Paul Bae contemplates a beverage



Resty times



This guy



Sleeping Bunnys


Our Stills Photographer ARIEL'S PHOTOS Are fantastic!

Here are just a few...I'm sure she has more on her website.

Just working out some new Yumi poster ideas.

VIFF starts in a few days and I need to write a novel, prepare the final picture locked version of Yumi for sound, write a radio play, and a full length feature film...in addition, I'll be polishing a Strindberg adaptation to shoot very soon, a podcast/webisodic show, and my newest feature film idea won't leave me alone. Plus, I need to prepare a fellowship application and figure out how I'm going to start paying off my credit cards...crazy.

Still, the poster looks pretty cool. Thanks Lori!

THE EDIT

Whew...who would have imagined that it would take almost three FULL days of sitting in front of the screen to re-type the script. The shooting script for Yumi in Love was 110 pages (plus MANY "A" pages)...I would put the grand total at 115 pages total, and that's being a tad conservative.

The actual film...87 pages.

Crazy.

I cut 28 pages of stuff from this movie. ALWAYS cut for performance, NEVER cut for picture. Those are my rules. If I loved a line but felt it wasn't delivered as well as I would have liked, it was cut. If I felt the dialogue wasn't working, it was out (as was the scene).

So...we're at 87 pages, 92 minutes, and I'm beginning to feel like it's time to send it off into the world of post audio.

A bit of ADR to pick up some things that were never recorded, some music, some sound design, and then it's off to...where...Cannes? Fingers crossed.

(why not keep em' crossed for Cannes!)

New stuff is coming...what's next? Things. Interesting things.

THE LAST KISS

Hmmm...films like this one, twenty to thirty something (even forty something) writers/directors trying to remake "Beautiful Girls," fooled me for a few years, but now I know what to expect. And I loved Beautiful Girls when I saw it in the theatre and I love it today. It's a great film, but not that popular...kind of a strange thing that it's spawned so many "Garden States"

Anyone who can make a film...that is one hell of a thing. Having just made a film, I have a whole new respect for the process. It isn't easy...unless you have millions of dollars, and then it's REALLY fucking easy. If you have two credit cards screaming past their limits, it can be a bit more challenging...still, it is one hell of a thing to make a film. Stars have to align and all of that.

I LOVE Casey Affleck as an actor, and he is SO GREAT in this film. Underused. Had he been the lead, The Last Kiss might have been alright. The editor could have easily chopped fifteen minutes off of this thing.

THE WRAP PARTY

Things are so hectic...I don't have time to call my good friends, and I don't have time to plan the wrap party...but man, I could use the wrap party. I wish there was a hall or a legion, or something...a gym...a common room in someone's building...anyplace where we could unwind and watch a trailer and maybe some short films.

let's figure this thing out...

Our newest doggie Frances.


YUMI TIME

I've cut Yumi in Love down to 92 minutes. Wow.

I also finished cutting a trailer this afternoon, but I'm not sure whether or not to put it online.

I'm in love with it. The actors in the film are so great. But I don't want to give too much away.

SOUND

I've spoken to a couple of really great people about doing the sound. We'll see how that pans out over the next couple of weeks. I'm hoping to have a sound mix and everything complete within a month.

I'm also wondering if there's any point in using a sweet trailer to try and secure some "completion" funding for the film. It would sure be cool to have some "name brand" music in the film, some Technicolor style colour correction, etc...it would not be sweet, however, to wait and wait for applications and paperwork. That's why you shoot a film on your credit cards, to avoid waiting!

BITS

Still need to find a way to clear up one storyline. I had to cut a WHOLE bunch of stuff that clarified a certain plotline because it just didn't look good enough. Now I'm thinking that post audio might be the only way to fix it up, along with maybe a quick pickup shot here or there. We'll see. It's only one storyline out of a whole bunch, but it needs to get cleared up.

I was worried about 11 characters in 90 minutes, but Altman had 24 major characters in Nashville and it's 160 minutes. By that math, you can have 12 characters in 80 minutes...I should be just fine.

COLOURS

Spent the day colour correcting the first 12 minutes of Yumi in Love...takes a long time, and this is just "scratch" correction; just for the rough edit. Later on I'll have to go in and seriously tweak each clip...time consuming, but there's no way around it. Yumi in Love needs to look "hot". And it shall look hot indeed.

THE EDIT

I'm stuck at 95 minutes. It doesn't feel like I'll be able to get the film down to 90 minutes, but I'm going to keep trying.

THE SOUND

I need to get close to a picture lock soon so I can get a master sound designer involved. I'm going to make a few calls tomorrow. There's dialogue, F/X, Foley, and Music to consider. It's a very big job. I'm still trying to wade through all the footage to find the "missing" sound. I don't think there's any way around some ADR, but who knows, there might be somebody out there who can polish up all this production sound. I'm guessing 25%, but I'm hoping it's MUCH less. I'm hoping for 0%.

THE FILM

Orson Welles said that "The notion of directing a film is the invention of critics. It isn't an art, or at best it's an art only one minute a day. That minute is terribly crucial, but it occurs very rarely. The only time one is able to exercise control over the film is in the editing. The images themselves are not sufficient"

This feels absolutely correct. There's writing, which is rewriting over and over until the last day of principal photography. There's directing. Directing is simply guiding the growth of that writing, allowing interpretation (or dealing with what you get on the day), throwing out what doesn't work and keeping only what does. There's editing. Editing is writing. Editing is not being afraid to throw everything away that doesn't work, and move things that do work into places where they work a little better. I've thrown out more than half of the lines I absolutely loved while I was writing the script.

I really think the film is working. I just need to watch it about 300 more times. I've started working on a simple credit sequence as well. Credits are cool.

90 minutes. That's the goal.

MINUTE 91:00

I had myself convinced (deluded) that my first assembly would be around 90 minutes long (for my 110 page script).

Yeah. That didn't happen.

There are a few minor logistical concerns at this point (mainly where to put certain scenes I've either combined or shortened). I've had to move a scene that takes place in the very early morning to the night before (the character's clothes are an issue but we'll see). In the script I can't believe I had the time jumping around so much, after so many meticulous rewrites! Nobody caught it.

It didn't matter until around minute 75, until then it was all going very smoothly...

It'll all work out perfectly in the end.

A feature film, as it turns out, is nothing like a short film...did I mention that?

Probably.

Back to work (or dinner and then work).

LET'S TALK TERMS

Nobody knows how to make a film.

A whole bunch of people know how to make a movie.

In much the same way many people know how to write a book, but nobody knows how to write a novel.

Each novel (let's consider literary fiction for this example) teaches the novelist how to write it. Each film teaches the filmmaker how to bring it into existence.

I'm at 68:53 of my first assembly of Yumi in Love.

Back to work.

MINUTE 63:00

I would like to think that I'm two thirds of the way through (ideally I would love to see Yumi at 90 minutes or less), but with a 110 page script...at one page per minute...I'm probably a bit less than two thirds (I hope I'm at least past the half way point).

Some scenes are easy, one is killing me. No coverage at all. Only two angles. This would be fine, except I'm trying to cut half the dialogue in the scene, and no character's head is in the same position for any line of dialogue.

I've discovered that most scenes that lack coverage end up better (more a blessing than a curse for sure), but once in a while...

The stuff in the bar looks pretty good. I can't wait to get some music and start on the sound.

Anyone know a good Foley artist who'll work for food and a deferred wage?

Please let me know!

Back to work.