Fearless Update

Yes there has been a lot going in my life and I have not posted much about it for a while. So How about I try now eh?

Fearless – I was getting snow blindness working on the edit so I left it aside for other things since before Christmas. That was until my friend Norbert came by to break bread with us a couple of Fridays ago. Sadly Lorraine was out of town at a funeral for an old family friend so it was just Jen, Norbert, Dylan and I. But we had fun. I wanted to show him a cut of the show so I spun it up and we had a watch. I was really disappointed with the work so far looking at it fresh and all the way through for the first time in months. Over all it was ok. It told the story but there were shots and edits that just bugged the crap out of me. So I spent all of last week re cutting the show. My biggest errors were in shot setup and execution of the edit. My original plan was to really pay homage to the two shot. A MySpace buddy, Gospel John, posted a rant about how the two shot has been forsaken for basic coverage.

Since I had not made any real stylistic choices regarding the show I thought sure why not. I’ll take up the torch.
But when I started cutting the show I reverted to trying to use all the close ups and reverse angles for the dialog. My biggest problem was that I did not frame the close ups well enough to work and they looked weird. The biggest spot was the scene with Emily and her friend Rhonda. We had even used that scene and setup in the test footage. I had a great two shot of the scene all the way through so I replaced it with that intercutting with reshoots if Lucy’s reactions. A bit of tightening here and there and it works great and I am very pleased with it. Mark came by yesterday evening and we went through the new cut with a fine tooth come and his comments were that it now plays like it should...about Lucy not Emily and Rhonda.
I also had issues with the opening scenes. I rearranged the sequences so that the very first shot is that of Lucy walking toward the camera. Removed a couple of Close ups there and now that plays rather nicely. With the addition of music, it will be even better.
In the party sequence I laid down some scratch tracks from a tool called smart tunes which provides royalty free music, but of the rather bland 70s porn variety. This needed fixing and I found a band on MySpace that will allow me to use some of their tunes to fill that in. I am also going to shorten the sequence by a shot or two.
Like I said Mark came by yesterday and we spent a couple of hours working on the color correction of the first half of the show and now the shots match in a rather pleasing manner. So all in all it was a very productive week for Fearless. Yea!
Other films – I lit two other shorts over the last couple of months with Mark. One was for Marty about this guy that is spending a lazy Sunday with his girlfriend who asks the dumbest question of all time – How many guys…? They are still working on that but in doing the show I met a new upcoming DP Named Anthony Tackett. He brought me on to another show we did a few weeks ago that was all dark and creepy that was some of the better lighting I have done. I think the camera has a lot to do with that. This was a Panasonic HD camera with the red rocks 35 mm attachment and the show looks pretty good from what I hear. But alas they are still cutting.
Anthony called me to light another show that the director wants to shoot film. Which will be nice but we are a week or so out from shooting and I still have not heard what stock they want to use or where the location will be.
There is another coming up in April and Yippee Ki Yea I do not have to gaff it. Just show up with my belt. Nothing firm yet but I talked to the guy and he seemed nice enough. He is bringing up a DP and Gaffer from LA. He says the script is 5 pages and he want to shoot it over 5 days so It will likely be stunt heavy.
That is all for now