ve set for myself.

What’s next?  Lots more editing of course.  If I’m running an hour a page, then that means I have 84 total.  With around 20% of that done, I have 67 hours yet to go.  Since Thanksgiving is next week, I’ll have to push it, but I do think I’m getting a bit better/faster as I go, so I still think it’s not unrealistic to get the rough cut done.  That being said, I do have two scenes which, combined, have over 60 takes, which will, no doubt, slow me down.  So maybe not by Thanksgiving Day, but, I feel, by the time the holiday weekend is over.

I managed to find the pictures my DP took behind the scenes when we were digging holes in the back yard.  I’m going to try and get them (and my wife’s videos) posted in the next day or two, but want to keep the momentum going on the editing, so don’t want to distract myself yet.

OK, I’ve let things slide for a while.  I apologize for those of you who may be following along.

When last I wrote about my movie, I’d just finished principal photography.  I was pretty depressed about the whole thing and mostly convinced never to do anything like it again.  Which, as I understand it, is quite normal for directors when production is wrapped. Didn’t make it any easier or enjoyable, though.

I wound up with 625 video clips comprising over 128 gigabytes of data and estimated to contain more than 700 minutes of ‘footage.’  (The usual low-end ratio is 10 minutes filmed for every page of material, so I was already short of the expected 840 minutes, for better or worse (probably worse, but only time will tell).)  I already started renaming the sequential, zero information file names to scene/shot/take and was half done. In order to do that, I need to watch the video until the slate, which is that clapper thing you always see on behind the scenes stuff.  For the first week I struggled doing so and it was the weekend before I started to get my act together. I did manage to get copies of all the raw files on my during-the-week computer (our house in Maryland), but managed to leave the backups and originals in our Virginia house (moron!), so when I started the next week actually doing the renaming (I have a spreadsheet with the original file name, then the scene/shot/take information as well as comments about the various takes) I found that I had stupidly renamed a number of files to the same name (thus losing the other) and somehow managed to completely fail to copy some file all together.  That forced me to wait to get the original media the next weekend, so zero progress for two weeks.

Boy, did I screw up my file renaming!  It took me probably more than 8 hours (spread over several days) to have confidence that I had all the correct files (two were even corrupted, but fortunately the original media versions were clean) and they were named properly.  So I got all my data and am all set to start editing on Monday.

Then I wound up with a migraine!  I get them at irregular intervals and they can sometimes last for 3-4 days.  After decades of experimentation, I’ve found a drug cocktail that will minimize the pain from the headache (before, my only ‘treatment’ was to hide in bed praying to sleep, as that was the only time I was pain free), but it makes me a bit spacey and does little to stop the nausea (makes dieting easier, though).  That lasted through Wednesday. Thursday, yesterday, I finally feel good again, so was all set to finally start editing when I got home from work.

But first I tried to make a ‘behind the scenes’ page showing off some of the videos and images my wife took, but Youtube has made that a small nightmare for me.  When I first uploaded the video there was a page that allowed me to get an embedded link for each video. That page vanished when Firefox thoughtfully decided to restart itself and I haven’t been able to find out how to get those damn links since then.  Way to be user friendly Youtube! If a professional programmer can’t figure these things out without Googling, then it’s too damn complicated.

So I figured, well, I have one, surely I can recreate the others, so I work on my web page replicating the same embedded URL and changing the code at the end of the Youtube URL.  Simple, right? Except the clips that show up in my web page seems to be random compared to the clip that shows up when I reach it via Youtube. I had to take a break or I would have smashed something.  If you want to investigate yourself, it’s the most recent files uploaded here: https://www.youtube.com/user/mitakeet/videos

Now to editing… Finally.  Except (you knew there had to be one, right?) the Kdenlive software that I had successfully used earlier, now, when I go to make a cut, jumps around randomly instead of the frame where I told it to cut.  WTF?! I tried reinstalling it, no luck. Well, hell, I’ll just switch to the second most recommended editing software, they’re all supposed to look and feel the same, right? Except the operating system software to load the other editing software denied the editing program even existed!  I had to take a break a number of times to keep from destroying anything, so it was a while before I decided I’d try the Linux version of Davinci Resolve, a very popular Window-based editor. Except it isn’t optimized to install on Ubuntu (the flavor I use), so I had to use this script to convert it.  Which took, like, an hour to download and convert.

It installed, after I resolved a dependency issue (one of the ‘joys’ of working on Linux).  Great! Now I just launch it and start going through the learning curve to use it. I fire it up, it goes through a bunch of introductory screens, assures me my hardware has enough horsepower to get the job done, then…  hangs. Eventually I get a crash report. Well, that sucks. I rerun it, exact same issue. So now I’ve wasted the entire evening and haven’t edited a damn thing. And got steam coming out of my ears and want to smash things.  I blow off some of that steam to some friends, then watch some TV and go to bed. As I lay there, I decided I’d try my wife’s hated Windows laptop to see if I could edit with it (will try that this afternoon). I have no idea if it has the horsepower to do editing, but I might as well try.  The cost of buying a new machine is such that it probably makes better sense to hire an experienced editor instead.

But I’d really like to get the experience doing the editing, as I’ve been assured in many places that I will grow a lot as a director by doing at least the rough-cut version of at least my first film.

I’m also going to see if I can do editing on my computer in Virginia.  If that works, perhaps I’ll just bring it home (which robs me of an off-site backup, but maybe I can leave one of my portable hard drives there instead).  My goal of having a rough cut by Thanksgiving isn’t looking very feasible any longer.

Boy, do I hate computers!

For better or worse.  Hopefully more of the former and less of the latter.

Sunday afternoon we completed filming the final scene of “Shenandoah Treasure Hunt,” which happened to be the second scene chronologically in the script.  The penultimate scene filmed was the fourth scene in the script.  Filming out of order has me worried I might have missed something important.  Indeed, last Saturday I forgot a scene, somehow crossed it off my list even though we hadn’t shot it.  Crystal commented earlier in the week, when I sent out the call sheet, that it wasn’t on the list, so thanks to her we got it worked in on Saturday.

Saturday, once again, was beautiful, with clear, painfully blue skies while we were shooting the day-for-night scenes.  Then, naturally, when we switched to the actual daytime scene, it got cloudy and dark.  Fortunately, the DP was on top of things and compensated beautifully.

I got some production stills from him, but stupidly forgot to copy them to my portable hard drive, so won’t have access to them until next weekend.  I intend to collect a few together and create a web page.  No doubt the actors have taken quite a few, probably even videos, but we didn’t make arrangements to get copies to me.  Now they’re off to the four winds.

Once again, I suffered acute depression on the way home Sunday.  I feel better today, but on the ride home I was pretty convinced I never wanted to do this again.  So many compromises, so many things that felt rushed.  Averaging 10 pages a day seemed so easy before, but I think it’s much more realistic to aim for a max of 10 pages and accept an average of around 7-8 per day instead.  There were many times where we simply didn’t have time to do more takes, as then we wouldn’t be able to get in the rest of the scheduled scenes.

I think if I had some expert helpers and extra lighting equipment we could go faster.  Nate had to do 99% of the work himself; about all we could do is fetch and carry for him.  But if we had dedicated crew who knew how to set up lights, they could be working on the setup for the next scene while we’re filming, which should help make things more efficient.  Of course, that also makes things more expensive, so all sorts of trade offs.

On Sunday, I was confident by the end of this week I could cut together a rough version of the film, to identify any missing scenes or scenes that simply do not work (for technical reasons or otherwise).  Yesterday disabused me of that notion.  I have over 600 files that total almost 126 gigabytes (and take hours to transfer!).  I estimate a total of 700 minutes, or a bit more than 11.5 hours.  Which need to be edited into around 80 minutes.  That’s actually a pretty good ratio (perhaps too good, meaning not enough coverage for optimal editing), the usual is 10 minutes filmed for 1 minute in the final cut.

My new estimate for a rough cut is around Thanksgiving, which is barely a month away (how fast this summer has gone!).  Then I need to catch up on beta reading I committed to back in spring(!) and, finally, deal with my own writing I have queued up.  We typically take the week between Christmas and New Years to hang out at our place in Virginia, but I have a sneaking suspicion I’ll be doing editing most of that time.

I’ve looked at a number of the ‘dailies’ and been pretty happy (indeed, looking through clips last night — so I can label them with scene/shot/take so I have some prayer of getting started with editing — helped lift my mood).  Unless there’s some egregious errors that are impossible to work around (e.g., I only one usable shot of a certain scene, and the boom mike is clearly visible in the corner of the frame; but I think I can crop it fairly easily), I don’t intend to do any reshoots or pickups.  Partly because the actors all insist they need additional compensation, despite what I made clear when this project got started, but also because they’re all busy and it might very well be January or even February before we’d have time to get everyone together.

While ‘watchable’ is a fairly low bar, it is, nonetheless a challenge for a first-time writer/director.  I tried to minimize that risk by having experienced script editors help me with the story, as well as experienced cast and crew, but it still needs to be edited together.  If my attempt at a rough cut is deemed inadequate (I hope not, but kind of expect so), then I will lobby my executive producer (wife) for some funds to hire an experienced editor to see if they can come up with something watchable.

As I work on cutting together the movie, I’ll also be thinking about material for a trailer.  Hopefully I can have something interesting by the end of the year, if not by Thanksgiving, and will be sure to make it available here.

Any lessons learned at this point?  Schedule fewer pages is number one.  Get the contracts signed before filming is another.  I’ve tried to look through the camera (well, look at the camera’s monitor) to see how the DP is framing things, but largely failed to do so.  I think that’s a major mistake on my part.  I focus on the actor’s delivery, but since I don’t know what’s in frame most of the time, I might not be catching something important.  I think, at a minimum, a shot list is important.  I had a list of all the scenes scheduled for each day (though somehow marked one off mistakenly, so even that’s not guaranteed), but missed a few shots I needed to get and had to remember to get them later.  If I had the shot list going into each scene, then I could check them off as we go and know nothing got missed.  If I continue with movie making, I’m going to hire an artist to do storyboards.  I think that would go a very long way toward assuring the vision in my head got captured, because I could show the DP what I had in mind.  I expect the DP to come up with better ideas, but they can only be better if he knows what I had in mind in the first place.

No doubt when I finally start getting the editing going I’ll identify other weaknesses, but these are the ones I know about so far.  This movie was intended to be a learning experience, and it has certainly lived up to that goal.  I think there’s a reasonable possibility, once I’ve got the movie assembled, that I’ll get excited again and want to continue, but as I type this, I’m straddling the fence.  Which is better than on Sunday, when I was firmly on the f-this side of the fence.

On to editing…

An update on my Treasure Hunt movie (crowdfunding link)…

Due to scheduling conflicts, we had to take two weekends off. We filmed last Saturday and Sunday and will do next weekend, then that’s probably it. There are some insert shots (someone holding a phone, computer, picture, etc.) and some transition shots (showing some iconic shots of the countryside while the characters are traveling) that need to be filmed, but I may not have the budget or time to do pickup shots or ADR (automated dialogue replacement), so it may have to be exactly the way it is.

The weekend was quite productive. We did, though, have a very long day on Saturday. Started at 7:30 AM (everyone was there on time, though the DP hadn’t slept at all Friday night) and I think it was after 9 PM when we wrapped the final scene. It was the day with the most scheduled pages AND scenes. And we dug a hole! The DP actually wound up digging most, he seemed to really enjoy it, but I don’t think the women did any at all. The DP wanted the hole deeper, but we hit a flat slab of bedrock and no one wanted to gamble another location would be better, so we covered the slab up with a little dirt and trusted to movie magic. We needed a couple of shots at the ‘blue hour’ (which was actually only about 20 minutes; it’s the brief time when there’s enough light to film things without lighting them, yet dark enough that ‘practical’ lights show up), which had us racing around a little, but it was almost all at our property.

The one location was at the Zirkle Mill. Naturally the day I choose to film is the same day that the next door neighbor decides to have a yard sale.  Thus, the parking lot we used, which I swear to you has been totally empty of cars for years, had a constant stream of people pulling in to park, then lazily lollygagging their way back and forth across the road between where we were shooting. Oh, there were also like 10x more noisy trucks on the road than I ever remember hearing/seeing since we’ve been there, which included two days we were putting in our driveway and were originally told we needed someone on the road with a flag (fortunately, they backed off on that before we left with the borrowed ‘road work’ signs). I was all set to quit and (possibly) try again some other day, but the DP insisted we give it some more time. He was right; we were eventually able to find the minute-long window we needed to get the shots.

The back of the mill was beautiful and the DP loved it so much he insisted on a wide angle shot that probably means we’ll have to do ADR of the actor’s lines. Boy, was that creek noisy! The DP almost was in the water he wanted to get so much of the mill in the shot. This is supposed to be the exact same physical structure that was there during the Civil War and which figures prominently in my plot and story.

We did a lot of day-for-night shooting. Almost all the scenes on Saturday are, in the script, at night, but I didn’t want to be up all night (neither did the actors) and we convinced the DP to shoot during the day instead. Naturally we had a largely gorgeous, clear, PAINFULLY blue sky, so I’ll have a lot of work in editing blackening that brilliant thing. We did a lot of walking on Saturday, from nearly one end of our property to the other. The driveway is a third of a mile long, so I expect we all did a couple of miles over the day. Which, of course, cut into the time we could be filming, hence the really long day.

I had to drop all my ‘bro’ scenes. The actor who was supposed to be the bro partner to my son sent an email around 4 PM Saturday (which I didn’t read for several hours) that he didn’t have a ride for Sunday. So I delete the parallel scene with the Velma character and am toying with revamping (the now deleted) almost final scene where the bros were going to dismiss the treasure. I’m now thinking of having Max go to the landlord instead, but haven’t made up my mind. Sigh. Getting actors for these scenes has been a nightmare from the very beginning. I’ve probably had at least a half dozen say ‘yes’ to a bro slot, only to back out later. I’ve never been able to get actors lined up for the parallel scene (they’re both meant to be background comic relief for an otherwise dull scene in the foreground; now no dull scene), though had come up with a way to film it later, so I had more time to try and get people (I had two tentative relatives, but they couldn’t make the scheduled day).

On the whole I think I got what I needed. Next weekend will be a challenge as well, it has the second highest pages, but half them are same location and scene, so I hope we can film it quickly.

While the process certainly hasn’t been without frustrations, on the whole, I think I’m happy with how things have been working out. I wish I had more focus to work on editing, so I could catch things we could recover from while still filming, but we’ve largely been so busy each weekend I doubt I’d have the time or energy to squeeze in any shots anyway. But I am learning a whole lot about movie making, lots of little things that can make things smoother. Like scheduling scenes with complicated wardrobe together, or, alternatively, if wardrobe is simple, scheduling all the shots from the same location/setup at the same time and have the actors change several times.