FORGE: A Feature Film by 500 Cuts

FORGE trailer 10.16 from 500 Cuts on Vimeo.

Paul, a recently fired chef, decides to check on his older brother, John, after an explosion at the research facility where John works.  Paul arrives at the family cabin and learns that John is holed-up in a hidden underground lab, and to complicate matters, Paul’s sketchy younger brother Jimmy is there hiding from loan sharks.  Paul rebukes Jimmy and reaches out to John whose history of mental illness dates back to the death of their father.

A visit from lab officials tells Paul that John was let go from the lab months before and may be working with stolen technology.  In an effort to help John stabilize his mental health, Paul agrees to connect with the technology to improve its ability to make decisions.

When Paul’s dreams come to life, he pleads with John to shut the system down only to find that John is farther gone than he originally thought, and that John’s intentions for the mind-reading tech are deeply rooted in his madness.

As part of my sabbatical obligations, I need to bring my experiences from the movie back to the Art Institute community.  I’ll be giving a 1 hour talk about the process which will include behind-the-scenes clips and scenes from the film.  The exact date has not been confirmed, but it’s looking like November 11th or 12th.  For those of you associated with the school, that’s week 6.

The presentation will be followed by Q&A.

The official full length screening of FORGE will take place in early January.  Why the delays?  (insert time is money speech here:  less money = more time)

Keep an eye out for the trailer release later today.

Forge Scenes 38 – 41 from 500 Cuts on Vimeo.

After John (Jeffree Newman) kills some thugs with The Tech, Paul (Luke Clements) scrambles to grab the keys to their car. To his surprise, Amanda (Jana Lee Hamblin) has come looking for him. He does his best to convince her everything is fine. He returns to the lab to find Jimmy (Alexander Mendeluk) and John have cleaned up. Dinner conversation isn’t what it used to be in the aftermath.

Usual Disclaimers: The mix, color correction, and vfx are all temp.

A couple days ago, I set an internal/personal goal of finishing the movie by September 20th.  I also set a goal of learning the full production workflow for visual effects.  Those two goals are butting heads right now.

I have a handful of very talented people helping me out, but they’re also very busy.  That makes everything take longer because every practical tweak or conceptual alteration takes weeks to implement since the schedules never seem to be in sync.  I was really hoping one or two people would take ownership of the complicated shots to build their portfolio, but that’s a lot to ask with all the other opportunities that come up for hard-working visual effects artists in Portland.

But I’ve found inspiration in District 9.  So well made.  Just goes to show where perseverance and a great idea gets you in this industry.

So now I go into zero distraction mode to get this project together.  Gotta build a priority list and stick to it.  As I’ve said before, it’s hard to focus on one thing when there’s so much other stuff to do.  But that’s all there is to it at this point.  Nothing tricky.  Just make the list and check off the items one by one.

I’m pushing forward to get the movie in good enough shape to submit to some of the bigger festivals.  I’m not optimistic about my chances, but I like to think of rejection as proof that I tried.

P.S. Don’t say “industry.”

Things are going really well on the movie so far, but man, the clock is ticking!  I have about 10% of the visual effects shots completed.  Of course, 80% of them are simple screen replacements so they’re not hard, just numerous!

In other news, I recently had coffee (I don’t drink coffee!) with my friend of 15 years, Joe Malina.  We hung out pretty much daily back in ‘96, then I got a girlfriend and screwed that all up.  Nevertheless, we met while taking classes at The Northwest Film Center, and made a few small projects together.  One of which was a no-dialog short shot on 16mm about a guy dealing with loneliness after a recent breakup.  It was Joe’s concept, and we hashed it out together over a burrito at La Sirenitas (the Siren, get it?) back before they got huge. It’s still one of my favorite shorts.   Those were really good times.

The guy who acted in it, David Rolfe, is now the head of broadcast at the globally dominant ad agency, Crispin, Porter, Bogusky.  And the guy who lived in the apartment in which we shot it is now a chef instructor at the school where I work, The Art Institute of Portland.  It’s funny because the culinary program just started there, and I haven’t see the apartment guy, Dave McIntyre, in about 12 years.  Now Joe tells me he works where I work!  That’s classic Portland.

Anyway, Joe is a colorist for film and video.  He trained up at Downstream back in the day, but now lives in Austin, TX and works there and in Dallas.  He was in Portland to visit his wife’s family and looked me up.  It was like we hadn’t missed a day.  What a great feeling to have old friends turn up, and you still have stuff to talk about!

Thanks for checking in.  More as it develops.

I’m trying to get a few people started on the visual effects since that will take the most trial and error and therefore, the most time.  Here’s a rough I did in photoshop to give Rafael an idea of what I’m thinking for the shot.  This literally took 5 mins, but I think it’ll do a better job describing my concept than a half hour phone call.

Before

After

Let me just say that when you have a lot to do on a project, sometimes the thing you’re currently doing isn’t nearly as interesting as the stuff you still have to do. Not to say that I don’t like editing… I love it… but after editing a few hours, I start thinking about playing around with Realflow or Houdini (software applications for visfx). Then I think I might need a better graphics card so I start shopping. It’s a battle to stay on task and keep the focus going.

So here I am, updating the blog and talking about focus! Back to it! Hunker down!

I’ve reached scene 33 out of 66 scenes.  It’s not technically the halfway point in the what will ultimately be the running time of the movie, but close enough!  Back at it m0re today.  But I may have to take a break to edit some sounds on a couple commercials.  Gotta pay the bills!

One of the tricks of editing, in my opinion, is to not have any favorites when you start the process. “Kill your darlings” or “Drown the puppies” or whatever your old expression of choice may be, you have to be aware that what you think is the best part of the take could be the thing that is ruining the rest of the scene. Listen for the warning signs. If you hear yourself saying, “It doesn’t make sense, but this is my favorite joke in the script!” or “He flubs the line, but that little smirk is perfect!” then you know that you’re making the wrong decisions.

One way to protect yourself from this kind of editing blindness is to get a little distance from the material. In other words, take a few days off after you’ve put together your rough.

More soon!

Co’s pretty much correct on both images below. In an early screen test, we shot at Tom’s apartment and realized that it has some very beautiful natural light. Very often it seems as though there’s an inclination to light everything. Sometimes even though natural light looks beautiful, actually lighting a scene makes more sense for continuity, controlability, etc etc….In the case of Toms apartment, we knew that we wanted to shoot with the natural light, and so we did! We weren’t there for very long, and so continuity wasn’t going to be an issue. There was plenty of light in there, and we were stopped down to a 2.8 on the 50mm lens. An added bonus is a shot where Paul (played by Luke Clements) is in silhouette at the window looking out upon an element that will be added digitally. Coincidentally, the silhouette provides a very clean edge “live matte” that will make it a lot easier for the FX people to add our digital elements in the background.

Co and I scouted the kitchen scene the night before we shot, and I pretty much decided that I would supplement the lighting that already existed in the kitchen- and for the most part, we just went with the existing light! We had two 4′ 4 bank flourescent fixtures with 5000k tubes, and those provided all of the additional light that we needed. We shot the screenshot below on the 50mm, and we were wide open at f1.4. Normally, I try to not shoot wide open because I feel the image loses sharpness, but in this case I felt that the existing light worked so well that we just went with the wide open lens. and brought in light where we could.

In the end, I feel that the scene has exactly the look we wanted, and a nice side effect of using natural/existing light is that the scene looks “un-lit”. As I thought about it, I also realized that the natural light of the apartment provides a nice transition state from the unnatural, manmade kitchen light to the very earthy feel of the cabin.

A small tangent about our camera setup- When shooting film, whether it be stills or motion, the sensitivity of the emulsion is referred to as the ISO. In simple terms, the higher the ISO number, the more sensitive the film is to light. You might say well, so what? Films with a higher ISO tend to yield more “grain” in the final image. With modern film stocks, this has become less of an issue, but often times in the “olden days”, movies were photographed with effective ISO’s as little as 25! To put it into perspective- your mom probably took photos at your 8th birthday party using 400-800 speed film. Now, as time went on so did advances in film but even so, it wasn’t too long ago that motion pictures were still being photographed at 100 ISO. Essentially, this means you need a ton of light to expose your subject! When outdoors, this isn’t so much of a problem since the sun is ridiculously bright, but when you consider lighting a subject that would otherwise be completely black, you really have to pump in the light.

FORGE was shot digitally, but the rules of ISO still apply, and the factors that go into lighting an image captured on film or on digital are exactly the same. Through testing and reading about other experiences, we pretty much surmised that the effective sensitivity of the HVX200 is around 320 ISO. Not too shabby! But here’s the hitch, we weren’t just using the HVX alone- we were taking advantage of the Letus Extreme 35mm adapter. A large part of the “look” of the film is thanks to the 35mm adapter we were using, but it does come at a price. In simple terms, this device allows 35mm still lenses to be mounted on the front of the HVX, that would otherwise have just a fixed lens. Without getting too much into the physics of light and optics that go on inside this adapter (you can read about that HERE) I will just say that it steals a lot of light that would otherwise go into the lens. Long story short? Our 320 ISO camera becomes a 160 ISO camera.

This isn’t always a problem, but it does have to be taken into account ALL of the time. The amount of light needed to get proper exposure is exponentially increased compared to a faster camera. By the way, “faster” in this case means more sensitive to light, “higher ISO” if you will. It’s a constant battle. Bigger lights take more power, and cost more money. In the case of this shoot, we took advantage of using HMI lighting. HMI lights are about 5 times more efficient per-watt than tungsten lights. So, our little 575 watt PAR really pumps out a lot of light for not much power draw- very important when filming at a practical location without the luxury of a big generator.

Please stay tuned for more screen grabs and technical discussions of the scenes!