INDELIBLE FRECKLES

Sst. There will be a screening of To’ona’i at the Academy Cinemas in Auckland on Saturday 31 October at 12:30pm.

It’s a cast, crew, friends, family and supporters screening, and being the inclusive kind of guy that I am, you’re welcome to come for a gander and maybe a natter.

(Or Feedback – Another Thought.)

As an audience member, the film or television series or theatre piece that I derive the most pleasure from is the one where I have to work hard at keeping up with the story, busily making connections not spelt out, and putting the pieces together. It makes me feel smart.

Imagined ego-stroking aside, I like the experience where I’m not a passive observer of events, where I have to read more into the nuances and subtext of what I’m seeing and hearing.  I don’t have to be sitting on the shoulder of the protagonist throughout. It’s like I’m… physically in the middle of the action wherever it takes – still invisible, still passive – and I have only the information available to the characters around me, and… discovering the story as it unfolds.

I feel… involved.

It’s a mean trick to do that.

So I’ve got this wee film that’s had a bunch of test screenings from rough cut to a graded and mixed cut, and the feedback and the comments I’ve received have been pretty consistent while I, for my part, have been just a leetle myopic in taking it all on board.  After each screening, I’ve swung tended one way or the other in trying to appease imagined audiences minimise narrative confusion.

Have I done too much?

Or not enough?

I don’t know.  I’ve written the dialogue with subtext and whatever it is that’s described as it’s what’s not said.  Its structure is classic – the finished product may require some concentration but the execution is consistent.  Amit says that I’ve hit the emotional beats.   James is sneaking in all sorts of filters, having quickly established how technically and aesthetically blind I am.

And thanks to the generosity and honesty of the test audiences, I think I’ve done all I can to tell the story the way I want to. I have to get over myself. How the audience watches the finished product is out of my hands.

Yep, it’s been a year since the last update – running out of money will do that – and so it was only last month that I caught up with sound designer Nathan Rea who has been quietly and patiently cleaning up the audio.

Before I get to those questions, let me just say what a phenomenal job Mr Rea has done: it all sounded natural. That might be a bit of a queer thing to say – and you well-know what a phillistine I am about a lot of the film-making technical craft – but everything sounded perfect*.

My questions – I only had three – were to do with his use of composer Nestor Opetaia‘s score:

• Why was there music at the beginning?
• Why had the music been changed in this middle?
• Why was there music at the end, before the credits?

Nathan’s answers were simple:

• As a bookend to the music at the end.
• No, the music had not been changed.
• In search of a place for the end music to play over the credits, the only way to avoid crashing it in at the end was to introduce it under the final scene.

Quite a bit of discussion followed where we discussed and agreed to try:

• Removing the opening music because, with a running time of twelve minutes, a bookend wasn’t all that essential.
• Nathan played the pre-audio-post cut of the film and nope, he hadn’t changed the music.
• The introduction of the music under the final scene was one of those happy, serendipitous accidents where the finished film moment became much more than the sum of its parts.

Nathan made the changes and we watched the film through again.

I signed off audio post.

*  There’s a sequence in the film where the location audio was so riven with kicked drink cans and circling streetracers that some ADR was considered. Mr Rea cleaned it up so thoroughly that it completely slipped my mind for another five viewings. Nathan – you the bomb.

POSTSCRIPT: I’m in the latter stages of colour grading at the moment, which I’ll post about hopefully maybe soon.

What have I achieved this year then?

• I wrote a ten-minute play in twelve hours, and watched it premiere (and close) twelve hours after that;
• I’m facilitating a disparate group of Pasifika playwrights (four months straight and counting);
• I’m an (increasingly) active Board member of the New Zealand Writers Guild;
• I’ve had a short radio play accepted for broadcast on National Radio;
• and I did some script consulting on a couple of projects.

I’m tempted to skew my stats a la the police leadership in The Wire but, for me, a project isn’t finished unless it’s finished, knowwha’Imean?

So:

• To’ona’i crawls towards completion;
• I’m co-writing a play, to premiere in 2012;
• I have my own play to push – and thanks to the joys of misery likes company peer pressure, the first act is due by mid-January 2009;
• the diversionary feature spec has copious thematic and strucutural notes… but an actual story has yet to emerge;
• enamoured with the short radio play’s ‘success’, I’m writing an hour-long radio play: I’ve got the opening and closing acts while the middle is currently all rough notes – forty pages to go!
• and the long awaited spec feature of 2007 has been roughed out and is approaching a proper first draft.

[Takes a few steps back and squints]

Okay. I suppose it’s just about perspective.

Yep, I’m a day late, and although normally I’d blame it on Samoan time or some such rubbish, I actually thought I had a whole other week to do it in. But uh-uh.

It’s a work in progress that I’ll add to over the coming weeks. Alu la ‘ia!*.

* – Samoan; Go on then!

Mr Tripuraneni has some, uh, musings on the post process to date.

Day 4

The rough cut thrown together over Days 2-3 was, if I may say so, a decent start. (Editing a twelve-minute short film was a daunting enough project to grind through – but the thought of cutting a ninety-minute plus feature still shuts down various areas of my brain.)

A moment of self-discovery late in the morning: doing the rough cut myself has dealt to a hitherto unvoiced fear of not knowing if I have enough coverage or not, and the paralysis that would ensue. There is never enough coverage – and if you do have enough coverage, there are never enough takes to give you ‘options’. But instead of being paralysed, I was forced to try different approaches like new sequences and new narrative structures – finding new ways of telling the same story.

Where I had started Day 3′s rough cut of 27+ minutes, by the end of the day, I had reduced it to twelve minutes.

Day 5

Twelve minutes can still be an eternity. I’ve sat through ten-minute-long short films that have felt interminable. Although I want a deliberate pace for To’ona’i, I definitely didn’t want it to drag. The cut just didn’t drag for me. Despite numerous trims and nips here and there, they made only a few seconds difference.

Two sets of fresh eyes were railroaded into an impromptu screening. One pair liked the pacing and story and acting. The other pair thought the cinematography was the best thing since sliced pan. The cinematography has been getting such good press, I get a glimmer now of the attractiveness of a possessory credit:

I took the cut to Mr Tripuraneni who pronounced it ‘good’ on arrival. He has since taken over: he’s going to tighten it up, clean up the audio and give it a quick grade. Despite his teasing about giving the whole film a hallucinatory feel – or possibly a Michael Bay-fired blur of images cut to Celine Dion warblings – I never once took the bait. I was too sick of watching and tweaking and watching and tweaking the footage.

He could do what he damned well liked.

Within reason.

Day 6

After I told The Goddess the joke about the sloth who’s mugged by a gang of delinquent snails (when asked at the police station what happened to him, the sloth says, I don’t know – it all just happened so quickly…), she pointed out that after a week of frowning and groaning and sighing at the hired MacBook screen, my mood had lightened considerably.

“Really?” I asked. She gave me Her look.

But I was having so much fun at the time.

Yesterday, I threw clips down onto the timeline just so all my eggs were in one basket.  It’s called an assemble edit.

Today, I’ve been trying to make a story out of them.  The more time I spend with the footage, the better an idea I have of what I’m doing. It’s tedious work.  But it has its moments – I give you a txt-exchange between my post-production whip supervisor and I from this morning:

ME (0828):  JESUS ON A STICK I HATE EDITING

HIM (0830):  So you finished the assemble edit i presume :)

ME (0831):  IM NOT TALKING TO YOU

HIM (0833): No you are not. You are just texting

ME (0833): Assemble was 30+ minutes. Am cutting now. Am kinda sorta maybe getting a feel for things. Slowly. But. Surely.

HIM (0836): You wanted to do the rough cut, so dont you point finger at me amigo. :) Make sure you [EDITING TECHNO-BABBLE.]

ME (0840): Stop interrupting. Genius at work. (Thanks for tip about [TREK-LIKE EDITING TECHNO-BABBLE THAT I ACTUALLY UNDERSTOOD]. A typically excellent idea from yourself.

HIM (0842): Oh yeah i am at work – you didnt have to state the obvious. Now back to the keyboard for you ;).

Just typical of him to get the last word in.

But who’s blogging right now, huh?

We wrapped today.  (Considers executing a little happy dance; thinks better of it in case of total body collapse.)

We had a wrap lunch of sorts yesterday as Mr Eversden and his ever-present assistant, Mr Hall, were no longer required for their lighting expertise – the camera was going to be operated from within the car, come what may.  I’d been warned that Mr Eversden could be a bit of a curmudgeon but I found him to be patient and accommodating and utterly professional.  Another name to ask for specifically when I can afford to pay full rates.

Today it was just our actors, the unflappable Mr Amosa and the irrepressible Ms Leilua, our grizzled DOP Mr Meikle, and myself.  Second unit stuff, I think this is called:  getting ‘dirty’ over-shoulder stuff of our actors driving around the city, catching shots of this or that guerilla-styles, capturing moments that may or may not come in handy. It’s always better to have options in editing, than not have enough footage at all.

Our day was five hours long.  After four looong days (I’d be up at 0600, out the door by 0630, home by 2100 with production stuff to attend to, followed by bedtime at 0000*), it was… I can’t find the words to describe how happy I was to see my family in the day time.  It sounds incredibly saccharine but it’s true of my relationship with The Goddess:  time apart is painful.

Sometime this week I’ll post about more specific things – like how could I possibly fill up a day like that with a mere short film, or why in the gods’ name would I do such a thing.  Until then, I’m off to bed.

*  Yes, this was only for four days.  Yes, I am a wuss.  And yes, right now, I don’t care.  But I’ll remember you said that.  I remember things like that.