Dark Design Pictures

It’s October 31st and sadly my favorite month comes to an end. I brought my costume to work but it looks like I’m the only idiot who is going to dress up today. For those of you who are visiting the site and haven’t seen Malificus go check it out. It’s a good little short for the Halloween Season. Hope everyone has a safe and spooky Halloween.

Last weekend was my 5 year wedding anniversary so I haven’t had much time to do any post project blogging. Malificus is has been posted to the filmography. So have a look see. I think the conversion form QuickTime to Flash Video screwed up the widescreen aspect ratio so I’m going to need to redo the file. Plus it is busting out of the boarders of the layout.

I showed it to Donnie yesterday and he gave me some honest feedback. I feel that it is lacking in a few areas, but what can you expect from a film shot in 48Hrs that is limited to 8 minutes and you are running 3 hours late. I think that the roles of Lew and Becky are not adequately explained in enough detail. The audience really doesn’t have much to go on. Also Sarah the empath randomly shows up. This is mainly do to the time constraints of the project. The biggest problem is have is I missed getting a wide at the beginning of the film to establish that the living room is vacant of the ghost hunters equipment. This is why Lew reacts the way he does when he walks downstairs. I also wish I did a few more pickup shots of the ghost. In the quick flashes I use the same shot over and over. The devil is in the details.

However I am pleased with how it turned out. There was a lot of good acting and I was able to color correct all the footage along with some special effects. All in all a job well done. On a side note I have to add that this is how I wanted things to pan out with Voices in the Dark when it came to the special effects. Good foley + visual effects = creepy!

Monday morning I begrudgingly got up at 7AM. I haven’t had a lot of sleep over the weekend. I got out of bed and started the process of printing tape. There were a few issues but that was mainly do to my own stupidity. Never stop the print to tape in the middle of the session. It’s just dumb! Things were beginning to run late, I sent am email to work to let them know that I wasn’t going to be in early. After the stress of not know if I was going to be able to film, lack of sleep and sweeting my ass off, I wasn’t about to turn this one in late.

At lunch I swung by Gus’ house to get him to sign the release and then it was off to Ryan’s apartment. Mike and Ryan were waiting for me. I brought my camera so I could show then the final product. I hooked up the camera to the TV and we sat back and watched it. They were very pleased. Ryan finished off the paper work and I handed over the tape so I could head back to work. Later that day Ryan sent out an email to let the team know that the tape was sent off. At this point we wait for the results to come in. I have to say that the team did an outstanding job. I really enjoyed working with Ryan and Mike and I look forward to doing it again.

I woke up somewhere around noon and it was time to hit the ground running. Everything rendered out of After Effects. My computer didn’t crash this time. There is nothing really wrong with it, but it desperately needs an update on the memory and processor department. Fuck it, a duel quad-core with 4Gigs of RAM would do it! My machine renders slow…..

To my horror I found out that the footage I rendered out was not wide screen. I began the editing process anyway know I could easily requeue up the footage. After getting the first couple of scene in place I began the process of fixing what I screwed up and started the render process over. At this point I queued up only by scene. This way when one scene is done I can queue up the next and edit. This occupied the better part of the day. If this was a 48Hr project I would of just used the footage I had and maybe fixed a few of them. But this for this project I had nothing but time. The tape just had to be post marked for Monday.

I had a few call from Gus Wanner about the score. He sent me 10 files by 4PM. After reviewing the pieces I put a call into him and for a few modification. It hard to come up with music for a movie you have never scene before. Gus as always did an outstanding job. I really don’t know how he pulls it off. While waiting for some footage to render from After Effects I started hunting around for some Foley. I had the principle editing done by 2AM so I started to add in the Foley and the score. At 3AM I was finished, so queue up the footage to render out and went straight to bed. All things considering it was a job well done.

I decided to shoot the eternal scenes first. Ryan’s apartment was close to a location I had in mind for the first scene. There is a stretch of road that is off of Eisenhower Road near the flee market which leads to the Black Swan Inn. It’s nice, over grown and kind of creepy. It didn’t take long I figure 30 to 45 minutes tops. I didn’t want to linger to long. It’s a public place and I don’t exactly have the proper permits if you know what I mean. So I got my shots and we caravaned to the house where we were shooting the rest of the scenes. The rest of the cast and crew where there waiting for us. I got a few establishing shots of the living room when the pizza arrived. After scarfing down pizza it was back to shooting. For the most part shooting went very smoothly. I had a log of setups and the lights were making the house rather warm. It was cooler outside that it was inside. I don’t I stopped sweeting till I got home and took a shower.

Around 6PM we took another break. Mainly so I could get the ghost into his make up. I put the camera on the tripod to get all the shots of the ghost. With the camera being still it will make it a lot easier to apply some After Effects magic. Some close to 9 or 10PM we took another break for dinner. This time some KFC. I didn’t realize how hunger I was. The three pieces of pizza at 3PM was the last time I had eaten anything. We finally finished shooting sometime after 11PM. So we packed up the gear and parted ways. It had been an incredibly long day, but for me it wasn’t over yet.

When I got home the first thing I did was take a shower and down some more water. I think I must of gone through at least five bottles of water and I’m sure that wasn’t enough. For the next two hour I pulled the footage off the tapes. At around 2:45 I started doing the color correction in After Effects. I ever toyed around a bit with the footage of the ghost. I finished the color correction at 5:40AM queued the footage to rendered, prayed that my computer didn’t crashed and headed straight for bed.

Last weekend I was invited to go to the coast with Andy and Dar Miller but that kind of fell through. The wife wasn’t feeling up to it and it as a good thing to. There was a major emergence Saturday morning which would of ruined my weekend if I had gone. So I ended up getting myself mixed up in another 48hr short film fiasco. I’m not saying this to be jackass they really are a fiasco!

For the most part I have given up doing short films for festivals and what not. Unless you are doing because a) it’s fun b) it helps you refine your craft or c) really really bored, there really is no point to it. Your not going to get discovered making a short film. Well it’s been a while since I directed a film so I’m going with all of the above.

Ryan Harris and Mike Martinez her partner in crime entered Team Nosferatu into the National Film Challenge. It has some sort of relation to the National 48hr Film Project. They were in need of a director, cinematographer and an editor. Well the got me instead, but hey I think I’m not half bad at this shit. Everything got kicked off on Friday. I was in Austin hanging out with some friends. While having dinner at Kerby Lane, I Ryan called and told me we landed horror. Score! I really didn’t have any ideas worth talking about. Kerby Lane was all decorated for a Halloween. My favorite holiday. While eating I looked up and saw this bundle of twigs. Then I realized it was the Blair Witch symbol. I have an idea! So I called Ryan back told her we should do something like the Blair Witch Project. They had already thought of that. Well some much for originality on my part.

The writers can up with really good story. It’s kind of like that show Ghost Hunters meets the Blair Witch. I get back in San Antonio around 2:30AM read the script and I’m off to bed at 3:00AM. Saturday morning I was rudely awakened at 8:00AM for an emergency at work. My boss gave me the story and I coordinated everything for him. He was out of town while all of this was going on. So I rallied the troops and waited for out part. Once the issue was resolve I zipped off to meet up with the team, but Bandera road was all screwed up because of construction. Insult to injury. I get to Ryan’s apartment so where around 2ish. 3 hours late. Mind you I haven’t met any of these people yet. So nobody knew what they are getting themselves into.

Holy crap! It’s been a long time since I’ve blogged about anything. Between work and Crosshairs I’ve haven’t had much free time for anything or sleep for that matter. Crosshairs is getting close to being in the can which is good so I can move on to other projects. I don’t have anything slated for DDP till the beginning of the year, which is going to be The Nigh Shift feature. In November I should be working on Cup of Joe with Mathew Jasso under the Ferro Studios banner.