Rough cut getting close

L-R:   Riley Neldam, Kenna Kettrick,
Ahren Buhmann, Sarah Winsor, and John the extra
(photo by Jennifer Dice)

Summer in the northwest -- it's later than it looks.

We're on the beach -- Golden Gardens -- for the bonfire scene. Shooting with a permit, in front of a slightly unpermitted fire-pit constructed of an old Smokey Joe with its legs yanked off, buried in the sand.

We had a fire captain -- Jennifer Dice-- whose job was to make the fire bigger.

Foom! Up it went.

Do people sing around bonfires anymore? They do where I come from. Last time I was back east visiting my brother Bret and his family, we had a bonfire in his backyard. My niece Freya lent me her plastic cowgirl guitar, and we were able to squeeze a few tunes out of it.

Group singing is good for the brain.

The world-famous St. Olaf Choir holds hands when they sing, the whole lot of them. It helps them function as a single unit. The vibrations and empathy are transmitted directly. They don't have to worry about holding a guitar, though.

Or a beer can.

In the editing room, the bonfire scene had some unusual challenges. Honestly, I was stumped for a couple of days over the best way to cut it. But I cracked the code yesterday afternoon.

Now that I've got a grip on the whole thing, I hope to finish the rough cut this coming week, and then start on the remaining music tracks immediately after.

I'm pretty excited to get going on the music.

Mondo Beacho report for the first Monday in March, 2014

Emily Purington, on set of Mondo Beacho
(photo by Mel Cafe)

It's been another busy week for Mondo Beacho!

'Getting toward the home stretch now, at least for the rough cut.

This week's photo comes from the makeup test, I think, for one of the scenes I was cutting this week. Emily Purington is dressed for the Georgetown confab by Barbara Blunt, makeup by Juel Bergholm.

Beyond that Georgetown bit, I also put together the rest of the water scenes and another Shilshole Ave sequence, and ended up on the roof of Surf Ballard, a place where the cast and crew spent more time than we ever thought we would...

... Actually that's true about Shilshole Avenue as well.

... The great thing about working with talented actors, in this case Sarah Winsor and Maya Briller, is that they are able to reproduce their performances again and again, each time as if they were brand new. Despite (or "in spite of" -- is there a difference?) some unexpected technical challenges.

Hooray for acting --  wotta fine profession!

Here's something funny: I got derailed about halfway through editing the Shilshole Avenue bit when I realized that I'd forgotten we had music for that scene that was baked into the script. See, I'd already edited the whole thing to a temp track instead. Hilarious!

I think I've just had this particular tune in mind for so long that I took it for granted.

Upon recutting, it was amazing once again how powerful all that stuff is...  Music.... Editing.

Anyway, special thanks to the patient Thomas Wold for the use of his lovely, summery hippy folkadelic tune.  Recorded on machines so old they don't even exist anymore, from what I'm told....

Speaking of music, once the rough cut is done, the plan is to set the picture aside to cool off, and re-commence work on acquiring and/or composing the remaining music for the film. Because for expediency's sake, a handful of scenes are currently scored with temporary tracks, which have copyrights owned by giant, reeking corporations, the kind that charge licensing fees that exceed  the entire budget of the film x2 for each tiny, forgotten song.

(What percentage of that fee goes to the artist? My guess = 0)

After the music is finalized, I can go back to the rough cut, put in the final tracks, cut to the new music and tighten the whole thing up for public consumption. (note the metaphor follow-through here....)

In other news:

Sarah was in another play this weekend which I missed, but will also be in Macha Monkey's Lollyville, playing at Hugo House in May!

Steven Sterne seems to be working non-stop -- beyond his directing duties at SPT he's now working with the Young Playwrights on a read-through series...

Alyssa Kay is in Charlotte's Web, opening March 21 at the Second Story Rep.

Mondo Beacho update Feb 24, lots of progress to report!

Lots of progress on the Mondo Beacho edit this week!

First off, many thanks to Eric S. Anderson for nifty little editing tip that helped get me out of the record store scene where I'd been stuck for a lot longer than seemed reasonable. It was at the point where I was basically "in a quagmire"...

Also thanks to Anna Forse, for a suggestion for the title scene, which I thought I'd gotten past on this initial cut but it'll be worth checking out for sure...Yes!

L-R: Riley Neldam, William Poole, Erik Hammen,
and Sarah Winsor at Dutch Bike, Ballard
(photo by Mel Cafe)

Yes... Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah: lots of ground covered last week.

Back on the bikes, for the lovely little scene that we shot up north by a manicured strip mall in Shoreline, WA. ( ... a strip mall?  In a beach movie of the mind?  .. Yes! ... Intentional! )

That done, it was back to Georgetown again, at Lect's Soup Stop. It was roundly agreed that the soup at Lect's is awesome.

Ease-of-location? Not so much. We pulled that one out of the fire just barely at the time.

But at the end of the day (aka last week) it cut together pretty well.

After that, I worked on a nice long scene that combines the first scene we shot on the film -- down by the rocks on the beach -- with one of the very last things we shot over in Ballard proper.

Also good stuff, but I'll definitely need some more ambient sound for that one.  And it'll need to be quiet ambient sound.

Especially after those Georgetown scenes.

Quiet ambient sound!  It's harder to get than you'd think. The thing is, your brain edits out a lot of sound around you, so something that you think is pretty mellow is actually picked up by the recorder as a big screeching, rumbling hunk 'o racket.

There's also a little touch of music in one part of the Ballard scene, though, and many thanks to Greg Wharmby of the band Horns of Ormus for the music tracks he sent! One of them is looking very good for that bit.

Finally, it was out on the water for some more canoe-camera shots, which I believe will comprise the second surf yoga scene but...

But the truth is these second shots came out really, really good.  So good, that I'm doing some serious considering behind the scenes what I want to do with them for sure.  Because there are several options.

(And, by "behind the scenes", I guess I really mean I'm just going to think about it and no one will know either way. And, is it really behind the scenes if I'm blabbing about it on this blog...?  Considering my likely readership, I'd say yes. )

Last week, I also picked up some more ambient sound, and like I mentioned earlier, I have come to realize that I still need a lot more. I can't go out in the rain, it won't sound right, but my to-do list now has a stack of outdoor jaunts on it. When the weather's right, I'll start carrying the recorder everywhere. Successful ambient sound recording seems to be a combination of luck and perseverance.

This week's still photo is from the bike shop, which is where we began the shoot day that eventually took us up to Shoreline. I don't know what Riley and I are saying in this shot but you can tell it was a laugh riot. (Will seems to be tuned-out, but he's probably just in character)

Mondo Beacho update Feb 17, post-valentine's day update

Not enough time to post properly this week so let's look at a few pictures!

L-R: David Thomas, Riley Neldam, Maya Briller, production morning.
(photo by Mel Cafe)

L-R: Erik Hammen, Maya Briller, Ahren Buhmann, Sarah Winsor on set.
(photo by Mel Cafe)

L-R: Ahren Buhmann, Iain Dalton on set, Georgetown Records.
(photo by Mel Cafe)

Brian Wolbert on set, Cairo.
(photo by Mel Cafe)

Mondo Beacho update Monday Jan 20

Ahren Buhmann and Sarah Winsor on set
photo by Mel Cafe

I'm working on the movie theater scene and accompanying bookends, hoping to finish them up tonight.

We originally shot a different version of the theater scene inside the mighty Grand Illusion, but unfortunately that didn't work out. We reshot one scene another day back in the theater, but ended up doing the rest outside further down the Ave.

At the time, I was wondering if we'd run into trouble with the the Rat and Raven, whose establishment abutted the creepy stairwell we were commandeering for the shoot. I'd done a drive-by of the location a day earlier and it looked like they were painting outside. We were working fairly early in the day, but the local reprobates were already queuing up outside the bar across the street. A few potential problems here, and kinda/sorta no backup plan, nor desire to figure out how to do it the official way at this point.  But,  bon chance!  It turned out the painters had been painting over the signage; the Rat n' Raven had gone belly-up. (The actual rats and ravens, however, remained on site.)

Drunk on good luck, we also tried running across the street to ask the vegan restaurant next to the bar if we maybe set up our camera on their their roof, to get a production-values-friendly aerial shot. But they were in the middle of brunch and didn't want to talk to us. We ended up parking Kat's truck in the middle of the street and shooting from the back. Worked just as well.

I also spent a lot of time last week editing the band practice scene.

That was a complicated one, because the scene needs to do several things at once: show the relationships between a bunch of new characters, be cool as a band practice, and also fit in with the look/feel of the rest of the film.

For most of the previous scenes, (including the movie theater scenes) I've just been eyeballing all the footage at once and assembling it intuitively. But the band practice scene just had too much going on for that to work.

(L-R) Kenna Kettrick, Amanda Keogh, Alyssa Kay,
Zach Sanders,and Brian Wolbert on set.
photo by Mel Cafe

I ended up going back to look at how I'd diagrammed it in the screenplay for the actual shoot (go figure), and pretty much started over, but it went well after that.

It was sorta like when you're trying to figure out a technical problem and you finally decide to look at the manual.

And continuing my practice of doing everything the hard way.

But -- with the accumulated knowledge from doing it the hard way!

"Hard: my calling card"

     -- Chuck D

Weekly Mondo Beacho update -- Happy New Year edition

L-R, Sarah Winsor, Mel Café on location for Mondo Beacho
photo by Anna Forse

Editing has progressed to the bike shop/riding scenes.

The bike shop location (Dutch Bike, Ballard) was awesome but a bit tight, and I shot a lot of weird angles that day.

That scene also has three performances to balance: Sarah Winsor and Will Poole doing one thing in the shop while Steven Stern's VO from the radio is talking about something else entirely.  

It's actually super fun, but also the first really complicated scene in the film, and it was a bit daunting at first. (By comparison the scene before it was just Sarah walking. Which, if you know the scene, is nuanced in its own way...)

To help move things forward, I've also decided that I'm done learning AfterEffects for the time being. AE is a useful tool, but dang -- everything I touch with it seems to need rendering (time consuming) and then needs to be re-rendered whenever I want to move the clip or change its length, i.e.: edit it. I'll revisit AE later, when I've got time to pretty things up.
 
The need for music is becoming very apparent now, so I went to a rock show a few days ago to check out the bands. The show was over at heartland, where we filmed in August.

There were four bands. Twice, during the break between bands, a random kid wandered over and introduced himself to me, for no apparent reason other than possibly he were curious about the big old fool standing in back. One of the kids turned out to be a former student of my friend Retz. The other guy I couldn't figure out at all.

But nice kids! Apparently the feather-haired denim-jacketed thugs who used to come attached to shows like a hair to the top of a wart have moved on to other projects.

Anyway, the headliner that night was Thee Samedi, a band whose vibe seemed exactly right for the radio or maybe as record store music in Mondo Beacho. The guys put on a great show, and I introduced myself to Alex the bass player afterwards. We exchanged a few emails the next day, and they are now on board for the film and psyched!

Yes! It ain't easy finding the right music.

In other news

Steven Sterne is the playwriting/performing marathon 14/48 this weekend. Be there or be square.

Mondo Beacho weekly update: audio edition

I finished naming and logging all the location sound files from Mondo Beacho over the weekend.

This was the first time I'd listened to a lot the production audio, and I was nervous about a couple of scenes.

The ambient sound on location in Georgetown was particularly difficult. Our biggest day there was on a nice, sunny Saturday,  and the area around the shoot (on the public street) was crowded with people. And motorcycles, and trucks. And freight trains.

And a crazy political performance artist with a portable sound system, who thought it'd be nice to be on film.

Oh yeah, and the Cessna jets, coming and going every ten minutes at 100 ft. overhead, from the nearby airport .

Did I mention that cast and crew had been on set since 5 am?

Anyway, with all that going on, audio from only one shot from that day was seriously affected, and that was a long master shot, which we covered heavily with a variety of nice, close shots. 

Beyond that, we have 100% lovely, usable audio. All taken with a portable recorder and shotgun mike on a boom pole. 

Thank you David Thomas!!

 

Also last week

I got together with a bunch of the actors to record clean versions of the three songs from the bonfire scene. The session was fun and went very well.

Singers included Sarah, Ahren, Riley, Kenna, Amanda, Alyssa, and Mel.

It was really great to see everyone again; I missed them.

In other news

2nd AD Kat Brede stopped by the other day to borrow my apple box for a different shoot.

I'm glad that the old box is getting a chance to go out in the field again.

Though it does make an awesome coffee table.

Mondo Beacho post production update Oct 7

Ahren Buhmann and Sarah Winsor in Mondo Beacho

Screen shot

This frame grab is from a scene that we shot down at the Georgetown Trailer Park Mall, a sort of vintage flea market here in Seattle, on a busy Saturday night. 

Just after sunset, actors Sarah Winsor and Ahren Buhmann and I walked among the crowd. They looked at the booths and went in and out of the trailers in-character, while I hung around nearby, filming them in little 24-second segments with the Bolex wind-up camera.

The summer-night atmosphere comes across very naturally.

We used Kodak Vision3 500T film for low-light scenes like this. The stuff really should be rated something more like 3200T, because it pretty much captures exactly what you need to see in the dark. The romance of the moment is expressed beautifully.

I do love shooting this way with the Bolex. Setting aside the times when it didn't hold the loop, or when I couldn't see though the viewfinder and when the wind ran out at a crucial moment -- this was really my favorite way to do things.


Cataloging

Meanwhile, back in the present, I've been doing lots and lots of trimming and Saving-as.

The screenplay for Mondo Beacho called for a plenty of short takes and ambience, and the physical results are cumbersome to sort through.

But in this process of looking at every single iota of footage, I'm really starting to see how the final film is going to come together, and how all that ambient footage will enable me to control the timbre of the story.


Post audio recording

I also met up with Steven Sterne (The DJ) this weekend and we finally recorded all his lines that we hear coming from the radio.

I'd always assumed we'd have time to do this during production, but of course that was ridiculous. Anyway, it was fun work, and great to see Steven as always.

Also, it looks like we'll be recording the clean tracks for the bonfire scene sometime near the end of the month. Scheduling is in progress.

Same goes for recording final vocals for the Clanking Chains songs with Ahren.