They Laughed at the Right Bits

. . . which was really all you can ask for, right?

Hello all! Keith here. Christian asked me to write up some thoughts about the recent Edinboro premiere that we had for Sweetmint.

This was an interesting experience for me because I hadn’t yet seen the completed film all the way through. Some time back I’d seen a cut that was a work-print, but there hadn’t been any color correcting, scoring, and the dialogue track was far from complete. Not only did I get to see it with all these things, but credits too!

Speaking of credits, I particularly dug the opening credit montage done to Molly Lewis’s song “My Hope”. I think it set the tone for the film quite nicely.

There weren’t a lot of people who attended the event. We didn’t really have a lot of notice to get much in the way of advertising done, but the people who did come seemed to enjoy it (except maybe the one girl who loudly sighed at the “chicks be crazy with the hormones” line). I wrote that line, so I take full credit for any offense created.

What can I say? Seeing words you wrote performed on a big screen is a surreal and wonderful experience. I haven’t been as involved with the project as Christian, but this is still my baby.

Speaking of Christian. . . guess who fell asleep during his own premiere screening? I know, right?

That’s all for now,
KWC

Blog Update… again

I have switched the server that the blog is on, and given it it’s own sub domain.

I am doing this in order to start work on the NEW Sweetmint site…

Please update your RSS feed for those following along.

www.SweetmintTheatre.com/theblog

In Response to my last post…

I’d like to share this message I got from fellow filmmaker David Neureuther… it goes to show that I’m not in this alone, and people are making feature films all over the place.

David’s film is called “Seven Year Rental” – To find out more about his film at – www.SevenYearRental.com

Hey Sir – I think we’ve been traveling the same journey on different paths. I don’t know if Jared Schmitt has ever said anything about “Seven Year Rental”, but I’ve been working on that movie for about as long as (I believe) you’ve been working on Sweetmint. After reading your recent blog post I just wanted to congratulate you on your completion. It’s a pretty great feeling to reach that finish line. I’ve enjoyed reading your blog because, especially through your last year of editing, it’s very much echoed my own experiences. I also submitted to the Milwaukee Film Festival this year – I know, that’s a whole lotta Jared Schmitt for one festival! (haha) Good luck; I hope we both have the chance to be MFF Filmmakers. – Respectfully, David Neureuther

Thanks David for sending a message… good luck to you, and I encourage everyone to go check out David’s trailer online… I look forward to seeing Seven Year Rental soon.

Prepare to get excited…

I think this is the blog post that I have been waiting to write the most…

As of 6:38pm CST, We finished Sweetmint!!  That’s right, it’s done… well almost.

I have been on vacation for the previous five days, and while I was away, my friend Mark Heleniak, and Jonathan Johnson were slaving away at the film’s soundtrack, and Graphic Design (respectively).  And I can’t say it enough, but I appreciate the hard work and dedication that they have put into this project.  The end result is going to be amazing.  (How do you like the fact that I was on vacation while they were busy working?)

But no… Sweetmint isn’t TOTALLY done.  I was at Mark’s house yesterday for five hours, putting together the last half of the soundtrack.  A film can never be REALLY done, there’s always more work that could be done.

Walter Murch once said “A film is never finished, it’s just abandoned”

But in this case, it isn’t time to abandon this thing yet… I’ve been saying that we are “done” but there’s still a little bit more audio mixing to do.  Not much… but there’s a few things we aren’t satisfied with yet.

But why then, am I saying we are “done” – because for the past month, Mark, Jonathan, and I have been working very hard, and under a lot of pressure to get the film, and Graphic Design done for the Milwaukee Film Festival Deadline.  And as of 9:13am this morning… the film was in the hands of the Milwaukee Film Festival’s Program Manager.  So all that work, stress, and late nights have all been completely eliminated.  (All three of us… Mark, Jonathan and I… took at least one night where we went without sleep… I used to do that all the time, not anymore).

So now, I am in the best mood I have been in, in a long time… my chorus director told me today, that he could tell that I seemed “relieved” about something… relieved and well rested.

So yes, there is work to be done still… Jonathan and I need to take a look at the design with a fine toothed comb, and Mark and I need to finish the Audio, and I also need to tweak the title sequence a bit.  But… the pressure is off for a little while.  The next deadline isn’t until August… and I’m sure we will be finished by then.

At this point, the only thing I want to do is nothing… for at least a week.  Mark and I have agreed to not “speak to each other” for at least 7 days… and the next time we do speak, it’ll be over a beer.  So we can both get some rest and relaxation in… (I know, I was just on vacation and now I’m taking another break…. we’ll call it a mental break, so I can avoid a mental break-down).

Thank you to Mark, Jonathan J., Bryon, Matt, Katy, Sammi, Sarah, Jared, Tim, Jamie, Zak, Jordan R., Smokin’ Joe, Rachel, Adam, Brianna, Jasmine, Cory, Chad, Nick, Luke, Lindsey P., Kevin P, Marc, Jack, Brad K., Elysabeth, Vicky, Donna, Mary Jo, Jonathan P., Heather, Noelle, John C, Jeremy, Cecilia, Job, Anthony, Beverly, Mark M., Karen, Robert, Jordan B., Megan, Amy, Tim F., Mike P., Kevin F., Drew, Frankie, Lindsey R., Mark F., Matt K., Sarah K., Heath, Nick V., Monica, Mike B., and Barb.

And of course, our Executive Producer Tim Rewolinski… and my friend and Creative Partner Keith Cunningham.

Without you guys… none of this would be possible.  I gotta make sure you get thanked now, cause I might forget to say it again in the future.

I will now be anxiously anticipating the results of the Milwaukee Film Festival, as well as beginning to submit to many other film festivals.

It’s not over yet… look for more blog entries soon.

Long Update…

Wow, I know it’s been awhile since I’ve given a formal blog post, but that’s because I’ve been super busy working on the movie… so I guess you should forgive me.

I don’t want to count my eggs or chickens before they are hatched, or cross the road or something, but the editorial department of Sweetmint is currently hard at work trying to meet a deadline of July 7th.  Which means, that one week from today, if we keep our noses to the grindstone… we will get this movie done.

Wait, let me repeat that… Sweetmint will be DONE.  Not almost done, not coming close, not almost there… DONE, FINISHED, In the CAN…

You’ll have to ask me one week from today how that feels, as of right now, I’m a little bit sleepy, and on edge.

I have my friend and mentor, Mark Heleniak working hard on the audio, and a newcomer to the crew… Mike Sandobrn, is hard at work on his day off today working on the title sequence.

And as for me, well still color correcting… co-ordinating, and wrapping up as many loose ends as possible.  All while trying to edit a wedding, and finish a website…

It’s gonna be a long long week, and I get a feeling it will be important.

Special Thanks to my brother, Marc Reichman… Marc came through big time last night.  I had a “whole” in my soundtrack, where I just couldn’t find the right tune to use there, so I looked through Marc’s archives, I found a demo that he had done that I thought would work perfectly… and two hours later, I have a finished track, perfect for the movie.

I may check in again this weekend, when I’m at my peak tiredness…

Quick Update… then a longer one later

I have temporarily taken down www.SweetmintTheatre.com

I am hoping to have a real website up soon for the movie, and my Domain Mapping had expired.  So instead of paying for it, and then not get a full year out of the Domain Mapping, I am going to redirect www.SweetmintTheatre.com to Facebook.

If you are following this blog via RSS, it may stay the same…

If not you will most likely have to change your RSS settings to http://Sweetmintmovie.wordpress.com

Color Correction… begin!

Last night I started working on Color Correction for the movie.

I feel like I’ve been waiting for a long time to get started with this process.  In order to do it, I had to bone up on my Apple Color skills, and watch a few video tutorials.  It’s a really great program, and it helps to give an interesting and stylized look to the film.

I got one scene done, after tweaking with Final Cut Pro, and trying to get Color to work with each other.  Once I figured that out, I got the first scene done, then decided to call it a night.

I watched the news, and then attempted to go to sleep.  I couldn’t fall asleep whatsoever… and I knew why.  With a deadline approaching to finish this movie, I felt like I didn’t get enough work done.  So at about 10 to Midnight I got up and went back to work.

It took me an hour to get the next scene done, and I was pretty excited about it.

The interesting thing about Color Correction, is when you start you think “This clip looks pretty good…” then you start to do some color correction or color grading on it, and you don’t think you’ve done a lot, but if you shut off those changes, it’s like “Woah… the original looks like crap.” – So I think that’s one of the reasons I like it… it is fun, and it’s pretty “magical” too.

Plus, once you do one clip… you just copy and paste to the rest.  So there’s a chance I could be done with this a lot sooner then I thought.

I finally got all the elements to Mark Heleniak at Earmark Studios, who will be doing the audio sweetening on the whole movie.  I gave a pretty good attempt at the audio, and it sounded pretty decent… but I’m not set up for audio clean up, and so I missed a lot of things that I shouldn’t have.  So Mark is working really hard to do a great job of the audio and give me and my cast a crew something we can all be proud of.  So I’m pretty glad to have Mark on board, he’s a talented guy and he’s devoted to what he does.

One week from tomorrow, I gave myself a deadline that the movie has to be done…

It’s close, I don’t know how realistic that is going to be.  The Color Grading and Audio is the least of my worries, I still need to get a title sequence put together, I need to lay out the music, and I need make sure I didn’t forget or miss anything.  So it’s either totally unrealistic, or it’s going to be cutting it close at the last minute.

We’ll see what happens…

So much going on, so little time to report….

Yeah, I know it’s been awhile since I updated this here blog…
But I’ve been super busy, you wouldn’t believe how busy I’ve been.

We’ve been working real hard trying to finish up the ADR for the movie, and as it stands right now, I’m only missing
three lines.  One of them is kinda my fault… I forgot to have Matt do one line, and now I have to make arrangements to have him finish it. 

I’ve also been busy working a bit on sound effects, just making sure they get added where necessary.

But the big news of the week, is that Nick Pecone… the musician who is scoring the movie, has sent me three tracks to check out.  I got a chance to hear them along with the video, and they already sound great… once the audio has been mixed and mastered the way I like it, it’s going to make for a pretty interesting movie I think.  I can’t wait to hear more from Nick.

Welcome to Cinema Tools.

For the past 5 years I have been using Final Cut Pro, Soundtrack Pro, Motion, DVD Studio Pro, and now I’m learning how to use Color.  But for all this time, there is one program that still alludes me… Cinema Tools.

What is it?  What does it do?  I don’t know, and I don’t know anyone who uses it… I like the name, sounds very professional.

Well, I still don’t know what is is COMPLETELY used for… but I learned a few things yesterday, and it kinda saved my life.

I may have written about this some time ago, but we reshot a scene, involving Brett, in his bedroom… because the first time I shot it, I was not too happy with the way it turned out.  So we decided to go in and reshoot… well, it had been so long since we shot anything for the movie, I forgot to check to see what frame rate I was in, and I ended up shooting in 30i – and the film was shot in 24P*.

*Note – 30i means 29.97 frames per second, interlaced… and interlaced just basically means it creates a bunch of horizontal lines to create the image.  24P means that it was shot in 23.97 frames per second, Progressive… which means that it was one solid image, as opposed to those crappy lines.

What’s the big deal you ask?  Well… interlace lines serve a purpose in their own right, but they DO say that having a progressive image will give you more of that “film look” – although some would argue that point.  But the main thing is, I shot in 24P, and now I’m stuck with footage in 30i, I didn’t think this would be that big of a deal, but once I started workign with the footage, I immediately noticed a lot of nasty stuff, like jagged edges instead of smooth, and a lot of busy lines where there shouldn’t be. 

So I thought about it… and said “I gotta reshoot” and then I said to myself… No way, not happening.  We have to live with this, I can’t reshoot again. So I started trying to figure out ways to effectively fix the problem… I tried the de-interlace filter provided by FCP, but that never does the job.  I knew the first thing I had to do was get the footage into 24 fps, and that’s when I realized, that Cinema Tools MIGHT do that.  So I opened the clip in the program, and first thing I did was click some random button that said “conform” and it gave me the option to conform the footage to 24fps… and then bam!  I had progressive footage in 24p.  Just like that… and I didn’t have to do hardly anything at all.

Then I discovered a snag… since you are removing frames to create this frame rate, the time codes are different.  So the scene that I had already edited in 29.97, is now completely off… so I gotta recut the whole scene.  No big deal, only the third time I’m editing this scene.  But then I discovered one other snag… all the audio iiiiiiiissssssss vvvvvveeeeerrrrrrrryyyyyyy llllllllooooooow.  But that’s easy… pitch shift, right?  Yup, exactly… I shifted the pitch (which makes a voice higher or lower) and now, Brett sounds like Brett again.

So, problem solved, and I learned something along the way!

Congratulations Drew…

I just wanted to take a moment, and send a congratulations to Drew Rosas…
Drew wrote and directed the feature film Rocky Trails, which will be premiering at the Oriental Theater tonight, May 20th…

Way back in 2009, I got introduced to Drew, through my friend Frankie Latina… Drew was looking for some help working on his film over the course of those three summer months.  I got to work mostly as a production assistant on three shoots, and on one of those shoots, I was acting as the boom operator.  So I got a chance to learn a lot about working on other people’s projects and learn their own work flow.

Through the course of working on Rocky Trails, I got to see that it is possible to shoot a feature length narrative in only a few months, and it was right after working with Drew I dug up my script for Sweetmint, and began reworking it for a feature film. 

As I’m writing this, I am listening to Drew being interviewed on the Backstage with Mark Metcalf Podcast and he is talking about the process in which he made the film, shot only on weekends, for a very very small budget.  Using your friends, and paying them through sub sandwiches.    Hearing another filmmaker, and even another local filmmaker talk about his process, and realizing that it was pretty similar to my own process (for a first time feature) is pretty rewarding to hear.  As if we are all in this school together, and we are all stumbling across the same lessons.

Actually, not long after I heard that Rocky Trails was premiering, I sent Drew an email… basically saying that I’m looking forward to the premiere, and I thanked him for allowing me to work on the project.  I also told him a bit more about Sweetmint, and how the movie probably wouldn’t have existed if it wasn’t for Rocky Trails.  And Drew said that making a feature film is better then any Grad School you could ever go to… and he’s absolutely right.

Kind of a funny story… on one of the shoots I was on, working as Production Assistant… we were shooting in an apartment that had wall to wall shag carpeting.  And the people who lived there, also had a cat… so lots of cat hair was caught up in that shag, and I got an allergy attack, bad… eyes swollen, nose running etc.  So I ran to Walgreens, and picked up the cheapest Allergy meds I could find.  Well, cheap isn’t always a good thing… and these meds put me to sleep in almost an instant.  So now while everyone is shooting, I’m sleeping in the corner with my head against the wall.  So, I guess I wasn’t too helpful on that shoot.

So, Drew… if you are reading this on Facebook, which hopefully you will… Congratulations, and I look forward to your premiere tonight.