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Topic:
The "Brooklyn Force" pregame thread: Closing in.
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Teague
Registered:
Apr '06
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Date Posted:
5/27 3:55pm
Subject:
RE: The "Brooklyn Force" pregame thread: Day 2 PICS! With a girl!
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I...was.
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Teague "Fig" Chrystie Zoic Studios Co-Host / "Geekza!" / http://www.geekza.com - What happens when you take a handful of insane, pro FX artists and give them a microphone? http://www.myspace.com/figchrystie
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AdamBertocci
Title: Manager: Fan Films
Registered:
Feb '02
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Date Posted:
6/6 7:01pm
Subject:
RE: The "Brooklyn Force" pregame thread: Day 2 PICS! With a girl!
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This week gave me a chance to actually show this film some love, an oasis of time in between big projects for work.
Did my own ADR over the weekend. This was not too difficult all things (read: my speech impediment) considered. It helped that most of my lines were in a Vader-like cadence which is pretty easy to mimic. Changed one of the lines. It's more dramatic now or something.
I have picture-locked the first half of the film. (Insofar as we need picture lock, as I can and will just screw with everything afterwards.) This was done for the sake of our gallant composer, I guess, but also for me, a bit--the film is working, darn it, let's not split hairs.
We are looking at a 14-minute-and-change run time. How much change depends on credits.
Being on the tail end of editing picture has resulted in a few little chores I didn't anticipate. Some blurring out of logos in the background that you don't really notice on your first few passes. Some weird effects touches. There's this one bit where I deliver a dramatic line, tears in my eyes, and then some stupid little tree-blossom thing lands on my head, ruining the moment. Fixed now, thanks to the digital revolution.
Rick McCallum loves you!
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"Run Leia Run", "The Chopped-Off Hands of Star Wars", and "The Fan Film Menace" ... check 'em out. http://www.runleiarun.com  MarriedVespin?!
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AdamBertocci
Title: Manager: Fan Films
Registered:
Feb '02
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Date Posted:
6/29 11:36am
Subject:
RE: The "Brooklyn Force" pregame thread: Day 2 PICS! With a girl!
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July is on the horizon. Halfway through the year already? It seems like time is flashing by faster than ever these days.
I cop to extreme neglect of my film this month. It wasn't intentional, it just sort of happened. Work. Family. Life. You know. I am hoping that with this turn into the latter half of the year we will have the chance to begin the last big push.
Attempted to schedule ADR with Carolyn, failed miserably. July it is, I guess. Attempted color correction on the outside-the-brownstone scene. Came up with several lovely options, but am not sure how far I want to push the look. I confess I never had a clearly defined color pallete in mind for that scene, perhaps just because I figured the neighborhood would define it, which it sort of did, but.
This weekend was spent auditioning musicians, after a fashion; I am looking for guitars, bass, drums, little bells, something to fill out Teague's piano, and for that, we turn to Apple Soundtrack and the eight billion loops it comes with.
I don't want to turn this into a sample-based score, so think of the piano as both primary instrument and lead vocals if you like, with the loops serving as accents and as backup. I will have to play with these orchestrations, a lot, because they need to serve their purpose of placing us in musical space without calling attention to themselves or serving as a crutch.
My first pass of "this general category of sound might be acceptable for the project" produced over five hundred loops. After releasing an effeminate shriek, I sat down and listened to each damn loop, generating a list of eighty or ninety loops that will be my go-to list. I don't actually anticipate using that many different patterns in the film, mind you. I'm just saying, homeboy needs his list.
Rick McCallum loves you!
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"Run Leia Run", "The Chopped-Off Hands of Star Wars", and "The Fan Film Menace" ... check 'em out. http://www.runleiarun.com MarriedVespin?!
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bgii_2000
Registered:
Jan '05
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Date Posted:
6/29 1:03pm
Subject:
RE: The "Brooklyn Force" pregame thread: Day 2 PICS! With a girl!
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I'd be willing to give the music a go.
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The circle is now complete. When I left you I was but the learner. Now I am the master. My website, blog, and movies http://www.theBradPlace.net What *IS* meatball? Holy crap I'm learning things everyday. - JeffCaauwe
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Teague
Registered:
Apr '06
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Date Posted:
6/29 1:08pm
Subject:
RE: The "Brooklyn Force" pregame thread: Day 2 PICS! With a girl!
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^knows his stuff
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Teague "Fig" Chrystie Zoic Studios Co-Host / "Geekza!" / http://www.geekza.com - What happens when you take a handful of insane, pro FX artists and give them a microphone? http://www.myspace.com/figchrystie
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AdamBertocci
Title: Manager: Fan Films
Registered:
Feb '02
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Date Posted:
6/29 1:31pm
Subject:
RE: The "Brooklyn Force" pregame thread: Day 2 PICS! With a girl!
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bgii - do you have some sort of demo of your stuff? Specifically guitar -- think Velvet Underground / Nico, Belle & Sebastian, Jack Johnson, Weezer... y'know, kinda indie, something that would fit right in on the Royal Tenenbaums soundtrack.
I'm looking for performance/"orchestration", not composition, so the task would be to be able to follow along with an existing performance and add to it. If this sounds like something you might enjoy doing, we can certainly talk.
Rick McCallum loves you!
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"Run Leia Run", "The Chopped-Off Hands of Star Wars", and "The Fan Film Menace" ... check 'em out. http://www.runleiarun.com MarriedVespin?!
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AdamBertocci
Title: Manager: Fan Films
Registered:
Feb '02
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Date Posted:
7/5 11:30am
Subject:
RE: The "Brooklyn Force" pregame thread: Picture locked.
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The Fourth of July was certainly a time of fireworks and celebration for me, and I will tell you why.
We're picture-locked now. The whole damn thing.
You see, as you recall, there are three sections of this movie: a first half, a second half, and a montage connecting the two. I refused to edit the montage without music.
This week I made a deal to use Van Kapeghian's "It Will All Be Over Soon" for the montage, and now for the first time, I can sit down and essentially watch the film from beginning to end. If by 'beginning' you mean 'after the crawl' and by 'end' you mean 'my credit'.
It is (almost to the second) ten minutes between those two points. From opening logos to crawl will take under two minutes, as the SW films themselves will tell you, and credits oughtn't to be much more than two. So we shall come in under the 14-minute mark, which pleases me.
It's nice to have a piece of Van's music back in some small way. I loved his score for TWOTE, but I simply don't have any projects in the immediate future that I think are right for him. This montage was a special case. I wish I could say I had some brilliant plan about this tune, but I didn't. I was just messing around on MySpace and my jaw dropped when I heard pretty much the exact tune I wanted, from lonely introduction to driving rhythms to its cautious buildup to unsettled, frightened rock. Ever auditioned an actor and just known immediately that you've got to cast them for one exact role? Same deal.
And what do I think of the film, all sexily picture-locked? I think it's a fine piece of work and one that will surprise a lot of people. The material is there. I just have to, you know, complete it.
I keep coming back to this theme of directing and how I've matured, hopefully, as a director. The big thing about directing is taking in all these disparate elements and unifying them. Every element coming in so far--performances, locations, cinematography, music--has said what I want it to and says it in concert with other things. I am creating a little world here, and I am very, very confident about it, even if it's hard to describe what I'm doing on paper. It may reek of Directing with a capital D, but this may be the first project I've made where the direction outshone the writing.
But for now, we work. Spending a lot of time, relatively speaking, fiddling with color correction on the brownstone steps scene. The trick is to get all the images I want while still letting them flow together naturally.
Rick McCallum loves you!
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"Run Leia Run", "The Chopped-Off Hands of Star Wars", and "The Fan Film Menace" ... check 'em out. http://www.runleiarun.com MarriedVespin?!
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Boter
Registered:
Jul '02
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Date Posted:
7/5 5:18pm
Subject:
RE: The "Brooklyn Force" pregame thread: Picture locked.
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w00t! Congrats on hitting a post-production milestone. May VFX shots not be the bane of your existence!
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Organizer, TF.N Filmmaking Workshop III Member, Key Pixel Gathering of Filmers (partial filmography in profile)  s for Alana, s for Grampa Tony. I Knew a Jedi. What *IS* Meatball?
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bgii_2000
Registered:
Jan '05
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Date Posted:
7/5 6:18pm
Subject:
RE: The "Brooklyn Force" pregame thread: Picture locked.
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http://audio.thebradplace.net/Last%20Dance%20With%20Mary%20Jane.m4a
http://audio.thebradplace.net/Someday%20You%20Will%20Be%20Loved.m4a
http://audio.thebradplace.net/AllHailColonelSanders.mp3
That's a fair sample of my guitarage.
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The circle is now complete. When I left you I was but the learner. Now I am the master. My website, blog, and movies http://www.theBradPlace.net What *IS* meatball? Holy crap I'm learning things everyday. - JeffCaauwe
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AdamBertocci
Title: Manager: Fan Films
Registered:
Feb '02
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Date Posted:
7/5 7:32pm
Subject:
RE: The "Brooklyn Force" pregame thread: Picture locked.
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Boter - We shouldn't actually have any VFX shots left to do, amazingly enough. Everything else was pretty much picture-locked before two days ago, and the only effects work I'm doing in the montage, aside from color correction and transfer modes, is simple and silly. This is actually worth telling.
Okay we have a coupla shots of the two leads standing in front of a white brick wall.
There are two little holes in that wall that drive me up the... ahem. So there's gonna be some digital finagling to cover those up with regular brick.
Another surprising little VFX moment is in the shot preceding it, which is a heroic shot of Carolyn and her lightsaber. I had to extend that shot to do a wipe transition... but I was already using every usable frame... so I had to roll a few back and forth, like the Tusken Raider in ANH. I am so ashamed.
bgii - Thank you for posting your samples. I think "Someday" is the closest to what I'm looking for here, the clean high acoustic sound. I think you know what I'm after though.
If you've the time this summer, I'd love to e-mail you the next Teague tune that comes my way and see what develops.
There would be three guitar tunes in total, all in the 2-3 minute range -- the crawl and tiltdown, the finale and credits, and Leah's suite. You would play along with Teague's piano and send the resulting pass(es?) back to me for mixing and such. Jamming in cyberspace! Could be fun, a nice way to earn a movie credit.
Rick McCallum loves you!
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"Run Leia Run", "The Chopped-Off Hands of Star Wars", and "The Fan Film Menace" ... check 'em out. http://www.runleiarun.com MarriedVespin?!
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bgii_2000
Registered:
Jan '05
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Date Posted:
7/6 6:26am
Subject:
RE: The "Brooklyn Force" pregame thread: Picture locked.
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Cool. Go ahead and send 'em my way whenever.
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The circle is now complete. When I left you I was but the learner. Now I am the master. My website, blog, and movies http://www.theBradPlace.net What *IS* meatball? Holy crap I'm learning things everyday. - JeffCaauwe
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Ripper
Registered:
Mar '02
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Date Posted:
7/6 8:36am
Subject:
RE: The "Brooklyn Force" pregame thread: Picture locked.
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that's either a brilliant or fantastic way to score a movie, I'm not sure which but I love it 
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"...I must have changed at Kings Cross" Jedied - Coming Soon http://www.thebiscuit.org
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AdamBertocci
Title: Manager: Fan Films
Registered:
Feb '02
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Date Posted:
7/20 10:59am
Subject:
RE: The "Brooklyn Force" pregame thread: Picture locked.
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^ "Pat Gets a Cat" was scored similarly: the composer laid down all the tracks of his own instruments and his voice, plus a click track for the drums, and farmed some guitar and bass and such out to collaborators online. It worked beautifully.
This week we (finally) recorded Carolyn's ADR. It took a lot less time than I thought it would, once she actually showed up (there were... forgetting-we-were-doing-it-that-day issues).
Among the lines we had to loop were a few when she imitated "Star Wars" characters, and so I wanted to get those as good as possible since we were dubbing anyway. Loaded up YouTube videos and such to show her what was up.
Never try teach a girl to do "Star Wars" voices.
We got a pretty damn good Amidala out of her (the trick is to get her to add a little Katharine Hepburn into the mix), but her Yoda's just no good, her voice can't handle gravelly. Lightsaber noises (you'll see): pretty good. The best ones came when we were just doing them wild, and I'd swing an imaginary toy saber about and ask her to provide sound effects to my motions.
So many of us fans have lived with these characters for years, some since childhood, and it's sort of weird to have to go track down examples of a lightsaber noise to show someone. What do you mean, what does a lightsaber sound like?! It sounds like a lightsaber! Zhvweeeehhrrrrw.
More to the point, another thing to consider is that, to portray a character imitating a famous movie, you don't have your actor imitate the actual movie... you have your actor do the way we IMITATE the character. That's a key distinction. (What we all recognize as the Universal Yoda Imitation Voice for Laffs and Hijinx doesn't actually sound like Frank Oz at all.)
Well, the ADR's all laid in and the sound mix is going decently. This portion of the experience was far less hellish than I was predicting, and you might even not be able to tell that Bed-Stuy was being torn apart by giant woodchippers on the day we shot.
Now I have to keep my eye on the ball vis-a-vis finishing the movie.
In the meantime, have begun working on the press kit, photos, DVD menus etc. The poster is nearly done, have been with it on-and-off since May, and can't wait to show you the real thing.
Rick McCallum loves you!
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"Run Leia Run", "The Chopped-Off Hands of Star Wars", and "The Fan Film Menace" ... check 'em out. http://www.runleiarun.com MarriedVespin?!
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Dolt
Registered:
Sep '04
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Date Posted:
7/21 10:12am
Subject:
RE: The "Brooklyn Force" pregame thread: Picture locked.
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Awesome--after the clip you showed at NYCC, I can't wait to see it (and with the real voices, no less). 
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HOMEMADE HOLLYWOOD: FANS BEHIND THE CAMERA The first book about fan films! “An amazingly inspirational book for filmmakers”--MicroFilmmaker Magazine HOMEMADE HOLLYWOOD at Amazon: http://tinyurl.com/33z5uc Get fan film news at http://www.fancinematoday.com
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AdamBertocci
Title: Manager: Fan Films
Registered:
Feb '02
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Date Posted:
7/29 9:50am
Subject:
RE: The "Brooklyn Force" pregame thread: Picture locked.
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This is more of a "blog" post than anything. Those expecting to learn about filmmaking will be disappointed. Those interested in the human soul may have cause to perk up.
This weekend I was in Brooklyn, twice. First in Bed-Stuy. I hadn't been back there since the shoot. The neighborhood was quiet, as usual (by "usual", I mean every day in recorded history except the one we shot on). The most interesting part of the review of the location, for me, was seeing how our day-for-night location actually looks at night, now that I'd done the day-for-night effect. Granted, I didn't get to judge the real thing under proper lighting, but I think my digital magic looks much better.
Two nights later I was in Williamsburg. I hadn't been back there since the shoot, either. By some mysterious twist, the L train actually got me there much sooner than I expected, and I had some time to wander around.
There's something about the air in Williamsburg near the river that gives everything a heavy quality even in the emptiness. The space above the streets has texture you can practically see. Looking over these locations in their brick flesh after having spent months with their digital equivalents, something seemed false about them, as if the camera had given them life that the evening would not. Like they were just sets.
I'll never understand how supposedly the hottest neighborhood in the borough can also seem so abandoned, so empty. Oh, sure, the main thoroughfare is jumpin', but take two minutes' walk and you can be the only sign of life on the streets. You have difficulty pulling that trick off in Manhattan even when it's 4 in the morning, though it is possible, and quite magical. There is no such magic in Williamsburg's empty patches--only loneliness.
Buildings under construction that we photographed in March are looking much more complete. A little less ominous for it. But it's tough to see so much of the waterfront shut down. You know what's coming.
I think all the recent hoopla about this year's round of official SW fan film awards got to my brain.
Last night I dreamt that it was 2003 or thereabouts and I had, in fact, entered "Run Leia Run" into the AtomFilms contest as I was once intending to.
The ceremony, such as it was, was taking place at a place that suspiciously resembled Northwestern's very own University Hall, complete with the quad and such out front. But on the inside it was all convention-center-y. It was a rainy night and I was late for said ceremony.
Then George Lucas stepped out of the building, oddly-cheap-looking certificates in hand. As if he'd known I was late but still coming and he wanted to meet me in person.
In the pouring rain, he hands me a certificate, which promptly gets soaked. Tells me RLR won Best Animation. Nods. I begin to weep and tell him he's been a huge influence on my life. We stand there a moment, alone in the pouring rain, while the convention rages on inside.
Now here's the thing.
In my dream, George Lucas looked exactly like Chris Rock.
Yes, THAT Chris Rock. The dark-haired, non-flannel-wearing African-American comedian in his early forties.
At no time during the course of my dream did I notice this as being odd or inaccurate.
Rick McCallum loves you!
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"Run Leia Run", "The Chopped-Off Hands of Star Wars", and "The Fan Film Menace" ... check 'em out. http://www.runleiarun.com MarriedVespin?!
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