smooth landing

film en route to processing

by sheer coincidence my editor was in town for a couple days and is driving to vancouver BC on I-5 which will take her right thru/past seattle and by alphacine and due to her good-nature (as well as her probable need to stop for a coffee re-up in seattle) she was willing to drop the film off. This is also perfect since she'll be guiding the film through post, who better to literally bring it to post.

pictures from production - TBBD

the westerner inn, interstate ave, portland ore

Matt Sipes, The Man

Matt Sipes, Todd Tschida, Edward Davee looks on

Laying tracks for dolly move

craft service, day 5

director en route to setting up shot

production wrap - The Big Black Dark

finished shooting TBBD last night. I had hoped to be better at updating all the steps of the process, from the script to the storyboards to the pre-planning to the shooting and all stations in between but time is a precious commodity when you get into the zone and literally i had zero time to do anything beyond make the movie. which is to say it gets all whirlwind-y and there's no ability for context much less commentary. so then here, post shoot, are some generalization from across the shoot.

birds-eye view: things went exceedingly well. i did some new things on this one, including but not limited to shooting on super 16, using rear-projection, using a jib arm, acting, super long takes. b/c we shot on film (ie, $) i was hyper-concious about how much film we had left and so nearly everything was done in one or two takes. w/ one big exception (jib arm shot #2).

random data: 5 shoot days (2 night, 3 day) spread across 6 days, Thurs-Tues w/ an off-day Mon. we shot in a bar, in a hotel, in a garage, in my basement, wooded property etc. we shot on 7 400 ft rolls of kodak b/w single perf 7222, a total of 2800 ft of exposed film. 7 speaking parts.

things to remember for next time: do tech scout w/ sound for all restaurant/bar locations; rehearse everyone, ie don't presume b/c someone is great that they get what you're going for; don't scrimp or be lax on craft service/food etc; hire a script supervisor and/or AD and, as a corollary, don't print out only one copy of a shot list and then freak out if it goes missing; if using jib and shot starts high and ends low be sure to get a remote camera device so operator can start camera high instead of starting low, running film while jib is raised and then lowered b/c you will run through an entire mag in 10 takes and eventually you'll have to just walk away and hope you got something close; if you have a late night shooting push back the next day's call as long as possible