Big progress!

Howdy folks!

So between working into the wee hours last night and pretty much all of today, I have managed to edit the ENTIRE set of sequences that occur on the jungle planet. This represents the majority of the film and is a good sign that we might actually be able to complete this thing by the end of the month.

As expected, and described in a previous post, we'll need to return to the woods for a few pick up shots of Clayton the Sleeper in order for all of the pieces to come together as they should, but the Stormy stuff is all GREAT! It's pretty fun to watch as it is right now, even without the special effects and audio work. So it just gets better and better from here.

Today I took this edit of the jungle footage to Bill to get his take on things. He always has his own ideas about what should be changed or adjusted, so now I have a few tweaks to do so that we're both happy with it. Not much though as we have now worked on several films together so I have a pretty good sense for what he likes to see. This is a good system as it provides the opportunity for an outside perspective of the scene that the editor has assembled. For example, I cut together the swordfight footage at a pace that I felt was both slow enough to understand and yet fast enough to be exciting... but after looking at the same footage for hours it becomes difficult to tell how the pacing "reads" to a first time viewer. So by showing it to Bill I get the first feedback on whether it was a little too fast or too slow or too confusing. But so far we're in pretty good shape and it's time to move on to editing the cockpit scenes to complete the first full edit of the movie. Still aiming for a full edit of the film to be complete by Friday.

Below is a shot of Stormy on the wrong end of a tazer-like device.

Later,

John

Fight Scenes!

Currently I've got about 8 solid minutes of the film completely edited. Doesn't sound like much on paper, but this footage accounts for the first three hours of filming that we did in the woods. It's also one of the major fight sequences of the film.

Fights take a long time to film. You end up with a lot of really great footage and you also end up throwing a lot of it away. The more you throw out, the faster the fight moves, which makes it more exciting and more cinematic. There's a lot of perfectly good footage that gets tossed, but it's mostly just variations of a particular move that you need. For example, if we have Stormy kick Clayton and he falls to the ground, you only need to see the kick once in the movie... but we may FILM it 4 or 5 times looking for an angle that makes the hit convincing, or that looks particularly powerful... or just looks cool in general. That's not to say that the ones that get tossed are bad, we just keep the BEST one for the movie.

We're getting better at this in stages. We once deliberately minimize fights scenes in an effort to avoid the mess of putting them together. The first big fight production was a major catfight in the upcoming Sangor Syndrome. Maria and another actress, both playing vampire babes, basically just started wailing on each other for hours. The result was about 2 and a half hours of footage that cuts together into a 4 minute vampire catifight. VERY cool, but slow to produce.

Nightveil: The Sorcerer's Eye has another major catfight... even more complicated since it's Maria Paris fighting against herself as she plays Nightveil, Blue Bulleteer and Alizarin Crimson all in battle at once in the big finale.

Stormy Tempest: Perils in the Past was the first time that we managed to do a major fight sequence in a reasonable amount of time...mostly due to necessity. We were at a comic book convention. It was the ONLY day we could POSSIBLY do the scene. We were down to one camera and about 1 hour of film... and we had no ENDING to the movie that we had been shooting all day. So we just went nuts, making it up as we went along with no plan whatsoever and no second chances... and it actually turned out to be pretty spectacular as Stormy faces off against three attackers at once. It was exactly the finale the film needed and we learned that if push comes to shove, we could film a fight sequence fast.

Getting braver, we next tackled Nyoka. Nyoka was designed to be ALL action, with minimal dialog and plot in the style of the old 40's cliffhangers. Nyoka has proven to be very popular and we're very proud of the results. It has the kind of sexy action that we now strive for in all future films.

So here we are with Stormy Tempest: Unmasked... and our goal this time around is to make a "Nyoka-style" film with lots of action and combat, but with the special effects and sci-fi craziness necessary to make a live action comic book. So far, it's working out pretty great!!!

I should also mention that one of the reasons why our fight scenes have improved so much lately is because Nicola Rae is FABULOUS! She doesn't actually know martial arts or anything, but she has training in stage combat and she's an EXCELLENT physical performer, plus she's gorgeous and over 6 feet tall in the Stormy boots. She'd look cool just reading the phone book... let alone kicking some bounty hunter's butt.

That's all for now. I'll add another picture to the blog tomorow.

Later,
John

Stormy Crushed

Hey folks. Nothing much to report. Tweaked a little of the footage and recorded some dialog for S.H.I.P., Stormy's A.I. co-pilot. Here's a picture though!

Later,
John

The Battle Begins

As you can see from the screenshot below, Stormy Tempest's first encounter with the bounty hunter Clayton the Sleeper does not go well.

Which reminds me, if you're afraid of spoilers you should probably skip this blog. I won't lay out for you every detail of what happens in the movie, but it's hard to talk about making the movie without talking about the movie itself.

Today I finally got into really editing together the movie. I managed to assemble about 5 minutes of the film I think. I'm starting with the jungle stuff, partially because it's the most critical part of the film requiring a lot of effects work... and also because it's the most fun!

We're going to try to populate the "alien jungle" with a few shots of dinosaur-like creatures and alien critters... not so much because the movie REQUIRES it, but just to see if we can pull it off. You never really know how "do-able" something is until you try to do it. Our first pass at CGI people goes all the way back to Nightveil: WitchWar, which was rough, but technology has much improved since then. We kicked it up a notch with Stormy Tempest: Attack of the Giantess during her battle with the flying rocketmen which turned out pretty decent. So now we'll see if we can do a few critters. Don't expect Avatar or Jurassic Park here though folks. If it doesn't work out, they may not appear in the final version of the film at all.

So today I focused on scenes where CGI critters may appear. Once that's complete, I can start planning the effects... how long the dino should appear and what it should be doing. I'll probably do a few of them myself, but I also plan to recruit Bill Marimon for some assistance (he did most of the CGI rendering for Planet of the Damned). I haven't told him that yet though. :)

No idea what will happen this weekend as always. I'll try to keep the updates going and try to keep pushing the film forward, but who knows. Next on my editing plate is a brief laser fight between Stormy and an invisible ("cloaked") Clayton. This laser battle occurs shortly before the scene you see below. Poor Stormy...

Later,
John

Cutting Complete!

Yee-Haw!! Finished cutting all of the footage into clips shortly after lunch today. 3 hours and 26 minutes of footage turned into who-knows-how-many-hundreds of individual cuts for a final film that will probably be 30 minutes long. Still have a lot of "day job" stuff to do though, so this is probably it for today. Tomorrow I can start putting this thing together. The plan is to begin with the jungle planet scenes first. I KNOW we have plenty of stuff for Clayton's cockpit scenes. Reshooting Stormy in her cockpit is not an option now that Nicola Rae is no longer in the state. We must make that work one way or another. So the only section of the movie that may require additional shooting is the stuff in the jungle.

We did a few minor reshoots for Nyoka and I suspect we may have to do a couple for this film as well. Nothing major. There's not a lot you can do without your lead actress, however, where we most often miss things is in the little transitional stuff. For example, in one shot Nyoka may be on the ground and in the following shot she's on her feet...but we never filmed her actually GETTING UP! So the solution is to cut away to a shot of Crimson Skull, creating an interval of time during which the viewer can understand that "oh, she must have stood up while the bad guy was talking". THIS is the reason why we prefer our bad guys to have full face masks! Pierson, our new bounty hunter, is ALSO out of state, but we can put ANYBODY in that costume and still get any transitional shots we may need. I made a cameo appearance in Nyoka as the Crimson Skull in 3 quick shots for the reasons described above. I may have to be Clayton the Bounty Hunter if we are missing similar shots this time... but there's no way to know what you might have missed until you start putting things together.

Below is a shot of the lovely Nicola Rae in her spiffy styrofoam cockpit! This is how it looks before we modify it, but once we add a bit of color correction, sound effects and the cool floating viewscreens, the cockpit takes on a new life and becomes much more visually interesting.

...but with legs like that onscreen, if you're hung up on the cheezy cockpit, I can't help you. :)

Later,
John

Clayton the Sleeper

Below is a shot of Stormy's new nemesis, Clayton the Sleeper. He has a bit of a crush on Stormy (who doesn't?!?!), but that doesn't stop him from taking her down with his arsenal of weaponry, including a stun pistol, flare cannon, wrist-mounted power-sucking tazer, tracking goggles, cloaking device, sword, "monofilament nano-weave" snare and tranquilizer spray. Stormy's in for a rough day.

Today I continued creating cuts from the footage we took of Clayton in his cockpit. We did fairly well keeping on schedule during the shoot... except for Clayton in his cockpit. I figured we could bust that out in less than 30 minutes, but we ended up spending nearly two hours on it. Granted this is mostly because we sat around gabbing, hanging out and fooling around, but in retrospect this is one of the scenes that we could have and should have spent far less time with. But hey, we had fun, and there's a lot to be said for that also.

I probably have another 30 minutes of cutting to do on Clayton's footage, which is probably an hour or two's worth of labor, but then it's on to assembling the film itself. Can't wait!

Here's the pic of Clayton. Stay tuned tommorrow and I'll throw up a pic of Stormy.

Moving Right Along

Still in the rather boring process of splitting the film into individual cuts. The good news is, today I made significant progress. All of the scenes that occur "on the alien planet" have been cut, as have all of Stormy's cockpit scenes. This only leaves the cuts remaining for Clayton the Sleeper's cockpit scenes and then I'll be ready to actually assemble these individual pieces and edit the film, which is much more fun and creative. Basically this "phase" of creating the cuts is about 80% over and I hope to finish cutting tomorrow. My goal is to be editing the film by the end of the week and to FINISH editing the film by the end of next week...then it's on to adding special effects and soundtracks. I'm a little ahead of schedule I think, but I'm sure that won't last.

The other bit of good news is that I made some screenshots from the film to share with anyone that might be reading our blog here. Rather than dumping them out all at once, I'll try to add one semi-daily with each blog posting. And so below you get your first look at Stormy's new adversary, the not-quite-notorious bounty hunter... Clayton the Sleeper.

Slight Detour

Howdy all!

So today I accomplished...absolutely nothing! Well, that's not exactly true, I just didn't get to edit anymore of the film. Instead, my efforts today were focused on marketing and promotion.

While researching MySpace marketing tips, I stumbled upon a service called TubeMogul. Basically it's a service that allows you to upload your video once and then TubeMogul "syndicates" your uploaded video to many different video sites all at once. So in one step, I can upload a trailer to YouTube, MySpace, blip.tv, Yahoo and several others that I've never even heard of. This will allow us to get all of our clips and trailers spread out to multiple video sites in a short amount of time and hopefully help to reach a few more people. The most important thing for us at this stage is to spread the word about our filmmaking efforts and hopefully grow our fanbase. We appreciate the time and effort that some fans have taken upon themselves to help us spread the word via thier own blogs and websites.

Which reminds me, I REALLY need to work on link exchanging also. Our links page has been empty for months now! If you're a webmaster and you have a related site or you make related films, please let me know at contact@ cultretro.com and I'll add you to our links page. We'd appreciate a link in return, but it's not required or anything. We've stumbled upon some cool film and comics sites and it's past time that we roll out some of those links.

So... in theory... tomorrow I should make MUCH more progress on Stormy Unmasked and I promise to work on getting some pics up here!

Later,
John

Same process, different day

Howdy, folks!

Still working on cutting the film down into individual cuts. Everything looks pretty good and I can start visualizing how things are going to come together. Currently I'm getting through about 15 minutes of footage every hour. If I could just sit down and be left alone without interruption, I could probably finish generating all of the cuts in about 2 days, but that's not how things go. Real life must occur and none of us can devote our full time to the movies just yet, though both Bill and myself would like to. It's good to have dreams.

As I'm throwing out the bad stuff, I'm also setting aside cuts that I know won't be use in the film but might be good for the bloopers. We don't really take filming too seriously and we're all just running around the woods like idiots and laughing and having fun with it, so there are always plenty of flubbed lines and smart comments from both actors and crew alike. We have fun making these things and we hope that it shows in both the film itself and in the bloopers.

Tomorrow is a work day, rather than a weekend, so I anticipate that tomorrow I should make much more progress.

Hope to post some screenshots from the film tomorrow so you can get a look at Stormy's new cleavage-enhanced costume and our new steampunk-cowboy bounty hunter, Clayton the Sleeper.

Later,
John

Breaking Down the Footage

Currently I'm working on breaking the footage up into usable cuts. Basically you watch the footage and insert a splice everytime Bill says "action" and another splice when he says "cut". It's a little more precise than that as what you are REALLY looking for is the point at which the performer begins to give you something that you can possibly use and then the point at which the performer stops performing. This gives you all of the usable shots of the film, which doesn't mean that they will ACTUALLY get used. That comes later when you are actually assembling the cuts in sequence.

It's tempting to start putting some of these shots in sequence now, trimming them together to see how the movie is going to look... but the movie as a whole goes faster if I can keep myself from "playing with it" at this stage. Better to isolate all of the cuts first. It's not fun or rewarding really, but it gives me a chance to see what we've actually got and increases my familiarity with the footage. The fun stuff is coming, but this might take a few days, depending upon how many hours a day I have the opportunity to work on it.

Pierson looks awesome as our steampunk-cowboy villian and Nicola Rae is breathtaking. I need to remember to put some screenshots up here!

John

The Sangor Syndrome

While John edits STORMY TEMPEST: UNMASKED, I'm back working on THE SANGOR SYNDROME. The first half of SANGOR will be released as a download and will run approx. 30 min. The title sequence for each half should have a briefer run time than the final, full length DVD version. I LOVE creating titles and am having fun with this one. Since the film is sub-titled BLOOD FIEND FROM OUTER SPACE and its about vampires, I decided the title visuals should be in hues of red. Here I wanted to be completely original so I created a font, hand drawn, rather than using an existing type face. I created a montage of images swimming thru a constantly moving, blood-red background. Images that pass thru the background are taken from production photos. Since the title is at the beginning of the film I did not want to give away certain images (like the SANGOR monster) before you see them in the film. So these images are subtle... blended into the moving red that streams across the frame. I applied a transparancy filter so that background streaming reds and photos merge together. On top of this the actual titles appear. This will give the audience the impression of what they are about to see in the film ahead. I've edited the music so that the beats hit where there is a visual impact. The film begins with a pre-title vampire attack which seques into a stylistic montage of one of our beautiful vampire women... then... WHAM! The titles start. Blood red clouds swirls thru a pool of blood... and thru that pass images (subtly) of the Alien space craft, the Sangor monster, Maria Paris, Lawrence Benjamin, Bill Greenman and Sydney Foxx ... the image of each actor moves across the frame beneath their title credits.

Bill Black

Stormy Tempest: Unmasked

Howdy, folks! Our intention is to blog our way through the production of Stormy Tempest: Unmasked. The goal is to release this newest film on January 31, 2010 and to detail some of our efforts in this blog. In general, we envision our films as "live action comic books" that we would LIKE to be able to release on a monthly basis. So far, our fastest production was just over two months, but it was much more complicated, requiring a great deal of greenscreen. This film, by design, should be less complicated. The question is: Can we do it in 30 days, the same pace as is required for a monthly comic book? Keep reading this blog to find out!
- - - - John

When we finish a shoot, Bill always sends out a review to the crew letting us know how the footage turned out, so we'll kick off the production blog with his letter.

From Bill Black...

EVALUATION OF THE STORMY TEMPEST: UNMASKED SHOOT

On Dec 31 I transferred all the footage from camera into Premiere Pro and watched all of it. Problem areas were minimal. The picture quality was exceedingly sharp, more so, it looked to me, than on previous productions. This was shot in DV and not HD and yet the resolution seemed durn near HD. Shooting in the woods with sun filtering thru trees presents an exposure nightmare in that it is impossible to get even exposure thruout the frame, esp since Stormy is WHITE and CLAYTON is black. That said, this all came out amazingly well, much like NYOKA. The sharpness of picture was partly due to the fact that I consciously keep the shutter speed at 125 or higher. Most was shot in the 180 range with some going up to 1000 of a second. The color, for the most part looked great.

The sound worked fine both in the cockpit and in the woods. There was no audible hum or hiss that I could discern. Sound levels of voices seem workable thruout with no noticibly low volume areas. Of course there was all kinds of extraneous noise picked up that we did not want (cars, people, leaf blowers, planes) during the outdoor shoot. Some scenes may have to be dubbed because of that. Many scenes were shot MOS. I'm assuming those did not have dialogue but that will be determined in editing. When I remembered to unplug the cordless mike receiver, the camera mike worked just fine. When I DID NOT turn off the receiver and Mark DID turn off the boom mike, I got incredible static sounds. If those scene were without dialogue, that no problem. Otherwise, they must be dubbed.

There were a few one-take scenes where cars, houses or people appeared in the background. Most notably these: (1) When Clayton straddles Stormy on the ground, car can be seen in bottom left of frame. However the picture resolution was so sharp that I was able to crop out the car and expand the picture with back to full WS frame without any noticible loss of quality. At least not on my 22" HD monitor. (2) When Stormy wakes up in woods about 3 mins into first reel and calls for "Ship?", the mike cord can be seen at very top of frame. I'm sure the same remedy can be applied. It's not the boom that can be seen but the little cord from the shotgun mike which was disconnected when we attached lapel mike. That cord dangles down so I must remember next time to tape it to the boom. (3) Ditto mike cord when Stormy says "Looks like I just found my ride..."

When the batteries died there was no disruption of quality. The picture remains perfect then just stops. That's good. Footage with the small Sony was not nearly the quality of the big Sony of course. Much of that footage was the sword fight so it will be cut into brief snippets anyway. Color and even exposure are not comparable to the FX1 but can be adjusted in Premiere. Sound with that camera was fine. Normally when using the camera mike, the sound has a bit of a tinny or hollow quality but not so much outdoors.

The performances were just GREAT! Nicola is so dad-burned PURTY!!!! I was really happy that this script allowed Nicola many scenes without her mask. Looks to me like this will cut together well. I don't know that we missed any scenes but it doesn't seem like we did. Pierson, I believe has established a new iconic image with that combination hood, goggles and hat. I know it was hell to wear that gear, but it sure paid off. I saw no problem with the performances at all. It all looked very good and true to character.

I can't wait to see it cut together. I believe we have another winner here. And we have some cool, funny scenes for the blooper reel! The alteration in the costume, ahem, greatly altered the entire space-time continnum... to our advantage, of course.

So, THANKS, EVERYBODY, for a great job very well done! We succeeded in doing another complete movie in a day and a half!

John's Notes: Stormy Tempest: Unmasked was shot on December 29th, 2009 for 5 hours (cockpit scenes and greenscreen) and December 30th, 2009 for 8 hours (on location in the woods). On December 31st, Bill reviewed the footage and created a digital copy. On January 1st 2010, I picked the footage up from Bill and began to review the footage in preparation for a first edit of the film.