Revisiting the Revisions of Revolt

I am a tinkerer. I like to revisit my old works and sometimes re-edit. If I see something I suddenly feel needs changed, I change it. I don’t like to do this on some levels because I should focus on new works, not the old ones. Therapeutically, I have ceased doing these types of things for the most part. There are exceptions…



I went back in and re-edited a bit of ACCIDENTAL ART, my latest real piece. I had a legitimate reason (excuse). Since the festival run is starting to slow down on this, as I won’t shell out much more money on festival submissions and the free invites have started to wane, I decided that if I put this movie on the Internet, it needed to be trimmed some. I thought a “web edit” was called for because the attention spans for the WWW, and the experience of watching it on a tiny screen versus in a theater with other people is very different.

So I went ahead and did some trims to the first half. The problem was, now I think it is a vastly better edit and I’m not going to use the original edit anymore. I only got rid of 3-4 lines, but somehow I think the movie moves and feels WAY better. We get out of the first scene quicker and we didn’t REALLY lose anything in terms of performance or story. Looking at the movie now, I let things meander, as in the actors have redundant lines that are unnecessary. I wrote the lines, and then I directed them, so this is all on me. In the end I can’t believe I didn’t see this sooner; as in 7 months ago when we edited it the first time. Sometimes I’m not that bright. Most people I’ve shown the new cut to have no idea I changed anything, so that is actually a good sign.



So probably around July I’ll put this movie on the web.

As I have mentioned recently on this blog, I’m doing three separate TV shows regarding film right now. The “call for entries” for the short film show has been a bit overwhelming. DVD’s and tapes are coming in from all over the country already. I’ve been busy digitizing a bunch of movies and preparing for the show all week.

I made this little promo because I had never made anything with the virtual white cyke and I had this idea I wanted to try in Adobe After Effects. It works for me. It’s a little :08 little ditty with some tricks gleaned from Video Co-Pilot.net and even the music is from the Pro Scores pack from Andrew Kramer. I thought something silly visually and impactful and dramatic audio would make a fun little bit. Take a look:

Happiness, Sadness, and other assorted emotions

I got my first Official Rejection yesterday for ACCIDENTAL ART. SXSW, my most coveted festival in this run turned the short down. Realistically, it was a long shot. I’m not surprised, nor depressed, but I am disappointed. I had 2-3 hours of a bummer, but then the Beverly Hills Shorts Film Festival accepted the movie, so that eased the blow entirely. There are a few dozen more festivals I’m awaiting the answer to. I’m not worried at all. I feel great, actually.



I’m going to go out to LA for this screening. I will try to work this to make this significant in more than one way. It’s the technical “World Premiere”. Cast & Crew and Work-In-Progress screenings don’t count. They say that the Word Premiere is very important, so I don’t mind my losing the cherry to Daniel’s fest, as it’s got a great reputation and the location couldn’t be better.

The goal is to parlay this into something beyond just screening. I have plans and goals to be met and I have barely a month to pull it off. We’ll see if I can, as I am an optimist, but there are no guarantees. The point is to keep your chin up, take the blows, and keep on trucking through.

I hold in my hands today, 3 copies of ZOMBIES OF WAR, the UK version of HORRORS OF WAR. I like the collection of DVD’s for this movie as it’s still something to be proud of. No, the movie is far from perfect, but if all you do is wallow in the negative, you will have done all that work for nothing. Be proud of your movies because they are as children; be proud of them no matter what. No one can really insult the movie or point out something wrong with it that I haven’t already seen, so there’s no insult in opinions.



Now the odd thing is the DVD box art clearly says there is the Commentary Track, Visual FX Demo, Behind the Scenes Documentary, and 5.1 Surround. None of these things are on the DVD. Sadly, I provided all these things for distribution, but they did not add them to the disc. What bums me is that buyers in England are blaming us, the filmmakers for the deception. We very obviously have nothing to do with that.

I did get an email from someone in London who said that at the HMV shop in Piccadilly Circus, ZOMBIES OF WAR was ranked 19th Best Seller for the week. That’s a great ranking considering we’re going toe to toe with big named DVD releases. Looking today, they are sold out of ZOMBIES OF WAR at HMV.COM and AMAZON.CO.UK, so that’s a good sign.

My past and future have merged in a single day.

Toodle,
PJR

Massive Machiavellian Marketing

Finished Accidental Art’s 6 minute scene and it feels good to be done, although “done” can still be construed as subjective since I keep making these little adjustments. One of the last things done was a license plate replacement done digitally by TJ Cooley, but tweaking it takes hours and hours, then because of the proxies and HD editing setup, every file has to be re-rendered down the line. Each time I make a 1 frame tweak, it’s 30 minutes to render the 4K files, 30 minutes to render the 1080P, and 30 minutes to render the MPEG2 for DVD, and 30 minutes for the MP4 for the web, and so on. And yet, I cannot let this go without it being closer to perfection, at least my own definition therein.



I’m already set to send the 6 minute piece to over 16 festivals this week alone, not including my own Cowtown Film Series, which will mark its premiere screening. If I never get to make the rest of this feature film, I could be content with this as a singular piece. There is an ending to it, and you cannot really guess where it goes from there, but it does have a compelling story. In the mean time, I intend to get this seen. If it wins awards, so be it, as that is not my goal per se, but they certainly won’t hurt the fund raising efforts.

A fascinating technical tidbit, even though this is shot 4K and I’m creating 1080P masters, I’m particularly impressed with how this piece looks on the CRT (Cathode Ray Tube), older TV’s. When playing off DVD or via component video from the timeline, Jesus Marimba! This footage looks drop dead amazing. Part of it is obviously the down-sampling of picture information, but regardless, the look is staggeringly impressive.

I have made a markedly clear change in my methodology; quality over quantity. My own personal bar has been raised. I can’t look back much now. What was in my head isn’t as good as the movie I made, thanks to the entire crew, not the least of which was Greg Sabo’s camera and lighting work.





Johnny DiLoretto from Channel 6/Fox 28 and formerly from the Other Paper has agreed to host the Cowtown Film Series for the Thursday night show. Every time I do one of these shows, they get bigger and better. Getting the Alive to sponsor the event was a big score for me. I’ve never had that big of a sponsor before. Hopefully Time Warner will follow suit soon, if not then maybe next time.

So I just had several movies play at the MADLAB FILM FEST downtown. I wasn’t able to make it, but I was told it was a decent crowd, but that the DVD’s played kind of skippy. Apparently they didn’t read my MOVIEMAKER MAGAZINE article. It’s the whole reason I wrote it; to avoid presentations snafu’s like that. Oh well.

Peace to all the brothers and sisters suffering,
Peter John Ross

Arbitrarily Ascribing to Arrogation

Slowly but surely my movie gets closer to being finished. Sound mix is officially done. I did some interesting panning for voices and sound FX to match the on screen action. The toughest thing to do was to add some room tone noise to shots that were crystal clear. Since one angle of an actor was noisier than the reverse shots, that meant I had to add that basic sound to these shots too. I hate making something sound worse, but it’s a lot less distracting than hearing each cut go from a sound to no sound. It wasn’t particularly bad, but it was not my happiest moment. It happens on shoots.

Two title effects left to do. I did the scrolling credits last week along with some other titles, but the main title at the beginning and the one at the end needed some motion tracking and insertion, so that was something TJ finished off and emailed me the project files. Either tomorrow or Monday I’ll insert these shots, tweak them to fit the music score by Bill Wandel, and that will pretty much put this project to bed.

ACCIDENTAL ART

The title to my next movie is ACCIDENTAL ART. It will screen on December 3rd and December 6th as a part of the upcoming COWTOWN FILM SERIES. These 2 shows have come together so fast, my head is still spinning.

I got a call from the theater, and the owner wanted to know if I was going to do any Cowtown Film Series this year. I hadn’t thought about it, but I knew I wanted to screen ACCIDENTAL ART soon. Also, I had never done cast/crew screenings of REFRACTORY or RELATIONSHIP CARD. So I started to put feelers out for a few shorts I knew were out there and got a pretty immediate response.

Within 24 hours I had over 2 hours of short films to play. Not a one of these are 48 Hour Film Projects from Columbus 2008 or 2009. My sole purpose in avoiding those movies is because many of them have already played in movie theaters twice in the last couple months. I like to show material that most likely has not been played in a real movie theater. The real reason I make movies is to sit in a dark room with a bunch of strangers and watch a story unfold in pictures and sound.

Since many of these movies showing will be cast & crew screenings, we didn’t want to charge admission, so splitting the box office with the theater was not an option, so we’re splitting the costs of renting the theater, as well as getting sponsors, many of which are already on board.


The biggest difference for this year’s Cowtown Film Series will be projecting in HD. Last year was on DVCAM tape, although great, is still a letterboxed 4:3 image with 720x480 resolution. This year we’ll be in 1920x1080 from an HD deck. I want the best possible color and detail, especially for the movie shot in HD. The colors and details should really pop off the screen.



I’m going to work hard to make sure the projection and sound is top notch. For whatever reason, I guess it’s respect for all the filmmakers’ hard work, I don’t want any screw ups or poor presentation. Few things in filmmaking are more disrespectful than not making sure you’re giving the best possible presentation to EVERYONE’s movie, not just your own. I was partly responsible for a screw up in the past at a similar festival, and I’ll never allow that again. It’s all in who you choose to work with, and I prefer professionals or people who care enough to work to make everyone look good.

The Cowtown Film Series is about the community. The selections this year indicate that the quality of filmmaking in Ohio has increased dramatically. While some local filmmakers are content to remake the same movie over and over again, most are pushing the limits of what you can do with a minimal budget.