Life is good.

We spent last night and the night before screening our brand-new film to appreciative audiences at two very cool venues: Attic Studios in Long Island City and 45 Bleecker in Manhattan.  The first screening was pleasantly intimate, with a sneak-preview sort of vibe; our 40-50 audience members sat on folding chairs and watched the film on a screen only eight feet away from the front row.  Last night’s screening was a bit grander in scale; we filled most of the middle section of the 300-seat theater, and it really felt like we were presenting all our hard work to the world.  Both screenings went exceedingly well, with laughs in all the right places, a celebratory atmosphere, and a lively Q&A session afterward.

Brigitte relaxes at the Queens screening.

It’s a heady feeling to be able to debut a film that hadn’t even been conceived five weeks ago — but that would mean nothing if people hadn’t enjoyed it. Fortunately, they did enjoy it; not only that, but they were moved by it, and continued discussing it after the screening was over.  It seems we managed to create a movie that has a life outside of our own hopes and expectations for it.  And that, more than anything, is something to be proud of.

Fauvell sneaks off with four red cups.

My heartfelt thanks to all those who attended the screenings — and especially those who attended both! And if you missed the film this time around, don’t fret; a DVD edition is in the works as we speak. We’re also planning to submit the movie to a heap of film festivals — so with any luck, it’ll be coming soon to a festival near you!  And if you know of a venue in your area that might be interested in hosting a screening, please let us know.

-KB

Last night, the entire cast and crew (minus Clint and Sumi, who were dearly missed) gathered at Brewvies for the first screening of the film we devoted our August to.  This was the first time anyone – including me, Mike, and Derek — had seen the entire movie in its finished form; we’d been too busy working on it piecemeal (and exporting the finished product) to actually review what we’d done.

Pretty darn cool.

Just seeing our name on the marquee was a thrill.  Then we got inside, and we started to get nervous.  It didn’t help that the screening before us (a rowdy showing of Back to the Future) had started late, which meant that we couldn’t get into the theater until 9:35 — for a screening that was supposed to start at 9:00.

Finally, at a quarter to ten, the film got started, and I started to relax.  My biggest fear had been that we’d have some last-minute trouble with the massive QuickTime file we’d exported, but it seemed to play fine, and as I sat in a plush chair at the back of the theater, flanked by my fellow Four-Week Feature team members, with the movie’s opening sequence unfolding on the screen in front of us, I felt a palpable sense of relief.

Of course, it couldn’t last.

Five minutes from the end of the movie — just as the story was reaching its emotional climax — the sound cut off.  Completely.  Derek dashed back into the projection booth, but as it turned out, there was nothing to be done; somehow, the audio file we’d grafted onto our QuickTime movie was five minutes shorter than the movie itself.  We paused the film and scrambled as best we could, passing out microphones to cast members so that they could recite their lines as the images played in silence — but of course most of them couldn’t remember their lines, so that attempt only made things more awkward.  The sequence that the whole movie had been building towards — the sequence that was supposed to redeem the somewhat rambling quality of the fim’s middle section — was deprived of the music and the few key lines of dialogue that made it work.  It was insanely frustrating.  We had come so close to having a successful first screening.  Couldn’t our luck have held for just a few minutes more?

Ultimately, we had a nice time anyway.  It was fun seeing our Utah-based cast members again, and people seemed to enjoy the movie (we even got laughs!), and afterward we had drinks at Brewvies and a very pleasant late-night meal at Denny’s.  Not only that, but the folks at Brewvies felt bad about our late start, so they didn’t charge us a penny for the screening!  That was a very gracious gesture, and much appreciated.

All in all, the evening could have gone a lot worse — and now we know what to fix in time for the New York screening!  Priority number one: Watch the whole movie before the screening starts.

I may have to let Derek take on that task.  I’ll be spending the next three days driving across the country with Lee Gillentine and a bunch of Derek’s film equipment.  From road-trip movie to actual road-trip!  What a wild summer it continues to be …

-KB

It’s 4:30 AM, and most of our team has gone to sleep after a nice little celebration at Maxwell’s in nearby Kimball Junction.  But Derek and Mike are still awake, tweaking audio, and I’m awake too, blogging about them.  It’s a pleasantly quiet moment after a very hectic month.  Mike and I are sipping herbal tea.  Derek runs on pure, unadulterated perfectionism.

I know Mike said we wouldn’t tweak after midnight, but as it turns out, we can’t help it.  We’re proud of this movie, and with all the work that’s gone into it already, we just can’t see our way clear to falling short in the home stretch.  (Well, okay, technically we’re past the home stretch.  But you get my point.)  The plan is to get the film into decent shape in the next ten minutes or so, then start exporting a QuickTime version of it, then go to bed while the computer does its work.  We can still make a few minor audio changes tomorrow, but the picture will be locked.  And then at 9 PM, we screen it!  That’s going to be very surreal …

So have we failed?  If we make changes after midnight, even if it’s just smoothing out audio, is that admitting defeat?  Do we have to re-brand ourselves as The Twenty-Eight-and-a-Half-Day Feature?  You’ll have to decide for yourself.  Obviously, I wish we really had been able to cease all work at the stroke of twelve and still feel good about the finished product.  But in the end, I think it would have been a disservice to ourselves and to the audience to be too uptight about the deadline.  So call us frauds.  Call us cheats.  Call us liars.  But come see our movie anyway!  Because it’s gonna be pretty damn good.

In the meantime, please enjoy this video of Mike and me trying to make coherent speeches while giddy and sleep-deprived:

-KB

When we chose Crazy Lake as the working title for this movie, my explicit reasoning was this: it’s a perfect placeholder, because there is no possible way we’ll use it as the final title.

Now here we are, three weeks later, hotly debating what the title should be, and of course Crazy Lake has become a front-runner.  Derek has been its most vocal champion for quite a while now, and in his opinion, it actually makes sense as a title for this movie.  My opinion?  It’s a really cool title, and I’m not sure if it makes sense — but then, I’m not sure if it has to.  Sometimes a title is just a title!  And I’d much rather go with something random like Crazy Lake than something on-the-nose like Family Odyssey or Siblings on the Road.  (Not that we’re actually considering those.  But you get my point.)

Derek mocked up this poster to help sell us on his favorite title. Pushy little devil, ain't he?

Also in contention at this point: Salt Air, Boxcar, and Chasing Home.  I realize that no one reading this blog has actually seen any footage from the movie yet, but — do you guys have any thoughts?  At this point, we’ll take all the help we can get …

-KB

With only three days left to go until our project deadline, it no longer makes sense to reckon the remaining time in days. We have sixty hours to go before midnight strikes and the project is concluded. After that, we have twenty-one hours to export the final version of the movie, test it to make sure it plays properly, and get ourselves to Brewvies for our 9 PM screening.

Well, okay 60 HOURS. Or, to put it differently: only 59 hours until this image is appropriate!

Last night, we screened a complete rough cut for the team. Well, it was supposed to be a complete rough cut; turns out, in our haste to assemble the film before showing it, we had omitted a couple of scenes (and included one scene twice).  There were massive audio problems, too: some scenes were inaudibly quiet, some obnoxiously loud, and some had so much background noise over them that it was hard to make out the dialogue.  Oh, and at one point a reflector came into frame.

And yet, for all those flaws, the movie is starting to look like a movie.  Certain sections of it still feel like rough assemblies, but other sections play smoothly, even dynamically, and at times I actually found myself engaging as an audience member — which is pretty remarkable for a film I’ve dedicated my whole being to since the first of the month.  The ending of the film was especially affecting — which is good news, since that’s what the audience will take with them as they leave the theater.  If all goes well, I think there might be tears in a few eyes as people exit the first screening.  That’s what I’m shooting for, anyway.

For now, though, it’s time to put my nose back to the editing grindstone.  Derek, Mike, and Redfield have been doing tremendous work, and I’ve got to scramble just to keep up …

-KB

Today, we returned briefly to the “production” phase of the project, taking a break from editing to shoot a short dialogue scene that we hadn’t managed to work in to our original production schedule. As it turned out, our production skills were a little rusty, and we ended up having to wait around in Salt Lake City while Lee went back to Park City to retrieve some needed equipment.

But the time was not lost! As luck would have it, our shooting location was just across the street from Brewvies, the venue for our inaugural screening (coming up in just five days). We headed over there to scope out the joint, and we were all blown away by what we saw. Brewvies is a full-fledged movie theater with a bar out front — or possibly a full-fledged bar with a movie theater in the back. Either way, it’s extremely cool, especially the theater part. Sitting there in the dark, knowing that in less than a week we’ll be there to screen a movie that as of now we haven’t even rough-cut, was a wonderful and terrifying feeling.

Movie schedule not current. But it still looks this awesome.

Details of the screening can be found on our Facebook Event Page.  RSVP!  And invite your friends!

We’d better make this thing good. It’ll have to be, just to live up to the venue …

Back to the editing grind,

-KB

This morning at around 7:30, we declared principal photography for the Four-Week Feature wrapped. We had been shooting since 5:30 the night before, mostly in a small forest clearing just outside Park City, which we lit up with generator-powered lights.  There’s a special kind of magic to exterior night shooting.  Or maybe that’s just the fatigue talking.

An hour later, we were sitting on couches in the condo’s living room, drinking mimosas and eating chocolate-chip pancakes, which were lovingly prepared for us by Sumi Lee and Gabi Madsen.  It was a welcome moment of celebration after an intense seven straight days of shooting.  Spirits were high; the mood was jovial.  Clint showed off his Iron Man undies.  Will appeared to be asleep.

Proud. Happy. Borderline delirious.

Now, I freely admit that this whole “wrap” concept is a bit of a sham.  In truth, we still have one small dialogue scene left to shoot, plus a bunch of montage footage and other miscellanea.  But we’re not going to rush out and grab those shots tonight or tomorrow.  In fact, we’re going to put off getting them as long as we reasonably can.  The editing phase of this project has waited in the wings long enough; it’s time to wheel it out into the spotlight.  I’ve been itching to get my filthy Final Cut paws on some of Derek’s beautiful footage.  Today, I will scratch that itch.

Sumi and Michael Redfield are headed to Salt Lake City to return some equipment.  Everyone else, as far as I know, is in bed.  The footage beckons.  I think I’ll make a pot of coffee and get started.

Wish me luck.

-KB

When Clint Byrne signed on to be a part of the Four-Week Feature team, he mentioned that he’d love to bring his Canon 7D along for the ride to serve as a “B” camera.  I was familiar with Clint’s and the 7D’s capabilities, having directed a short film they shot (“Outfits,” a 2009 Brooklyn Film Race entry), so I immediately agreed.

Generally, multiple-camera shooting is done in three types of situations:

1) When there’s an insanely difficult or expensive stunt taking place, and the filmmakers want to capture it from a variety of angles without having to do it over too many times;

2) When a lot of the dialogue is improvised, and it’s difficult or impossible to reproduce a scene from a new angle; and

3) In traditional TV sitcoms, which are all about acting and writing and moving on to shooting next week’s episode with a minimum of fuss.

The Four-Week Feature doesn’t fall into any of those categories, and I wasn’t sure how much, if at all, we’d be taking advantage of our multiple-camera capabilities.  But as it turns out, the B-Cam has been an absolute godsend.  We haven’t used it for every scene, or even every day, but when we’re pressed for time — the sun is setting, we’re behind schedule, they want us out of this location — it’s invaluable to be able to knock two angles off the shot-list in one fell swoop.  And, of course, we’re always pressed for time to one extent or another.

Bosom buddies.

Clint and Derek Van Gorder have developed a near-telepathic link with each other, to the point where Derek will ask Clint what ISO he’s shooting at (whatever that means), only to discover their camera settings are already the same.  They’ve become a two-headed monster of movie-making magic.  It’s a beautiful (and mildly disturbing) thing to see.

Yeah, it's eerie.

At this point, it’s hard for me to imagine how we could possibly have made this film with only one camera.  Just another entry on the list of Things We Never Knew We Needed, But Were Lucky Enough to Get Anyway.  It’s a long and ever-expanding list.  We are lucky, lucky folks.

-KB

The last few days, bopping around the desert from one remote location to another, it’s been dawning on me more and more that we’ve made our lives as hard as possible.

The “easy” way to do a four-week feature would be to restrict the scope of the movie right off the bat.  You would start by limiting the number of locations — a huge time-saving measure.  You’d also want to keep the number of characters to a reasonable minimum, to simplify scheduling.  In our case, we could easily have made a movie set in a condo in Park City, Utah, used a few supplemental locations around town, and congratulated ourselves on a job well done.  It would still have been stressful, difficult, and most likely invigorating.  But that’s not what we decided to do.

Instead, we conceived of a road movie — a family odyssey that covers vast distances and rarely returns to the same place twice.  Logistically, making that kind of film on this kind of schedule is beyond insane.  It means losing precious hours to long drives out to the middle of nowhere, baking in the desert heat, being far away from props and food and comfortable beds — all the things Sumi mentioned in her recent post.  Making a film is hard enough in the first place.  Adding a time limit and a ton of travel takes you dangerously close to plain old self-destruction.

And yet, we remain undestroyed.  The past few days of shooting have been relentless and exhausting, but we’re finally back at the condo, cooking and doing laundry and looking forward to a full night’s sleep.  Tomorrow night will be our first night shoot — a big climactic emotional scene — so we’ve set a noon call time for the first time since the early days of shooting.  Noon!  It feels like sweet, sweet freedom.  But of course, there’s plenty to get done before then …

We may not have made our lives easy.  But we have made our lives pretty awesome.  Right or wrong, we’ll always have that.

-KB

It’s been dawning on me that amidst all our production updates, on-set photographs, and sentimental reflections, we’ve neglected to give you blog-readers much sense of what our movie is actually about.  In a small way, I’m hoping I can rectify that right now, before I crawl into bed around 3 AM to get my precious five hours of sleep.

As reluctant as I am to admit it, Crazy Lake is about family.  It’s about four adult siblings coming to terms with each other under difficult circumstances.  It’s about the relationships you don’t choose, that you could never live without.

Is that vague enough?  I hope so!  I think Mike Lavoie will kill me if I give too much away.

As for today’s shoot: it went extremely well.  We got what we planned to get, and a little bit more.  We also got walkie-talkies, which have already proven insanely useful.  After just a few hours of having them on set, it’s hard to remember how we ever did without them.  (A lot of frantic hand-waving, if I recall correctly.)  Sometimes it pays to have the right tool for the job.

Tomorrow we’re heading out past Salt Lake City again for some desert shooting.  But right now: sleepy-time!

-KB