The Lightcrafter

The trailer is done. I think it looks and sounds great (thanks Mr. Downey for all your help!) and I’m really happy with it, even if it is just a glimpse of what’s to come. Had a great eval conference with Sally, so I guess aside from tomorrow’s screening (which will be more celebration than class), I’m all done.

The Lightcrafter has a long journey ahead of it still, but I’m so glad I was able to get it the closure it needed for this class… which, I might add, has been an extreme pleasure to be a part of. To work with so many others on such a wide variety of projects was an absolutely incredible experience. I’ve now known almost all of you for the better part of the last two years and it’s a bit sad that now we all have to go our separate ways. I hope we can all keep in contact as the years go on.

Looking forward to tomorrow’s screening!

Audio has begun to come together for The Lightcrafter, all thanks to the musically gifted Sean Downey. We briefly met to work out a few details and brainstorm, and what I heard had me really impressed. Although the project’s lack of completition had me feeling a little bummed at first, I think the trailer is going to look really great.

All that remains aside from audio are a few more shots (still trying to figure out which ones specifically to focus on) and getting some “trailer text” together — all in light painting, of course.

Looking forward to seeing it all coming together at last! (Even in severely condensed form.)

Shooting continues on The Lightcrafter. All I really want is to take a nice long break, but NO! Bad Sean! Plenty of time for that after the 9th. In the meantime, revamping the film is taking full focus.

Sally pointed out that the Light Spirit material in the finale is the strongest stuff, so I’ve been working on fleshing out a few gaps in the sequence to at least get that part complete. Still not sure if I’ll present that in its unbroken entirety though… if I plan on embracing the trailer structure, I wouldn’t have nearly as much good content to pull from the other scenes to carry it. We’ll see how that goes. A lot regarding those details will depend on the forthcoming (and somewhat last-minute but hopefully high quality) music and sound design.

In other news, I just recently caught a glipse of my injury from a couple weeks ago (from falling down in the woods), and was surprised to see the biggest bruise I’ve ever had!

Yikes! Fortunately it looks far worse than it feels (after all, it did take me about two weeks to notice!) — although I should probably take it easy on the running around in the woods when I get back to filming that again.

In other other news, tonight’s shooting culminated in the capturing of the 10,000th file on the Mark II (over 95% of its total history of photographs and video clips being Lightcrafter-related) — quite a feat! There will be many, many more before this is done.

Fine cuts are over. Project obligations certainly are not. While it’s abundantly clear to everyone who saw The Lightcrafter on Thursday that the work I have left to do should probably keep me busy for the next several months, I have far more short-term goals in mind as well.

The fine cut was relieving, but also a bit embarassing. To show something that was that patchwork, without the slightest decibel of audio, especially having it alongside pieces that were actually finished, was a bit depressing, but showing the full structure was important in getting some good feedback.

Now obviously I won’t be showing that version of the film, storyboards and all, to the public on June 9th. Rather, I’m going to take everything I’ve shot that looks good, compile it together alongside some newly shot material, get some nice audio together, and try to make a two to four minute trailer, capitalizing off of the dream structure to be a bit more non-linear in the presentation, but still having the current beginning and ending (although slightly revamped).

In many ways I don’t really feel that up to pulling that off over the next week — I’m a bit drained of vigor for the film at the moment, but I do think I can pull off something really cool with this. It’s a far cry from my original goals, but I don’t want to end the year with a fizzle — it’s gotta be a bang!

Tomorrow is going to be my “fine cut” screening of The Lightcrafter. What it will actually end up being is more of a rough cut with no audio, and only about half of the shots finished or present. And finally, after way too much fretting… I am fine with this. For now at least. There is still much to be done. Hopefully I will be able to get the public screening version substantially closer to my vision, but I imagine that I will still need quite a bit of time to film some of the more complex shots, fine tune the Swordmaster sequence, and work on audio.

Yesterday some significant progress was made — all the remaining bedroom scene shots are done! There’s a chance that I might refilm one or two shots somewhere down the line, but at least the entire beginning and ending scenes are present.

Right now I’m editing… trying to fix up as many shots as I can before the screening, but it seems that there will be quite a bit of absent light painting, so if you see any actors interacting with nothing, that’ll be why.

Overall, I’m proud of what I’ve been able to do, but at the same time really do wish that I wasn’t quite as ambitious with this. Still, no better time than the present to learn from mistakes.

Two words: utterly overwhelmed.

I have 117 shots left to film, after cutbacks, disregarding several thousand additional photos of light painting to be composited in.

With five days to go before the fine cut, I have had to step back and look at the project as a whole to re-evaluate my strategy and goals for what I’m going to do with it. Without the slightest shadow of a doubt, I know that this cannot be finished in time. Instead, I’m trying to figure out where to focus my attention. Do I spend the rest of my time making light entities (particularly the ones that steal away the flashlight) so that I don’t have actors pantomiming? Do I fill in the gaps of the finale so that the whole thing ends with a visually spectacular bang? Do I just throw up my hands and say “OK! No more filming!” and whittle away at the mountain of editing that I already have?

It’s disappointing that I can’t do more than one. The project is not going to be what I hoped, not at all… not yet. I’m beginning to take a more long-term view on it. It’s turned into something that if I spent the entire summer filming and editing, I’m still not confident that it would get done. And I’m also beginning to feel OK with that. Like with all my previous projects, this has above all been a learning experience, and a fantastic one at that. While it may be unfortunate that all my films end up turning into something to learn from rather than something that I’m completely satisfied with, there is still so much time left to get things right. The Lightcrafter will be something quite cool when it’s all finished, but even now I see things that need some improvement that cannot be refilmed (some of the shots with Trevor, for instance).

It’s also getting to the point where so much has come crashing down that I know if I tried to press on and cobble together a “fine cut,” it would kill me. I already injured myself in the chase scene while running in those darn slippers and don’t really feel like shooting video of me running around. Another very unfortunate thing that happened is that my most-used camera accessory — the wireless remote — appears to be broken, meaning that light painting can only occur if we hold down the shutter on the camera itself (severely, severely limiting the angles I can light paint from, and it also causes more shake and blur in the photographs), and if the only way to continue light painting is to sacrifice quality for expediency, I say “no way.” Harmony has had it up to here (insert very tall, sweeping gesture here) with the project and has long deserved a break from all the work she’s done, leaving me with no one to work on it with. I don’t feel that great anymore — yesterday I felt so overwhelmed and generally “blah” that practically nothing was even accomplished. Another day of zero productivity will sound the death knell of the project, at least as far as the public screening goes.

Rant, rant, rant.

Anyways, like I said, what’s troubling me the most is trying find out where to set my focus. I know that it would look unprofessional to have storyboard/animatic material spliced in to fill the gaps, but it’s either that or I completely ditch trying to follow the storyline.

All I want to do right now is lay down, spend some time with Harmony, and relax. I don’t have the mental energy to think about this anymore.

What in the bloody hell am I going to do.

I am so tired. Very productive day, but jeez… I’m not too far from passing out from exhaustion.

We finished all of Trevor’s scenes today. Some heavy editing will be required on many of the photos (it was a 90% light painting shoot), and some of the shots may not be as good as I had hoped, but I think it’s about time I put perfectionism aside and settled for “good.” After all, the fine cut is in six days.

I also started working on audio, finally. Hopefully I can get everything with that finished by Wednesday, which is the last day I have the TASCAM.

Well, that’s about all I have to say, and I’m feeling pretty loopy so I’m gonna call it a night.

Yesterday’s shoot was about as could as I can reasonably expect anymore. We didn’t get everything done, but quite a lot of it, which I’m fine with. Thankfully, Trevor offered to work more tonight, which is when we’ll get the light painting done for our brief battle scene. Thanks a bundle Trevor! You’ve given up a lot for this movie!

Also a great big thank you to Sorrelle and Sarah Alspach for helping out with lighting. It is very very tricky to light things up in the woods and it wouldn’t have worked without you. We also had a bit of a scare when the copper prop flashlight suddenly died. Turns out there were bad connections inside it, and Sarah managed to hotwire it with some wire running between the batteries and the connection points. It worked great and truly saved the shoot.

Earlier in the day I dragged my iMac all the way across campus and back for monitor calibration (still having problems with dark levels though), and filmed with James for about four hours downtown as the impromptu main character for his “Fortune Cookie” vignette, running all over the place and eating somewhere around 20 fortune cookies. It was a very tiring but fun and productive day. Hopefully today will at least be able to carry the latter of those three traits. It is for sure going to be the last day of Trapmaker-related shooting unless some horrible catastophe happens. Hmmm… I probably shouldn’t have said that.

Today has been a relieving if not entirely productive (so far) day. I talked with Sally about the state of things and it relaxed me a bit — although it also invigorated new hopes in me that if I can get the current structure completed nicely for the week 9 fine cut, I might be able to use week 10 to do a large amount of sound design tweaks and maybe, just maybe putting the visually ridiculous second half of the sword fight back into the movie if editing doesn’t take as long as I’ve feared. I’ve poured so much time into shooting material for it, and James has given up plenty of his own as well, that I would feel bad not getting it in there. It’s also probably going to look really cool.

Mostly I spent the day scrambling about to prepare for an impromptu change of future plans. I hope to get an internship through Dave Cramton and Peter Randlette working in the new and amazing CCAM studio in the library. I wrote up my application, letter of interest, and résumé and got it all taken care of super fast. I’m informally meeting up with Dave on Friday to chat about it some. I have high hopes about this — this is the perfect opportunity to spend my final year.

But anyways, Lightcrafter. I talked with Tommy today and through testing footage on a different monitor, I found out that the background detail actually is there, and that my monitor just needs some serious recalibration such that I can see it. Yay! That means no reshoots. Thank God. (Also thank God for being able to find replacement flashlight bulbs that work! That means I now have to reshoot some things when the flashlight was broken. But still a big yay overall!)

There’s a big shoot tomorrow that will hopefully end The Trapmaker’s portion of the project. I don’t have anyone assisting me aside from Harmony yet, but I think we might be able to do OK. Getting that taken care of will be a huge relief. In fact, once those shots are taken care of, I just have to get one head shot of Harmony as the Light Spirit and a few arm close-ups and then all the characters aside from me will be wrapped up. The remaining stuff of me is still daunting as I haven’t focused on it in a couple weeks, but… it is manageable! There’s still “light” for this project! It… could… work!

With all that taken care of, I need to get to some shooting now, and probably some editing as well. Busy day. And did I mention it was my birthday?