Glimpses of a brighter beyond

Oh, we are close.

I mean so close that we can almost smell the finish line. It’s a bizarre feeling, like reaching the final chapter in a book that’s taken two years to read. But it has cheered us up somewhat.

On paper, the day-job hasn’t changed too much. We’re still taking daily receipt of the remaining CGI shots, and trading finesses to the sound, music and title sequence with our post-posse, but we are close enough now to the end of the tunnel to know that the light wasn’t a train rushing towards us after all.

The tally: only four remaining CGI shots, 48 tweaks to the sound mix and three minor changes to the titles. By this time next week we should actually have a finished movie. I know I’ve said this before, but this is the first time that I’ve actually believed it myself.

And to think that our initial intention had been to take the finished film to Cannes last May. Only five months late, Phelps. I’ll leave it to you to decide whether this represents poor project management, staggering naivety or unwarranted optimism on our part.

We crossed an important threshold last week. There were four bastard CGI shots that had been lurking in the wings for a couple of months, which involved taking out green legs and replacing them with a knotted stump. Despite our best efforts on set to collect all the useful footage of empty frames and replacement elements, making these shots look good was always going to be a challenge. A challenge not improved when the compositor that was working on them suddenly upped and left for Australia, leaving behind only a set of undecipherable scripts on a flavour of software that no one else in the team was using.

So, the shots have sat on a back-burner for a while, thwarting all attempts to plan for activities beyond the end of the film as they waited for someone with the requisite chops to come along.

And then, as if by magic, along he came.

Suddenly our world gets that much brighter. The shots look so damn good now that people are going to be surprised when they find out that actor Joe is actually bi-pedal in real life (and people blessed with the Horror Channel can check this out for themselves tonight at 9:00).

And we relax. Finally.

Our initial approaches to the world’s finest horror festivals have yielded a paltry return, but it does mean we can now start planning the most important screening – showing the movie to the cast, crew and members of our zombie hordes. There are still some logistical issues that need to be ironed out, but what I can say at this point is that it can’t hurt to keep the evening of 17^th November free. And be in Winchester.

That said, the last two years have been a valuable lesson in the perils of counting chickens… better write it in the diary in pencil, eh? Hedging.

Yawn of the Dead

It’s taken a while, but I am now genuinely sick of all things undead.

Fed up, pissed off, irritated and narked. No more runnething over for Andy’s cup. It’s now officially half-empty.

And we are so close to being done. I mean, we're within a gnat’s gland of complete. But why does the last 1% of the work take a ridiculously disproportionate amount of time to finish? With all memories of our last moment of creative excitement firmly in the rear-view mirror, the process has become a struggle for the line.

I guess this isn’t unique to making a movie. A lot of complex projects hit the moment of diminishing returns at some point, where the effort required to make incremental improvements suddenly gets larger and larger. Nothing is ever finished, only abandoned.

Part of my antsiness is plain boredom with the process. We get sent something from someone in our post team. We slot it into the movie. We see / hear whether we like it or not. We send our notes back. We rinse. We repeat. Sure, in and amongst it all, our lists of outstanding issues with the audio and VFX shots are growing steadily smaller, but every day the curve is levelling off further. A slowing trend towards finished, which sits tantalisingly just out of reach.

And perversely, we’ve never been busier. Trips to London to snipe off moments of problematic audio and to swap across data because my provincial broadband is useless. Hours spent analysing why a shot or sample doesn’t work, or trying to translate an emotional reaction into a logical list of fixes. Days when all I do is act as a digital sheep-dog, making sure data goes to the right people and watching blue bars on my laptop slowly climb to 100%.

But actually, my disquiet is probably more to do with that nagging voice at the back of my head telling me I really should be doing something else. I don’t think I’ve learned anything useful about filmmaking for a while, other than skills in diplomacy and project micro-management, and it seems cruelly out of sorts with my experience of the last couple of years. And with the tank of redundancy cash now down to fumes, it’s time to get a proper job, feed the mortgage, and develop a sense of perspective about what the last two years have taught me and what I would do differently if I go round again.

So, no September cast and crew screening, I’m afraid. But definitely October. Unless it’s not. And if you find that frustrating, imagine how I feel. Whining.

Y'all

No holiday to Texas for Jake and Andy. Not this year.

Yesterday the official word finally came back from Fantasic Fest – thanks, but no thanks. It was one of the politest stock email fob-offs that I’ve ever been sent (Texans are renowned for their good manners), but any hope for a world premiere in the Lone Star State is now firmly quashed.

And the mood in Charmed Central? Mostly relief. Relief because the thought of having to craft a completed movie from the current set of best-guess jigsaw pieces over the next few days would spiral both of us into the worst kind of depression. Twenty months into the journey, and putting anything less than gorgeous in front of a paying audience will simply not do.

That’s not to say that we aren’t considerably closer than we were last week. The music is, well… done. The sound is down to the final tweaks and level changes. And a concerted amount of activity has delivered us the bulk of our remaining VFX shots.

But it isn’t finished.

The tally as of six pm today: 116 audio tweaks, six more VFX shots that we have yet to receive, another 38 that need playing with, an almost-there titles sequence and a technical grade that should be ready at the end of the week. But, as we found just before the shoot, it’s the little things that swallow up all the time.

So Jake and I get a couple of weeks reprieve.

Phew! But even so, it’s still a kick in the balls. I’ve never been great at dealing with rejection, although to be fair I don’t take compliments that well either. Fine – it was an early version of the film in super low-res that finally uploaded 36 hours after the cut off, full of green socks, sections of muffled dialogue and a confusing third act. Sure – it’s an American festival and they may not appreciate the British humo(u)r or understand Mac’s Scottish accent. OK – so this is the most prestigious event in the North American horror calendar and we were in competition with a bunch of high-budget offerings with big names and expensive cameras.

But this is the film about the zombie Jesus, people.

So, a small army of post-production elves allow themselves to relax slightly, and a thousand Southern rednecks are denied the opportunity to lynch two limey blasphemers before anyone else gets a chance to. Their loss, it seems.

One down, three more to go. Packing.

Fright-night

If hanging around on a tenterhook is your idea of fun, may I suggest submitting a film to a festival?

With the Texas Fantastic Fest due to kick off on September 20^th, we still haven’t been informed whether we’re in or out. And we aren’t due to get the final word until the 7^th September. That’s a lot of house to get in order in under two weeks: pulling together a press-pack, squeezing the movie onto an HDCAM tape, booking flights, finding a hotel. I mean, Fantastic Fest would be doing quite well just to get all their printing turned around in time.

But this is the way they roll, and until we get told differently we need to keep the testicular cuffs wrapped tightly around our VFX, titles and sound guys. And so far everyone appears squeakily confident.

Not that anything ever works perfectly first time. There was a trite project management sound-bite that my last employers used to bandy around – failing to plan means planning to fail. But actually, I find planning to fail a much safer default. If we ask for stuff a few days ahead of when we actually need it, it means that when the inevitable internet issues and incomplete deliveries push everything past the deadline, it doesn’t automatically drop us in the shit.

And with the Charmed-imposed finishing date of the 7^th September looming large, we had a bonus moment this week to reflect on our progress. The FrightFest screener.

God, I love FrightFest. What better way to spend a glorious summer bank-holiday weekend than sat in a dark room ploughing through a mountain of gore and monsters? It means I can switch of that nagging voice that tries to tell me to get off my arse and head outdoors and make the most of whatever fleeting sunshine there is. Hey, I paid good money for the opportunity to sit indoors, and that’s exactly what I’m going to do. Five days, 35 films, ten KFC meals and five late night boozing sessions amongst the horror faithful.

Heaven. And, yes – I do realise that FrightFest just happened last weekend. Without Jake, me or Zombie Resurrection in attendance.

Not this year, sadly. A mix of catastrophically depleted personal funds, an evolving production diary that doesn’t allow us to plan time-off more than a week in advance, and all the work involved in getting another cut of the film together.

But there is another. The FrightFest Halloween all-nighter. A bonus selection of horror mayhem on the last Saturday of October, back in the West End. The spiritual home for the UK premiere of Zombie Resurrection.

And they want screeners today. No rest for the peddlers of the wicked – the poor FrightFest guys get to move seamlessly from watching films in a cinema all weekend to watching more films from the comfort of their respective sofas.

Zombie Resurrection has moved on substantially from the earlier screeners last month. Glen-the-sound has a bucket-load of ADR to play with, Dale-the-tunes has had another spin with his music, Ads-and-Matt-the-VFX have been sending through plenty of updated splatter, Tom-the-foley has been tirelessly generating nastier zombie noises, and Marcelo-the-edit has fixed some of the more persistent confusions from the test screenings. We can do so much better now.

And FrightFest deserve a better screener. Send us your latest, gents, and let’s see where we are.

So, after another mental couple of days, the DVD that got delivered to them yesterday is that much happier. All of the ADR is in, all the cracks in the music resulting from the final edit have been pasted over, and we are now officially without a green sock to be seen.

Happier, but not quite there yet. There is still some way to go before we can unleash it on the paying public: another 22 CGI shots, 23 more that need attention, and 117 tweaks to the sound. So, it’s another busy seven days on full alert as we snipe off these last moments, and only then do we get to find out whether we needed to rush after all.

But in any case, September is when we plan on gathering the cast, crew and horde together for the first mass screening, at an awkward time of day on an as yet undetermined cinema screen that will be mildly inconvenient for most people to get to.

And sadly, this will also be the moment when rash pub promises come back to blight us on the arms – it’s almost time to start looking for a tattooist in the Winchester environs to dispense a couple of Charmed logos. Any recommendations? Stuck.

Mac-spletives

And so, 34 bread-based lunches later with Dale-the-music, Glen-the-sound and the eight Zombie Resurrection cast members with sound to fix, yesterday we finally say adieu to our ADR.

The final tally – 225 new sound snippets to improve our aural landscape. The odd line of dialogue with too much noise on it, grunts and groans from various bludgeonings, swathes of zombie growls, screaming, weeping and manic laughing. And three bonus lines of dialogue to assist the more confused viewer through the final act.

Hampshire has already said another fond farewell to the delicious acting prowess of Rachel, Joe, Simon, Shami, Eric, Danny and Jade, and it was the incomparable Jim Sweeney that was the last through Dale-the-music’s Southampton studio, flying down from Glasgow yesterday just to swear into a microphone.

One of our deliverables for international sales is a re-written screenplay, with the original dialogue swapped out with the actual lines spoken in the movie. It's an essential document for subtitling and dubbing the film for foreign markets. When I got onto this couple of weeks back, I had naively assumed that this would be a fairly simple exercise – after all, Jake and I went to a lot of trouble finessing the dialogue before the shoot to make the lines trip easily and effectively out of the mouths of the actors. Surely a professional respect for the written word would ensure only minor deviations from the page?

This, it seems, is not how it works. Seven hours later and I had effectively re-transcribed the entire movie from scratch. And it was a hell of a lot better than the one we wrote.

But along the way I did get some interesting insights into the acting process.

Regular attendees to the blog will know that Jim plays a character called Mac in the film – a veteran soldier with a voracious appetite for a very specific brand of zombie carnage. And an uncanny ability to cut directly to the insult. My recent exertions transcribing the film into Final Draft allowed access to some enlightening statistics: Mac has 888 words of dialogue, and the highest swearing-to-rest-of-sentence ratio of any character. And this was just the swearing that Final Draft’s profanity filter could identify – the vaginas, head-raped cock-parks and cock-in-anuses have all unwittingly passed through the algorithm with an official safe-for-PG-viewing stamp.

And so it came as quite a surprise to me to find that Jim had somehow secreted another twenty 'fucks' into the film above and beyond those allotted in the screenplay. Mac now defaults to dropping in expletives where a lesser man would use a comma, and probably means that any future trailer cut for universal viewing won’t feature the big man with his mouth open at any point.

Although, to be fair, Jake and I didn’t go out of our way to help. After getting Jim to roar repeatedly at an empty Southampton graveyard to 'shut the fuck up' (Charmed Apocalypse’s new preferred quiet outdoors spot – see the earlier blog entry for the problems we had with Rachel and Joe), our final act in the studio before dropping him back at the airport was to record some personalised Mac-based ringtones for our high-rolling IndieGoGo contributors. It was one of the perks we offered, courtesy of Zombie Resurrection’s 'swearing connoisseur'.

Some advanced warning to Marty, Debbie, Adam, Andy and Chris – better not assign these to anybody in your phone book that might call you when you’re in a public place. One for when the mother-in-law rings, I recommend. Incarcerated.

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.