Jack Daniel Stanley & Mark Johnson's REKINDLED

Just watched Rekindled. You got my vote... the HVX is yours.

You used a 35mm adapter, I presume? Which one? - It might be on this thread somewhere but I haven't the time to read every page (and if it's on the first page I give everyone permission to slap me)

The lighting and the music really stood out for me. What imagery, what composition! I am absolutely blown away.
 
Jack, you are going to have a mainstream appeal once you get into longer features... tens across the board from me!
 
You used a 35mm adapter, I presume? Which one?
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Jack made the offer to help him shoot and I had a frequent flyer ticket I needed to use so I flew to New York and brought My Redrock Micro M2 and lenses with me. Unfortunately, the M2 developed a glitch in that the ground glass was off-kilter on its motor mount and couldn't be adjusted back into balance. It created a wavering "heat wave" effect and so we had to ditch the M2 but, luckily, Jack has a Letus adapter with Nikon mount so we were able to use my lenses with Jack's adapter.

Thanks!

By the way, as soon as I sent an e-mail to Recrock Micro they shipped a complete replacement assembly with new motor and ground glass that was waiting for me when I got back to California. Can't say enough about Recrock's support.
 
I really liked this one. The mood was unexpected. Beautiful images. Great Editing. I've included some notes below. Great job!

movietime: 00:00:11:05 - Love the beginning and and color. The music sets an interesting tone.

movietime: 00:00:21:07 - Pretty gross. Big woman on the 'slab'.

movietime: 00:00:34:05 - Creepy red room. Or should I say 'Red Rum'.

movietime: 00:01:23:08 - The acting seemed 'theaterical'. Was that intentional? It almost makes it more creepy.

movietime: 00:01:56:04 - Nice effects with the different angles.

movietime: 00:02:49:08 - Nice pauses and good acting.

movietime: 00:03:23:08 - Love the bulletin board montage and music.

movietime: 00:05:17:25 - Nice juxtaposition of image and music when the guy gets his throat slit.
 
I'm with John and a lot of others. Honestly, Jack's topped himself and just set yet another standard. Guys like Curuguon, Rich, Jack, and Haakon (coming to mind first) are really showing us what "digital" can do when you dig at it.

I will get to the rest of the movies soon, but Jack's is sticking with me really hard.

Really, Jack and Mark. Thanks for showing that off. I want my own DVD hi-res version, please.
 
Now this is a complete story with plot development and climax that makes sense and it was entertaining - oh - and pretty tense but not too gory. I felt the musical treatment throughout was pretty well developed along a single idea, almost. Acting was very good. Sets, lighting, camerawork were strong. I would expect Rekindled to be a top contender against The Seeing, of course.

I would enjoy your candid and honest dissection of our soundtrack. The uploaded version is our theater mix highly compressed for crappy speakers. We plan to correct that after the fest is over.

Nice work.
 
wow you've done it again. i haven't watched stricken yet but since it's out of the competition i can say this is my fav film and i'm pretty sure you'll win.

the editing and pacing at the beginning is still a bit too fast for my taste but thats the only thing i can think of that i didn't like.

the set dressing (especially in the red room) is amazing. and off course the cinematography is great as is the case with all your films.

also the music was great, it was dead-on in the photo-wall montage.

and using the record as the title screen was a really cool touch.
 
235 Studios said:
I started to type this in a PM- but I ifgured others would be interested in the response should you care to divuige some of you process:

I am currious how you went about securing each location- it sounds like you painted a room and dressed the set well. (which comes out in the film - I lreally enjoyed each location). Anyway- was it a friends house? Did you have to redress the location after you left? (Paint it back to the original colors). What kind of prepwork went into the sets?
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Well it's kind of funny. The Basement and Apartment are both mine (basement's in "my" building).

I tried to secure a friends loft that has all sorts of weird objets d'art for the red room and I was stumped on a basement, calling and calling but to no avail.

In desperation I asked the maintenance man of our building about the basement, which in a lot of ways is off limits to tenants, and it turns out, lol, that 1) he's a former grip from Puerto Ricco and 2) there were all these secret chambers that were locked and that no one used with a small amount of stuff in them from as far back as the 20's!

Deal was we could use the basement from 9pm to 7am, when it is closed to tenants, though this part is always closed.

So the basement was more or less like this when we found it. We moved the table from the small back room to the front room as seen in this shot
main.gif

and here's the small backroom pretty much as it was with a little cleanup and moving some stuff around
antechamber.gif

and of course here is the set dressed
shrineset2.jpg

note in the above shot that little 6" battery lollfluorescents have been placed within and behind certain objects to light up the set and add texture

shrineset.jpg

In this shot, done after mark had gone back to LA and I had about a week of B roll to shoot before shipping his camera back to him, a six inch fluorescent is in the cigar box shooting up on the polaroid of Jin.

Note also that all of the polaroids of Jin were composited into these shots in post, the polaroid in the shot/on set is actually just a black square.

The set dressing consisted of real newspapers (not for closeup) and newspapers that Mark printed up (for closeup) and polaroids that we (mark mostly) made in photoshop and printed out on glossy card stock on my inkjet printer. There were 20 or so polaroids total and about 10 that were closeup ready.

The phrenology head and voodoo dolls were mine, research for a feature screenplay and a bit of New Orleans rubbing off on me. Cigar box and led string lights I already owned as well. My mom happened to have that old turn table though I had never seem it before (it just turned up when we needed it).

The pages of meticulous psycho scrawl were made from downloading a good handwriting font from dafont.com and "greeking" text having to do with phlebotomy and such and printing them out and then spraying them with coffee in a small atomizer
scrawl.jpg

we also downloaded stock images from istock to collage into the journal pages

The Red Room was my apartment. This was a challenge because my apartment is only 1 room. So living there while shooting, especially with an out of town house guest and all of his two crates of gear in tow, was a challenge. Because we had access to the secret locked part of the basement, we moved all of our stuff down there during the shoot and we painted the wall red with a oxblood sea sponge treatment ...
composite-upstairs.gif

you can see from this mid process shot that the wall had not been repainted from Bone Hand
bonewall.jpg

In bonehand only a corner of the room was dressed and we were just too busy after the fact to repaint. So the idea was with Rekindled to paint it something that we could live with after the fact. It doesn't look as crazy as it does in the movie with our new cheapo wanna be Ikea from Sears shelves etc. Looks pretty cool actually off camera. Also the whole room was dressed as I wanted to do actual blocking this time and wanted to show the room as empty for a better ghost reveal effect.

The wall hangings, which Mark has mentioned, were Memento Mori or portraits of the dead. These are actual dead people folks but the photos are public domain, so we could download them, print them at kinko's and use them in the film. The black frames were already owned (used for posters from plays I had done) and the little battery fluorescents were also already owned, part of an attempted homemade Obi light and just part of my light kit.

While we were working on other set elements my girlfriend set to scratching out the eyes of the phots with a pen, a pivotal and metaphorical image that clues jin into what's going on here - dead people that can't see represent her, particularly this dead bride photo.
deadlady.jpg


Also the memento mori creep us out because they represent what seems to be an unnatural attachment to the dead, and certainly that would characterize Jin and Marty's (yes his name is marty) relationship.

here's a great site with lots of memento mori portraits
http://thanatos.net/galleries/categories.php?cat_id=1
try this if that link doesn't work
http://thanatos.net
 
There were 20 or so polaroids total and about 10 that were closeup ready.
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Actually, J-Dan, there are 31! While you were working with the actors that one afternoon I kept cranking them out. Some of them admittedly got pretty bizarre and there's still that one of the exposed brain that pops up in some of my dreams unexpectedly ...
 
Wow -- great work! Thanks for the glimpse behind the scenes. It's amazing what you can do in your own little apartment building with enough drive and ingenuity.

Now that we're basically 70 pages into this thread there's not much left to say, but I'm a big fan of the record and the song's use in the film. Lovely!
 
I was looking at that & thinking the same thing, then it just dawned on me how much Jack's theater experience/career has REALLY helped him with the look of his films, with regards to the sets at least.

In theater it's all about the sets & props (well in addition to the performances of course, and some lighting/makeup things). So I'm sure all his experience there had him used to repainting & re-using props & sets for different productions. What's just second nature for him, is either too much work for some of us, or is outside of the box.

Thanks Jack ... simple things like paiting the walls add SO much to the look ... not to mention your other attention to details which totally did NOT go unnoticed.
 
Envision said:
In theater it's all about the sets & props (well in addition to the performances of course, and some lighting/makeup things)
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Er...what?

Anyway, I think the strongest thing about Jack as a filmmaker is the fact that he has this eye for detail and is willing to put all of this time into it. Jack mentioned that we had some white walls in Bloody Mary, some of which was intentional - but not all. And he was right. The thing that set this one off for me was the detail, choices, and work put into the set. Even that damned record.

And this is a sort of hallmark of all of his movies - his ability to take a location, for instance, and REALLY make you believe it's something else. He did this in Bonehand. I remember watching that movie, and thinking: "He's never once shown an entire room..." but he made those locations work for the story. It was a sign of someone with NO money, using his ability to visualize something, and then use the camera in such a way as to show you only what he wants you to see to fulfill that vision. I learned from this myself and reused one room in Bloody Mary as two entirely different locations.

This one again showed what an EXTREMELY focused eye and vision can do with basically nothing. And unlike many here, I know exactly how much nothing he had to work with. Who was the ****ing cracksmoker who thought Jack was rich????? That has to take the prize for stupidest, most clueless statement of HorrorFest. Can we give out a dunce cap for that one?

I don't mean to demean Mark's work, or the actors or anything, or call them nothing. What I mean is, moneywise, the fact that this looks like $10,000 on like 15 cents.

All this is not to say it's a good movie especially for a cheapy, I just want you all to know you really should be inspired, because if Jack shows nothing else, it's that you can just ****ing go do it. Put your excuses aside and do it and do it well. What you mainly need is the willingness to look and learn and practice.

I had some quibbles about the story, but I've talked to Jack about those - And I'm sure once he calms down, I can stop taking the death-threats seriously, and get that restraining order removed.

They may all boil down to personal preference. I know there are some people who don't like my movie, I don't like others, but I don't want that stuff to detract from the respect I can still have for him as a filmmaker, just because he didn't make certain choices I would have made. And I think that's important in this fest, to be able to separate likes from critiques of technique, etc.

Now Thurston, you wanna climb down off your pile of money long enough to grab a coffee in the Slope and smoke a couple $100 bills?
 
Yep, this one got knocked so far out of the park its in another time zone now!!!

I wouldn't even begin to attempt a critique of this film, this is just a great film across the board.

Wow
 
thanks again for all the feedback everyone.

I'm glad most people like it and I enjoy learning from those that have criticisms for the film (except for desperate comfort - yeah you lift that restraining order and see what happens to you thumbilina).

Seriously I do appreciate the feedback.

Please let me know if you have questions as I haven't seen much of a need to comment on the feedback other than to let you know I appreciate it very much and think that a lot of great points are being made. I think the feedback in general this fest has been more constructive than some past fests, at least by in large in the threads I have been to.

So thanks, and like I said let me know if there are other questions :thumbsup:
 
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