Color correction complete

Uncorrected still photo by E. Hammen

Ahren Buhmann and I recently finished a several-day stint of color correction for Beach Town (a rock and roll beach movie of the mind). Ahren doing the correcting, me saying "yeah, that looks a million times better" over and over.

What is color correction? (or, "What would possibly need "correcting" about all those beautiful images?")

Color Correction is the process of balancing slight discrepancies in the hue, brightness, or whatever, of each shot -- and at the same time making sure the individual shots look good side by side with all the other shots in a scene, which may have been taken in different light, on different days, with different filmstock, and so on.

The result is that the film as whole flows well visually. It's movie magic. The illusion!

Anyway, Ahren did an awesome job and color correction is officially finished 

Next up: the final sound mix -- so that the audio flows nicely.

Then we're done.

Social hour: I ran into Kenna Kettrick and Amanda Keogh at the theater and talked to them for a bit. Great to see them both!  Also worked a bit more with David Thomas to tweak some music.

Quick update on Beach Town; color correction in progress!

linkage photo by E. Hammen

It's been a busy week here in beach town. So I'll keep this brief.

Color correction is in progress! It is lots of fun to work with Ahren Buhmann and frankly, an exciting process.

Picture lock is one thing, but when you balance all the little pictures that you've locked against each other, it gains cohesion. The result is greater than the sum of the parts; it's something new.  And that something is the final film.

Coming up: I'm meeting with David Thomas for a bit of updating to a particular music track, and I'm making plans on getting the final audio mix worked out.

Exciting!

Picture lock is nigh

photo by E. Hammen

Picture lock is nigh. 

Last night I was working on the film and thinking, "Well, I'm not touching the opening credits anymore, they're ready for Eric Anderson to work on font and layout."

And then, I looked at the credits this morning... and I thought the same thing!

Picture lock is nigh. 

This morning I also looked at a pretty major (actually very minor) last-minute shakeup I did to a little scene, and lo and behold it looked spot-on.

I'm meeting with multi-talented and very patient Ahren Buhmann the week after this to start color correction.

Picture lock is nigh!

"Nigh" is a funny word. It seems like it has to be connected to "night" but the etymology references I've seen imply this is only a coincidence.

Today's photo is also not related to Beach Town, but it might as well be. Long n' low is the angle here.

I love sidewalks and I love grass in sidewalk cracks. Is anyone up for making a feature film entirely about this? It'd be called "Grass in the Sidewalks". Or maybe "Flaming Grass", just to spice things up a bit. Or maybe "Grass -- and I Don't Mean the Kind You Roll up and Smoke, I Mean the Kind that Grows between the Cracks of your Sidewalk!" I'm sure Kickstarter revenues would be boffo.

Social hour: 
I saw costumer Barbara Blunt in the coffee shop last week! Great to see her out of the theater and walking around in the daytime.  Also heard from Iain Dalton, who has been working on music videos recently -- very cool!

Beach Town labor day update

(photo by E. Hammen, and not Beach-Town related)

If you want to find all sorts of little, tiny changes that need to be made in a film, a good way is to watch it "one last time". But boy oh boy, did I get a ton of work done this week.

This penultimate pass, which I'll be finishing tonight, addresses all the post-test changes that I already made -- makes them nice n' graceful -- and addresses how those changes affected the scenes around them, and the film as a whole.

For example,  I added a little bit of music to a scene that previously had none. The scene before it had music, differently motivated, so the transition between scenes needed to be timed differently (music dictates the beats rather than the ebb and flow of ambient sound in this case) . Then the cut to the next scene needed to be re-timed for the same reason, and also accounting for the change of feeling that the music gave the previous scene. And the ambient sound below the next scene changed a bit because it didn't have to compete as much with the ambient from the previous scene anymore.

It might sound boring and more of the same, but since I'm so far along in the process is pretty groovy and all about unearthing interesting new things and perfecting existing things.  Affirmation and proclamation. The one-hair brush instead of the big flat wall-painting brush. And the drum of spackle has been officially retired.

I've still gotta look at it as a whole again, but it's really gelling!

I also worked with David Thomas last week for some more mixes, both to new music and for a few tweaks to some existing tracks. David finished those over the weekend (!) and those'll be going into this cut as well.

Man, the music and thank-you credits on this movie are gonna be extensive. I don't want to mention any names, but perhaps, on this crazy little DIY film... perhaps a certain someone was collaborating? 

Oh yes he was!

Lastly, but not leastly -- Happy trails, Riley!

When is a lock not a lock? When a door's ajar. Beach Town movie update

I'm getting closer to picture lock. Not quite there yet, but close!

Here's where we're actually at: 

Completed -- audio levels pass. Also made a few more cuts in the process.

Completed -- spotting for possible new music bits. Also made a few more cuts in the process.

Completed -- ambient sound. I think! But just in case, here's a little joke: Q: How much ambient sound does one picture need? A: more.

Added -- a few new music bits. One of the songs I was able to pull from my massive outtakes file. And, by beautiful chance, I also got the new record from the mighty rock n' roll band Horns of Ormus via USPS, and a couple of their tracks happen to work very well in the other spots! (Thank you HOO! Uh...we'll talk!)

But I still might need one more music cue...

Might is the key word here.

There's this one scene... People have said as much...

But I'll tell ya, so far I've hated what music cues do to this scene, and to the rest of the sequence around it! I've been going back n' forth on this one ever since the test screenings, and I spent most of the day yesterday just addressing this one issue. Man, I tried a hundred things. I couldn't even find temporary, unattainable music that'd work. Rolling Stones, you will not be getting a call from me. And I went to bed having not figured it out.

However, it's been said that your subconscious works on problems while you sleep, and when I woke up at 3 am to listen to a big rattly train going by outside the window, I think I may have come upon the solution.

Social hour
Besides working tirelessly to finish the film, I've been out and about, and over the weekend I caught the riotous 14/48 festival, which featured a short play by Beach Town set dresser Jennifer Dice and a performance (in a different play in the fest) by Steven Stern. They're also doing another original play at SPT this weekend "The Spear Carriers". Check it out.
I also saw Sarah Winsor while I was downtown waiting for my car to get fixed. It was great to catch up; she has a big show coming up this fall at the Annex Theater that sounds exciting.

Here's that good old Beach Town trailer again.


Beach Town trailer from Erik Hammen on Vimeo.

Beach Town official trailer

Happy August everyone! If you're just tuning in, I'm still working on getting the film ship-shape after our test-reviews, but in the meantime --

A public trailer is ready!  I hope you dig it -- please share with anyone and everyone.


Beach Town trailer from Erik Hammen on Vimeo.

Beach Town!

Beach Town

I changed the name of the film -- the old title seemed to imply that our Rock and Roll Beach Movie of the Mind was one of those "mondo" films.
This new page redirects from the old site, please adjust your Favorites to point to this page.
More to come very soon!

Update... of the mind

1922 color film test, with Mae Murray

While I let the film's new title marinate, I've been working hard to finish a pass at a new cut that addresses the test audience comments. I'm going to try to squeeze in some more work on the trailer as well.

It's worth spending time to properly process test audience comments. What happens is you hear from person A, person B, and person C. And while A and B love everything except for one little bit that really bothered them, person C thinks that one bit is the best part of the film.

All very smart people, just different aesthetics. How does this film fit into that? And what's person D going to say that's going to affect what A,B, and C said?

That said, person Z, who I talked to last week in real life, had just one major comment and a suggestion, and that suggestion actually addressed a major element across the film that I'd been stumped on. Digging into the film now, the changes I've made based on this new suggestion have been coming out great.

I watched a few other films over the week, specifically to see how they used their score music. I haven't done that in a while, it's always very interesting.

I'm also thinking a lot about color in this go-round, hence today's picture, which is not from our film, but of lovely Mae Murray, in an early color film test (1922!).  A long time ago I thought it might be cool to shoot a beach movie in black n' white, but calmer heads prevailed and instead we have glorious Kodak color. Everyone knows that B&W is great -- hell I've made as many film that way as in color -- but sometimes you wanna use charcoal, and other times you need oil paint. Whatever's best for the project. Right? Right!

Sightings: Anna and I saw Kenna Kettrick at the theater over the weekend, and just a few hours ago I ran into Riley Neldam out on the street, working on commercial shoot. It was great to see them both!

Test audience results (mostly), title change, trailer

I am coming out of my cave to report!

A big huge thank-you (once again) to Gordon Modin, of Gordon Modin Video Production for his help in finalizing the test audience preview DVD and review-only streaming content.

Gordon is a great guy who knows everything and has helped me with my last three films.

That leads to a second huge thank-you to my anonymous test audience for their candid, thoughtful, and thought-provoking comments!

Not much of which I can talk about right now (though I am very, very happy with the overall reactions) but one of the things that came from this was....

Trailer
I am putting together a trailer for the film, and as soon as it's done (and the new title is finalized) I'll post it on YouTube and Vimeo for all to see and share. It's gonna be awesome.

there's no audience like a test audience

Hey look, there's Gidget, the original Surfer Girl.

I read this book years and years ago. I've never seen the movie or the TV series.

The book was not as much fun as I thought it should've been. Maybe because it's so dated, or maybe because it was never much to begin with, and just happens to have been made into an iconic Sandra Dee/Sally Field vehicle that seems sort of quaint 50 + years later.

But what a great cover on this paperback edition, yeah?

Anyway, I finished the pre-test version of  Beach Town last night. I'll be sending preview DVDs out to my Test Audience this week. This gang of mysterious, unnamed suspects are a few reliably unbiased and thoughtful people who each have a specific perspective that always comes in handy.

They've been hand-picked by me for exactly that reason. Whether or not they like the film can even be beside the point.

In Hollywood, they have a company that handles test audiences.

The way I hear it, (taken with a grain of salt), a randomly-chosen audience has to fill out long questionnaires about a film before they can leave a stuffy, Tuesday afternoon screening. The questions tend to reinforce the insecurities of the moneymen... such as "Did you find the running scenes boring?" for a movie like Chariots of Fire.

With these data in hand, a war of the wills begins between the studio -- whose job is to understand and mitigate risk involved in making money by financing and distributing a variety of disparate films -- and the filmmaker -- whose job can be any number of things but ultimately whose professional reputation is on the line for the artistic decisions that lead to the critical and financial success of this one film. 

Show + business = show business.

Here's a true story I heard recently, (though I've fudged the numbers) about an independent filmmaker whose finished film was picked up by a big distribution company.

Under a big distribution company, a film can be shown nationally, even internationally, on the big screen in front of real theater audiences, and there will probably be some kind of payday for the filmmaker to come from this. 

So that's all very cool.  

"We'll open the movie at 1100 screens nationwide," the distributors said. 

"But first, we'd like your permission to run it past a test audience."

"Or," they said, "if you'd won't use our test audience, we can open on 11 screens."

What would you do? Take a chance that the test audience will love your film and that the distributor won't ask for even more concessions, such as cuts or even reshoots, to try for a better test? (Multiple re-testings are not uncommon). Or do set your jaw and choose the "option" of the handful of theatrical screenings, hoping that word-of-mouth and great reviews will inspire the distributor (whose test screenings you rejected) to take another chance with a "difficult" filmmaker and open the movie across the nation? 

What if you make a few recommended cuts, add a T&A scene, and the film tests well, and then it opens to an average of 45 on Rotten Tomatoes and is gone from 1000 of those 1100 screens after the first week? What if you don't make any cuts, the film gets good reviews, but no one can find it at the local mall and it closes in a week from the 11 arthouse screens to make room for the new Wes Anderson film.

Anyway, I haven't heard how this dilemma turned out for the filmmaker in question. 

But I'd be willing to bet that the distributor would not go for the idea of modeling the movie poster after a scribbly-looking children's book cover.

June update #2

L-R: Ahren Buhmann, Iain Dalton,
Kat Brede on set on Beach Town.
(photo by David Thomas)

Well, I got a ton of work done on Beach Town this week. I'm getting very very close now to a preview version.

And the sun just came out after a dark couple of days.

There's a nice little study in profiles here in today's photo, taken outside Cairo on our one, long day there.

There are two groups: Iain and Kat are setting up the tripod (up up up), while Ahren stands talking to Kenna Kettrick and I, both OC.

Now then. Which of these two groups is the yin and which is the yang?

Or, is it actually that both groups together are yin, while the sunny area around is yang?

Or, is Cairo, with its illustrative t-shirt in the window, actually itself the yin, while nearby Top Pot Donuts is the yang?  Perhaps... Yet Top Pot Donuts was clearly on the shady side of the street!

Either way, I promise more info on the film next week.

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!