My Newest Student Film (F3) is Done!

SO EXCITED!!!!

This post is a few weeks late, but after over 380 days my third student film is finally done!  The film is called "At the Feet of the Union" and is about a young Confederate soldier in the Civil War who is struggling with self doubt.  I've blogged about it before, especially during the visual effects cycle, but now that we have been through the sound edit, the color grade, and all the formalities of picture lock in the film school it is finally finished.

Mixing in the mix stage.

The sound edit was a one week process that started in a calibrated edit bay.  Most of my film was shot during a horrible rainstorm, so almost every single line of dialogue had to be replaced.  I recorded ADR several months ago in an isolation booth, so I already had a good head start on the dialogue edit: I didn't need to do much cutting and filling of white noise at all, which saved me a lot of time.  The school has a great sound library, which is where I pulled all of my backgrounds from.  For foley, I grabbed my friend Travis and spent a day in the school's foley booth.  The foley booth is a lot of fun.  There are multiple surfaces to walk on to create various footstep sounds and dozens of strange props and materials in there to make sounds.  We did all of the footsteps, clothes rustling, prop noises,  and body sounds in foley.  Finally there were a few hard effects I needed to add in, such as guns firing, and I grabbed those from the library again.  After the edit came the mix.  The mix was supervised by Chuck Allen, the post production supervisor at FSU.  Chuck has a career of experience in the music industry behind him and really facilitated the mixing process.  Sound editing is a creative process that is a lot of fun and has more to do with story than anything.  In my opinion, once you learn the basic tools your skill as a sound editor wholly depends on your creativity as a story teller and your understanding of soundscapes and how they can enhance a story.  Sound mixing on the other hand is a highly specialized and technical skill set.  Chuck took my edit and ran it through various auxiliary sends and returns and helped guide me through a strong mix in one of our mix stages at school.  He gave me creative control as far as volume levels and equalizers are concerned, but there is no way I could have done what he did to my film without him.  (We finished the film in a Dolby LTRT format, which I had never even heard of before.)  This experience really showed me the value in getting professionals to work on your film in the finishing department.

My DP, Victoria, working the control surface in Resolve.

Then we moved into color correction and grading.  This is one of my favorite parts of the post production cycle.  I just find it to be really fun and I have invested a lot of time into learning multiple color grading softwares.  This was the first time I got to grade a film in the full version of Da Vinci Resolve.  Previously I have only ever worked in the Lite version, but the full release gave us access to some very powerful noise reduction tools, which helped us out A LOT because at the time of shooting our F3s none of us had had any experience with the equipment package the school provided us.  I had a chemistry teacher in high school who would constantly tell us he believed the best way of learning was through exposure, and that is definitely the school's approach when it comes to gear.  They threw a Red Epic our way with some old 16mm lenses and basically said "have at it."  Each show we continued to learn more and more about the camera and the lighting gear we were using, but the noise reduction was a great tool to help us fix our mistakes.  For example, when it started pouring rain outside during our night exteriors, we lost the ability to light the scene because of the danger of water and electricity, so we pulled up a jeep and used its headlights in tandem with a practical fire on set.  We decided to go with a zoom lens so that we wouldn't have to change lenses in the rain.  A big problem with this was that we couldn't open up the T stop below a 3.5 or something like that, so we ended up with dark and noisy footage.  But if I had to go back and do it again I would make the same decision.  I believe that my DP and I made the best decision we could given the circumstances of the shoot, and the noise reduction really cleaned those night exteriors up.  It was great.  There's an odd little texture that comes from the NR sometimes, but it is WAY more tolerable and WAY less distracting than the noise, so it's just a tradeoff we had to make.

Technical processes aside, I want to talk about what working on a seven minute film for 380-some-odd days did to me creatively.  The production itself wasn't really 380 days: we took a huge break in the middle of that time to continue or regular classes, but that said the F3 was still very much on my mind during that time.  During the year of classes I took during the post cycle of my F3, I feel like I became a completely different filmmaker.  We had some really strong directing classes with Jason Maurer, co-director of the feature length animated film Delgo, and Antonio Mendez Esparza, writer/director of the award winning Spanish feature film Aqui y Alla (Here and There).  I also began an independent study with Jason (which I am still working on) during which we break down scenes from films and work on pre-visualization techniques.  Beyond that, I have really gotten to know our parallel class of students in the Production BFA program and have worked on several of their thesis films.  I feel that this year I had a lightbulb moment, where suddenly some things started to click.  The visual grammar of film, as Martin Scorcese calls it, is really starting to make sense to me and because of a particularly laborious film seminar I went through this year I believe I have much firmer grasp on the core principles of storytelling as a screenwriter.  So the bright side is that I feel like I am a better filmmaker than ever.  The downside is that these discoveries I have made and the things I have learned all taint the way I look at my F3, and when go back to work on sound or color or visual effects or whatever, I just can't stop looking at what I consider to be my mistakes.  Having to constantly go back and analyze and critique my seven minute film for an entire year was a surprisingly difficult experience.  It really made me question my own talent and abilities and really resulted in a lot of soul searching.  It's really hard to adopt a constructive mentality when you know that you won't be shooting your next short film for months and months to come.  In short, I never want to go through a process where I spend so long on something so short ever again.  It's destructive to morale, and doesn't create any opportunities to keep practicing and improving.  I hate to say it, but I don't like watching this film anymore.  I'm not exaggerating when I say that I believe I have watched it over 500 times.  Mistakes should encourage you to be better in your next endeavor, but in this case that encouragement disappeared quickly because there was no end in sight, and the mistakes became like weights looming over my head for a year.  That said, now we are DONE and I am more confident than ever in my ability to make a great new short film moving forward into thesis.  I'm an optimist, and even though the whole F3 process was arduous, I hands down believe that I learned way more from that process than if everything had gone smoothly and I was happy with my end product.  Not only have I learned to become a better filmmaker in terms of blocking, shot selection, cinematography, etc, but more importantly I have learned how to handle high stress situations, how to deal with malicious criticisms, how to adequately self-critique myself, and how to persevere and dig myself out of a creative rut.

Now... on to thesis!