The Last Will, the first feature film that I worked on, was picked up for international distribution by Quantum Entertainment about six months ago. Eric has been trying to get it listed on IMDB, but they will not list it for us until the distributor puts the movie on their web site. Well, it finally happened. The Last Will is now on the Quantum Entertainment web site. I have three credits on the film; Associate Producer, Editor and Visual Effects. Hopefully my first IMDB credits are just around the corner.
In addition to the international distribution through Quantum, I am setting up a new web site for the movie, thelastwillmovie.com, in order to start self distributing the film until we secure domestic distribution.
The issues with the video capture on ARMY Men have caused some small problems, but I have worked through them. It turned out that I had to edit in 29.97 fps. If I kept the project at 24 frames per second, the footage from the XL-2 would have looked horrible. Every fifth frame would be missing and cause a stutter in playback. On the other hand, editing in 29.97, the DVX footage is stuttering slightly because that frame has to be added. This is okay though because all of the footage in the last scene needs to be smooth. The entire war scene can stutter because I will be adding some camera shake and film effects to replicate Vietnam war footage.
The Wire removal on the 29.97 footage was a challenge. I de-interlaced the footage, and worked on individual frames. The de-interlaced footage didn’t look nearly as good as the progressive footage from the Panasonic, but it was good enough. I have done the color correction on it and adjusted the brightness, contrast and saturation on all of the footage, so that it matches nicely now. Once I have applied the Magic Bullet effects, there should be no telling which camera the footage came from.
Eric has finished the sound effects and score, so ARMY Men should be complete shortly after the holidays. Once it is complete, it will be up at CreativeLOGIC. I’ll post it here as well.
The first recording session for the Bobby Bo Bodeo dialog tracks was last night. We recorded 14 pages of the script in three hours. Overall it went well. The cast is fantastic. The energy was high and the character voices are exactly what we want. I expected to be able to record the entire 26 pages in one session because the engineer told us that we would be able to record four microphones simultaneously without a problem.
Well, we had a little problem. The microphones were in close proximity to each other, and there was no partitioning between them. And using microphones with a cardioid pickup pattern, there was a lot of spill from other voices into adjacent microphones. Because of this, we could only record two characters at a time with playback instead of characters playing off of each other live. This doubled our studio time.
When Eric told me that the studio was in the recording engineer’s home, I expected one of two things. Either a home recording studios that is set up entirely for business, or just a home studio. Because of the price we were given, naturally I expected the latter, and that’s what we got. I am not complaining by any means. Rick, the engineer, was great. He was easy to work with, and the recording sounds top-notch. Besides, in order to get the pilot episode done on a limited budget we are willing to do whatever it takes. When we get picked up we will get all of the toys and gadgets we need.
Because of the holidays, most of us are busy for the rest of December, so we are going to reconvene in the beginning of January to finish recording the dialog. We have also begun seeing preliminary proofs of the character models from the animation studio. It’s looking good. Take a look at some photos of the cast at the CreativeLOGIC site.
The project moves forward.
Big news in Zadie Land! Eric Miles has been working on a script called The Dockmaster. It’s been through a few revisions, and he sent it to our contact at Quantum Entertainment a couple of weeks ago. She really liked the script and offered to help us get name talent. Well, she came through by setting us up with Michael Pare. Michael is interested in playing the lead role of Officer Mergensen in the film. And based on a combination of the script, the director (Eric), and Michael Pare’s involvement, Quantum Entertainment has guaranteed us domestic and foreign video releases. This is big news in the CreativeLogic camp. Having a distribution garantee, and name talent attached should help us in securing the financing needed to make this movie. Stay tuned for updates.
I captured the ARMY Men footage after we wrapped last Sunday. We shot everything in 24p, and the DVX100a footage looks great as usual, but I am concerned about the footage from the XL-2. It all captured at 29.97 even with the Advanced Pulldown Removal. I was assured by both Chris the D.P. and Rich the Camera Operator that the camera was in 24p mode. I have never worked with the XL-2 before, so I hope I am capturing correctly. It should be the same as capturing from the DVX. It shouldn’t make a difference, but I am going to try and re-capture the XL-2 footage with the XL-2. I hope that works because the footage looks horrible compared to the Panasonic video and I think it will have an adverse effect on the finished product.
