A Ghastly Notion of Persistence

So Brant Jones edited my newest movie. Then we stitched together fragments of my edit into his cut and we made a “best of” edit. The cinematography is astounding, both due to the RED ONE camera, and mostly due to its operator/cinematographer, Greg Sabo. I am very happy with the results. There is still much to do. Color correction, sound mix, scoring, and various other technical details, but I can now watch a movie and foresee what it shall be.



Bryan Michael Block came up to the studio last night and looked at the cut with me and we made some minor tweaks here and there. I also realized I had not done a test on how to go from my 1280x720P proxy edit back to the 4K RED files. So I tested out the procedure of making an EDL from Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 and then editing that file in NOTEPAD and changing the file names from *.AVI to *.R3D, then re-opening the EDL in Premiere. So far that is the single procedure and technical aspect that has worked without any kind of hitch.



I’ll screen this cut as is to a select few people to gather some opinions. It’s too fresh and I’m too close to it to arrogantly decide this is all the editing that needs to be. I want feedback from key personnel, as well as other people whose opinion I value.

Started some of the minor visual FX work on this today. More RED issues reveal themselves. Exporting to RED is not as easy. There are no settings for it. So exporting files with edits to an FX artist ain’t gonna be easy. So we’ll do it old school and send the whole clip and tell them the time code. Or export as an uncompressed file. I have options, but each one has potential downsides with color, etc.

Once finished, the next step is to use this to raise the rest of the budget to shoot an entire feature. I have a few ideas on what to do, some things I’ve never tried before. I view this as my last real attempt to make something out of what I’ve been doing for 10 years now. After this, might consign myself to a life of day job editing and working for other people in other capacities, but I don’t know if I could ever overcome the urge to make movies of my own. I have something to say and I like communicating it to people via moving pictures and sound.



In other news, I won some awards at the BEST OF UNDERNEATH CINCINNATI FILM FESTIVAL screening last weekend. I won BEST CONCEPT for Relationship Card, plus I got an HONORABLE MENTION for BEST SOUND (take that Tim Dutton with your professionalism and surround sound!). Relationship Card also got a half an award for BEST ACTOR with Amanda Howell, sharing with John Whitney’s Measured Sacrifice performance with her. We joked because the screen said John’s movie, but the award had a picture from my movie. The official statements credit it to both movies now. It’s like 2.5 awards for Relationship Card.



Speaking of Relationship Card, that and How to Deal With Telemarketers were official selections to the TROMADANCE FILM FESTIVAL, run from Lloyd Kaufman and Troma Studios. I wish someone had let me know. I got the rare experience of finding out my movies were playing from someone unrelated to the festival who was going. Weird. I could have gone too.



Now Sonnyboo productions has 5 movies in the TIME WARNER ON DEMAND FILM FESTIVAL/VIEWERS CHOICE competition thingy on channel 1111 or 411 (depending on where you are at with Time Warner). The most views win s $500. I hope someone else wins this. I don’t need the $$$ that bad right now. Although, 2 out of the 5 Sonnyboo movies were not directed by me, so GRUDGE MATCH (The Derek) and REFRACTORY (Joanne Fromes) could win and I wouldn’t mind helping out the others. I even got mentioned in the COLUMBUS ALIVE for this.



I’m also working on another book thingy as a quickie. Royalty free screenplays if you buy the book, then you have the legal write to make a movie based on the scripts therein. They are all short screenplays, some that I’ve made and some that are unproduced at this time.

That’s all I got for now. Peace out and Respect,
Peter John Ross

The Past Crimes of Paul and Christopher

So this new piece has been rolling around in my head for a long time, about 5 years. I was going to follow up HORRORS OF WAR with this in
2006 if I could manage it. I had 4-5 drafts of the screenplay, and it just didn t come together. The stars were not aligned at the time. The past few months have been much more about waking up, like from a terrible dream (ever see Indiana Jones & The Temple of Doom and the whole takes a fire to burn you out of the trance?).



I made the first couple shorts this year to get my legs back. Making movies is like playing guitar (something I used to do). If you don t practice, you can lose the skills a bit and get rusty, so the shorts acted as my trial run. Both pieces (Refractory and Relationship Card , alliteration unintentional) I am proud of. I have improved on some of my old skills and ideas. I have not only retained some, but I tried new and better things with telling a story with the camera.

This past Saturday, we shot a 5 page script. It was my first real chance to work with Greg Sabo since a 1 day pickup shoot on HORRORS OF WAR and he wanted to play some with his RED ONE camera. We ve talked about working together for a while and this was great. He’s an artisan with the camera and Greg has a lot of big toys.



Now I remember why I wanted 8 weeks of rehearsals with the actors. There was barely any time on the shoot to focus on performance a lot as it takes hours to setup lights (to make it look like you didn t light anything). When the sand starts to drain out of the hourglass, you have to rely on the actors to know what it is they are doing and what you did in rehearsal. There wasn’t a lot of gray area about what the scenes were about and what I wanted, so we had it all smooth as glass. I will definitely rehearse like this again. The worry is that you over-rehearse and kill the spontaneity, but it didn’t since we saved the bigger performances for camera.

Max and Ruth filled in for art department, and they did an incredible job. It helps when you have department heads that take their jobs seriously and really think about the purpose and meaning, as well as how color reflects mood and character.




Shane Howard stepped up to bat for a couple FX shots, especially the bullet hole in a head. He delivered on time, and fast. That helped. Max “Bruce Willis” Groah delivered on a promise that blood splatters would easily wash off walls and carpet and it did.

I brought on the Derek as a producer to help me not have to deal with every tiny detail that wasn’t related to directing. I often short change myself as a director because I produce my own stuff a lot. On HORRORS OF WAR, I had that same opportunity and I squandered it some as I wasn’t as prepared to actually Direct. I don’t want to NOT appreciate things like this, so Derek is da’ man for covering, and also ADing the shoot.

Sound was done well, and I start to wonder how much of Chauncey s rep is undeserved. Having a full crew of about 20 helped the day not take forever. We lost time in a company move from the house exterior to a different house 3 miles away for interiors, but it was worth it to get the depth.



The RED footage is staggeringly impressive. It has latitude much more akin to film and that s not even taking into account the 4000+ pixel size of each frame. We started at the exterior shoot around 11AM and ended that portion after Noon. The sun baked us but the footage looked great on the monitors. I nearly had a heart attack when I saw the digital files after the footage dump, but Greg showed me how much latitude the footage had. REDCINE software and even a version of it within Adobe Premiere Pro 4.1 (with Red 1.7 updates) allows you to put the equivalent of a filter over the footage or an entire telecine colorist in front of the raw R3D files before you use them to edit.

I downloaded all the footage to my internal drive of my computer at home, more as a backup, but I figured I could peruse the footage, albeit slowly since the specs are nowhere near RED minimum. After a 4 hour transfer whilst I slept, I got up at 8:30AM to sneak a peek. The footage set to play at 1/8th quality played surprisingly well. In fact, all my plans to create HD proxies to edit from might be put on hold since the machine at work is a lot faster and more filled with RAM.



If I thought the footage looked great on the monitor, that wasn’t nothing compared to what I looked at today. The detail was staggering. The RED ONE is the most filmic video camera ever manufactured. The depth of field, the lens options, the latitude, contrast, and quality of image all rival actual 35mm film. I can clearly see now what so many TV shows are switching over this fall. It makes sense on many levels. For TV, there is no film print being made (anymore), and the look matches well and it makes everything easier in post production for editing and finishing. The only significant difference now seems to be archival. It s a tapeless workflow and it s all data on drives of various sorts and if something gets corrupted or lost, it s gone as opposed to a tape or a roll of film negative.

Just as I had hoped, this will be the best thing I‘ve ever made. I rehearsed the way I wanted to, played with depth of field for cinematic reasons, and worked with a good crew to meet my goals and everyone exceeded them. Whatever my hopes were for a “look” greatly passed my expectations. By luck, serendipity, inspiration or whatever it was, the color of costuming, paint on walls, randomly selected paintings and lights all coalesced into a perfect image on virtually every frame.



I wanted to thank the entire cast and crew for helping to make something special to me. I hope I put together something that deserves the talent that was involved. I m just trying to make fun of some aspect of humanity that annoys me and I got A-List creative types from our area. I soooooo don t deserve this.

I’ve already started going through all the footage and making my mental edits. I promised myself NO EDITING the first two days after the shoot. Get some distance and maybe even get another editor to take a crack at it. This is akin to the promise I made to myself about NO MORE COCA COLA CLASSIC and GOING TO THE GYM. At this rate I’ll have a rough cut done by Tuesday morning when I promised myself I’d start looking at footage.



Good day Acolytes of Boo!

The Guild and How they Got their Cashola

I'm a huge Joss Whedon fan. After recently getting the DVD of DR. HORRIBLE'S SING ALONG BLOG, I finally discovered the web series THE GUTHE GUILD written and starring Felicia Day.



For their first "season" (albeit 10 3-5 minute long webisodes) they primarily existed on PayPal donations... which I thought was illegal, but I'll have to look into their exceptions and how they did it. Now SPRINT advertises for 6 seconds at the head of each video and they are making decent money on the DVD sales and other advertising.

Everyone wants to try to turn the microcinema, camcorder shooting into some kind of profitability. THE GUILD has succeeded in that regard, but it isn't just a fluke. Some forethought and marketing went into their success.



Now the two most significant things in their business model to me was the niche marketing of gamers, formerly D&D geeks/current World of Warcraft and Everquest fantasy online role players who have an unhealthy addiction to their gaming to escape reality. A specific marketing target with crossover appeal made a perfect genre that was otherwise not being addressed. How many TV shows focus on that group and mocks them with a tender and loving touch?

Far more importantly, the writing is stellar. Absolutely witty and sharp, Felicia Day's talent as a writer and the importance of good writing in the end result of a "good" product cannot be understated. She followed the indie film commandments of writing for what she has access to for free, a restaurant, some apartments, a house, etc.; nothing too extravagant. In the current season 2 episodes, there are dolly shots and some obviously higher production values, but still looks almost the same. Filmmakers overlook that “normies” aka normal people don't really give a shiite about the slightly off lighting or framing in the earlier episodes of THE GUILD because they cared about the characters and situation.



I like THE GUILD series a lot. It was no accident, nor was it the luck of the draw that got this web series to be fiscally viable and very popular. The combination of niche marketing and sincerity in writing that made this a success on many levels.

CLICK HERE to watch THE GUILD