"Live Blogging" the 48 Hour Film Fest

tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8937176077268459194.post-68869698619418037242008-07-13T00:00:00.000-07:002008-07-13T22:08:34.933-07:00"Live Blogging" the 48 Hour Film FestWill be updated periodically as I grow more and more insane. Saturday 6:30am Woke up to an unfriendly alarm. Went to bed four hours earlier after Spin the Bottle. Checked my e-mail and found a note from the director saying our call time had been pushed back to 9am instead of the previous 8am (...yay), and we were to meet at an apartment complex in Kent. Considered going back to sleep and getting another hour's rest, but decided against it for some ungodly reason and started sucking down coffee. 9:15am Finally find the apartment complex. Kent is stupid. I meet the crew and discover that these guys are a bit more serious than expected. Our director is different than last year, which is all I care about. Our DP has his own HVX-200 and three 16 GB P2 cards. And our Gaffer has his own lights and sound equipment. And we have a Line Producer, Key Grip, Regular Grip (they're calling him Technical Assistant), Catering, and four actors (two of which are the Producers). And me. I'm the P2 guy and editor. But what really impresses me is the grip equipment. It rivals what we had on the "What the Funny" set, and paid big bucks for. I sheepishly hide the shotgun mike and XLR cable I grabbed from Caution Zero this morning thinking I was going to be "saving" the shoot because no one would have considered the sound to be important. I'm glad I was woefully under estimating these guys. I have a small conversation with our DP regarding format and frame rate, then steal one of the P2 cards to make sure that my computer can read its contents. I've updated my OS since last I've done this, and I didn't want any nasty surprises when I was given a loaded card to dump onto my drive. And, as expected, my computer doesn't recognize the P2 card. It knows a card is in the slot, but doesn't recognize it as P2, and so I can't use my nifty disk image trick to copy the contents. This is around the time I would have begun to panic, had I not already thought of this and downloaded an updated P2 driver form Panasonic's website last night. I install the driver package and after a quick reboot, the P2 card happily shows up on my desktop. Still disappointed, though, that Panasonic has yet to come up with something better than "NO NAME" as the de-facto drive label. 10:30am We begin shooting. I've set up on a table in the hallway outside the lounge where we're shooting, but it's in the sightlines of the shot, so I move my gear to the floor nearest the only outlet I can find. Wish I'd brought gaffe tape. 11:15am I'm given my first card to capture. My set-up is basically the same as it was for "WTF", except the external HD I'm using is mine and not Stephen's. Same kind, though, OWC. I insert the P2 card into the PCMCIA slot and tell Disk Utility to make a disk image of it. It finishes in about 20 minutes which I think is remarkably fast for a 16 GB card being written to a Firewire 400 drive, but whatever. I open the disk image and compare the contents. Bit for bit, they're the same. Turns out that our DP hadn't "filled the card", and in fact had only written about 3.65 GB to it. 12:45pm Our actress arrives toting a small cat-like dog. I am worried about it walking on my keyboard as I'm capturing the footage, so I place myself on the floor next to my gear and miss out on the apparent hilarity coming from the set. 1:00pm I'm given the second card. Full this time. It takes an hour to create the disk image. In that time we are fed lunch by one of the actor's parents. 2:30pm The shoot moves out to the apartment complex's pool, so I am able to get my gear up off the floor of the hallway and onto a proper table in the lounge. Our director asks to use my boater in the shoot. I give it to her then wander downstairs to the restrooms to try to fix my hat head. 3:00pm I wander out to the pool to ask our DP how the next card is coming. He tells me that he didn't realize he could shoot so long with it in 24p Native mode. I stumble back to the lounge with nothing to do, so I bring up the "Countdown with Keith Olbermann" podcast on iTunes. Rachel Maddow has been guest hosting all week. 4:30pm We're wrapped for this location, which frightens me because when we move, I'm still stuck here for another hour capturing the P2 card. If our next location was a stable place, I would just wait and set up there to capture, but the next location turns out to be a bar - not a suitable place for my laptop and hard drive. I decide that they could do without me for the first forty minutes or so a the next location, and that I'd just hang at the apartment complex waiting for my processing to finish. But then, our director casts our Key Grip, Technical Assistant, and me as extras in that scene, which means changing clothes and, you know, being there. I make it clear that I can't go anywhere until the card is captured, which is okay by them since they have other scenes to shoot before the extras are needed. Brandon, one of the producers and the guy who got me into this mess decides to hang back with me since we've already filmed all of his scenes. I change into my "extra" outfit and stare at the progress bar on lappy's monitor. 5:30pm We finally arrive at the bar and immediately begin filming the final scene there - one in which the main character is hit on the head by a flying egg. Apparently, the footage looks amazing. I'll have to wait to find out. 6:15pm We're behind schedule. We were supposed to be done by six, but as we all know, schedules can get thrown out of the window at any time when filming. We caravan to our final location, the home of the caterers, where dinner is waiting. 8:00pm I have another talk with the DP and convince him that instead of waiting to capture the card at the location after we wrap, that I take it with me to the office and capture it there. He seems a bit reluctant, but I convince him that it really wouldn't be an efficient use of my time to sit around at this stranger's house for an hour after everybody had gone home. Plus, I'd be really uncomfortable. Sure, they're nice people, but still... 9:15pm We're wrapped. I hand Brandon his clothes back, grab the final P2 card, and take off. 9:45pm I arrive at the office and begin capturing the final P2 card. 10:30pm The capture done, I hook my drive up to the Quad and begin to copy over the five disk images. 41.25GB all told. Not bad for twelve hours of HD 720pN shooting. I realize, though, that I don't have enough disk space on the Quad to accompany the disk images and the resulting Quicktime files that Final Cut Pro will make from the .MXF files on the images. I delete the images from the Quad and work straight off the firewire drive. It seems to work just fine. 11:00pm Footage review begins in earnest. We did a lot of takes early on, the first couple scenes filmed eating up about 10-12 takes each. Sunday 1:19am I finally fill in the "liveblog" up until this point, then continue to monitor footage. 2:10am Done reviewing and ingesting three of five disk images. Am starting to get a little tired. This place also gets kind of creepy at night. 2:35am Our one actress, the one with the toy dog, is playing a stereotypical 40's era starlet, and sounds exactly like Jennifer Tilly in "The Cat's Meow". ...or is it "Bound"? 3:21am Have finished logging and ingesting all the footage - the most boring part. Now begins the fun creative part of assembling something out of everything. I've celebrated with a beer. Perhaps not the brightest idea. 4:30am How is it 4:30 already? 5:20am Getting light outside. I'm feeling the pinch. The director is going to show up at 10am to go over the first cut. My composer is going to be here at 12:30. The entire thing needs to be done and delivered by 7pm. Why do I feel rushed? 6:30am The 24 hour mark. My stomach is starting to ache. As far as editing goes, I am further along this year than I was last year. Hm. Doesn't feel like it. 8:07am Made myself some coffee. To keep from falling asleep, I've also taken a couple walks around the block. Capitol Hill is a pretty quiet place on an early Sunday. The stairwell smells like chamomile tea. 9:55am My neck hurts as I just fell asleep in my chair. I've finished a rough first cut of the film, with only five minutes to spare. I wonder if our director knows where the office is. 10:59am Called the director. She should have been here 20 minutes ago with coffee for me. In the meantime, I've been experimenting with looks for the film, and trying to ignore my Soundtrack Pro issues (it's buggy in Leopard with the latest version of Quicktime. Apparently, it's a "known issue", but Apple hasn't done anything about it yet). 11:03am May have already found a work around for STP woes. Empty trash, close After Effects, shut down, turn on. Let's hope it stays that way. Well, okay, let's hope Apple fixes this issue, but I'd be happy for knowing how to alleviate it in the interim. 6:28pm Off the grid for the last seven hours in a frantic pace to finish the film. I will attempt to sum up. I realized what may be making STP burp. Plugging in or unplugging the headphones while the computer is on. If I don't touch the headphone jack, then everything works perfectly. The director showed up around 11:30 with some coffee. We sat down and started going through the film. It seemed like an extremely slow nitpicky process, but we were making good headway. At 12:30, my producer and musician showed up. They got to work scoring the film, and deciding upon some sound effects. (P.S. to this story, turns out due to lack of time I wasn't able to put in many of the sound effects - it was either that or export the film. I chose the latter.) I gave the musician and my director and producer a firm time limit of 3:30 so I could go through to create the soundtrack and perform the color correction. We had picture lock at 3:38. My heard is racing right now, though, because the deadline for the film is 7:30pm sharp. If you are two seconds late, you aren't allowed as part of the competition. You still get a screening, though. I have a lot of color effects on my film that I'm performing in FCP (I know, I know - any die hard After Effects or Color fans will know I'm on their side - it's just that I found a free plugin for FCP which allowed me to accomplish the look I wanted with one freaking click). The downside to all this? Render times. Then I have to record it onto a miniDV tape, and make two DVDs to be delivered in, uh, less than an hour. Good lord this is nerve-wracking. The thing is, though, I'm really proud of this film. Honestly. At 3am this morning I was wondering what I could do to conceivably get out of this obligation, but I'm glad I've done it. Just, breathe. Sleep comes soon. Oh, by the way, I'm on hour 36 without sleep. Unusual for me. 9:52pm I may have fucked it all up. To wrap up, the rendering took longer than anticipated, and when I tried to record it onto a miniDV tape, both cameras I have in the office refused to talk to FCP (frigginwraslefrak). So I started to burn a DVD, beginning, of course, to export the .m2v files through Compressor. It was perhaps five after seven. Batch manager said it would take approximately 16 minutes. Then I would have to burn the actual DVD. I began to pace. I began to breathe heavily. I began to apologize to my team who were there to deliver the media to the 48 hour film people (luckily, only 12 blocks away). I shut down the .m2v export process and decided that the quickest way (barring fighting with the cameras some more) was to export a .mov. I was wrong. Looking back, I should have let the DVD export proceed. But instead I pressed on with encoding a .mov with the intent of putting it on a CD. After that stressful encoding, I handed the CD off when my clock on the quad read 7:23. We got a phone call in a couple minutes. Our team had made it to the office before the doors closed. Therefore we were eligible for the competition (as opposed to just having a screening, which itself is still pretty cool, don't get me wrong, but we all believe this year we have a contender). Where it might bite us, and which is completely all my fault, is that you need to deliver by 7:30 two different types of media - one as a primary and one as a backup. We were only able to deliver one. I'm still waiting for the official word. Some sources say that we will be disqualified from judging. Others say that if the .mov is able to be viewed then we made it in time and can deliver the backup at the night of the screening, given - of course - that it is the same film on both formats. It's my fault because I'd had trouble recording to miniDV before, and I knew I needed to do it and I didn't research and test methods before I started scrambling with twenty minutes left in the competition. It's my fault because I stopped the DVD encode when I should have let it go. It might have been done in time (the actual DVDs, when we got around to finally burning them, took maybe two minutes). I was sour for hours, constantly apologizing to my teammates. Nobody wants to go through all of that only to find that you've become disqualified at the last possible minute, especially me. I mean, by the time I walked out of the office at 8:30, I had been up for 38 hours, with maybe a total of ten minutes' sleep in my chair. It's now five after ten at night. Why am I still up? Well, I had Friday's "Countdown" to watch, dinner to eat, plus I didn't want to leave this hanging. I hate stories that stop in the middle. Anyway, if you're so inclined, our little film - eligible for award or not - will screen at the Neptune in the U District on Tuesday, July 15th at 9pm. It's called "So, You Want To Be A Paparazzo", or something like that. I can't remember.benlauhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08651514273599770295noreply@blogger.com