musique et fuutbaal

On Monday I managed to get four talented musicians into the tiny, ill-equipped school recording studio. It was about a hundred degrees in there and I was stuck next to the recording engineer, chain-smoking hand-rolled cigarettes the entire day. I have a hard enough time communicating to actors and cameramen what I'm looking for, but musicians was a whole other ballgame. "more abstract", "no, more jazzy", "no, less like that kind of jazz", "uh, could you play something happier", "can you all just imagine there are all these dancing 5 year olds in the room", "oh, that didn't work, okay, back to abstract"....and on and on. But in the end we got a million takes to work with and I think it is quite cool to have original music to work with. The price was 74 euros= 40 euros for a tank of gas, 30 euros for lunch and 4 euros for brownies and coffees. A reasonable deal I'd say.

So, the picture is edited (8 minutes with credits), the music is recorded, and now the sound has to be "designed" and mixed. I am going to record the final voiceovers this weekend. As for ever getting a 35mm print (the dream/the goal/the myth), I have to wait until my school budget is revised (???) and pray until September. If all goes miraculously well, and it never does, I'll be 100% done by October.

In the meantime, I need to start working on a feature script...something without a 5 year old star...

Going in circles

Editing is perhaps the hardest part so far. I know I haven't been blogging that much, I think it is because I already spend the entire day in front of a computer and am trying to avoid them outside of the editing room. Saint Denis, where our ancient is located, is dirty and hot. Twice this past week the water has been down at the school- causing bathroom incidents beyond disgust. There are cigarette butts and graffiti and teenagers bugging you to use my cell phone and smoke a joint with them and it is not a very conducive environment to contemplation. So, I try to find solutions. If this was a flatbed I know I'd be more limited but I am cursed with infinite choice and yet the footage doesn't seem to have any interest in telling the story I want it to tell.
I've been constantly reworking the structure with my editor and she is getting frustrated with me. So we've been arguing a lot which is even less conducive to filmmaking.

We showed a cut last week to around 8 people. Not one of them understood it- really, most of them said they were totally lost. So we went back to the more linear structure that is in the script- but it feels flat and disjointed and boring. We've got lots of different little post-it notes of all the different scenes and we keep shifting them and trying to figure out if changing the whole order can make any bit of sense. At this point, I'm wondering if it really has to make sense or should I just give up and go for pure madness.

The schedule is also driving me mad- is it worth it to try to get everything done in the next 2.5 weeks or accept I have to put things on hold for 3 months this summer? very very very tired and frustrated.

dont' forget me!

I know I've been terrible- not blogging for a whole month...
Well, the film was on a little post-production pause....but is now fully on play.
I showed my professor my rushes. He was extremely dissapointed, he said I "must break it apart and destroy everything" in editing. Which is what I've now set out to do, I agree with him that it is too clean, too sterile, not magical. I'm not sure how to overcome this..maybe getting phoebe tooke out here for some optical printing (are you listening??)
I have an Avid at my school. It is archaic and running the version that I believe came out shortly after the last ice age. But it appears (knock on wood) very stable, and we have a private, but very very very unglamorous, little room all to ourselves for three weeks. I've found a wonderful student to be my editor and I'm extremely happy I'm not in this alone. She's nice and easy going and so far, four days into synching up clips, so good.
Finally today we reached the "starting" point- it took since Thursday just to get all the media imported and subclipped and the sound in synch with the picture.
An important lesson for all future filmmakers: Make your script person take copious notes, make sure your slate is legible in every shot, and if you can afford a time-code capable sound recorder, get it.
I've learned a bit the hard way on these few points.

Well, for the next three weeks I'm digging in to this editing mess- then comes sound- and then hopefully getting something finished before I head home for the summer. This is looking less and less likely. I think I'm going to have to delay my official graduation until the fall. I guess that's okay.