DONE (almost) + the Teaser Trailer

It's been nearly a month since I wrote on this blog. I've been quite busy with many other things, plus I was dissuaded from writing because I would periodically read other blogs from other "indie filmmakers", and it sort of turned me off from wanting to write about the progress. There's just something too self-assertive about this, what this blog is, and I hope it doesn't come off that way, but I'm afraid it might. It may just all be in my head anyway.

145 minutes. That's the length of the entire film at the moment. It's a good length, I feel. I understand the need for a lean film, a movie where the fat needs to be trimmed. But I think if I do that too much with this movie it might lose some of what I originally wanted; which was just a movie about....well, that's pretty much it. There's not much of a plot that this movie rides on, so it just happens, for the most part. However, with that being said, there are a couple scenes that I could cut. But there's already been debate about that. In every motion movie film, you're always going to have some great scene that you ultimately need to scrap, whether things are repeated, etc.

I'm hoping that I can keep the length without ruining anything. I know I should probably learn now to let go now, but part of me wants to keep as much as I can while I can. We'll see. In describing what NICOTINE is, I'm having trouble. People want a short synopsis, so I give it to them, but even that doesn't explain what the movie is.

Maybe this trailer will help.



Or, maybe not. I don't like trailers. I can't make a trailer. I don't want a lot of footage to be in trailers. I wish Hollywood would only release teaser trailers, not full trailers with every single piece of material they shot contained within 2.5 minutes. That's insane.


Going forward:

Sound Design / Foley: I love this part. Everything will be Mono, not Stereo. So even though you may see a car enter frame left, and exit frame right, I will not be moving the sound with the vehicle. It was a conscious decision to do that. It just wasn't the right movie to exercise that ability. It has a lot to do with how we take in sound too, more specifically, how Paul receives sound.

You walk down the street and you're aware of all the sound -- all the small details; dog barking, someone on a bike, yelling in the distance, a gas pump across the street, the cadence of a car hitting the stone wall driving through a tunnel, a radio on in a car as it speeds by. We could have done a lot with sound, where it engulfs you and surrounds you, to a point where it drives you a bit mad. But I thought that maybe it could all be achieved in Mono. It's all down in front and the sounds are all garbled together. That seems to fit Paul a bit more.

I have a lot to do with sound yet. It will become important too because we're not using any traditional score, so in part it needs to supply the natural sound effect of the particular location, but also act as an emotional tool.

That's all I have for now.

Oh, here's another poster; the same as before really. I went a bit fancier, adding some stuff too it -- my H8C logo, the work-in-progress logo for Self Destructive Films. I didn't need to, and was maybe a bit silly of me to do, but I became incredibly giddy once I finished the movie a few nights ago. I'm not sure if this will be the final poster, but I'm liking it more and more. But is it too loud? "I'm An Indie MOvie!!!!!!!!" I hope not.

100 minutes and the new poster

As of Sunday, December 18th, NICOTINE hit 100 minutes. No, that's not the complete length of the film, because that is still up in the air. I'm still gonna guess 2 hours and 15 minutes. I need to trim. I don't want to trim, because, as I've stated in the past, I love excess. But excess is only good and cushy if nothing is truly redundant. Another thing is just trimming scenes down by cutting in late or cutting out early. There are times where cutting out of any given scene ten seconds sooner will have a different impact than leaving those ten seconds in.

The nice thing -- well, sorta -- was that I was sick for five days. In those five days I didn't cut anything. So looking back at it today felt invigorating to say the least. I had been working on a scene that lasts all of eight minutes, but takes place in a car, in a front yard, at the front door, in a basement, back to the door, to the driveway, etc. It was a lot of cutting around, and each section was/is so short that I had a horrible feeling that the entire film was suddenly going to feel too pieced together. This particular scene was modified from the screenplay a bit because of various elements at the location, which is fine. Added to that I was having an off day when we shot this scene. There were just some days where I felt like I didn't actually contribute to anything; I royally screwed up and wasted several hours and money and didn't make much progress. We eventually continued to shoot what wasn't working and even re-shot quite a bit on a different day. Anyway, back to what I was saying. After five days of being sick, I went back to what I had cut and suddenly the scene worked. Having a break from the work is generally a smart idea.

I will be cutting a trailer soon. I don't like trailers. If I could, I would just rip off The Brown Bunny or Little  Children trailer, but I can't do that. Well, I could.

Rudy Pavich, the actor who is playing Scott, will be putting together the music; messy jazzy Reno-ish lounge music is what we had talked about a bit. It's not really a score, but he's slowly been putting something together. On December 8th he sent me a rough cut of something he was working on. I will probably have that featured in the trailer. My trailer won't explain much of anything, but I prefer that to a trailer that gives too much away.

Now then, here is Poster #4. I have my name on it because enough people wanted to know why I didn't have my name on the poster. It feels weird doing that, but, whatever. This is more of a typical indie movie poster, I believe.

Until next time!

Shaping the Movie

When someone asks me what my favorite part of the filmmaking process is, I generally take a long time to think about my answer. It's all equally stimulating to be honest. Getting the spark for a story, writing it all down on note cards, finding the damn point or reason for why the events happen, writing the screenplay, finding the actors, locations, directing, editing. It's all fun and challenging, but it's certainly in the editing process where you can see it really come to life. It's really your third pass at the film, so when you get to edit it all together, it's such a big relief. First pass: writing. Second: shooting.Third is editing.

As of a couple days ago, NICOTINE is 77 minutes long. At this point I think the movie could be 2 hours and 20 minutes. I'm fine with that, but I'm really trying to keep it under 2 hours. All along the way while shooting, we even took little things out here and there, stuff that I felt would be redundant to a certain extent. The film went from 100 scenes to about 80 scenes. We also re-wrote some scenes and added a couple scenes in that weren't originally written, or extended some scenes out.

Right now I'm not trimming excess material. I will wait until the whole thing is assembled, then I'll see what can be trimmed. Some of the footage that would be considered "filler" is exactly what I wanted, and what I want the movie to feel like, in some ways. It's that random, sort of nothing fluff that makes everything so interesting in life. Yet it's a movie that essentially needs to "entertain" the audience. That's a whole different subject though. Maybe I'll be the only one to find the movie interesting. I'm not sure.

I'm not too worried about the running time, but at the same time I am worried. Why? Originally I set out to write a movie that would be 90 minutes. Somehow that managed to get away from me.

Movie goals for myself: Make a 90 minute movie and write a comedy. Both goals will be incredibly hard.

I will spend a good 6 hours editing on Wednesday. I hope to get to at least 90 minutes.

That's all I have for now.

DONE

It feels great to be done shooting. Yesterday Jeff and I completed a couple simple scenes, plus a some random pick-up's. Those are the best, but the most time consuming. You set-up for twenty or so minutes, you shoot it once or twice and blamo, you're done.

Why the shooting of the film last longer than expected was mostly due to us unable to shoot in a gas station. You're probably sick of me talking about this gas station extravaganza, but it's the real reason. 21 or so gas stations were looked at, Holiday and BPs to smaller locally owned ones to stations that were a few miles up north or down south; I spent an afternoon many weeks back scouring around trying to find this place. Nothing. For the most part the employees were kind and thought it would be great, but upper management had issues. Issues that were never actually brought to my attention, and I've never been able to pin-point the exact problem.

Because this scene wasn't going to be shot, Wednesday afternoon I wrote out a new scene that would fill in that void. I sort of wrote it. I supplied the idea of what the scene was going to be, but Jeff came up with the core. It's different than what the gas station scene was going to be, but it will work and we even hit on a couple "plot-points" in the film with this new scene. There are times while developing a character when you discuss subtext and the reason a character will behave a certain way. I love this stuff, because it gives life to a character's motivation, but most of the time when these things aren't verbalized or even suggested in the subtlest of ways, the subtext becomes entirely lost to a point where the audience member just doesn't understand it. So, we touched on one or two subjects that are on the back burner through-out the film, but not too much. Whether this new scene will work as a whole when the entire film is cut together, has yet to be determined, but as an individual scene in the privacy of Paul's car, there's certainly an undeniable amount of realism. I think it's great.

That's another topic of discussion through-out the making of this film: who's to say what is or isn't realistic when two characters are talking in private, or who's to say what is or isn't said out-loud when a character is alone? This is tough, and hopefully we did it right. I think we did.

___________________

I've been working at my real-world job a lot in the last three weeks. It's been nice. I haven't worked this much since July. I've been such a financial bind since August (because of the movie), that Jenn's been having to help me a bit more. I'm thankful she's been able to. I owe her a nice big check, which she'll get on Monday. I also need to thank Corey and Dave for working whenever I needed to do my movie stuff. Right now, as I edit my film and get it ready for festivals and as I'll be able to help more with making Wedding decisions for mine and Jenn's Wedding in September, I've been getting more stressed and sleeping less. Not because of the Wedding or really my movie, but because of my future employment at the theatre. With Digital Cinema going in sometime in the next few months, there may not be jobs for traditional 35mm projectionists -- so what do I do? I have no idea. I've been apart of Willow since I was 5 or 6 years old, and have been employed at the theatre for 10 years on January 2nd, 2012. Where do I go from here? I'm worried, but I'm almost optimistic about what comes next.

I'm going to get back to editing. I'm about to cut a pretty fun scene together. Super fun!