Sweetmint – the Blog

Last Friday, I took a copy of the rough cut of Sweetmint to my Executive Producers home, and had the opportunity to watch the film in it’s entirety… straight through, with no interruptions.  At this point I had only seen the film in bits and pieces, but never straight through.  It was fun to watch it, and think about how this is only the beginning… this film will look and feel a whole lot differently when we are all done.  I keep reminding myself that there’s a whole lot of work that still needs to be done, and I know that there’s a long way to go until it’s finally complete… but it was neat to see it from start to finish. 

Tim had some really constructive comments that will only help me as I move forward.  I noticed a week or two ago, that there is a particular spot that could use a little short scene.  And Tim caught that as well, so I am going to write some sort of scene to go in this hole… that will help tie the scenes before it, and after it together. 

I think I was suprised at exactly how well the film flowed together… I was concerned early on that things moved too quickly, but seeing the film laid out, it moves really well, and keeps your attention throughout the film.

I took about 2 pages worth of notes on things that I need to fix as I start the re-edit, and I will address them as I can.

Next thing to do, is to schedule a screening of the rough cut with the cast and crew… I’d like to get their opinions on things as I movie forward. 

This weekend I made a big push to get the last 10% of the film edited…
I worked for about 4 hours on Friday, and about 9 on Saturday (I think it was 9… it was certainly a lot more then it felt like).

I don’t know why I had this desire to get the film done, maybe so I can move on to the next part of the process, I’m not entirely sure.  But either way, I had the time… I made the effort… and the film’s rough cut is complete.

When I initially finished it on Saturday Night/Sunday Morning, I declared the run time to be about 1 Hour 27 Minutes and 30 Seconds.  Then on Sunday I looked at my work again, and discovered that I had a portion of the timeline that I used as work space, and had some raw clips in there.  So once I removed them and put them back in place, the run time became 1 Hour 24 Minutes and 30 Seconds. 

That’s okay though, although I like the 1:27 time, I’m okay with 1:24… because if you might remember I stated many times, that my hope is to have a film that’s between 1:20 and 1:30, so I’ve hit my mark irregardless. 

Also, I’m already thinking of things to add to the film as I’m watching it… for example.  There is nothing between the morning that Roger calls Sadie, and then they go on their date.  At one time, Krueger suggested we do a “getting ready” montage for that date.  I agreed, but for some reason it fell by the wayside.  So I’m thinking some time in December we may film that montage, of both Roger and Brett getting ready for their date.  That will be a good connector between early morning and late evening… and will most likely add those 3 minutes.  If I add any more, it will most likely be small and simple like that.

I have to admit, that I the editing this weekend wasn’t totally easy… I ran into a few snags, and had to make some difficult choices. 

Friday night was spent mostly editing the band performance at the Sweetmint Theatre.  I wasn’t entirely sure how I was going to pull that off… but I think the footage turned out pretty well in the end.  I’m anxious to get other people’s approval, and opinions on it.

Also, I had to cut a few lines of dialogue in one of the scenes that take place 5 years later.  When Brett and Roger exit the theatre, and go lean on the popcorn counter… Dave and Wes come out and say hello.  Well, we had some issues with that… because the actor playing Wes, cut his hair from one shoot to the next.  So we see a shot of those guys in the theatre, and Wes has short hair… but when they go into the lobby he has longer scruffier hair.  We did notice this at the theatre, so we tried to shoot a quick pick up shot without having to redo the whole thing.  But of course the lighting was off, the framing was off… the exposure was off.  And it just looked like garbage in comparison to the rest of the footage.

So in order to make it work, I’d have to make the good footage match the bad footage… and I didn’t want to do that.  So I experimented with just cutting that portion of dialogue.  I lost about 30 seconds of the film doing it… and I didn’t miss it.  So I’m going to cut it together to make it a deleted scene.  (except in the deleted scene, Wes will have scruffy hair).   That’s the way it goes sometimes… there’s not a whole lot I could have done.  Or actually there was, but it was a matter of whether I wanted to do it or not.  And I chose not to…

On another note, I released the first of our teasers this weekend… and as Co-writer Keith Cunningham points out “That tells me nothing about the movie” – to which I respond “Your right Keith, that’s why it’s called a teaser…”  As my Mac’s Dashboard Dictionary Widget points out… a teaser is a short introductory advertisement for a product, especially one that does not mention the name of the thing being advertised. 

And to further prove my point to Mr. Cunningham… Here is what Wikipedia has to say on the matter*.

A teaser trailer, or teaser is a short trailer used to advertise an upcoming movie, game or television series.

Teasers, unlike typical theatrical trailers, are usually very short in length (between 30–60 seconds) and usually contain little, if any, actual footage from the film. Sometimes, it is merely a truncated version of a theatrical trailer. They are usually released long in advance of the film they advertise. One of the reasons for the name “teaser” is because they are shown usually a long time (one or one and a half years) before the movie comes out, so as to “tease” the audience.

Their purpose is less to tell the audience about a movie’s content than simply to let them know that the movie is coming up in the near future, and to add to the hype of the upcoming release. Teaser trailers are often made while the film is still in production or being edited and as a result they may feature scenes or alternate versions of scenes that are not in the finished film. Other ones (notable Pixar films) have scenes made for use in the trailer only. Teaser trailers today are increasingly focused on internet downloading and the convention circuit.

Here it is, the first of many teasers for Sweetmint…

Sweetmint Teaser 1 – Krueger and Katy talk about the director…

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*Reference to Wikipedia Article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teaser_trailer

I made a huge push this weekend to break the 1 hour mark on Sweetmint…
Actually that was my goal on Wednesday of last week, but I just didn’t quite make it.

I finally hit that milestone on Friday night… I edited the scene where Roger finds Sadie sitting on his front steps.

This scene was very challenging in a lot of ways, most of it had to do with the natural light coming in from the left.  The color temperature kept shifting, or the sun kept going behind clouds.

I think it would have been beneficial to shoot that scene on a dark day, a cloudy day, or even a rainy day.

At one point I thought about scrapping the whole scene and redoing it, but I worked a little harder at it, cut in for more close ups, and it actually turned out to be pretty decent.  Especially the kiss that happens at the end of the scene, on set that day I capture as much b-roll as I could possibly get, and then used as much of it in my scene as possible, and it really helps drive the scene forward a bit.

I know it’s been awhile since I posted, I’ve just been engulfed in the editing process… but another thing that happened that I wanted to point out, was that I had scheduled a reshoot in Brett’s Apartment that ended up getting cancelled.  I wanted to have the scene shot by the time I was ready to edit the scene, well there was some issues that meant we had to postpone the shoot. 

So I thought I’d sit down and edit the scene anyway, with the footage that I already have.  And quite surprisingly it turned out well… I don’t want to say that I “made it work” because there was nothing difficult about it.  It was just me being paranoid, and called for a reshoot before even looking at the footage.  So I didn’t “make it work” it just worked.

The next major scene that I’m going to be editing is the band performance, and Sadie’s goodbye scene… I’m hoping that that will bring the runtime of the movie to at least 1 hour 15 minutes… as of right now, it’s 1 hour and 4 minutes…

I’m approaching the end of the rough cut pretty quickly here… and my goal is to start calling in actors to do some audio recording. 

This is minor, and probably only interesting to other FCP editors out there, but I changed my layout from the standard lay out to the two-up layout… and I find that once I got passed the adjustment phase it’s actually a really nice way to work.  And particularly working with 16:9 footage… you have a smaller timeline, but bigger viewer/canvas window.  And a much smaller browser, but that’s insignificant.

As I wrote about in my last post, I needed to take a one week break… a friend of mine commented that in the end this is going to be really good for me.

I quickly realized that one week, was going to evolve into two…

Last night, after a screening of animated short films at the Milwaukee Film Fest, I headed home… and had plenty of time to do some work. 

So it was slow going at first, trying to recapture my rhythm… but I got it.  And next thing I know, another scene is done.  It was a short scene, but it felt good to get back to work.

I didn’t quite get a two week break… but I did take a week and a half…  Now I won’t be editing again until Saturday.

On Friday I’m doing a reshoot…

So last weekend was one of the worst editing sessions I’ve had on Sweetmint.  Nothing was working out right, and I should have taken a step back, and I should have come back to it later in the day, but I started… and I wanted to finish.

I was editing the second Theatre Auditorium scene, and probably one of the longer scenes in the movie.  The script is 8 pages, the scene ended up to be 5 minutes even.  This scene is the first time that Sadie is taken to the Friday Night Freakout. 

I made so many mistakes on set, that I really paid the price in the editing room… I don’t know if I was rushed, if we were rushed, or what… but one actor skipped 2 lines on a close up, and I didn’t catch it.  And furthermore, I didn’t completely have the coverage I needed to transition from one line to the next, so I had to kinda patch it with spit and papier mache. 

In the end, I think I made it work… but I’m not going to lie, there was a point where I screamed, then pounded my fist on the desk, then paced… childish I know, but it was really eating at me to get it right.  And I was determined to get it at that moment, and not save it for the next day.

Irregardless, I’ve decided the film can wait a few days, and I actually think I won’t get to work on it again until next Monday, so I’m officially taking one week off. 

I am doing this because I need it… just step away and concentrate my efforts on something else for a few days.  Things can wait…

Last night we did a special episode of my Podcast, Cine-Rama… Normally I am the host of the show, but last night I took a step back and was a guest on the show.

Keith Cunningham led an interview with myself, Matt Schmitt, and Bryon Krueger as we discussed the making of Sweetmint, the history behind it, the stories behind it, the experiences we shared while making it, and what it was like to work with Cory.

It was a fun interview, and hopefully we’ll get to do more in the future. 

This interview will appear on our website www.Cine-Rama.com, and it will also be a special feature on the DVD.

Another fun part of the evening, was that I showed Matt the first 30 minutes of the movie, this was the first time that it was being shown to an audience, albeit very rough and not even close to polished… Matt didn’t vomit, or run out in terror, so the movie must be somewhat entertaining.  Somewhat…

I don’t think I’m going to get to work on it until Saturday, I got a bunch of movies to watch and review so I’m going to get that done first… I think I worked on the film for about 45 minutes all week.  Maybe next week I’ll get more of it done.

On a separate note, we finally got the last scene scheduled, so Krueger, Anecoic and I will be headed over to the recording studio to finally shoot that scene that’s been hanging over my head…  I knew we would get it scheduled eventually.

Krueger and I are also doing a reshoot over at my Aunt’s house, shouldn’t take more then 10 minutes, but we had to get it done before the leaves really started changing colors.

I have been working, pretty much non-stop for the last week…
Had a few sleepless nights, and have been working very hard to make progress.

As of right now I have about 30 minutes of footage edited, which is no small amount… it is now longer then my last film, and has taken it’s place as the longest thing I have ever made…

But, with all that said, I needed a break… I worked most of Saturday on the project, well into the night.  But Sunday I decided not to look at the film at all. 

For someone like me, this is no easy task… I’m constantly working, working, working… on something, anything… I don’t care what it is, I gotta be working on something.  So I just shifted my focus on something else for a change. 

I reset my animation studio, so that I could do a few tests, and built a testing puppet… so now I really will have something to distract myself a little bit. 

It was good to take a break from the film for a day, I’ll get back to work tonight I’m sure.

I’m approaching a major 8 page scene, probably the longest scene in the entire script… so I gotta really psyche myself into it, and do a good job…

I mentioned to a friend that I feel like up until this point the editing has been easy, and maybe it has been… or maybe my mindset was making it easy.  But now suddenly the work is becoming more difficult, the edits aren’t coming naturally and I have to work harder to make something work.  But again this could be my mindset… and maybe now that I’ve taken a break, it’ll go back to being easy.  Who knows…

More to come…

Well yesterday being Labor Day, I took some time to get some work done on Sweetmint. I could only work so far as we had family coming over for a picnic.

I was working on one particular scene yesterday, which so far has been the trickiest of all the scenes so far… it took me a little bit of time to work out the problems, but in the end I was very happy with the results…
I’ll keep which scene it is a secret… adds a little mystery.

Last night I was struck by a bit of insomnia, no matter what I did I couldn’t fall asleep, even Tylenol PM wasn’t working, which usually it does…

So after about an hour and a half of tossing and turning, I got up to do a little more editing. Which is probably the reason I wasn’t sleeping in the first place. After about an hour of editing, I finally got back to sleep.

You know, dreams are a funny thing… over the weekend, I had a dream that I though would be worth mentioning.

I dreamed that all my professional role models turned into Zombies, and were trying to kill me. People like Terry Gilliam, Penn Jillette, Frank Zappa, Jean Luc-Godard, Ingmar Bergman… they were all coming after me, and were trying to kill me. There’s a metaphor in there somewhere. I know it…

Christian’s got his groove back… I’ve edited a really lengthy scene last night, and I was in a grove for the most part, and then the phone rang… and I just lost that grove.

I think I worked for about 3 hours last night on this scene, it’s the second scene in the movie, the first scene that takes place in the theatre. 

As I wrote in the last entry, I wasn’t sure where to cut to a closeup and where to cut to a wide shot, but with this scene, I felt like it was easier to figure it out. 

I kept catching myself trying to fine tune everything, but I had to slap myself on the hand and stop myself from doing any tweaking, I gotta keep telling myself… this is just a rough cut right now… keep it rough, lay out the scenes and move on to the next one.  It’s not about the details right now, it’s about the rough cut…

Either way, 5 1/2 minutes roughed out, that’s not too bad… I completed that scene last night, and that was my goal… I may have time to work on it a little bit tonight, but for the most part I think I’m just going to take a break.

Work 2 days, rest 5… I like that.  Sort of…

Actually, it’s hard to be at work when I just want to edit my movie…