Mondo Beacho Jan 27 update

I worked on the beach sequences over the weekend.

Fairly straightforward, but there are a few details that will probably not be worked out until I watch them in the completed rough cut, rather than as scenes by themselves.

The forest and the trees, is the issue. Nice stuff, though.

I just posted a couple photos this week because I don't have time to write much.

The photo above is from the first day. It's around 9:30 (?) on Saturday morning and the lovely Seattle beach is pretty quiet.

The photo below is from the scene at little coney. Malts for all. Ask Ahren about the Green River malt. (It's a killer). I also talked to David Thomas today, he's got a final mix of one of the Fairies' songs ready for me to check out, very exciting!

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

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.

September 30 Mondo Beacho report!

I keep coming across little rogue ends of film here and there. The photo on the left shows a little strip on my car floor, caught below a cheeseburger wrapper from Dick's. ...

So! Where's Mondo Beacho this week? Glad you asked.  It was a mixed bag this week.

Edit prep.

I spent a lot of time going through the footage, separating it out into shots.  Lots of good stuff, and I'm feeling very, very optimistic about the film in general.

Bookkeeping.

I sent the cast and crew their honorariums, glad to have those out. The honorariums were just a small token of appreciation, rather than something that inadequately represents the enormous contribution they have made to the film through their art and labor. With these done, I was also able to complete most of the final budget tally.

Beyond that, I don't talk about the budget of films anymore. It cheapens the medium as an art. No one asks painters or sculptors or theater producers how much their work costs, and when they do it underlines the crassness of the product, like in the Julie Taymor/U2 Spiderman play on Broadway.

Anyway, I'm an artist, not a banker.

Music.

Ahren and I are going to start rehearsing soon as prep for the clean recordings we'll need of the Clanking Chains songs.  I also just contacted the rest of the folks about recording clean versions of the bonfire songs, which I think we'll do "live" in one marathon session. We'll go into an actual studio later to record Ahren and Kenna's singing and Steven's voice-over (the DJ on the radio) after that.

I've also been playing around with instrumental music. It's mostly just ideas at this point, but it's good to be back in that space, as there is a lot of material still TBD for the radio. And it's nice break from editing prep.

In other news

I attended the Annual Members Meeting at the Northwest Film Forum last week and it was announced that in addition to programmer Adam Sekular leaving the organization, production guy Dave Hannigan is also leaving! He's going to Portland to do the same good work he did for us, but there.  The Portland people are great - Thomas Phillipson programmed my film Time of the Robots last year for the NW Film Festival -- but it'll be weird to have Dave gone. He was really the last of the old guard, with Jaime Hook and Michael Seiwerath, back when they were in that weird building on the edge of a cliff on the bitter end of capitol hill, when they were Wiggly World, they still ran the Grand Illusion. I think that building is now a dentist office or something.  Anyway, Dave and Adam are great guys and the NWFF won't be the same without them.

Also ran into Ahren and Kenna, in the lobby at Seattle Public Theater, going to see another play.

It was good to see them again. Ahren grew his beard back.

Mondo Beacho update, Sept 23



photo by David Thomas

Last week was difficult on the personal end, but nevertheless I got some good work done on Mondo Beacho.

Costume department - wrapped. Barbara came by and picked up all the costumes, most of we've donated to the mighty Seattle Public Theater. Our kids take classes there and they would move out and live there if they could. The SPT community also brought us Barbara, Steven, Ahren, Kenna, Alyssa, Amanda, Emily, Zach, our set dresser Jennifer, and a bunch of extras.

Music. I finally recorded a guide track for the vocals for our opening song. The current version is a rough track that we used to shoot, with the understanding that we'd go back and get it right later. I still need to record some more guide tracks for the bonfire scenes and get all those tracks to the actors, and schedule some recording time.  I also still need to record the DJ's radio-voice tracks with Steven.  I will try to wrap my head around this in the coming week.

I was debating for a while whether to use some of the live versions of the bonfire songs that we recorded on set, but I'm pretty sure we can't use all the songs, so the problem is that post-recorded songs would probably not mesh gracefully with live songs. I don't want it to sound like it used to on "Happy Days", when Joanie and Chachi would sing, and Erin Moran would sing the first line naturally but when Scott Baio came in for the second line, they processed his voice through about sixty pounds of anti-stink filter, and it sounded like he was being beamed down from a space ship.
That sort of thing might be fine for Chachi, but not on my watch, brother.

Pre-Editing organization continues. I'm in the early end of the long process of organizing all the footage that we shot and then scanned in telecine. This organization involves taking very large files that are several reels of film combined, and cutting those files into a zillion small files, each named for a scene/shot number to make standalone sub-clips, one for each take and/or angle of a shot. Many of these files are only 20 seconds long. Most are not more than a minute. After I've worked for a while, I back up these new files onto a second drive. Using my old computer, this is all a slow process.

A big part of it is disentangling the relationship between the shot names and numbers that we planned on in pre-production, versus what we ended up and slated during production, versus what makes sense in organizing the footage for editing in post production. Ultimately, I have to defer to the production slate for the purposes of audio sync later, but again, as scenes were added/moved/altered in production, some slates were not consistent. So I make notes on the script and try to name the final file in a way that makes sense across the board.

I am not fastidious by nature, and have had to go back and rename files a couple times even in this beginning phase -- I'm an artist, not a bookkeeper -- so I have to keep reminding myself that this kind of fastidiousness pays off later. Or rather, the lack of fastidiousness will burn me later. Slow and steady...

However! The process of slowly, slowly going through all the footage, and not even doing it in order, is good for my brain as an editor, and already I've thought of some things that wouldn't have occurred to me if the process were more linear. And that is exactly in line with my usual, comfortable process...

In other news...

It's been raining a lot this month, and every morning without fail, I look out the window and am grateful that we had such a warm and sunny summer. Often September/October are warm and summery, but not this time, and we really lucked out. It's nice to see a daily reminder of this when other things we weren't as lucky with.

Alpha Cine is processing their last batch of film this week. Strange to have our own lab going the way of telecine-only, but not surprising, with Vancouver having swept away the production boom of the 90's, then the rise of digital, and finally the fall of projected film prints. I am not looking forward to mailing out my film for processing, but on the upside, I worked with Spectra Film & Video down in Hollywood when we did The Last City in the East, and they did a great job.

Mondo Beacho is cast and crew'd

Auditions. You can't live with them, and you can't shoot 'em...  unless you're making A Chorus Line....  (Funny!) Anyway, the dust has cleared and I am so glad that we have found such a lovely, talented, and clever cast and crew. They are as follows:

Cast:
Noelle - Sarah Winsor
Arthur - Ahren Buhmann
Pete - Riley Neldam
Farrah - Kenna Kettrick
The DJ - Steven Sterne
Mike - William Poole
Jeremy - Brian Wolbert
Valerie - Maya Briller
Charles - Iain Dalton
Eva - Emily Purington
Dave - Mel Café
Sylvie  - Alyssa Kay
Gretel - Amanda Keogh
Jason - Zach Sanders

Crew:
Director/DP - Erik Hammen
Producer - Erik Hammen
Producer - Anna Forse
CoProducer - Steven Sterne
Associate Producer: Babu Rajendran
Associate Producer: Jeannette Idiart
Assistant Director - Mel Café
Assistant Camera - Iain Dalton
2nd AC - Katrina Brede
Location Sound - David Thomas
Set Dresser - Jennifer Dice
Production Assistance - Jon Idiart, Aadi Nickels
Makeup - Carmen Wilson, Juel Bergstrom, Marina Boychuck