Mondo Beacho update

photo by Erik Hammen

"What's your film about?"

A girl moves to the beach
and spends a lazy summer 
exploring the ramshackle beach town 
and falling in love with the wrong boy.

Mondo Beacho, a rock n' roll beach movie... of the mind.

I think this understates the issue, but dang -- if anyone's got a better way to say this in one sentence, let me know. Artists are the people least-qualified to describe their own work.

I'm at the point in editing where it's pass after pass over the same material, looking as much at overall flow as little details. But of course, the better it flows the more the little warts stand out. Then when I stop and shave off the warts, the flow is changed. What? yes.

That said, there's nothing like hanging out with other artists to invigorate your own work. I spent the weekend in Minnesota, eating and drinking with a whole bunch of fine and lovely people and arts-types, some of them even 'Beacho or film-related, including:

Thomas "Folkadelic Two-step" Wold. His song "Downstream" is in the film and whose new, third record is just about done.

Paul D. Dickinson and Jessica Raymond (from The Last City in the East, the film I made back in 2011). Beers. Laffs. Paul has a new project boiling up but I probably can't mention it yet. Happy birthday, Jessica.

I also had dinner and more drinks with experimental/narrative filmmaker Rolf Belgum, (Driver 23, Atlas Moth, She Unfolds by Day) and his clever and lovely fiancee Heather. I even got to see a few clips from his long-gestating and still untitled new film! Fantastic!

Back in Seattle, I'm looking forward to a very productive and sunny week this coming week.

Memorial Day post, Mondo Beacho

Yessir, it's time for another random-seeming Mondo Beacho update.

But the posts reflect the process, which at this point is not smooth or predictable, it's organic.

It's a living thing, man!

I keep retooling the opening of the film. It's very, very important to start your film out right. Enough cannot be said about this.

In fact…  the opening is so important…

(how important is it?)

I'll tell ya!  The opening is so important -- it's unbelievable.

(That one goes out to Steve O'Neil)

Anyway, I'll be working on that opening scene right up to the last minute.

When is the last minute, by the way?

I don't know yet.

It'll be done when it's done.

That's what they say in painting.

Right now, I'm typing this foolishness instead of working on the "band practice" scene, which is about a quarter of the way through the film.

Just before I broke for dinner, I realized that scene needed to be put together differently.

It actually looked quite good as it was --  but that was in the context of itself.

After I watched the whole film before it up to that point, all of a sudden it was clear the approach needed to be different.

The film informs the scenes.

The screenshot above is from a different scene, the "gig scene". We shot that at Heartland, a DIY club that actually had its final show last night. They're closing up due to losing too much money. Heartland made a good run of it. Mondo Beacho got two bands from them due to me going to see shows there: Punishment and Thee Samedi.

Good bye, Heartland!

I saw a good movie at the Seattle International Film Festival today. "My Year with the Nuns". That Matt Smith is some storyteller.

And, the movie was playing at the Egyptian Theater, which closed down earlier this year and was possibly going to go away altogether, but SIFF has decided to take it over and rehabilitate it.

That's the second single-screen theater they've rescued this to. They bought the Uptown a few years ago. It'd probably be knocked down for condos by now, if not for them.

That, my friends, is how a film society should operate. Hell, if that's all they did, I'd be a supporter.

In other news, my short film The Last City in the East is opening for Modern Times (that's right!) in Minneapolis this week. Are you in Minneapolis on Tuesday, May 27 at 8:30? Check it out!

Hurry up and wait, Mondo Beacho

photo by Erik Hammen

I definitely got some good work done on the film, but last week was a very hectic. I'll have more specifics to post soon.

I did see a lot of relatives this week. Quite a few of them are crazy artists just like me. That's always nice to remember.

Also good to remember is that I need to come up with a better pitch for the film. How to explain it to the uninitiated. "Mondo Beacho is a beach movie of the mind. ... " what else?  Umm.... I don't know, but do you wanna hear about this awesome edit I made by removing two frames from a clip and adding three from a totally different scene that matches?

The least qualified person to describe art is usually the artist. The smart ones don't say anything. I fall into the other category. If anyone's got a good way to describe my film, please let me know. ( but "not yet done" is already taken)

Update May 11, in brief

Erik Hammen, Riley Neldam, Ahren Buhmann on set
(photo by David Thomas)

I made good progress on the cut despite a very difficult week and more of the same to come.

I'm about 2/3 of the way through the final cut, working on the scenes like the one in downtown Ballard, out on the water, and outside Surf Ballard with Maya and Sarah.

Digging up buried treasure everywhere. Who buried it? Me.

Today's photo is from the scene we shot at Lect's Soup Stop. (Lect's is actually not featured in this photo. )

Our window of time to work at that location was very small, and it started shrinking the minute we started to shoot. If I recall correctly, I had to "drive solutions with proactive detail-oriented problem-solving." Put that phrase on your resume, it'll double your take home pay. Just kidding.

Anyway, I love that scene now. I worked it last week, and it came out great.

In other news, I had lunch with Steven Sterne on Friday, it was great to catch up. He's been very busy acting these days.

Last summer, my kids were extras in a non-Mondo Beacho movie, called "My Year of the Nuns", and it's playing at the Seattle Int'l Film Fest this month.  I'm pretty sure this is not a "Nunsploitation" flick, but the director is Bret Fetzer, who also wrote the play "Lollyville" that Sarah is currently in, and the writer is this guy Matt Smith, who I saw acting in another movie once, and he was pretty funny. So I've got high hopes for it.

May 5 update

Sarah Winsor makeup test
(photo by Mel Cafe)

Last week was a bit random, but here's where we're at:

David Thomas and I finished mixing the rest of the internally-created music. I'm putting the finished tracks in place as I go, and suddenly everything looks 20% better. Good sound = good picture. This is solid math.

I also go up through the coda of the post-theater scene in the edit. I'd thought that coda was pretty much set in stone -- three nice shots, then out we go -- but true to the nature of this cut, it was now very clear that one of those shots had to go. In its place, I'm using two other clips, which were previously discarded from their original places in the film.

So maybe I'll end up using this newly discarded clip for something else as well.

I hope so. In an ideal world, the shot/Use ratio is ideally 1:1 -- that's good math.

In other news...  hey look, there's Sarah Winsor in today's photo. I think it's a makeup test photo from the set. Anyway, Sarah is starring in a stage play right now over at Hugo House called Lollyville, which I saw over the weekend and highly recommend! The show runs through May 24th.

Final cut begins!

Old Rocky Point amusement park dining hall.
Home of the Shore Dinner (Best in the World).

This week I sent David the last few music tracks to mix, and started on the final cut of the film.

It's worth noting that the rough cut is not actually rough -- the idea is to get as close as you can to perfect.

Then, you take a break (for music, in our case) and when you come back for the Final, you can concentrate on the performances without having to worry about structural issues inherent in the process of assembling a film from a million different parts.

It's all about going from good to great. 

So it's pretty fun, and exciting to see things working out so well.

Working all the way through the bike scenes over the weekend, I have to say that I am feeling a lot of love for the actors.

I also spent a lot of time on the ever-important opening title sequence. Moved a few things around , and laid in the newly-mixed opening song, which sounds great (thanks David!!).

I also badgered my (Emmy Award-winning) friend Eric S. Anderson with questions about font choice, size, opacity, kerning, leading, etc. My own know-how in that area is limited to what occurs to me randomly, but nuance and subtlety are the order of the day.

Eric is a trained professional and a cool cat, and ... he offered to do the work on them. What? Yes! Thank you Eric!

Also over the weekend, I walked downtown and grabbed a half-dozen more ambient audio tracks, and spent some time organizing and cleaning up my files, including removing some remaining AfterEffects artifacts, and adding that AE stuff to my list of things to do with Ahren Buhmann when the cut is finalized (in addition to color correction-- thank you Ahren!)  I don't want to spend time farting around with AE and failing at it when Buhmann can figure it out in a few minutes.

In other news:

Time of the Robots, one of my previous films, got a few screenings in Chicago. There's still some life in that old, strange warhorse!

Jennifer Dice and Steven Stern have another play over at Seattle Public Theater next Saturday (May 3) at 12:00 noon. It's called "Maria Morova", and has got something to do with BabaYaga.  It's going to be great -- I'll be there.

This week's photo comes from the (now gone) awesomely hand-built Rocky Point amusement park that my family used to go to when I was a kid. Apparently there's a place now that serves the old timey Rocky Point food. I wonder if it's any good?

April 21 update, music music music

Fence in downtown Coupeville, WA
(photo by Erik Hammen)

More great news on the music front -- we scored two tracks from 2i to be featured in Mondo Beacho!

2i were a fantastic band out of Minneapolis that were known for their totally unique sound and awesome live shows. The two songs we're using are actually from one of their live recordings.

Thank you Sharon Kaniess and 2i!!

I also sent three more new songs to David Thomas, all footage-tested and ready to mix.

So... as of this writing I have one more song to finalize (tonight) and one more to either find, or more likely, to write -- but I've got a pretty good idea of how it's going to go.

In other words, we are inches-in-time away from starting the final cut with music!