Hey guys – thought I’d go ahead and give everyone a little update.
Our production company (Lead Balloon) and its sister companies (Psychic Bunny and Codename) just moved offices last weekend, so I was pretty darn busy up to then with the move. Before we moved in we had to order glass, build walls, install breakers, rewire the whole space with about 50 ethernet lines, choose colors, paint, and negotiate with the building managers about all of this. Whew! It was exhausting!
But at the same time we were also very busy on the movie. Dwayne, Lawrence, and I recorded all the voiceover dialogue for the film, and I’m very happy with it. As far as I can tell, anyway. It’s hard to tell before you really start editing it to picture, but in Lawrence’s awesome studio, it sounded great. Many thanks to Dwayne for saying things like “That’s awesome” about 20 times in a row and not stabbing me in the neck. That’s just Franklin bein’ Franklin!
Speaking of that, I finally did a count of how much we shot for the film: a grand total of 26 hours. Granted, a lot of that is B-roll that we took driving around the Yakima Valley, getting beautiful sunset shots. Those are going to come in extremely handy when editing all the scenes into a film…the sinew that will hold all the movie together.
Some other great news: pretty much every scene has been transcoded from the native H.264 codec we shot in to an editable Prores codec. During this process we also synced all the video to all the audio. We actually did this in a pretty novel way. If you’re interested, let me know and I’ll post the document I wrote down all the steps in.
The result of all this is that I could finally start editing the trailer for the film! This has been really exciting for me. One, it’s starting to look like a real movie, and two, I’m that much closer to actually being able to show the footage to other humans. I showed the rough cut to my producers a week or two ago, and now I’m making some changes based on that. Hopefully it won’t be too much longer before I can show all of you!
Above you’ll see a screengrab I took of editing the trailer, so at least you could see the progress. And yes, I tried to pose Dwayne and Kristina in the funniest poses possible.
Sounds like you been very busy with all that going on. I’m happy and exited to read this. I can’t wait for the preview and I’m pretty sure a lot more people can’t either. Keep up the hard work!
I’m so excited to see this! (And the new office!) I can’t thank you enough for everything you taught me this summer. I’m really proud to say I worked for you.
Yes Rick, I am interested in your novel way of syncing the audio and video if you are still willing to share.
I can’t wait to see the final product. A juicy trailer might hold me over for a bit.
Thanks!
Ben
Sure, Ben! Just emailed you the document.
Congratulations on your project. I began my teaching career in Granger during your senior year in high school (I taught 8th and 9th grade then). I have returned to Granger and am now teaching a class called “Film as Lit” to 5th and 6th grade students as an exploratory class. If there is any time that you might be back in the valley and have a chance to speak to my class I would love to have you swing by. Best of luck to you!
Hi Marc – Yes, I’d love to come speak. I’ll get in touch with you offline.
Hey, congratulations on making an independent film! I know first hand how hard it is! I wrote and directed “Hannah and Jude,” which was shot on Saturdays from November 2010 to June 2011 in Yakima, Tri-Cities, Ellensburg, and just outside of Moses Lake.
Your project looks really awesome and the cast looks phenomenal! Best of luck moving forward! Keep me updated!
Nathan! Sorry for the late reply! We were quite busy with our Kickstartering. Is your film finished? We’d love to see it!