Mondo Beacho Update Feb 10, 2014

L-R: Erik Hammen and Steven Sterne,
on set for Mondo Beacho.
(photo by Mel Cafe)

It snowed last night in Seattle, so who's thinking about Mondo Beacho, a rock n' roll beach movie of the mind?

Hint: me

On Sunday, I finished up the gig scene and the post-gig codas, including a bit of cloudy day, and then started on to the next record store scene. (Over on the right is Steven Sterne, spinning the wax and that's a fact. )

It was a very busy half day of shooting at the record store. We were up before dawn and had to be out before 11:00 AM. In putting together the clips for this scene, I realized that we missed a shot. 

I went into the vault and reviewed all the footage from that day, and we got a lot done. The footage goes and goes and goes.

Not a lot of takes, though, and as time got tighter toward the end, we started consolidating shots. Instead of a master and two singles, it'd be a master only. But we definitely missed one shot all together. Welcome to the glamorous world of independent film.

However! I think I know how to solve the problem.

Maybe it'll even be better than the original idea.

That's why editing is fun.

L-R: Ahren Buhmann, Emily Purington,
Riley Neldam during production.
(photo by Mel Cafe)

Back to the gig scenes -- I gotta say those came out as good as I could've imagined. They're fun and entertaining, but seem "real" as well.

It was quite a puzzle though, getting it all to work together like it needed to. I mean, you'd think I'd have learned something from the other band scene, which I put together not that long ago.

But not really, no.

All I did was relearn my weekly mantra --  the hard way.

Speaking as the resident expert, in a Rock n' Roll Beach Movie of the Mind you gotta keep the "mind" part very present. So intellectual exercises, or "doing things the hard way" are an important part of the process.

Today's second photo was taken at the production house, during that vague period between Makeup and Shooting on the day of the gig shoot. Riley and Emily are waiting.

Waiting, waiting, waiting.

Monday Mondo Beacho update: Jan 13, 2014

L-R: Iain Dalton, Erik Hammen, Anna Forse.
Photo by David Thomas

I'm currently working on the Farrah and the Fairies band practice scene, cutting it using the temp music track that we recorded live on set.

David Thomas has begun mixing the new vocal tracks we recorded last month with the existing instrumental tracks, and it'll be nice to have a "real" version.  Kenna Kettrick actually sounds great in the on-set version, but the instruments are muddy.

Yesterday, I finished up the scene before that, where the boys eat and walk to that band practice. There are two eat/walk scenes, both shot in Georgetown in rackety, unstable locations and using a conceptual cutting plan rather than your standard moving/master/singles whatever. But so far, the first one came together as planned !

Um... Whew. -- but I love those eating/walking scenes! Writing, shooting, and putting them together has all been very satisfying.

This week's photo was taken during the production of the first eat/walk scene.  Iain Dalton, Anna Forse, and I are walking the same line that Ahren and Riley will walk in the movie. That's called Method Production.

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.