Memorial Day post, Beach Town

Yessir, it's time for another random-seeming Beach Town update.

But the posts reflect the process, which at this point is not smooth or predictable, it's organic.

It's a living thing, man!

I keep retooling the opening of the film. It's very, very important to start your film out right. Enough cannot be said about this.

In fact…  the opening is so important…

(how important is it?)

I'll tell ya!  The opening is so important -- it's unbelievable.

(That one goes out to Steve O'Neil)

Anyway, I'll be working on that opening scene right up to the last minute.

When is the last minute, by the way?

I don't know yet.

It'll be done when it's done.

That's what they say in painting.

Right now, I'm typing this foolishness instead of working on the "band practice" scene, which is about a quarter of the way through the film.

Just before I broke for dinner, I realized that scene needed to be put together differently.

It actually looked quite good as it was --  but that was in the context of itself.

After I watched the whole film before it up to that point, all of a sudden it was clear the approach needed to be different.

The film informs the scenes.

The screenshot above is from a different scene, the "gig scene". We shot that at Heartland, a DIY club that actually had its final show last night. They're closing up due to losing too much money. Heartland made a good run of it. Beach Town got two bands from them due to me going to see shows there: Punishment and Thee Samedi.

Good bye, Heartland!

I saw a good movie at the Seattle International Film Festival today. "My Year with the Nuns". That Matt Smith is some storyteller.

And, the movie was playing at the Egyptian Theater, which closed down earlier this year and was possibly going to go away altogether, but SIFF has decided to take it over and rehabilitate it.

That's the second single-screen theater they've rescued this to. They bought the Uptown a few years ago. It'd probably be knocked down for condos by now, if not for them.

That, my friends, is how a film society should operate. Hell, if that's all they did, I'd be a supporter.

In other news, my short film The Last City in the East is opening for Modern Times (that's right!) in Minneapolis this week. Are you in Minneapolis on Tuesday, May 27 at 8:30? Check it out!

Hurry up and wait, Beach Town

photo by Erik Hammen

I definitely got some good work done on the film, but last week was a very hectic. I'll have more specifics to post soon.

I did see a lot of relatives this week. Quite a few of them are crazy artists just like me. That's always nice to remember.

Also good to remember is that I need to come up with a better pitch for the film. How to explain it to the uninitiated. "Beach Town is a beach movie of the mind. ... " what else?  Umm.... I don't know, but do you wanna hear about this awesome edit I made by removing two frames from a clip and adding three from a totally different scene that matches?

The least qualified person to describe art is usually the artist. The smart ones don't say anything. I fall into the other category. If anyone's got a good way to describe my film, please let me know. ( but "not yet done" is already taken)

Update May 11, in brief

Erik Hammen, Riley Neldam, Ahren Buhmann on set
(photo by David Thomas)

I made good progress on the cut despite a very difficult week and more of the same to come.

I'm about 2/3 of the way through the final cut, working on the scenes like the one in downtown Ballard, out on the water, and outside Surf Ballard with Maya and Sarah.

Digging up buried treasure everywhere. Who buried it? Me.

Today's photo is from the scene we shot at Lect's Soup Stop. (Lect's is actually not featured in this photo. )

Our window of time to work at that location was very small, and it started shrinking the minute we started to shoot. If I recall correctly, I had to "drive solutions with proactive detail-oriented problem-solving." Put that phrase on your resume, it'll double your take home pay. Just kidding.

Anyway, I love that scene now. I worked it last week, and it came out great.

In other news, I had lunch with Steven Sterne on Friday, it was great to catch up. He's been very busy acting these days.

Last summer, my kids were extras in a non-beach movie, called "My Year of the Nuns", and it's playing at the Seattle Int'l Film Fest this month.  I'm pretty sure this is not a "Nunsploitation" flick, but the director is Bret Fetzer, who also wrote the play "Lollyville" that Sarah is currently in, and the writer is this guy Matt Smith, who I saw acting in another movie once, and he was pretty funny. So I've got high hopes for it.

May 5 update

Sarah Winsor makeup test
(photo by Mel Cafe)

Last week was a bit random, but here's where we're at:

David Thomas and I finished mixing the rest of the internally-created music. I'm putting the finished tracks in place as I go, and suddenly everything looks 20% better. Good sound = good picture. This is solid math.

I also go up through the coda of the post-theater scene in the edit. I'd thought that coda was pretty much set in stone -- three nice shots, then out we go -- but true to the nature of this cut, it was now very clear that one of those shots had to go. In its place, I'm using two other clips, which were previously discarded from their original places in the film.

So maybe I'll end up using this newly discarded clip for something else as well.

I hope so. In an ideal world, the shot/Use ratio is ideally 1:1 -- that's good math.

In other news...  hey look, there's Sarah Winsor in today's photo. I think it's a makeup test photo from the set. Anyway, Sarah is starring in a stage play right now over at Hugo House called Lollyville, which I saw over the weekend and highly recommend! The show runs through May 24th.