Sounds Crazy Lets Do It

Meat Love haiku

2009-03-31T16:45:00.000-07:00

Sweet scent of new love.
Enchanting! Or could it be --
A roasted chicken?

Some test shots

2009-03-24T15:11:00.000-07:00

Louis doing some tests with the DOF adapter and his Sony HVR-A1U high def camcorder. Nice results - we'd get rid of more of the glass grain if we had a motor on the focusing screen to vibrate it.

Not a lot of vignetting, either!

World Premiere!

2009-03-20T21:10:00.000-07:00

Meat Love has been selected to screen in the Davis Film Fest in our homebase city of Davis, California. We'll be in the 12 noon block on April 4th at the Veterans' Memorial Theater, right after the intermission. I'm proud of the actors and crew who gave up many hours of sleep in order to eat Pirate Booty and stand around in a cold, darkened store... and the people who work at the Davis Food Co-Op, who tolerated our antics!

The Davis Film Fest was just as much a part of our production schedule as the shooting or editing was - we used the final submission date as a drop-dead filmout date for Meat Love. It was great to have such a solid end point especially when we got into editing, because it meant that we could devote as much time to the movie as it needed to get done, with the knowledge that after February 27 we were free and done and could sleep and party and go grocery shopping again.

Maybe that was just the editor and I on that last bit.

Moral of the story: having a hard deadline is motivating and a relief when you make it.

What happens next? We're submitting to a film fest for shorts in either LA or SF, and after that, we'll be booting Meat Love into the wide world of Youtube and Vimeo, to seek its fortune and an audience...

We are DONE

2009-02-27T07:42:00.000-08:00

I 'm driving the burned DVD up to Davis to drop off for the film fest submission tonight. The poster directly below is available here: Poster store as a FULL SIZE FOR REALS poster. You can also see here a couple samples from the animation I did for the end credits.

We MADE A MOVIE!

Trailer - rough version

2009-02-15T13:16:00.000-08:00

It's a bit squished, and needs some fixes, but... it's kind of exciting!

Still making progress

2009-02-13T12:41:00.001-08:00

We wrapped principal photography at about 2 pm on Sunday the 8th, after shooting 7 days (not in a row) and 32 hours altogether. We broke two lightbulbs, forgot cables twice, and went through three boom operators. Maybe we should stop mistreating the poor sound people.

Everyone's been set free to have lives and weekends again - everybody but the director and editor. Editor is, unsurprisingly, editing the short. Director is hemming and hawing and asking for the cut to maybe be shorter no longer no maybe three frames longer and can we make it slow motion no you know what never mind put it back the way you originally had it. Director is also
working on the poster/DVD cover and shirt design.

Producer is looking at the rough cuts and trying to decide whether it was worth all the lost sleep.

Look for a trailer on Saturday... we're makin' a MOVIE!

Kids...

2009-02-03T21:22:00.000-08:00

So I'm showing my boy the little blog here, going through the pictures, and he points to the picture of Allison, and says, "Who's that?"

"That's Allison, she's playing the sushi girl."

"Nice. You always need some not-American hot chicks."

*Sigh*

They grow up so fast.

2009-02-02T18:35:00.000-08:00

Some ACTUAL screen grabs from the stuff we've shot!

Who ARE Those Guys?

2009-01-26T22:36:00.000-08:00

. . . asks Sundance, sensing that a new wave in cinema is on the horizon . . .

Second weekend, part 1

2009-01-26T12:06:00.001-08:00

While everyone who's anyone is at Sundance TALKING about and WATCHING movies, we're actually MAKING one. How do you like that, Robert Redford?

Katie, Victor, and Jim are showing Robert Redford a thing or two about dedication.

The director's primary job is to sit on her ass and watch youtube between takes. In fact, sometimes she even watches youtube OVER takes, which is why she didn't keep track of shirt colors and we need to reshoot this shot with a black shirt.

Much like those Russian snow leopards, Brandon is elusive and hard to catch on camera - mostly because he's got the camera in his pocket and is taking photos of everyone else. HOWEVER - the old pile-of-lambchops bait trick that snow leopards always fall for works on producers, too.

Jim P is an actual honest-to-god butcher. This is accuracy! That's a lamb butt sitting next to him on the chopping block. It contains 2 legs o lamb and loin chops!

Conor takes his role very seriously while at the same time taking chicken eating to a whole new level.

Camcorder nerdiness

2009-01-26T11:21:00.000-08:00

We're shooting Meat Love on a Canon Optura 30 camcorder. That giant black tube of doom attached to the front of the camera is a 35mm depth-of-field adapter, made (mostly) off the plans at Daniel's GG-holders.
The adapter lets us use Nikon AI lenses on the camcorder as well as allowing us to control aperture (and so also depth of field). We've got four lenses, and they've all come in handy: 100mm, a 50mm, a 35mm, and a 28mm. The great thing about these lenses is that they're from the Nikon F series camera and have been phased out - you can't use them straight on a new Nikon digital SLR. This means they're super cheap (comparatively) on Ebay. It's pretty neat.

So what goes into the adapter?
From closest to the camera to closest to the lens:
-a 34-37mm step-up ring
-a 37-55mm step-up ring
-a 55mm 10x Opteka macro lens
-a 55mm circular polarizing filter with the glass removed
-a 55-58mm step-up ring
-a 58-60mm step-up ring
-a size 2 Canon macro extension tube
-two size 3 Canon macro extension tubes
-within one of those size 3 tubes, a screen holder (fabricated by Daniel Schweinert holding a Canon EE-A focusing screen
-a size 1 Canon macro extension tube
-a canon EOS bayonet mount
-an EOS body to Nikon lens bayonet adapter

And a tube inside to hold the focusing screen to the right focal flange.

But I'm not done yet! One of the things that the adapter does besides providing beautiful depth of field is it flips the image upside down. People who know say that this is because of physics. It is entirely possible! I'm an art school dropout so as far as I know, it could be because of reversed photons or something.

It's hard to frame shots when they're upside-down... but fortunately we are Resourceful. This is our solution:

A firewire cable hooks the camcorder to a Macbook running FlipFlop, a program written specifically for 35mm adapters, turning your laptop into an on-set monitor. It flip-flops the image, it can magnify to aid focus, it can do crosshairs and safe areas and show 16:9.

And FlipFlop, like the plans for the 35mm dof adapter, is totally free. The internet is a wonderful place.

Photos

2009-01-20T22:43:00.000-08:00

Poster idea.

2009-01-20T17:57:00.000-08:00

Actually I don't know that there's a poster in the budget, but there's going to have to be something to stick on the front of the DVD case. Flyers are just cheap mini-posters, right?

Another Brick in the Wall

2009-01-19T21:42:00.000-08:00

My friend Lee came up with a tag line for us after I gave him the elevator pitch for the Meat Love story:
"Boy. Meats. Girl."

Now all we need is an official project Haiku.

My Shoulder is Sore

2009-01-19T17:28:00.000-08:00

That's it. I'm not really much of a blogger.

First Night's Shoot a Shocker

2009-01-18T20:16:00.000-08:00

Well, not a shocker . . . but pleasantly surprising! The cast and crew all share a level of inexperience and sense of adventure at the filmmaking enterprise, as well as a willingness to cooperate and a tendency to be quick on the uptake for new skills. Combine all of that with a good story and all-night access to an empty grocery store, and you have a recipe for cinematic greatness. Or at least an entertaining short movie.

Looking forward to NIGHT TWO of the shoot, beginning in 1 hour and 37 minutes. And counting . . .