Butterflies in the Wind in pursuit of happiness

that's interesting
I wish I could have both, but I'll settle for one ... DVD sales perhaps.

If I go with DVD sales, I'll have to come up with a spectacular trailer. I need to go nuts and come up with some outrageous creative ideas. LOL

I mean like I did grow up in the 60s Haight Ashbury :-)
 
oh, shucks, I took off the QT clip from my index page :-)
I placed the new encoding of the clip at:

http://www.releasing.net

I put a PayPal buy now button below it. I'm testing the whole placement and design of the page to see if I can get some sales going.

Two trailers on the same page might be too heavy for some browsers. I wonder what people with dial up see when they open my website.
 
My only thing is the trailer is over three minutes. Give us just a taste. (About 1.5 minutes for a long trailer). Check out the Watchmen trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4blSrZvPhU it's long too but look at all we get in 2 minutes in 15 seconds. For a film like this I'd say go to a minute and thirty seconds for your long trailer and give us the meat. You may also want to enlist Zak or someone to do a professional cut. Although again kudos on doing a 70's period piece. Not my favorite decade but you've got the look down.

-Nate
 
I don't know how I ended up doing a 70s period piece -- not a favorite decade of mine either -- but there it is! I must start saying thank you to all compliments and own up to my skill at capturing the 70s look, even when I'm not trying.

Am I just getting old or am I stuck in a Groundhog Day syndrome as a filmmaker? LOL
 
I'm gearing up to do a 1 or two minute trailer that follows the suggestions of the commentators to this thread. I'm very appreciative for these wonderful suggestions regarding the format and substance of what makes a great trailer.
 
I'm also going to try another approach of marketing DVDs on the Internet:

direct contact. I will email all my friends and ask them to buy a DVD. I have thousands of virtual friends. Let's see how real they are.LOL
 
filmman said:
1. Disjointed editing -- that's how the film is :-)
2. Non-traditional transitions -- I sent two days on them LOL
3. Some of the actors' performances -- my fault...shooting alone, no energy left for directing. *sob*
4. you would not purchase the movie -- SUCCESS! You shouldn't buy the movie; I don't want to lose a friend.

The movie cannot be synched. I should have clarified: this movie was dubbed, not lip-synched, because the dialogue was not always what the actors said. I decided to change the dialogue and dub the movie ala Federico Fellini, my Italian filmmaker hero, who shot MOS and dubbed all his movies after he had finished principle photography.

He wrote the script for the dialogue after he finished with the PICTURE.

When theater actors asked him what they should say, he said, "count one two three four five six seven ... count."

He just needed lips moving so he could dub anything he wanted later.

BUTTERFLIES IN THE WIND was the first movie I dared shooting like this. What I discovered was that I was able to treat directing the dialogue to be a lot more of a creative process, almost more than the picture part.

I'm going to go further with this concept in my next feature film.

Thanks for your interest and help with my movie.
Click to expand...


Wow, Fellini was able to do that? I goty to see it to believe it :) - cause when I edit tricky scenes, I find that lips are not very forgiving, unless you are sinching exactly the same words from another pass, that is... Doing overdubs for me would be the last resort to save a scene if I am going to lose it for good if I don't fix the sound. I find that nothing is ever quite more true than the original on location performance. i think I would chose crappier sound and genuine performance over good sound and much less genuine performance...

Then of course if I could get BOTH :)

Ahh the things we have to go through to make films...

PS: due to my severe lack of time these days I was not able to read this entire thread but wanted to drop in and say hello, can I buy a film directlty from you, so I can see yoru work, if so how?
 
Deuceofspades said:
I find that nothing is ever quite more true than the original on location performance. i think I would chose crappier sound and genuine performance over good sound and much less genuine performance...
Click to expand...

So true. I try so hard to get clean sound on set.

-Nate
 
sound

sound

Although I will say it is distracting to not have the lips match in Vic's movie. Which I think may be one of the reasons you have trouble getting it widely distributed. I didn't really care so much because it gave it a definite style... I loved the style because it felt like a 70's movie with the grain and ADR.

But I think some might/could/would have a problem with it.

I recommend getting Vic's movie and seeing for yourself.

I saw a movie called "INK" that was entirely ADR'ed at the Santa Barbara Film Festival last week. Even though it was professionally done. The actors lose a level of emotion.
 
Thanks for the responses regarding dubbing. Dubbing practices differ in Europe as well. For example, Italians dub all films they buy, whereas Scandinavians only do subtitles. I think the French also only do subtitles on English language films, because they consider the actual expression of the language to be of paramount importance.

So for example, Claude Lelouch shot the entire movie A MAN AND A WOMAN with an MOS camera. He recorded the sound on the Nagra after every take. The lip sync in A MAN AND A WOMAN is perfect. You can never tell it was 100% dubbed.

As for Federico Fellini, he didn't care about lip synch. I used to think that only the English language version was so poorly dubbed, but then I found out one day when I was on my way to the Cannes Film Festival in the airplane (It was Alitalia) where I saw for the first time a Fellini movie in Italian. The dubbing was worse than the English language version.LOL

Then I understood that for Fellini the image and the sound were separate entities, each had their own role in his movies. I found that fascinating.

Like I said earlier in this thread, I learned when directing the dialogue in BUTTERFLIES IN THE WIND that there was a whole other level of filmmaking which I had taken for granted and that was the dialogue. The dialogue was always subserviant to the image in my movies before. I thought that's how it should be; however, I don't think so anymore.

Sound and dialogue especially have their own role in my movies from now on. I will approach them separately and try to marry them together during the shooting and later during the editing.

I think in this way I will make more profoundly interesting movies. I'm cross my fingers. LOL

Thanks again for your interest in my movie. Thanks Aurant for buying my movie. BUTTERFLIES IN THE WIND is available from Amazon. I think it can be downloaded.

http://www.amazon.com/Butterflies-W...ef=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1233562679&sr=1-1
 
This has been bugging me for a while now and I can't find an answer in the thread..

What does Persuit Of Happiness have to do with "Butterflies in the wind"?

It doesn't really make sense to me why the title of the thread is "Butterflies in the Wind in pursuit of happiness".
 
Thanks for asking; I'd forgotten myself :-)

To me filmmaking is the pursuit of happiness. I only make those films that make me happy, not what the distributors want.

As an indie filmmaker, I have agonized over this a long time (for 4 decades, if you want to know ;-) our first audience is the distributor. If he doesn't like the movie, we're dead in the water. I always hated that.

I spent twenty years making movies that I thought the market wanted, hoping that with the money I would make from such movies I'd make the movies that I wanted, namely my "art films" or the movies that I "believed in."

This never happened, and imho it never does; it's a waste of years of one's life, and in the end leads to bitterness. Bitterness is terrible for an artist especially :-)

So, I decided to live the dream of the filmmaker: in pursuit of happiness is my way of saying, I make movies that give me enjoyment first, and then I'll worry about distribution.

Another thing, now that distributors aren't advancing money, it really doesn't make any sense to go out there and spend a fortune and then put oneself at the mercy of distributors who will say one day, "give me horror" and the next day, "give action", etc.

As indie filmmakers we spend two to three years shooting and making a movie ready for distribution, only to wait for somebody to "pick it up."

Now that the Internet is allowing us to explore new possibilities of recovering our money and time invested in movies, let us help each other any way we can, to promote each other and get our movies into the marketplace.

I'm willing to help indie filmmakers get their films into the international marketplace. I don't have connections in the domestic market (I think nobody has anymore, because the cost of marketing a movie in the US is totally out of wack, so nobody gets special treatment even if you have connections).
 
filmman said:
So for example, Claude Lelouch shot the entire movie A MAN AND A WOMAN with an MOS camera. He recorded the sound on the Nagra after every take. The lip sync in A MAN AND A WOMAN is perfect. You can never tell it was 100% dubbed.

[/url]
Click to expand...

I just watched this last week for the first time. Great movie.

Vic, not sure if you know about it, but this is a software program made for automatically matching two audio tracks in sync.

You could record raw audio in the field, then re-record it in post and use the software to match them up so that the new will be in sync with the old. Of course, it is not 100% perfect, but... it helps if you are recording audio the Fellini way.

http://www.synchroarts.co.uk/products/vocalign/vocalign.asp
 
Oh, thanks for the tip. I sent them an email. I'd love to have this software. I could really indulge my penchant for shooting MOS :-) But of course, once they're no longer bothered by the dialogue being out of sync, they notice other flaws.LOL Is there a software that makes a movie more compelling? Like knocks off scenes that do nothing to further the drama? Or adds dramatic special effects with those sound bites that make Youtube fans click uncontrollably on a movie clip? Let me think, what else? LOL

Thanks for stopping by and giving me the link. Seriously this software could make my life simpler.

I didn't know Breathless was shot that way, Billy. I remember seeing a documentary on Jean-Luc Godard. Yeah, he used the Arri 2c also. Well, it was the poor man's Mitchell in the 70s.
 
Hey, Jim, I was reading the software requirements. It says Pro Tools is required. I guess I have to buy this software also. Right now I'm using Soundtrack Pro, which is the music program that comes with my FCP Studio 5.04.
 
there is also a stand alone version. these programs are running around $350 each. they're great but expensive. I will definitely consider them should I shoot another MOS movie with a lot of dialogue.

thanks for the tip again.
 
I'm looking for trailer music

also the sound bites that help smooth the transitions between unrelated scenes

where do I find those?
 
The trailers and the posters are so important for the success of a movie. One must think of them at the same time as when doing pre-production.
 
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