Ironman
Well - it is the weekend again and I plan on doing some much needed housework and pending tasks. I still haven't replied to my emails but at this point I can't be bothered. It is one of those phases where I don't like answering anyone - I will get over it soon but for now I am enjoying the freedom of ignoring non-critical mail.
The cut for 'To'ona'i' was locked on Wednesday night and neither David nor me were hurt or injured during the process plus I didn't have to use the knives and forks on David. David won the overall contest of the number of changes suggested to number of changes agreed to and implemented by 11-9 but I don't mind losing this contest at all as the locked cut feels so much more fluid. I encoded the files and passed on the DVD's to Mr. Mamea - now most of my active 'hands on' part is done and it is upto the sound designer to make the short film cohesive by creating an immersive sound design.
I went and saw
Iron Man yesterday and it was a nice experience. The movie has flaws but it works wonderfully well and is great escapist fare. The center of the movie is Robert Downey Jr, who really sells the movie to you and the supporting cast supports his well. And the thing I liked about Iron Man was that in one of the few action sequences in the movie Tony Stark goes ape shit while dealing with his enemies. You never see that kind of brutal assault from a super hero because they are supposed to be 'good'. Imminently watchable.
Time for my beauty sleep.
Ciao,
Amit
Labels: Movies, Post Production, Short film
Awarded
Well - FIVE was chosen as the Best Feature by the judges at DeReel Independent Film Festival in Australia. And yeah I am thrilled beyond words.
Besides that - just mentally preparing myself for tomorrow when I sit down with David to lock down To'ona'i - the short film that he is making. I need to sharpen my knives and forks to combat his nanchucks - it will be one helluva wonderful event I swear. I will write an update if I come out as the survivor.
I have seen the first 4 episodes of Season-4 of Battlestar Galactica and it is thrilling as usual. Seeing the cylon civil war was awesome - they seem to be laying parallels with humanity but I am finding it hard to imagine as to how they will wrap up the story.
Anyway time to hit the sack.
Till later,
Amit
P.S - the new DARK KNIGHT trailer rocks..it rocks real hard.
Labels: Five, Post Production, Short film, TV Series
Out Stealing Horses
The book '
Out Stealing Horses' by Per Petterson has been a magical read. It is so lyrical but heart breaking at the same time. The narrative flows like a river and melts your heart and soul with it's simplicity which offers profound insight into the human condition. It is a highly recommended read and it is rare for translations to be as good as this one. The ending breaks your heart and you can judge it by the last line of the book which says 'we do decide for ourselves when it will hurt.'
David and Christina came over last night to pick up the DVD and watched the tweaked cut and I am still alive, so needless to say the cut is almost there - a couple more minor changes and the cut is ready to be locked. Now I get a couple of weeks break from the short film post before David sorts out background stuff and then we will have a couple more days in post for locking the cut down. Now it is time to concentrate on the music video and try and get that organized, so I am still able to finish it within the next couple of months. At this point - I need to test out the post workflow for the music video as it is going to involve a small amount of 2-D animation as well.
Well that's me for now.
Till later,
Amit
Labels: Books, Short film
The Vancouver Film School/YouTube Scholarship Challenge
They are not paying me to put this up or anything but I thought I would post it here as it is a good opportunity.
The Vancouver Film School/YouTube Scholarship Challenge
YouTube and Vancouver Film School have partnered to create an international competition to make film school accessible to everyone. The challenge? Create a short film, animation or pitch addressing the theme "what matters to you." The prize? Three scholarships to any of Vancouver Film School's 14 outstanding educational programs, including Film Production, 3D Animation & Visual Effects, Acting Essentials and more.Submissions close at 11:59PM EST on May 9th, 2008. For more information, visit
www.youtube.com/vancouverfilmschool.
Cheers
Amit
Labels: Movies, Short film
Further developments
The past 2 days have been super busy and I desperately waiting for the weekend. I was supposed to go for an audition on monday evening right after my acting lessons and because the character I was auditioning for was supposed to speak in an american accent I scurried around for an accent coach and I got in touch with
John Dybvig, after recommendation from Mike [my acting teacher]. The time was fixed for Monday late afternoon -straight after work and I was excited. Then early on Monday morning the audition got cancelled but I still decided to go through with the accent coaching as it is something that I had been meaning to do for a long time. So I went over to John's place for my lesson straight after work. The class was extremely helpful and I intend to keep at it, so that I have an additional skill set if need be. After the lessons I drove over to my acting lessons in the evening and then came back home and cooked some Keema Curry to wind down after a long day. By the time I hit bed I was dead tired. A 16 hour day in total.
Yesterday was no less busy as I went home straight after work and started working on To'ona'i. I started implementing the changes that I had discussed with David and I got into the flow of things pretty quick. Editing is not about cutting - it is about intuition and working from the heart rather than from the mind. Anyone can cut but not everyone can make a story flow - it is a craft (like writing or acting or any other creative art form), which you just develop as you gain more and more experience. I made some interesting discoveries about length and the time of a cut, that I am pretty pleased about.
Funnily enough I lost track of time and missed my physio appointment and ran really close to the line with my salsa lessons. The lesson was interesting in the sense that there were more girls than guys at the class - which was a problem as you can only dance salsa in pairs and the steps for girls is different from that for the guys and the fact that guys are the ones who have to lead the dance. It was a good workout, especially after the 2 private classes I took before this group class. A lot of what the salsa teacher taught in the private lesson started to make sense including the observation that kiwi girls are really hard to dance salsa with [not all of them obviously but most of them] and the guy has to work extra hard to make them work to the signals. Kiwi girls forget that in the dance it is the guy who leads and they just have to follow the signals and they try and control the dance. Typical!
Anyway after the salsa lesson, I came back home and went about authoring a DVD for Mr. Mamea and I didn't finish it till 12.30 at night. And by the time the DVD authoring was done and I had tested the DVD on a couple of machines I was on auto-pilot mode and was glad when I finally hit the bed. With post production schedules I hate running close to the line and I always like to keep aside contingency days just incase shit hits the fan - luckily in this case it did not and everything went to plan. So I did have a good sleep knowing that I had done my bit even though it was a 17 hour day and it was my 4th day of doing 15+ hours a day. So yeah I am eagerly looking forward to the weekend but that's not before I hand over the DVD to Mr. Mamea tonight and discuss further post production action on the short film.
Till later,
Amit
Labels: Acting, Food, Post Production, Short film
To'ona'i Rough Cut
The weekend disappeared into post production for To'ona'i and I have just come out for a breather now. Mr. Mamea brought over his short film on Friday evening and we had the viewing of the rough cut he had done and after discussing the guidelines on how much liberty I had [ruling out any Michael Bay style fast cuts or David Lynch style mind games], I went about tightening the short film.
It took me an hour on saturday morning to get used to Final Cut Pro, which is what I was editing on [I usually edit on Avid] and then some more time to come to grips with the material in front of me. Once I had taken everything in, the next couple of days went away in a breeze as I was constantly finding ways to economize the story telling without losing the core of the story and also developing a more solid story rhythm and pacing.
I was pretty pleased when David viewed the movie again last night and did not have a heart attack and neither did he kill me for chopping off about 2 minutes off the running time of the short film. There are a couple of minor visual tweaks to sort out but the refined rough cut as it stands is looking pretty good and is flowing nicely. Sound post on it will be a challenge and my sympathies are already with the guy who will be doing it as it will be a massive mission to clean up the audio - which because of the nature of the short and the shoot wouldn't exactly have been easy to record in the first place. The rest of this week will be going into implementing those tweaks and also authoring DVD, so the David can do what he needs to do with them before the project moves into it's final cut stages.
There are other commitments to fulfill this week and I am sure I will somehow manage them as well.
Till later,
Amit
Labels: Post Production, Short film
Weekend!!!!!!!!!
I had a weekend off and it was really nice as I did nothing - I recovered from the weird week that was last week and basically slept through most of it in between doing some writing for 'Rejected'. It is going to be a busy few weeks with the impending post on 'To'onai' from later this week combined with a lot of smaller commitments during the week and ongoing projects.
I have also slowly started getting back into running as part of my conditioning program for my hamstring recovery. It was definitely really hard to start off with but I am slowly getting into the rhythm and it feels good. Another 2 weeks and my hamstring will be completely healed (fingers crossed).
One of my newer ongoing projects is learning how to speak Spanish. I don't know why I wanted to learn a new language but I felt that I had to and the only language that came to mind was spanish. I wanted to learn it at a language school but that would have meant trying to co-ordinate and block out times in my schedule, which would have made life a little more inflexible, so I searched online for some good self-learning spanish language programs and found one that I liked. I went ahead and bought it and now am learning espanol in my own time. :-)
It feels great getting my weekends back and also at all the progress of all the current projects {atleast the ones that I am actively pursuing}.
That's me for now.
Amit
Labels: Random, Short film
Brief Update
It feels like ages since the last time I updated on here. There hasn't been anything significant happening at this end. I spent the day at home as I wasn't feeling well at all but I am definitely feeling better now.
The work on REJECTED is happening slowly but surely and it is turning out to be a fun process , writing in collaboration and having fun with the characters. Talking of collaboration - I dropped out of the short film that I was writing as it didn't make sense to divert my energies to writing something in an art form that I am not focussed on in the long term. As far as the music video is concerned - I have a concept but now I am racking my head about implementation and achieve what I want to see on screen. The self-imposed deadline for the music video release is end of May, so hopefully I will be able to achieve that.
Besides all of this - I am helping the inscrutable Mr. Mamea finish his
short film and I am involved in the post production side of things as a consultant/supervising editor/post production dictator. Just had a meeting this evening and things are looking good with the workflow and I set some deadlines which will surely make life interesting for Mr. Mamea as he slaves away wondering about the meaning of the word 'freedom' and then we will re-assess the situation. Muhahahaaaa {evil laugh}.
That's me for now.
Amit
Labels: Script, Short film
PEACE
One of the randomest things happened and I broke a 3 year promise to myself - I was talking to Lance about future projects (even though I am taking time off projects) and he mentioned that he had about 12 minutes worth of 16mm film stock and 2 16mm cameras. That got me thinking and I was racking my head about the possibility of making a short film on 16mm film - a short film in this case being really short with a maximum time limit of 3 minutes as that would give us the flexibility to shoot with a ratio of 1:4 (which is insane - trust me on that one). I racked my brains about for a short film that would still be a good human story despite the massive restrictions we had. I asked a couple of people if they could write something but when things came to nothing I decided that I probably had to do something about it.
It dawned on me that some of the short stories written by Uday uncle are very cinematic, touching and at the same time very human. So I went about reading some really short short stories from the book '
Short Shorts, Long Shots' which I had co-translated with Bob
chachaji [Robert A Hueckstedt] when I was in India and I found 'Peace' - it is this wonderful short story that takes you by surprise. I promptly emailed both Uday uncle and Bob chachaji and both of them gave me a go-ahead to make the short film. I sat down and wrote the script - which is all of 2 pages long but has so much going on within those 2 pages - to the point where I think making this short will require a lot of attention to details to make it authentic and a long pre-production period. So yeah - I am happy that I broke my vow because I did it for something that is worth it. I am excited and have started assembling the jigsaw puzzle of a pre-production into it's normal state. This will be very very challenging but fun at the same time.
Peace out,
Amit
Labels: Books, Short film
