By Chance Shirley
August 19, 2004
Under the Gun
I've got good news and bad news. The good news: HIDE AND CREEP has been officially scheduled as the "kick-off" movie for the 2004 Sidewalk Moving Picture Festival here in Birmingham, Alabama. The movie will screen at 8 pm on Thursday September 23, the first day of the festival.
The bad news: HIDE AND CREEP has been officially announced as the "kick-off" movie for the Sidewalk Moving Picture Festival here in Birmingham, Alabama.
There's a saying that films aren't released, they escape. Meaning that, given unlimited time and money, people would continue to tinker with a film and never want to call it "finished." So, there's something to be said for setting a deadline. We weren't really ready to start shooting HIDE AND CREEP last November, but we did start because we were afraid we'd run out of autumn and winter days if we waited any longer.
Personally, I'm not really ready to start wrapping up the post-production process, but the deadline has been set, so we'll just have to get it done. And having a public screening to look forward to is a nice incentive to keep at it.
As for what "keeping at it" entails these days...
Spending Money
When we first started getting HIDE AND CREEP footage transferred to videotape, we were getting it on DVCam tapes. Quality-wise, DVCam beats the heck out of VHS, but it's not quite super-clean broadcast quality like DigiBeta. Also, DigiBeta stores video with more detail than DVCam, so there's more latitude for color correction with DigiBeta.
We eventually wised up and started getting two copies of our transferred footage: a DVCam copy and a DigiBeta copy. I can work with the DVCam footage at home and use the DigiBeta footage for the conformed "master" of the complete movie, which we'll make after we get the edit done.
Now that we're getting ready to make that master, we have to go back to the lab and re-transfer our first 10 or so rolls of raw footage to DigiBeta tapes. Which is tough, since the transfer from film to video is the most expensive part of our filmmaking process.
Also, there's a reason DigiBeta video looks better than DVCam video: DigiBeta video uses less compression. So, when you load it into a computer, it takes up more disk space. It actually takes up a lot more disk space, enough that we invested in a one terabyte (that's a thousand gigabytes) external hard disk, which will be big enough to store all the movie's raw footage for creating the master. I hope.
One expense I'm looking forward to spending a little money on is special effects. Co-producer Stacey Sessions and co-director Chuck Hartsell did a good job on the few make-up and gore effects they put together, but neither of them is an effects pro.
However, I recently met Jonathan Thornton, who's worked on some big-time Hollywood stuff, like EIGHT-LEGGED FREAKS and USA Network's new FRANKENSTEIN show. He took a look at a rough cut of HIDE AND CREEP and agreed to create a few new effects for us at a ridiculously low price. I really think Jonathan's stuff is going to give the movie a big boost in production value.
You can get a sneak peek at some of Jonathan's gorier work at the web site for HOME SICK, another indie he worked on here in Birmingham.
Causing Controversy
Chuck and I recently considered changing the title of HIDE AND CREEP. We'd never considered "HIDE AND CREEP" the best title ever. It was originally just a working title, but it kind of stuck, especially since I was always writing about it at the Shoot. We've even managed to get a little press in other places, and they always mentioned HIDE AND CREEP by name.
So, there was already a little "buzz" going around about HIDE AND CREEP. Should we scrap that title anyway? And, more importantly, had the guys running the local film festival already printed stuff with the title "HIDE AND CREEP?" I mentioned the possibility of a name change to Erik Jambor, the festival director at Sidewalk, and, a few hours later, found myself at a local watering hole addressing a small but vocal group of folks in the Birmingham filmmaking community who were in a bit of an uproar over the whole name change thing. "Are you gonna change it?" "What are you gonna change it to?" "What about all the press you've already gotten?" "When are you gonna decide?"
I was happy to see people interested enough in the movie to even care that we considered changing the name, much less to get excited about it. In the end, we decided that "HIDE AND CREEP," though not perfect, is not terrible. And, not wanting to lose any prospective audience members who know about our movie as "HIDE AND CREEP," we decided to leave the title alone. Which, of course, was Stacey's advice on the subject from the start.
By the way, if anyone does have the perfect title for a comedy about small-town life and zombies, please send it my way.
Shooting (Still)
Didn't I announce back in April that we'd finished shooting HIDE AND CREEP? Oh -- I actually said we'd wrapped "principal photography." Which is true. We've just had to get a lot more pick-up shots than I initially expected.
One thing I've found out about pick-ups: it's a lot easier to get the stuff the first time around. Any time you have to return to a location, it involves loading all your equipment, driving some distance, unloading, and setting up. So it takes hours to get 30 minutes of shooting done. If you'd gotten the shots the first time, it would have only added 30 minutes to the day.
Also, we've had problems with the weather. In Alabama, it rains a lot more in the summer than the winter, when we did most of our principal photography. So scheduling outdoor shoots is a little trickier. More importantly, locations look different now than they did a few months ago -- they're much greener. Some of the outdoor locations that looked nice and desolate in January look like part of a rain forest now.
Sometimes, reshoots and pick-ups can't be avoided. For example, we're shooting the new effects footage with Jonathan since we met him after we'd already shot most of the movie.
Discovering the Beauty of HD
You know I'm a film guy. I love shooting Kodak. I love shooting Fuji. The digital revolutionaries can have my Super 16 camera when they pry it from my cold, dead hands. But I finally understand the potential of high definition video after seeing Michael Mann's new movie, COLLATERAL.
As far as movies go, it's a blast -- a well-made suspense/action piece that reminded me a little of Hitchcock's NORTH BY NORTHWEST. But the cinematography is where COLLATERAL really shines. Most of the movie takes place in Los Angeles at night, and Mann mostly shot the movie using only available light. So all the nighttime exteriors look very similar to the way they'd look to the naked eye. Something that, even with the best film cameras, stock, and lenses, is usually impossible to achieve.
This low-light HD stuff isn't perfect. On several occasions, they've pushed the cameras so hard that the image is marred with video noise and some compression artifacts. Still, there's a certain beauty to seeing pictures on a movie screen that look so real and raw.
If you're at all interested in the technological side of filmmaking, you should really take a look at COLLATERAL.
Realizing the Error of My Ways
Back in Part 10, I mentioned a problem I was having with the Tascam DA-P1 DAT recorder -- I though the "limiter" was causing distortion in the recorded audio.
My pal Sam Frazier, Jr., did a little research and discovered the real problem -- a hot microphone. Apparently, the Audio Technica 4073a (the mic we used on HIDE AND CREEP) works best with the signal reduced by a 20db "pad." I checked out the DAT machine, and, sure enough, there's a built in -20db switch for mics like the 4073a.
Sorry for leading you guys down the wrong path on that one. Like I always say, making a feature is a learning process. Unfortunately, you learn most of the lessons the hard way.
Speaking of sound equipment, Fostex recently released a new portable audio recorder, the FR-2. I haven't found any reviews yet, but it looks like a pretty cool machine. It's set up very similarly to portable DAT machines (like the DA-P1), but records straight to disk or flash media. So there's no tape to jam. It lists for less than $1,500, making it the most affordable professional tapeless field recorder on the market.
