Sundown For A New Day

In 7 short weeks the world has changed... and today we solved the biggest issue:  relinking the media files. My wise and generous editor came by this afternoon and we sat at my counter -- doors open, me with a frosty frappuccino, he with a tall soft drink, and Sagan on the floor munching chips and playing with the light saber -- trying desperately to figure out why the files wouldn't link properly and, most importantly, why his files (which he created the film with) had time code and formatting data embedded in the video. Even he was baffled, and he's the master. I paced until we found our solution and now I sit here patiently while Shooting Days 3 and 4 are re-transcoded and re-linked. THEN on to the issue that got us here in the first place -- color correction to the mirror shots.

But I'm jumping to the end here, because yes, I did successfully screen the film to multiple audiences in Europe. Glowing praise, rave reviews, kind generous words. However, I quickly realized at the first showing (in Dublin, Ireland) that 2-3 scenes, plus the credits, had not been color corrected. As the director, I take full responsibility for this lapse. Although Scott and I went through the film pretty thoroughly over a few hours for the color correction, I did not stay to review the final film in its entirety, something a true director would and should always do. But I raise my hand in my defense: Scott was sick with a terrible cold. Sneezing, tissues, nose blowing. And we had been sitting in a small room, tight quarters, close together, for more than 3 hours. I was leaving in just a few days for Europe.  I don't think I need to say more. And yes, for those of you wondering, I was 100% healthy during my European trip.

Matt graciously re-created the closing video credits with the color corrected video and now the ball's in my court to make the final corrections, insert the new video footage, render the whole thing, and burn the DVDs. *whew*  I can do this without too much thought, just some babysitting, so maybe I'll make it a little party this weekend -- wine, beer, mexican food, editing and rendering.

Chinatown 7D Color Correction Example from Stu Maschwitz on Vimeo.
color correction example

My great friend Paul Alvarez once told me that if you keep on smiling and being nice, one day you wake up and you're it. I'll work on that... although I'm feeling more like an exploding star than the "it" girl I used to be. Some people get juiced from drama or the pain of life. It's probably good (and healthy) that I get inspired by love, peace and fun, but it would be great if I could harness the crap too. Maybe that's why I'm in a rock band. Get your juice where you can, I guess.

The film festival submission list is short but focused. We're considering submitting to at least one festival in France, which will force me to write my own subtitles. Perhaps I have some sort of mental illness, or maybe I just enjoy little challenges like that. Not committing to that though, just mulling it around. For you crazy people interested in my festival list, here it is, in no particular order:

• Sundance
• Santa Barbara International
• Ashland, OR
• Port Townsend, WA
• Austin Film Festival
• Cannes
• Cinequest
• Los Angeles Film Festivals (Int’l, Short, Latino)
• Palm Springs
• San Francisco
• Seattle
• Slamdance
• Toronto International
• Uppsala Short Film Festival

* a quick note here, I already submitted to Sundance with the uncorrected version, so I have a little time to replace it with the new one... uhhh hopefully

I'm also perusing the list of short film festivals... ahhhhhh
In the meantime, I'll be making margaritas and rendering. 

Sun has set on the summer
A new day dawns for the fall
Go forth and conquer

Whippin' It (Good) With Shoes Fully Tied

Right now, at this very moment, listening to Devo, drinking Chardonnary courtesy of Chateau St. Jean, I am officially celebrating. Three weeks behind. It's been a wild two weeks. Took a hatchet to the world and spent a few days dealing with the bleeding. And throughout all of it, I'm smiling.

Just when I was ready to finalize the editing process and begin refining the film, I had to take a little break to deal with life. My full plate was waiting: reviewing the rough cut, finalizing the montage, completing and sending out the music licenses, meeting with my post-production team to refine the edits, pull out and relabel the audio recordings -- all this to stay on schedule. The key is that our composer is leaving May 15 and will be gone for two weeks. He wanted to see the rough cut by May 1 so he had time to watch it, lay down some draft music, and meet with me to move forward with his ideas and my changes. Alas, it was not to be.

Sometimes we have to stop to tie our shoes, so that's what I did. The rough cut sat for 9 full days without me even looking at it; the montage was posted up for nearly a week. So I took care of business. In the back of my mind, it was nagging, like a Very Important Meeting that you had to attend and where you had to give a speech but had never written it. I had dreams about old boyfriends and semesters in junior high. The whole school year had gone by and I hadn't attended one class the whole time. I woke up mildly panicked. Oh man, didn't I dump that guy? Oh no, could I make up the classes in a week? It Was Crazy. Amusement Park Crazy. Alice in Wonderland Crazy.

Just when I felt like I was hitting a wall, I got an email from a neighborhood friend, a kid from my junior high and high school, who was with another friend in L.A. They were talking and my name came up. (I don't ask how or why here, I just accept the blessing.) The best part of this story is that the mutual friend is Don Terbush from Universal Music Group, who has been one of my great sources for film music over the last ten years. One of my (still-to-be-done) tasks was to call Don. So an angel knocked on my door that day. Well, literally, it was an email angel in the form of an old neighbor, whose dog bit my brother when he was 10 years old. I called Don right away, gave him the details about the project and sent him the music list for licensing.

100 lashes to me. Nothing like a little lashing to wake a girl up. But I'm a traditional kind of gal, with a nice little whip. I plowed through the film a dozen times, identified where to tighten, where to cut, where to use an alternate shot, where we're going to need music, and laid out the remaining edits to complete it from Intro to Fade to Black. Shoes are tied. No tripping over life here. Bring it on.

And because I'm in a friendly mood and slightly drunk, here's a list of songs we're licensing, or at least hoping to license... just for fun.


Opening - HONEY IS COOL, On The Beach
Montage - THE MIGHTY QUARK, Kangaroo #1
Patio Scene - WYE OAK,  I Don't Feel Young
Closing scene - NOUVELLAS, These Days Are Gone
Credits - KASEY CHAMBERS, If I Were You

39 Days (and one last scene)

... that's how long it's been since principal photography wrapped. What have we done since then? Sure feels like a lot. First, I immediately took two weeks off to sleep, spend time with my daughter and basically process the production. At the end of January I met with Matt Rhodes, our special effects master, to go over the scenes that needed effects. 

By mid-February THE MACHINE had finally had arrived. THE MACHINE is my new editing station, a shiny brand new iMac7. New software was immediately loaded: Final Cut Studio, MS Office, QuickBooks and Final Draft. It's a little daunting just thinking about editing; I have a massively huge learning mountain to climb. My first goal: to cut the trailer. I also have a pile of DV productions that are sitting there waiting for me to create them. Let's just say there are a lot of "opportunities" to work.

AD Wyatt Norton, my friendly supporter and wise AD, was excited to shoot a scene for the credits that got cut from the shoot. He said, "That dialogue is too good to waste," which is a great compliment in its own way but also a challenge. It sounded good to me, but I was having a hard time conceptualizing where it would fit in. Should we put it at the end? But then, would it take place after the bridal store visit, or would we have to put it in the front, so it would be an event before the the movie scenes happened? I called Mick, my trusty co-writer, and he was having the same struggle. Then I called AD and opened up the conversation -- what are we trying to do with it? Since I had to do a little re-write of the scene -- taking it out of the bridal store and moving it to a separate location -- I had to know the "why" behind the scene. AD got deflated that we had to take his little idea of whimsy and catapult it into practical reality... but I think we came up with a fair solution. I wrote the scene so that it could sit anywhere in the film, front or back, and take place in any time, past or future. We'll put it in and see where it works.

THE SCENE:  Holly and Jennifer showed up. We put them in clothes and makeup, and set the lighting. While we had originally conceived it to take place on a beach, AD hadn't had time to set up with studio to do a wide shot so we had to stay with medium and close-up shots. Hmnmm.... already it's different. As we were prepping the bottle of champagne for the toast, the cork popped, and I was okay because I had brought a couple of bottles. I pulled Adele, our trusty mannequin into the shot and laid out all the liquor bottles on the bar. I brought two margarita glasses from my favorite SF Mexican Restaurant, La Barca, and pink champagne. Where are they? On a beach somewhere, at a resort, at the tiki bar, looking tan, wearing summer clothes, and toasting champagne to Helen's "happily ever after." It was a struggle. We had no help (Olivia, our trusty studio assistant had stayed home that day to do a history project), and AD had had a rough couple of weeks. By the time Jen had left, AD realized that we had forgotten to back-light Jen's close-up, and it was the first time I actually had to say, "We'll fix it in post. " By 1 pm, AD and I were finishing up the last of the champagne and coming up with ideas on how to use the set, listening to Kasey Chambers sing, "If I Were You (It's All Gonna Be Okay)." Nice.

No matter what, at least we all got to drink a little champagne in the city in the AM on a Sunday.

Launching Into Post-Production

Some pick-up shots are planned for next weekend, Jan 30-31, which will include a scene we cut out of the bridal shop shoot and some additional dialogue I'm working on. We're planning to shoot against a green screen so we can experiment with beach or vacation-like backdrops. After that, we're heading into post-production.

At the moment I'm reading "In the Blink of an Eye" by the renowned editor Walter Murch (The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Apolcalypse Now, The Godfather II, The English Patient, etc.) to get in the mode for cutting and organizing scenes. Walter has some great metaphors about editing, but my favorite concept is his theory about blinking. His philosophy is that although we live in a 3-D world of continuous time, we blink not only to water our eyes, but also to "cut" our own internal film, and shifts in pace according to the nature and frequency of our thoughts. While in film we can assume that someone has moved from the entry to the door without seeing them walk there, we don't do that in real life, but we BLINK, which in effect cuts the scene for us. We blink to separate and punctuate ideas, just as a cut should do in a film.

One of his great tricks to keep perspective is to put paper cut-outs of little people next to his editing screen to keep the 'big screen cinema' in perspective. I like that. I'm adopting it.

From the animated film entitled “Dead All Along” by Giles Timms. Cut-out figures, inspired by illustrator Edward Gorey.

I'll be meeting with our post-production supervisor on Monday night and with another investor on Thursday, so everything is moving forward. First step, buy a new editing system to put together a clip. I'll also be listening to a lot of CD's over the next few months to get the pacing and energy and vibe together. Production may be over, but the film still has a long way to go.

In graduate school, I studied the arts as social and political expression... reading plays, novels and watching films for political content. My thesis focused on Czechoslovakia, whose arts community was instrumental in overturning the Communist government. Playwright Vaclav Havel became their first president after the Soviets left. Coincidentally, the most well-known Czech writer is Milan Kundera, a long-established refugee in France, and author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being (a film edited by Walter). You can check out the trailer for The Unbearable Lightness of Being here. It's very avant-garde and has a uniquely strong European feel to it. Haven't seen it in years, but I think I'll be previewing it before we start editing.

For a little Q&A on Walter Murch, you can read this article here.