Back in the loop

And suddenly it’s all go again in Charmed Central.

After those long painful weeks of hearing about all the hard work required to finish the movie only through despatches back from the post-production guys, Jake and I have found ourselves firmly in the mix again. Gone are the thoughts of 'is this the right moment to start looking for a proper job before I default on my mortgage'. Making a movie has once again become a full-time enterprise. Full-time, but with the odd eighteen-hour marathon thrown in for good measure.

It seems that we are officially into the movie-making end-game.

The September festival screenings have probably done as much to galvanise everybody into making this last push as anything else, not that we’ve heard anything back yet from the big three that we put in for last month. But if Texas, Toronto or Sitges do come calling, we need to be ready to answer.

So, we set a date for delivery of all the finished pieces – 7^th September. All the VFX shots, grading, sound, music and titles.

And throughout the diverse Zombie Resurrection post-production crew members, minds focus. Here is a digest of the activities of the last week or so: 

Tuesday – our second test screening of the movie to complete strangers in Winchester (with a massive thank you to Christian, Jeff, Adam, Ashley, Joe, Naomi and Becca for laughing in mostly the right places). 

Wednesday – a meeting with our VFX guys to discuss the CGI shots that we had already received, and to agree a schedule for the delivery of all the rest of them.

Thursday – an audio scrutiny of the film to finalise all the remaining ADR samples that we need to collect from the other six cast members, followed by a thorough analysis of the feedback forms from the two screenings to look for common threads (and a minor dialogue re-write in the final act to deal with the confusion that some people were experiencing).

Friday – more VFX shots.

Saturday – Simon and Shami join the posse at Dale-the music’s studio in Southampton to do all their ADR.

Sunday – Eric and Danny do likewise.

Monday – St. Marcelo-the-edit comes to Winchester to undertake the final finessing of the film down to our absolutely, totally finished cut, honest.

Tuesday – more VFX shots, with another meeting with the guys in the evening.

And today – our penultimate ADR session, with Jade.

And on the seventh day He rested. We, however, should be so lucky.

But what the hell would I do with a day off? It’s not work unless you would rather be doing something else. It’s a taste that’s going to make my delayed search for a day-job that much suckier, but then again my CV must have flight-risk written all over it anyway. Destitute.

Credit crunched

I’ve no idea what’s changed, but it seems that we’re now official.

Presumably some threshold must have been crossed in the arcane IMDb processes, but sometime last night our Zombie Resurrection entry into the Internet Movie Database suddenly appeared. Twice, actually. No warning, no information, nothing. One day we were considered to be a high completion risk, and the next we’re all buddies again.

It might have had something to do with the recent round of festival submissions - the screener submission website WithoutABox is part of the same organisation that’s responsible for IMDb. Although the database rules state that you must have a verifiable premiere date before you can go up, it looks like the $55 entrance fee was enough to buy us a bit of latitude (unless the festival have good news that they’ve failed to share with us).

And so there we are. A complete list of all our cast, crew and zombies, for all to enjoy.

It has taken a good couple of weeks to tidy the entry up into something that almost looks sensible, with every change request taking a reported 7-10 days to be processed. There are still spelling mistakes on a couple of horde members’ names in the pipeline, and a few job titles that needed fixing, but it’s close enough.

But something that we can’t seem to fix is the awful synopsis, and a really strange tagline that must have been written on the spot by the festival organiser. In the place where the pithy 'prey for salvation' should be sits the slightly less manageable 'a zombie messiah that can raise the undead from the dead...after they've died...again'.

So we continue to plug away, to trim and manicure. And hopefully by the time that anyone can actually go and buy the movie it’ll be coiffured to perfection. Although, if anybody knows the IMDb administration password, we could cut out a lot of faffing.

Go take a gander, and we’ll see you again in 7-10 days. Immaculate.

Into the great beyond…

Sobering times in Charmed Central.

So, let’s just take a moment to consider where we currently are with Zombie Resurrection. The first pass of the music is written, the sound is tidy, and everything has been coloured in. The current best copy of the film still has a long way to go before it’s finished, but it does finally look and behave like a film should. Prospective horror festivals will accept nothing less.

Zombie Resurrection is open for judgement.

With our eyes on an early September finishing line (to hit the first of the possible festival screenings), this is now the last moment we have to make it better. Over the 150 times that Jake and I have watched the latest cut over the past few weeks, a couple of moments have jumped out at us that need work. Tweaks. Nothing drastic. A finessed edit here and an extended beat there.

But, really, what do we know? 150 viewings later and the jokes aren’t funny anymore. The jumps don’t shock, the gore doesn’t offend, and the emotional moments don’t move. For us the film exists as a series of moments: shots needing light balancing, dialogue needing replacement, bludgeonings needing a coating with digital gore.

Gone is the big picture. Gone is any concept of whether the film actually hangs together as an entity.

And now is the last moment that we have to sort that out.

So, now is also the perfect moment to get a bunch of people together who have no previous attachment to the film, and ask them. The great British zombie-loving public. These are the only people we can trust to let us know where the problems are.

Time to organise a couple of screenings. Get in a load of beer and pizza, sit a panel of people that we’ve never met before down in front of the largest telly we can find, and watch them watching it. Our first completely dispassionate audiences.

And it’s as daunting a prospect as we’ve had to face since the shoot wrapped. Well, more specifically, since I had to deal with the unwelcome stains on my girlfriend’s floor after the wrap party.

The first session was last night, hosted by hero-zombie-Ross in his Winchester cathedral of technology. Having taken a slug to the head over the course of the shoot, he isn’t allowed to have an opinion, but his pals are. Grab a beer, sit down, and get comfortable, Simon, Louise, Row, Daren and Ormy.

Please don’t underestimate what a painful evening this was for Jake and me. Sat to one side, the film suddenly seemed to race by without ever catching its breath. Wasn’t that last moment meant to be funnier? Did anybody actually find that last jump scary? Can anybody understand Mac’s Glaswegian accent?

And the biggest laugh of the night? An overly-graphic sound effect that Tom had added to his foley reel to accompany the premature ending of some woodland coitus. It’s an immediate answer to the question that Jake and I had been wrestling with beforehand – is that squelch just a little bit too much? No, it turns out.

A braver man than me would have looked at the completed questionnaires by now, but I may save that moment for a stiff scotch later in the week. We have another screening in Winchester University on Tuesday, bizarrely back in the same room within which we shot all our Chapel footage last year. It’ll be interesting to see whether they’ve managed to get all the blood out of the floor tiles.

So, until then, I’ll content myself with the nagging butterflies, and save the analysis until all the votes are in. But in any case it’s a big Charmed thank you to Ross, Simon, Louise, Row, Daren and Ormy for giving over their Friday night to make two grown men nervous. Suddenly I understand where all the worry-lines on Andy Murray’s mum’s face have come from. Tweaking.

Building sound-castles

Bloody kids.

Yesterday marked the beginning of the ADR process – gathering all the replacement bits of bad-quality dialogue and miscellaneous bonus grunts and groans from the cast.

Automated Dialogue Replacement, although I’d be interested to know how the word 'Automated' found its way into the acronym as it was a far from straightforward exercise. But Sunday was decided to be the moment to take a day off from watching people running around on the telly to kick-start the process of making Glen-the-sound’s life easier.

Step forward Rachel Nottingham and Joe Rainbow, Zombie Resurrection’s naïve teenager Becca and officious party leader Gibson respectively. Good solid professionals to call upon to play the part of cast guinea pigs. Nothing too strenuous missing from their collection of on-set dialogue - just some extra sounds of weeping, exertions grunts associated with various zombie bludgeonings, and long swathes of the deranged kind of Tourette’s that arises during the slow transition to zombiedom.

And a couple of lines from the first act of the film, where the extraneous noises evident in pre-apocalyptic Portsmouth woodland simply couldn’t be scrubbed out.

There is, it seems, an adage in getting good quality ADR – if you’re replacing lines originally spoken outside, you need to get the sound recordings done outside too. Unless you’re doing all your ADR in a perfect anechoic environment, there will always be a little room reverb evident in what you record in a recording studio. It’s OK for all the inside stuff, as you’ll then be adding a whole load more fake reverb to the ADR tracks to make them match the rest of the dialogue from the shoot. But once even a little bit is on there it can’t be taken off.

In the great room-less outdoors, these lines will stand out like a green sock on a bloodied stump.

And so we face problem number one: is there anywhere in Hampshire that is suitably quiet? Somewhere acceptably close to a car park, but away from planes, trains, automobiles, dog-walkers, fields of livestock, chirruping crickets or tweeting birds?

Or, more importantly, bloody kids?

There is something about the eager squeals of children that carries for miles. Too much car noise? Just head deeper into the woods. Aeroplanes? Hang back for 20 seconds and it’ll be gone. But the sound of an eight-year-old having fun anywhere in the same postcode? You’re waiting for nap-time before that’ll get any better. And while I can’t blame any parents for wanting to take full advantage of the few days of actual summer that we’re going to get this year, please know that your selfish pursuit of fresh air and exercise is making our lives really tricky.

But, a hundred takes of all the swapped-out dialogue later, and Glen-the-sound was finally happy that he’ll be able to fabricate quiet versions of all our troubled chat, even if it’s a syllable-by-syllable Frankenstein agglomeration of acceptably noise-less moments.

And so we get to head indoors, over to the recording studio built at the back of Dale-the-tunes’ garden.

This is where all the movie music magic happens. A grown-up potting shed into which Dale can escape from the wife and kids, and actually do something worthwhile other than sipping scotch and pretending to whittle away at a piece of wood while listening to the Archers. Sound-proofed, covered in acoustic diffusers, and with a bloody-great piano in the middle where the lawn-mower should be.

And it was at this point that everything took a turn for the smooth. As Rachel screamed and Joe sweated, we powered through the rest of the list with grace and agility. Outside in the garden no one was any the wiser about the cacophony of shrieks and growls that have left me with slight tinnitus this morning. Anybody needing to gut a pig or torture a suspect in a residential setting could do a lot worse than phoning Dale-the-tunes up for copies of his architectural plans.

And at eight o’clock last night we stepped outside into a welcome cool breeze with 2/9s of our ADR firmly in the bag. To Glen-the-sound and Dale-the-tunes, it’s an enormous Charmed thank you for giving over your Sunday to our screamy silliness. To Rachel and Joe, it’s our eternal appreciation for coming back to Winchester almost a year to the day after we started shooting to re-enjoy the horrors of life on a zombie set. To all the other cast members, prepare yourself for a phone call.

And to the parents of small children in the environs, what’s wrong with the X-box or the cinema? If it’s fresh air and countryside you’re after, open a bloody window and buy a pot-plant. Incredulous.

Zomtography

With only a week to go, now seems like the perfect time to let you know what you’ll be missing if you’re thinking of wasting the next two weeks sat in front of the Olympics.

Down on the South Coast we’ve got better things planned for the first half of August. The terrifically talented Rob Luckins, he of photographic duties on the set of the movie last year, is having an exhibition. And there’s not a discus, high-jump or sand-pit in sight.

Unlike some of the key roles on the Zombie Resurrection crew (I’m thinking of Director and DoP here, particularly), taking photos is what Rob does for a living. Well. When he’s not pointing a camera at somebody, he’s teaching other people how to, and so it may come as no surprise that he’s amassed quite a lot of them by now.

Enough, it seems, to decorate Room 237, Portsmouth’s premiere comic-book store, with some of his choicest cuts.

Disappointingly, it won’t be wall-to-wall zombie carnage, although by popular demand last summer’s undead will be making a solid appearance. This is the problem when you spend the rest of your time taking photos of Mike Leigh and Wayne Hemingway – they tend to get grumpy when they’re bumped by a bunch of nutters covered in blood. One sympathises.

Anyway, for those zombie-enthusiasts in the environs, it’s a no-brainer. For everyone else, it’s a road trip. Catch it while it’s still squelchy. Shot.

Beaten into submission

Jesus H Ripe – that was harder work than I had imagined.

To save you any angst and stress, I should reassure you all up front that the screener did get finished, and was submitted in time (just) to Fantastic Fest, in Austin, Texas. The US’ largest horror film festival would be an awesome place for a world premiere.

Well, I say 'in time'. Actually, by the time that the film had finally successfully uploaded to the extraordinarily flaky WithoutABox site on about the eighth time of asking, it was about 36 hours past the deadline, but a severe amount of apologising and mea cuplae to the organisers later and we are officially locked and loaded.

But this was no easy ride. I haven’t had so little sleep over such a long period of time since the shoot.

The division of labour broke down something like this: Matt-the-VFX was pulling together the last of the VFX shots through till Thursday lunchtime, and then FTPing the buggers across to us. Meanwhile Ads-the-grade was making the whole movie look pretty and FTPing his bits across in stages. Glen-the-sound was tidying up the last bits of problematic dialogue, and Tom-the-foley was manufacturing some deliciously sick zombie noises. Andy-the-dog’s-body was downloading everything as it came in and putting the jigsaw together, while Jake-the-actually-knows-what-he’s-doing was grading the bits of the movie that Ads didn’t have time to get on to, adding muzzle flashes where appropriate, and plastering over as many cracks as we could. 

An insane amount of juggling. But by the time that I left Jake’s hive at 5 AM on Friday morning, we had all the right notes in mostly the right places.

Friday’s activities were to be so much simpler – one final quality check viewing, render the bugger off and fill in all the submission forms. And we had until midnight before the deadline ran out. Masses of time.

And relax…

Ah no. Not in Charmed-land. Nothing ever goes that smoothly. The forms were simple enough, but getting them a copy of the movie in the format they wanted was an exercise guaranteed to confound even the most patient of filmmakers. It was the initial promise of 36 hour render times, and a website that just wasn’t interested in accepting our film, no matter what browser, broadband provider or OS we tried.

But by 4 AM on Sunday morning it was there, courtesy of Jake’s girlfriend’s parent’s broadband, and via an enormous amount of industrial language.

And it’s my sincerest apologies to Nik-the-zombie-extra, whose fortieth birthday party on Saturday night was the final casualty of the enterprise. Sorry, mate – I’ll make sure I’m at your fiftieth, if you’re still talking to me.

So, it’s a couple of days to catch our breath, and then we get to go round the loop again with a couple more festivals. Let’s hope that karma takes stock of the credit that we’ve amassed over the past few days when determining how easy a ride that’ll be. But, when all’s said and done, I’ve got to tell you that the movie really does look and sound lovely. Sure, there’s still the odd green sock, and we have gallons of digital gore yet to throw about the place, but it doesn’t require a leap of imagination to see the finished film that’s hiding in the mist.

Hell – it’s not like we haven’t made it easy for them. Invisible.

Now you see it...

Now you don't...

The thin brown line

It’s all going down to the wire in Charmed Central.

It’s the end of the long wait, as Jake and I try to assemble all the first passes on everything that’s happening in Zombie Resurrection post-production into one place. It’s not going to look perfect. There’ll be CGI missing, green socks aplenty, and all our zombies will sound nothing like they’re going to in the finished film. But it’ll be enough. Enough, hopefully, to secure ourselves a spot in a couple of festivals.

All the best festival submissions happen in June and July. The global horror silly season appears to run from September to Halloween every year, and if you miss the boat there is a strong possibility that the US premiere of your movie is going to be in front of twenty people at an obscure festival organised in a church hall in Boise, Idaho. And there’s no way anybody’s going to let us out of a church alive after seeing the film.

So, it’s got to look nice. Not perfect, but nice enough that the programmers can see beyond the next few months of manic post-production activity at the finished movie lurking beneath the surface.

And, I guess more importantly, it’s got to be now.

Deadline one is at the end of this week. This is for the largest and most prestigious horror film festival in the US. Which probably then makes it the largest in the whole world. Within the extraordinarily vain world within which Jake and I operate, this would be a satisfactory place for the world premiere of Zombie Resurrection, and getting accepted can’t hurt when chatting to distributors and sales agents.

And being the conscientious programme managers that we are, we gave ourselves a week to allow us to bolt it all together. Everybody – can we have your homework in for Friday 6^th, please?

A week seems reasonable. There are going to be important pieces missing, and the inevitable mistakes. A week gives people time to fix any major problems, to dig out important elements that absolutely need to be in there, and for us to fill in the remaining gaps as best we can. And then enough time for us to upload an entire movie to the submission site over my woeful broadband.

So, you’d imagine that we’d be just about done piecing everything together by now. Er… not quite.

Stand up Dale-the-tunes. Charmed Apocalypse’s star performer. By Wednesday last week we not only had his first pass on the music for the entire film in all its 24-bit mastered finery, but we’d also had the opportunity to sit and watch the film with him, chat over a bunch of changes, and he’s already managed to address every single one in time.

The man is currently sat on a cruise-liner somewhere giving his brain a well-earned rest. Just as well he works so damn fast, as it wouldn’t be much of a holiday if he’d had to shlep his keyboard and computer with him, and then spend his shore leave sat in a Marrakech internet cafe.

And the sound is also looking pretty good. About ¾ of the dialogue has been tidied up, and we have plenty of the juicier foley elements – the rips, hits and splats. It’s incomplete, and filled with what I can best describe as temporary zombie noises. But what we have got in is fabulous quality. When it’s finished the film will sound genuinely splendid.

Bang in a couple of workarounds, appropriate some bonus foley from the internet, revisit a couple of moments from the native audio footage, and we’re in business. So far, so good.

But the graded footage and the CGI. This is causing us sleepless nights.

As of midday on Tuesday, we have nine minutes of graded footage in our timeline. We are roughly seventy minutes shy of a sensible viewing experience. And we are only about twenty shots into our CGI list of 88.

This is the problem at our end of the movie machine. The guys that are pulling all our visuals together are all proper VFX artists. They have day-jobs in the industry, and even though the CGI is the single largest cost in the Zombie Resurrection post-production budget the whole thing still only equates to about 2/3 of what they would charge James Cameron for a single shot. This wealth of craft and expertise shows itself in the superb quality of the work that they are producing; however, when JC needs something done quickly we find out just where the pecking order starts and stops. Money talks, bullshit walks.

Great for the finished film. An extraordinary stressor when we’re also working to a tight deadline.

And from where I am right now, it’s touch and go whether we’ll actually have something to upload in time. It’ll be a few days longer of leaping out of bed in the middle of the night to start something downloading that will then take fourteen hours to complete. It might just be doable if everything works first time, but this is not the best of project management principles.

So we wait, crossed fingers poised over the download icon. Anybody know a good steak-house in Boise, or can recommend the best US health insurance for trauma and burns injuries? Excommunicated.