labingi | Entries tagged with hour before morning

The Hour before Morning

I met with Michael on Sunday to look over the visual effects so far. He and his colleagues have done a lot of work! Highlights include...

* The infamous "hover sphere" scene, which we failed utterly to film with any continuity. In this case, our mantra, "We'll fix it in post," has proven pretty valid. Michael has created a nice continuity via "hover sphere" effects that makes good sense out of the disparate people standing/sitting around like they weren't in the same shoot, which they weren't.

* The telepathic FX are also looking good, kind of purply and wavy--nothing mold-breaking but very coherent for tracking when telepathy is going on. Michael also interpolated a nice bit of TPFX when young Jenchae makes a fist. Jake, the director, came up with the fist idea as a visual for young Jenchae's anger. We hadn't thought telepathy at all, but Michael's effect becomes a nice piece of foreshadowing for Jenchae's telepathic power; it all came together nicely.

* The mindscape green screen stuff is also looking good: dark and starry and mysterious.

* Finally, I was personally excited to see the orange, cityscape twilight of Akhté's big window. I'm not a very visual person, but this was one of the strong visual images I've ever since the book (it's in the book), and it's looking exactly as I pictured it. Lovely!

Real Life

In RL, things are finally slowing down a little--and will stay that way for about three weeks before speeding up again. I got my welcome albums for the kids in Haiti sent off, which is a huge load off my mind. I've been putting that off for months.

I now have confirmed teaching appointments for three classes in the fall, none of which, of course, are at my first-choice school, which I'm still waiting on. If I get in there, I'll be teaching four, which will kill me, but at least the money will be welcome. Better rest up while I can.

The composer has written some music! This is an update because the whole post-production process is proceeding at such a snail's pace (no one's fault, just microbudget circumstances) that any update is a huge update. Go, Grayson, for writing some music! Baby steps until completion.

Many thanks to

sixish for capturing screen shots from The Hour before Morning rough cut! (Yes, it's sad that I can't grab pics from my own film. I am challenged.)

Meanwhile, the film itself is currently with the visual effects folks, who just sent me a rough of the spaceship:)

( Three pics below the cut )

Last night, Matt and I reviewed the second cut of The Hour before Morning and did some additional edits. It's looking a lot tighter now.

The highlights:

* We rescued some bits of footage that failed to make it into the rough cut: Brett as dead body, which is important because Elek does not only kill women; Ash'torian soldier being telepathicked away by Akhté; a couple of establishing shots of scenery.

* I think we've rescued the "problem" scene of Jenchae and his terrorist friend. The original cut lacked the intercut dialogue of older Jenchae and Elek and had no blank screens in place to indicate FX shots. Having repaired that, I think the scene actually makes sense and has tolerably good pacing.

* We also got blank screens in place for the ocean and sunrise footage at the end. Even with no FX, it makes the pacing and dialogue feel a lot better.

* We discussed using fades to indicate flashbacks and elapsed time. Once those transitions are in place, the sequencing of scenes should track a lot better.

We plan to meet again Monday for further revisions, and hopefully we'll have a lock soon, and I can pay our FX people lots of money (by my standards) to take it from there.

In today's news:

( Star Wars )

( The Hour before Morning Rough Cut )

( Making a Friend and Discussing Introversion )

I feel a need to post an update. Here goes...

The Hour before Morning progresseth... at a snail's pace.

We did a spot of dubbing for The Hour before Morning today, and then we watched the half of the rough cut that Matt had on his computer. By and large, I was very pleased. There are certainly some amateur moments: some rough edits, mumbled lines, odd lighting/makeup, quick cuts with dubious continuity (that last entirely the fault of yours truly, the writer). But a lot of those places can be smoothed over in post with the generous application of fade outs, music, audiovisual tweaking, etc. Will it look professional? No. Will it look pretty good for a $10-$15,000 movie. Yes!

Most pleasing were the performances by our three principals. They are all consistently good-to-excellent with many pro moments. My current favorite is Trish's (Meravyn's) reaction to Greg's (Jenchae's) bad pun, "I have him in hand," a play on Elek having recently broken his hands. I cannot describe the way she widens her eyes, but it speaks volumes.

We saw

haemony as Jenchae's mother, looking very motherly and appropriately under stress. I don't know how we managed to miss her falling scene; we shot it at least five times, but it's not there. We still have good material though, better once we have music and a less utterly weird (lack of) transition into the scene.

Thanks to Tyler, Jonathon, Greg, and Matt (in no particular order) for fine work on the dubbing today.

***

In other news, in a week I start teaching and am totally unprepared. Why did I take on three different courses I've never taught before?? Still, I am excited and think they will be good once I'm done with my initial scrambling.

I long ago gave up blogging every shoot of HBM out of sheer exhaustion. But the filming has been going very well. We're almost, almost done with all of our non-prison cell filming, and we're looking forward enormously to settling down in one set with the same 2 or 3 actors and doing nothing but prison scenes.

We have been fortunate in our locations: we got some very nice scenes in our quarry: both desert planet and forested planet, and we got two versions of the rural western Oregon look with two types of weather on different days, so we'll have a nice variety. Pure happenstance gave us a dried up pond that's going to look nice and charred for a crash site. (We have a total of four planets for exterior shots: Manyrock, Besqûn, some Ashtorian planet, and the planet they crash on.)

We have also been fortunate in our cast and crew. In the main, everyone has been very responsible about showing up on time and being prepared. Boy, do we have a lot of actors for this movie... and they've really all been quite responsible and cooperative. The crew bears the brunt of the effort, of course, with most of us having to be at most every shoot. We are now entering a state of terminal exhaustion, and after our last on-location shoot next week, we will take at least two weeks off to collapse (or work, go to school, have a life, etc. as the case may be).

I still don't have any photos to post as my computer is not the one on which the footage is stored. Alack. Hopefully soon.

We had our third shoot for The Hour before Morning last week. I never did get around to blogging about the second shoot because my computer chose that evening to melt down, so I'll recap here:

Shoot 2: Meravyn, Trenod, and the Wounded Man.

We wrapped Trenod (Sam) and the Wounded Man (Eugene) with this shoot. It was all day Saturday, lots of hard work and good things accomplished. It was also another adventure in the unpredictability of microbudget film making. We asked everyone to block out their whole Saturday to ensure time for the several scenes we needed to film. But life intervenes, and a few days before the shoot, we got word that Sam had to work till 2:00 on Saturday (this can happen when you can't pay your actors and they need to eat) and Eugene had to leave by around 4:30 Saturday to get ready to catch his plane to Mexico. So... our full day for filming became about 2 hours for all the scenes that required Sam and Eugene both. Everyone rose very gamely (and intelligently) to the challenge. Before Sam arrived, we filmed everything else we could that involved just Meravyn (Trisha). Then, we blazed through the Sam & Eugene scenes, and finished up with Sam & Trisha. I was amazed by everyone's calmness and diligence under pressure. Very good performances from all involved. I could feel the heartbreak of Meravyn and Trenod's breakup. Sam played Trenod, I think, more sympathetically than I wrote him, which is all the good. I think he will be a character many people will like. (He tends to be disliked in the book, from my experience.)

( Read more... )

We had our first shoot for The Hour before Morning on Wednesday.

It was inspiring, my first experience of what I always imagined would make it fantastically personally fulfilling to work on a collaborative project like a film: everyone coming together, working hard, having a blast, and leaving in very high spirits, eager to go on.

We had about a billion misadventures, which was inevitable given that:( Read more... )

"On Race in The Hour before Morning"

or

"My Attempt to Beat My Critics to the Punch"

Being totally unqualified to speak to RaceFail, I've been reading with interest and avoiding sticking in my oar. Here, however, is my very tangential contribution, a rumination on my own creative mazes.

I'm making a science fiction movie. I don't know if it will be good or bad, but I know this: if more than ten people ever see it, at least one of them will observe that it's got the black people oppressing the white people. The following is my explanation of how I arrived at this predicament, with some comments on what I'm striving to do about it.

( Read more... )

We had our first rehearsal today for The Hour before Morning. Trisha and Sam rocked as Meravyn and Trenod having marital problems. They both utterly understand their characters and have clearly been practicing a lot on their own. Trisha donated a cast of her skull as a set decoration. Very cool, very telepathic:)

I have updated the Hour before Morning web page, complete with new cast photos. More to come soon.

The poor thing is nearing the limits of my 1998 HTML 4.0 powers. Soon I will have to locate someone who will do us a proper site.

For now, yay, we have all three leads cast, and they are all really good! Also a really good Akhté and Trenod. We are still searching for the perfect fit for Ned'yem if anyone in the Eugene/Portland Oregon area is interested...

Here's the very first bit of my movie, The Hour before Morning, to make it on to film. It's an audition for the role of Akhté by Johan K., sent to us all the way from Sweden. His interpretation of the character is quite different from the Akhté in my head, which is one of the exciting things about collaboration. Other people can really teach you things about your characters!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWMLCG4aqc4