A New Arena

At the suggestion of the assistant editor of my local newspaper, I started a blog some time ago to follow my progress in the world of filmmaking. He suggested making echos of it on various sites, such as MySpace and Livejournal. So, having come across this site to follow a friend's blog, I've decided to add it to the copy and paste.

I'm not quite ambitious enough to go back and copy all the previous blogs, but I will do a brief update.

Through the insanity of what constitutes my life, I somehow found myself working on some no-budget filmmaking. I started out knowing very little about the technical side of things, so naturally I've been doing the leg work in finding out how to edit and do effects and even lighting for my various crewmembers who have been to film school. Luckily I'm both patient and dedicated (or was that stubborn?), so over time I've learned rather a lot, at least enough to know what we need to make my projects see the light of day.

The two projects at hand are a zombie film called Graveyard Shift, and a vampire film called Old Blood. Graveyard Shift finished production over a year ago, and has presented some interesting challenges for edit and effects. These mostly have to do with a load of amateurs doing things like filming scenes in a shop with bright sunlight coming through the window when it's supposed to be night time. In editing, this isn't a massive problem. One can mask off the window and change it to night lighting. That's all well and good until someone walks in front of the window, which requires expert rotoscoping to make a new layer so the character will get the light from inside the shop rather than disappearing in the darkness of the window.

Enter the new rotobrush feature on CS5 (Adobe Premiere Pro). This is a feature that can do the job relatively easily. The only problems are that the programme costs rather a lot, and my computer isn't powerful enough to run it. Anyone else would be facing the problem that only experts who require high pay would own the programme. Me, I have this thing with luck. Whatever I need for the filmmaking experience has a way of manifesting, either because I'm making props or because the right item will 'just happen' to be available, like some expensive Chemistry equipment a cousin of a friend had access to when we were making an Alchemical lab...

So, of course a new friend, who came to me, had recently purchased CS5 and offered to help. Meanwhile, having had a series of would be editors and cutting the shots several times myself for various reasons, I've developed basic editing skills. The state of play for this project is that I am nearly finished cutting, and the effects editor is getting some technicalities sorted to get his programme up and running so we can finish this. I still need to record ADR for the main actors as we filmed in public places and have everything from screaming kids to traffic in the background, and I still have some music contracts and background music to finish sorting, but we're on a constant work flow that will hopefully see this project in a salable condition by end of this summer.

But of course I multi-task and couldn't possibly focus on just the one project.

Last summer we started shooting my second film, Old Blood. Having learned quite a lot from the first one, it has gone well and looks like it will be a LOT easier to edit. But, we didn't finish before the weather got too bad to continue, so saved some of it for this summer. We had our first shoot of the summer yesterday.

Meanwhile, we've had people moving away, other people moving in, a child actress about to get braces any second, and all sorts of things going on that have caused a few re-writes and new scenes to be added. The story actually gets a bit better with every change. We should be able to finish shooting by end of summer as well, and I can spend next winter editing this one.

Through both these projects, we have had many obstacles based in working with literally no money and insufficient technology.

But we're doing it. And the results look promising, especially if you like old B-movies.

Production quality on these no-budget films is not what you would get from a Hollywood blockbuster with extensive computer graphics, but the stories are entertaining and the lead actors at least are good at what they do. The imperfections add to the charm of this genre.

More importantly, everyone involved is having a good experience. We are all learning from everything we do, and we have a brilliant time while we're doing it. I'm even twisted enough to thoroughly enjoy sorting out problems, like the shoot where one actress was snowed in and another was sick while it snowed on our 'set' but we had to get a shot of someone on the ground. The feeling of triumph when I win, is priceless.

And I always win. ;)