Carpenter Production Blog

Trip, Doug, Jena, and I all met for breakfast at 8:00am last Saturday morning. I had gotten a lot of sleep the night before because I knew I wouldn’t be sleeping the next night. At 8:30am we headed over to Runnals, the theater building (and the location of the final battle), to receive our prompts. We were the first team to get there. We got these things to incorporate into our video:

Genre: Action
Location: Runnals
Famous Movie Quote: “May the force be with you.”
Obscure Movie Quote: “Heineken? Fuck that shit, Pabst Blue Ribbon!”

By 9:00am a few other teams had gotten there and received their parameters. 9 o’clock was the official starting time, and we headed out as soon as we could to Trip’s room to brainstorm. We didn’t like the fact that we got action as a genre, but it could have been a lot worse. (A couple of the other genres were art film and foreign film.) I think the original inspiration for doing a prohibition film came from our obscure movie quote, and we kind of built a lot of the first parts of the movie around that. Once we had a general theme laid down - future prohibition film, deadbeat worker gets tied up in mob - we started to try working out a plot. It was really tough because there were four of us pulling it all kinds of directions. We had a semi-finished storyboard by 10:50am, at which point, Jena (Assistant Director) and I were freaking out because we were losing daylight fast. The sun sets at about 4:00pm at this time of year, so we knew we wouldn’t have much time at all to film anything that had to be outside.

The first thing we shot was the monotonous box moving scene. That was the one we had the most worked out at the time, and we knew it had to be in daylight. Being in direct sunlight made it a little weird to shoot, but it was the only location (behind Dana) we had because we needed a loading dock and boxes. We were really appreciative of the Dana staff for letting us use their boxes, and we’d also like to thank the residents of Dana for consuming the copious amounts of alcohol that they do. Without their rampant alcoholism, we wouldn’t have been able to find discarded beer boxes within 20 seconds of entering the building.

After that, we filmed the apartment scene with Trip + Rine. We also called in the bruisers and did the beat-up scene in the apartment and right outside on the brick wall. Then we headed down to Sturtevant to shoot Doug’s box office scene. Jena and I agree that Doug’s office is one of the best sets in the movie. Even with our haggard desk lamp lighting setup, I had to pump the ISO up really high to get enough light in that scene. Doug’s office is where one of the two good dolly shots in the movie takes place. Canon’s USM system in their lenses pretty much erases any rumbling the (fairly crappy) dolly creates, which basically turned our O.K. shots into some outstanding ones.

All of the other filming was fairly straightforward. For most of the shots, I used the 7D on top of the head of my D&S tripod, which makes a surprisingly good shoulder-mounted rig because it has two handles. The sound was captured with my new Azden SMX-10 shotgun mic mounted on top of the camera. This is the same setup that Jake has, and it’s working really well for me. Jake, I really appreciate all the advice you’ve given me about the 7D; a lot of the cinematography in this film wouldn’t have been possible without you. :)

Our last setup and final cast call was at 8:00pm in the coffeehouse. We did all of the speakeasy scenes then. The first shot we did was the long sweeping dolly shot. This is where the USM really came in and rocketed up the quality of the film. As you can see, I totally screwed up the focus pull after the first sweep, leaving Tyler and Mimi out of focus for about 3 seconds. Having recently moved from a Nikon to a Canon, I continually pull focus the wrong way. I’ll eventually learn. We did the long sweeping dolly in 3 takes. At the end I have to transition from carpet onto uneven tile floor, creating a lot more vibration on the dolly. You can hear the rumbling sound if your sound is up high enough. On the first couple takes I tried picking up the dolly, but I found that ineffective because of the long conversation that ensued. I ended up putting upward pressure on the dolly so that it was lighter on the ground, but not completely lifting it off the ground so it would stay on the same horizontal track.

The editing was kind of like the start of a running race. It was about 11:00pm and were all excited; footage was flying everywhere, but nothing really made sense. I transcoded the raw 1080 30p H.264 into 720 30p Apple Intermediate Codec, since that’s the only decent HD codec Final Cut Express accepts. (I was pissed that we had to shoot in 30p instead of 24p, but I don’t think it made much of a difference in the end.)

At about 3:00am we had a rough cut done, which was about 15 minutes long. It was drawn out, and without narration and music, quite boring. Jena and Doug had been working since 1:00am weeding through tons of Billie, Ella, and Duke trying to find the perfect songs. We first went over the entire film and cut out a ton of stuff. I think the most cerebral part of editing is when you have a rough edit, especially of a conversation, and you have to try to figure out how to splice together different sentences in an order that makes sense, or when to cut a scene but leave enough information in it. After we had it more closely cut, we started putting the music in. Jena did a really good job integrating the music with me. She’s really good at knowing what parts of which songs would be good in what places. You can really see that shine through at the end title sequence.

Trip, who made an amazing effort in cutting the 15 minute version down to 13 minutes, was loopy and generally unhelpful at 4:00am. Nonetheless, at that time he recorded the entire narration and then promptly went to bed. Jena and I worked from then until about 8:00am incorporating the narration, doing the titles, and tightening up the whole thing. The contest deadline was 9:00am, and I knew when I hit that render button at 8:00am that it wouldn’t get in on time. I sent Jena to the judges with photo evidence that our movie was done.

We screened it at the festival at 7:30pm that night. We didn’t show it on a DVD, opting to use a flash drive so everybody could see our HD-goodness. The audience seemed to enjoy it, laughing hysterically at Ethan’s “the boxes went in, but they didn’t come out” line. Doug won the Best Supporting Actor award, and we all won the grand prize, 1st place award. I think we also won the “best use of thugs” award.

This is one of the longest movies I’ve ever made, and the first film I’ve produced from start to finish on the 7D. I really like the 7D as a run-and-gun camera; I think it’s just the right balance for getting good normal shots and then turning around and creating really cinematic shots. If I had to pick one extra thing I would have liked to have on this shoot, it would have definitely been a viewfinder like the Z-finder.

All in all, I’m really glad I did the Red Eye this year. I have some really amazing friends. I’m about as useless as a male nipple in the creative department, and they really took what we had and ran with it. We all complimented each others’ abilities; it was kind of like the dream team for filmmaking. I might not be on campus for Jan Plan in 2011, but I’ll always remember this as one of the most fun times I’ve ever had making a movie.