And now, a production story: This story focuses on the "native" sequence. The native sequence was an interesting obstacle to tackle for a variety of reasons, namely it was my first time operating the camera with the glidecam assembly. Jeff is the regular DP, but when he is unable to perform that duty, it falls to me. The native sequence (due to Jeff’s role as the native) was the first of these instances, and that in and of itself made this scene personally challenging. Allow me to describe the set of this scene though, so that you may more accurately envision what was going on. The scene takes place in a cedar swamp, visually similar to the yoda swamp found in Empire Strikes Back. The scene required a 4x4x4 pit be dug through the floor of the bog, which was comprised mainly of thick tree roots and intensely unpleasant smelling mud. Fortunately, the task of digging this pit did not fall to me, as I was off acquiring a white wolf that was called for. After the set was properly dressed we began shooting (with Ben Dawson, VAMP, operating the sound equipment). This scene was shot out of order, as we had set out to shoot the concluding fight scenes first, and cover the ³birth² of native from the Edmond angle. Thus, shooting was progressing nicely and for a nice break from the action, we decided to shoot our wolf. Owen is the happiest looking wolf ever, and he just wasn’t going to play along with the whole aggressive animal idea. On a side note, he is a very smart animal, knows how to outmaneuver his obedience chain, and promptly chews through his leash when he no longer feels like being on it. Needless to say, Owen wrangling was a full time job for someone. After we finished with Owen, we noticed that the generator appeared to be having problems (If you’ve read any of the previous adventures, you will know that this was only one of many). With only a few hours of daylight left, we elected to send the generator to the shop and get a rental. Unfortunately, this crimped us on time for shooting the rest of the fight and we did not finish that evening. At least we made it home by 11:30pm (we start at 7am)...... The upside to this is that we knew we had to go back for a re-shoot, and while planning that we actually made a small story refinement that really helped to strengthen the scene overall. So, we finally got back out there for the re-shoot, got it in the can and left. That’s only two times out to the cedar swamp, not bad right (Did I mention that we re-dig the 4x4x4 hole each time we go out?) We next returned to the swamp for the beginning of the "birth" portion, but since we didn’t have our druid army that day, only the druid leader, we shot reaction shots and the beginnings of the ritual. That’s three days. Day four, the birth and control of the native went very smoothly, and seeing them in post, cut together even better. So, this scene required a lot more work than we had anticipated (four days rather than two), but ended up turning out better than we had hoped. A fair trade I’d say. -Andrew
George Washington Carver made a very valuable contribution to Folk Lore. "Well Andrew, that’s crazy, he’s been dead for years, how could he help?" Great question, here’s the answer. Those in the know will instantly realize that George Washington Carver created peanut butter, primarily as a nutritional supplement for the working class. Peanut butter is a very cheap source of protein, does not spoil in the heat, and is mighty tasty. It was also the nutritional cornerstone of the Folk Lore craft services program. Nearly everyday members of the cast and crew had the opportunity to dine on two lovingly made peanut butter and Jelly sandwiches, primarily built by the talented sandwich artist Ben Dawson. The workflow goes like this: Take one whole loaf of whole wheat bread (the jam wont soak through nearly as fast as white bread). Remove the bread from the bag, and place half the bread on a clean surface. As fast as possible, apply peanut butter to the upturned slices. Apply your favorite type of jam to the other slices. Mate them together. Place the finished sandwiches into the bread bag, taking care to seal the bag with a twist tie (this helps the bread stay fresh). Eventually people will say they are tired of PBJ, but when everyone’s worked hard for six hours and that’s all you present (and your 25 miles into the middle of the woods), they will grudgingly eat it. Rinse and repeat! -Andrew
And now It was our first day of shooting and things were progressing well. We had started shooting at 1pm (as this was our first really long night shoot day) and had a great start with the opening scene victim flashback. This scene was an interior, meaning that we were able to use house power as well as not worry about outside variable such as wind. Upon completion of the scene, the production moved on to our next location, an exterior located in a nearby field. This would be the first day we used our generator set-up, which was simply a high dollar construction grade generator with a beautifully engineered "sound box" placed over it in hopes of decreasing noise production. To our dismay, the generator would not start upon request, seemingly as a result of our sound reduction box. No big deal, we moved the generator farther down the hill and mostly isolated it using natural terrain features. So, now that we had power established on the set we progressed to our next shoot of the day, a scene of father leaving the crime scene and investigating a nearby field. To our (primarily my) dismay, the microphone really really really sucked when any kind of wind seemed to be present. This was surprising, as the microphone was very high end, came with wind gear, and shouldn’t have any kind of problem. As a result, the audio from this entire scene will require a lot of post work to clean it up (not the end of the world, it’s fixable, just labor intensive) Moving on in the day, it’s now two thirty in the morning and Jeff and I have discovered that our high dollar microphone is completely useless. It seems it was totally incapable of picking up dialogue with any change of tone. Reflecting upon how people speak, it becomes readily apparent why this would become an issue. As a solution, Jeff and I borrowed (at 2:30 in the morning) a microphone from May, girlfriend of Piotr. She had come to visit Piotr and create a documentary on us for a class project in her masters of communications curriculum. This microphone (which cost far less money) was exponentially higher in quality than our microphone. We survived the night with ok-ish audio and got up early the next day to find a new solution. As I recall, this was a Sunday and a holiday weekend of some type. This meant we couldn’t contact the online retailer with whom we had purchased the initial microphone for a solution. Jeff, Piotr, and I went to Traverse City in search of the best microphone we could buy, as we had a full night of shooting that could not be rescheduled. The only place open was radio shack, and the only microphone they had in stock was 29 dollars. We were in big trouble. We went to the Kuntaw club in the hopes of finding contact information for a fellow Kuntaw student with contacts at a local television station. Luckily, he was already there training alone for his eventual upcoming elevation to black belt status. He laughed as we told him our sob story, told us to relax, and 45 minutes later had produced a $3500 mic setup that we ultimately were able to keep for a week and half. Thus, the movie has really good sound now and we lived to fight another day. We went from totally screwed to best-case sound set-up in a matter of minutes. Making movies can be stressful, but it seems to always be an adventure. -Andrew
Well, we finally wrapped on our principal photography, sending Piotr home and dropping Ben off at Hippyfest 2005 (He deserves the break...) Shooting was a monumental task, accented with technical adversity almost every day. An example for your amusement can be related in this tale: During our first principle photography excursion to the Upper Peninsula we were unable to shoot a few key scenes on our last scheduled day due to generator difficulties. Note that this was the professional generator we rented to replace the original generator that was being repaired / optimized in the shop. As we geared up to shoot on our final UP day, we discovered, to our horror, that the generator would not turn over. Of course, this was not only Sunday, but Fathers day as well. We were not able to get the generator fixed, and thus, we were unable to get to our planned locations for the day. The crew shot some other scenes using "house power", wrapped Audrey, and headed back for the studio in Traverse City. Upon our return, we sent the defective generator back and picked up our refurbished old generator. It worked splendidly and all was good. A week went by, free of problems, as Jeff and I decided that the production needed the more extreme locations from the Upper Peninsula. We set a departure date, carefully packed the gear, and shoved off. Upon our arrival at the first of our isolated UP locations, we learned to our dismay that the gas tank portion of the generator had developed a huge crack along the top. Upon ignition, the generator would spew gasoline all over the rapidly heating exhaust mechanism. We quickly concluded that this would result in a large fire and cut power. So, here we are, miles from anywhere in the middle of the forest, standing around the newly broken generator we spent ten hours trucking up to the UP. The mood was dark to say the least. Fortunately, this took place on a Friday and we were able to rent another generator for the day to get our shots. Laughing yet? The biggest thing I learned from this experience is that making films is probably 80% problem solving. Fortunately, 98% of the shooting went really well and Jeff and I are looking forward to a fun postproduction. We hope to have a rough edit done by the end of July and a finished, saleable product completed by the end of August. Hopefully the updates from here on out will be filled with good will and cheer, as the editing process rolls along in a gentle, calm fashion. -Andrew
Production Value.... it's a blinding grail. Something that all indie projects, be it music or sculpture or movies, must strive for. Production value is the simple term given to the feeling that your work doesn’t look cheap. It's what inspired Chris Nolan to commission a real Batmobile for Batman Begins, a monster tank that really could drive 90 miles an hour and turn on a dime. It's what inspired Jeff and I and I to scrape, save, beg, borrow, and steal for an HD camera (We didn’t want our movie to look cheap, and HD is equivalent to 35mm film, what "real" movies are shot on). It's what inspired Jeff and I to pick up a month old deer corpse on the side of the road in the heat of summer.
What!!
A month old deer corpse! Damn Yeah! We needed some bones really bad. We had this plan that we would integrate old bleached bones we had found into a costume for one of our principal villains. We were desperate to make it work. We both grew up in the woods of Michigan, and deer die all the time during winter. How hard could it be to find some bleached out bones....... Well, its really damn hard, and this was like the 15th time we had driven by this deer while we were out location scouting. So, frustrated that I hadn’t found what I wanted yet, I pulled the truck over to the side of the road. Jeff, as I recall, was kind of incredulous to the idea. I think all I said was something like "Do you want the bones or not?" We got out of the truck, and as cars rushed by we entered the ditch. This was early summer, and the deer had been there for about a month. Most of the fur had decomposed, and half of the body was missing, but it still had a lot of tissue. And it stunk, very very very bad. Within 15 feet of it the smell was overpowering, and it only got worse as we drew closer. The sense of smell is the oldest of the human abilities, and that was reflected as we got closer. The smell told us to leave, that we didn’t want any part of this, that it was dangerous, that it was housing some really bad, really hard core bacteria. It didn’t matter, we needed production value. We used plastic shopping bags to pick it up, and ran at top speed to get it into the truck. It was the worst smell imaginable, and I was close to retching the entire time. So now we had our bones, we just had to figure out a way to get the rotting deer flesh off of them. That night we made a fire in Jeff's backyard. After the fire got up to what we believed was hot enough, we quickly grabbed the dear corpse and rushed it up to the fire. At first, it smelled even worse as it started to burn, but very rapidly after the flare up, it started to smell much, much better. In the end, the fire was too hot. We were successful in removing all of the tissue, but the bones became so brittle that with any pressure they would simply crumble in your hand. We never did get bones for our costume, but we did get some really cool "spell component" props. I imagine that this story will sound pretty extreme to those of you uninvolved with indie production, but to those that our..... you likely have a better story to pass on. -Andrew
Friday, August 5, 2005
Andrew here with a little lesson on movie making. Most productions employ the use of some kind of clapboard when shooting, to ensure the proper sync of audio and video during postproduction. What this means is that before each shot, someone walks out in front of the camera with a clapboard and “claps” before each take. On the clapboard is a written description of the scene as well as what take is being recorded. Some of the fancy ones even have a time code on them that links up to a computer and automatically syncs up sound and video. Needless to say, that format is very expensive. Jeff and I employed a different system, affectionately called “The Clap”. This means that before each take one of the actors or production people stand in front of the camera and physically clap. This is fairly effective method and doesn’t cost anything. The only down side is the sound guy has to keep track of each take with a pad of paper (usually held by his teeth, as both hands are supporting the boom pole), resulting in some soggy paper and the ability to only communicate in vowels. The other problem is that since there is no clapboard person on set, the job doesn’t always get done. This means that when the assistant editor (who could that be…) is syncing up all the audio in post some things end up taking forever when they should only take a few seconds. Instead of simply finding the clap at the beginning of each take, you have the pleasure of hunting through the entire clip looking for something to sync up with. You would think anything would work, like a voice, but remember that you must be accurate within 1/30th of a second. It’s possible (as is being proven), just very time consuming. So, if you want to save some money and use “The Clap” make sure to stay on top of every take and demand that the clap be done. Fail to do this and you could hate yourself later. -Andrew
