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 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.

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 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.