“By Night, My Love”

When we first meet Anna — our Girl in “A Girl and a Gun” — she mentions having starred in a film in her native Kansas… a film titled “By Night, My Love”. It was that experience that brought her out to Los Angeles.

This film is mentioned a few times and it’s the sole credit on her headshot. As such, we’re planning to shoot some footage from this film and put together a faux trailer, which we could then use as a promotional tool for “A Girl and a Gun”… in a similar manner that Hotel Chevalier served The Darjeeling Limited.

The role Anna plays in “By Night, My Love” is that of a classic femme fatale. Thus, I thought I’d shoot it in the style of a period noir… black and white, with voiceover narration, as if Anna had emerged from another place and time… a Kansas that hadn’t changed since the 50s. And, when it comes to the narration, I’ve always been stuck by the directness and strange grandeur of Sydney Greenstreet’s introduction to “The Maltese Falcon”… a role he would later rehash in the despicably hilarious “Across the Pacific”.

I guess the real challenge will be finding someone who resembles and sounds like Sydney… and then cramming all the requisite buzzwords into the trailer’s narration: astounding, astonishing, fabulous, incredible, fascinating, unbelievably exciting and diabolical. Oriental treachery, however, might not make the cut.

 

“A Girl and a Gun” Keyframes and Storyboards

Here are a few keyframes by storyboard artist Janet Kusnick (Kill Bill Vol. 2, The Road, The Day the Earth Stood Still), who also storyboarded most of the film.

The storyboards for “A Girl and a Gun” can be found here, in a private, password-protected gallery.

“A Fedora and a Thumb”

  

Features Showreel & “Dustclouds” Clips

Features Show Reel:

  

“Dustclouds” Clips:

Understanding (Part 1)

Understanding (Part 2)

Delirium Waltz

Journey Outward

Mrs. Casanova and the Dust

“Sandcastles” and “Dustclouds” at 9th Annual Polish Film Festival in Los Angeles

Here are some pictures for the films’ screenings at the 9th Annual Polish Film Festival in Los Angeles… as well as from the Gala Opening at the Director’s Guild of America.

“Sandcastles” and “Dustclouds” Screening Together at Laemmle’s Sunset 5

Screening together for the first time:                                    Laemmle’s Sunset 5

Wednesday, April 30th                                                       8000 Sunset Blvd.

Sandcastles 4:00pm                                                         West Hollywood, 90046

Dustclouds  5:30pm                                                         View Map

Followed by a Q&A with Irina Björklund and me.

“A Girl and a Gun”

“All you need for a movie is a girl and a gun.”
– Jean-Luc Godard

When I decided to write a Los Angeles based story, I had certain criteria and self-imposed limitations in mind. That, and Godard’s famous quote. The criteria concerned subject matter, tone and aesthetic, while the limitations were anticipatory and dealt with financial plasticity… it meant writing a story that could be dressed-up or dressed-down to fit any budget.

My intention was to come up with a fairly simple, modern, neo-noir plot. It needed a salient love story, which I wanted to center around a street-tough kid and a beautiful girl with a gun, and all the usual, noir sordidness. I already spent enough time in Los Angeles to know what I would use as a backdrop: the after-hours speakeasies, desolate downtown streets, outdoor markets and neighborhood taco stands. Pit them against the lives of the Hollywood elite and you’ve got an interesting dichotomy.

When it came time to register the project and make it official, I had to give it a working title. So, in keeping with Godard’s formula, I decided on “A Girl and a Gun”.

Once I knocked out the first draft treatment, which was about twenty pages long and took me four months to write, the process picked up considerable steam. A few weeks later, I had a thirty-four page treatment, which I began to circulate amongst friends and industry folks. The response was universally positive. At present, a few weeks since then, I’m looking at a forty-some page scriptment, which contains all the major dialogue.

The next step is to write the actual script, which should come in at seventy pages and yield a ninety minute film. Run time is, of course, a concern. Since this is meant to be a commercial venture, I must keep everything lean and mean. Coming off of “Dustclouds” (a robust, 144 minutes epic, edited down from a 165 minute work-print!!), the idea of working on a ninety minute film seems like no work at all.

With all that said, I’m now certain “A Girl with a Gun” will be my next project. “Accidentally on Purpose” will have to wait. Given the enormity of “Accidentally on Purpose,” I somehow think that this is for the best. If I were to do it now, I would have to face countless compromises, which the project was not equipped to handle; with “A Girl and a Gun,” I’m accounting for them. Furthermore, the script for “Accidentally on Purpose” still needs some serious work. I took it back to index-cards / outline twice last year and, although I finally have the story pinned down, it still needs a proper, dedicated rewrite. Beyond these two projects, “Blue Skies Bring Tears” is still a collection of notes, quotes, images and loose dialogues. I wish I had the mind to commit all of it to paper and come up with a basic outline or a simple draft treatment, but I find it impossible to inhabit all these worlds at once. For now, it’s “A Girl with a Gun” and the LA hipster world of my street urchin Ian.

A New, “Untitled” Los Angeles Project

So, what initially grew out of a need to a.) keep myself creatively challenged, b.) remain technically sharp and c.) test out the new “RED ONE” camera, has turned into a far larger project than was first anticipated.

At first, my idea was to shoot some documentary footage of downtown Los Angeles: its homeless, sidewalk vendors, open-air markets, late-night taco stands, and architecture (in all its states of construction, de-construction and re-construction)… as well as the city’s miscellany of cultures. The “RED ONE” is small and light-weight, and when pared down, has a prosumer / camcorder look, which I thought would prove perfect for this style of “guerrilla” shooting.

But then, as happens so often, a story surfaced. Slowly, the project began to shift into the realm of fiction. I wanted to keep the story simple: a girl, fresh from the heartland, a street-tough boy looking to make a buck and a gun. Its setting: Los Angeles as “Paradise Lost”. I constructed a basic, three act plot outline in Scrivener… and then ideas started coming at an ever-increasing rate. After a few weeks (of writing and restless obsessing), the outline produced a twenty page, feature film treatment.

My first year in Los Angeles has been a mixed bag of emotions. Within the first few month of being here, I began to sense darkness behind the city’s glamorous veneer. Los Angeles, with all its promise, is often brutal on young, ambitious people. More often than not, what they envision as being the proximity of success is merely an illusion. I see thousands of these faces, in stores, bars and cafes; all of them waiting for their moment to arrive. In that regard, I am just like them. This realization deeply saddened me. The industry and the human condition. This talent held in suspense. It looms like low death.

These brooding realizations coincided with the double suicides of New York artists Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Blake. A few weeks after their death, I read an article about them in New York Magazine. The article made mention of this exact disillusionment, which Theresa and Jeremy faced during their time in Los Angeles. In some respects, as trapped as they had become by their own machinations, I shared many of their views and observations. I could totally see how Los Angeles could make a person become that paranoid.

Furthermore, that same NY Mag article included a quote from Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust. That happens to be one of twenty books I brought with me to Los Angeles (the New Directions’ Paperback Edition: Miss Lonelyhearts & The Day of the Locust, the former being one of my all-time favorites), so I immediately reread it. My observations were quite different from West’s. I didn’t see boredom and emptiness as much as I did jealousy, cold, soul-sucking self-interest and, of course, a deep-seated paranoia, which breeds further paranoia. In my opinion, these aspects dominate and propel the industry and, as such, they inevitably permeated and guided my story.

“Sandcastles” HD Mastering: Color Grading and SFX Work

Here are a few finished sample clips. Please note the color grading on the bottom clip. Compare it to the work clips from the previous entry; an amazing transformation.

The digital color correction and grading were done in Color by Jeremiah Belt, who works out of Fresno. He and I did a lot of prep work over the net and by sending hard drives back and forth… and then, when we were close to settling on all the looks, I drove up to Fresno for a crazy, 24 hour color session, during which we did all the final tweaks. Then, in the interest of time, I synched the whole project and did the final renders back on my rig in LA. The workflow was a breeze. And the results are stunning… especially considering what the source footage looked like.

Lastly, all the compositing was done by Anthony Barcello, whom I mentioned in the entry below.

Four years in the making, the film finally looks as I had intended.

 

 

 

“Sandcastles” HD Mastering, Step by Step: Before and After

No one will ever (EVER!) appreciate how ridiculously time consuming this has been. I re-captured all my source footage last year. I re-edited the whole film, using an old, DV master as my guide, thus recreating my original, DV timeline. I then exported each clip, cut by cut (of course, leaving some heads and tails) and imported those individual clips into Shake.

Once in Shake, I converted / up-rezed each clip from DV NTSC 29.97 fps, (interlaced, anamorphic 16:9, 853×420) to Uncompressed 8bit 4:2:2 Quicktimes (in the process: de-interlacing, anti-aliasing, tweaking the detail level / sharpening and resizing each clip so as to force it into square pixels) 1280×720, but still keeping it at 29.97 fps.

I then took those 720p, 29.97 fps clips and ran a series of tests on them. Note: each one required different settings when it came to frame-rate conversion. I tested each one with various motion settings (fast, best, flow-smoothness, and flow-precision) but almost always utilizing backward-flow, de-interlacing a second-time and, without exception, re-interpolating all the frames. Lastly, I played with the details setting; keeping the delicate balance between sharpening / over-sharpening and keeping the DVs natural grain.

The last step took me from Uncompressed 8bit 4:2:2 at 29.97 fps to Uncompressed 8bit 4:2:2 at 23.98 fps, all in 1280×720.

Almost all the clips behaved differently and had to be watched frame by frame. Weird, unexplainable artifacting would often occur and it’d have to render four different clips, using four different motion settings, and then cut together a suitable clip from those. Then again, there were quite a few times when I’d substitute out a few frames from my resultant 23.98 fps clip with frames from the mastered, 8bit 29.97 fps source (which I would re-time into 23.98 fps, thus creating a slow-down clip) but, all the while, making sure that the substitution would not result in staccato movement.

Once I finished mastering the clips and they were re-nested in the Final Cut Pro time-line, I would apply two plug-in filters to them:

Nattress G Nicer V2.0 FC16, DV 4:1:1 to 4:4:4 - This plug-in is intended for chroma reconstruction, but it worked beautifully to uncompress DV’s color information, making for smooth, un-pixelated edges, without blurring the image.

Color Smoothing 4:1:1 - A somewhat similar process to the above, this plug-in eliminated some of the red saturation in skin tones and helped (re)construct the image into 4:4:4 color space. The plug-in was not made with this purpose in mind; it was just a happy byproduct I came across.

I then rendered these clips and exported / imported them back into FCP; into a separate, master time-line.

Granted, I only did this a few hours a night (then leaving the clips to render over night), but each, individual clip took me about a week to master… working frame by frame, like an animator. The results, however, are quite great. You might not be able to tell from these low-rez clips, but when watched full-rez, on a 1080p, calibrated, HD display, the difference is colossal.

At the present time, the whole film has been mastered. Some special effects work is still being completed by Anthony Barcelo. He is set to finish all SFX work by November. Beyond that, there is the issue of the opening dream sequence, which needs to be re-done; I’m still looking around for someone with the right mix of motion-graphics talent and experience. And then, lastly, the color correction / grading… which I’ll either do at Nolo with Mike Matusek or here in LA, if I can find someone willing to give it a go using Color or Final Touch HD / 2k.

Sample clips:

480i: Old, from DV master (NTSC, 29.97 fps, interlaced, anamorphic 16:9, encoded in H264). Was never graded or color corrected. Straight from source. 480p / 720p: New, Uncompressed 8bit 4:2:2, 720p Quicktimes (23.98 fps, also in H264). No color manipulation has been performed.

480i: Old, from DV master (NTSC, 29.97 fps, interlaced, anamorphic 16:9, encoded in H264). This clip was previously color graded in After Effects… albeit not very well. 480p / 720p: New, Uncompressed 8bit 4:2:2, 720p Quicktimes (23.98 fps, also in H264). I did some color grading to this. I played with this clip in Color, although I’m clearly not a colorist. I tweaked some elements in the primary phase, giving it more contrast, making it more “filmic” etc. and then added three layers of secondary correction. This simulates what I’d like the finished scene to look like.