Life’s like a Movie, write your own ending. Keep believing, keep pretending. – Jim Henson
It’s always something of a journey when one sets out to make a film so it’s an understatement to say that this has been a great adventure. And here we are, after 3 months of pre-production with another month of production and it’s “In the Can” as they say. There’s these moments in life where you wonder how it all began and why it went the way that it did. In retrospect, I don’t know how or why but I do know this: we wouldn’t be here if it weren’t important. From the beginning, I have believed that there was a reason that 4 guys from different parts of San Diego somehow came together and formed an association that made a 20 minute Action/Suspense Film that took just 6 months to be completed.
For much of the past 10 days, I’ve been in my Editing Studio non-stop as I took off the Thanksgiving holiday week to work on editing. I’m happy to report that I have over 13 minutes of editing completed. Currently, I’m working on getting Picture Lock and if all goes as planned I should have that in the next few weeks. Mostly I’m just doing the edits with syncing the video and audio together on the timeline. If I had another week off from my day job then I could say that this would be done and we’d have Picture Lock in another week so I’ll speculate that it’s going to be a couple of weeks till then. Keep in mind, we’re going to need Color Correction (which I have a lead on for doing this, courtesy of Sue Vicory. Thanks Sue!) and we will probably have an Audio Specialist work on the Sound (not the Music or the Sound Effects, just the Sound in general.) And last but not least is the Special VFX which I’ve been looking at. So far, I’ve got a couple of great shots to put in the Muzzle Flashes. The action came out very well and I’ve done a bit of manipulation with the video so it’s coming along nicely at this point. Late last night, I put aside my mouse, put my feet up, turned off the light and watched the first 13 minutes. The opening sequences are really beautiful to watch as the weather was so nice, the locations were very pristine, quiet and framed well. So it’s truly an amazing thing to watch.
The major sequence is The Garage Fight (scenes 12 & 13). I anticipate this taking the largest amount of time to edit as that’s where the majority of the action took place. I can’t really say what to expect as I’ve not looked at much of it yet as I’ve been trying to focus on getting the storyline editing done which is my priority. So I’m heading into there this week and I’m optimistic on how things evolve. After that, we have the scenes of the Governor’s office and the ending as well as doing the Voice Overs. That will go quickly as I don’t anticipate it giving me much of a challenge. After what I’ve done so far, the ending parts will be a Vacation.
Overall, I can’t tell you how great this looks. From the way it was lit and the sound (thanks Don & Marci!) to Terry’s expert handling of the camera to give me a lot to work with (thanks Terry!) to all the actors giving it their all. This is something special. I’ve worked on other Shoots before and there were technical issues or glitches or the director and the screenwriter fought like cats and dogs lol. But this one ran like a well-oiled machine. It’s hard to describe what I feel in the moments we captured because they are little bits of time encapsulated forever. I was usually so busy being the Producer with other activities On-Set that I normally didn’t have much of a chance to watch what we were doing. But now I have a front row seat and I’m really enjoying the view.
I can’t wait to share it but that would be premature right now; it’s very rough and I have so much more to do. My focus remains on getting it edited so we have Picture Lock, then we can start doing the fine tuning with the Music Score, Special VFX, etc.
Will keep you apprised of my progress.
Casualty Films 