FEATURE: SEARCHING FOR ANGELS (formerly JANE DOE)

Hunter007 said:
Kholi: Thanks for your thoughts. Actually, Vivica's part was written in right from the beginning. We always intended to use her and her character reflected that right from the start. We believe that writing characters in after the fact for a name, shows in the final product. Vivica's role is crucial to the film's progression - we just wanted to shoot as much of the film as we could before we brought Vivica in - figured our money would stretch further that way...we just really wanted to shoot. In retrospect, that was a bad idea and names will ALWAYS be filmed first.

The approach to this trailer is different than that of the first. We tried to tell the story, but with the structure and missing the Vivica scenes that fell flat on its face. Feedback was generally that it looked awesome, but nobody really understood what was happening. So, for this one we scrapped the whole idea of telling the story, due to a very complex timeline and just chose a bunch of cool, abstract shots like the Seven Pounds trailer. It appears that some people are still trying to figure out the story and to be honest, I don't mind that. The way I see it, it'll encourage people to see the film once its released. Trailer editing is indeed an art and the release/marketing of a feature is a lot more difficult than we originally thought. We're truly learning a lot about the process as we move forward.

Kegan
Click to expand...

Aah, then in that case, this is a much better trailer all around. It feels less like a showreel of clips and more like a story. Good deal . Expect to see this one on a few sites soon.

Trailer editing IS an art, man. I've been chopping away on this one for a week and finally locking it down. But, it's got another few weeks to go through sound design, title design, vfx and then grading. Like Martay said, it's all detrimental for people like us.

I'm behind, though ,because I still also need a Poster or three. BLARG!
 
Hey Hunter (Or Kegan rather),
I'm a director/writer for my own shorts....also, cinematographer/editor (many hats as the way in my situation of making "no" budget short films) though I've done some camerawork and editing for friends projects, though they've been small shorts or music videos. I've been busy lately writing a feature screenplay for the last couple years now, outlining it, writing...re-writing, etc. Plan to jump into my own first feature film next year if possible.

Haven't tried a 24 TFC project, though Veronika London was going to audition for my last short film but never showed up to the audition, ha. ....then again, it didn't sound too good to her I'd assume - No pay, no budget and was in scarborough (which I assume never looks so professional compared to a downtown Toronto thing).
small world.

And I noticed after I read your answer, that vimeo's site explain that plus feature too. I just didn't bother to read the FAQ.


I hope you guys get into TIFF, that would be amazing for you and your film team's careers. I'd try to get tickets to TIFF and see it if that's the case. Otherwise, will just look for the blu ray /DVD when it comes out.


One "Jane Doe" question out of curiosity: how many days was the shoot? (if you've wrote it earlier in this thread, I'm sorry)
 
Cool, thanks for the response. Great to hear that you're spending the time on the script. Pft, we shot quite a bit in Scarborough. Director and I are from Ajax.

Total shooting days for principal: 29 and two b-roll days.

Kegan
 
Hey guys, feeling bad that I'm leaving to Kegan the sole responsibility to replying to questions here so I think i'll pipe in there a little more often. I'm in a huge race with my calendar right now to get to picture lock and the calendar seems to have a few strides on me so I have to pull a Hussain Bolt on it. thus my absence from the threads.

Kegan's basically addressed everything to this point and I definitely do want to reetirate that Vivica Fox's character was not added at the last minute. I wrote the character into the sript right in the beginning and its an integral part of the story.

Also to add to Kegan's point about the old and new trailer, I guess quite frankly I regret ever even calling that a trailer. It was more of a "movie sample" or proof of execution to sales agents, distributors etc... At the time we didn't want to hit them with yet another "slick, glory shots edited to cool music" trailer. We wanted more of a tool to show the merit of the film and that definitely did work to our advantage. However releasing it was probably a mistake on our end but hey, you live and you learn.

Also that "trailer" only got about 6000 views or so and quite frankly not really from the audience who will probably be purchasing/renting this film so in the grand scheme of things it doesn't have much of an impact. If anything it helped open some doors for us that have now put us in a great position.

We're currently getting distributor interest, going to keep working the markets with Cannes up next and now that we'll have a final picture to sell it will make things a lot more interesting from here on out. I'm a first time feature director so have yet to build my reputation, and as you know in that scenario presales based on a trailer are just not happening in the current marketplace unless you have a track record. I wish my 100plus broadcast music videos i've directed held some weight but apparently not haha. but we've all got to start somewhere and so far this seems like a good start for us.

Glad you guys like the trailer and hopefully we'll be updating you with some interesting news soon.
 
Looks like an interesting film with good visuals and sound. I'm just seeing this thread today. So you all are in the Cannes market or competition? Trailer was enough to make me wanna see it. Hope to support with a DVD purchase. Keep Pushin! Tieuel Legacy! Motion
 
Thanks for the support and kind words. No we're not in competition at the festival. Our sales agent will be representing the film at the market this year. We're actually not even done with post to this point yet but we are just weeks away, at which point we'll push hard with our festival run. We'll be starting by submitting to TIFF this year however.
 
Sitting here with mastermind, going through the edit! Trimming is a A LOT easier said than done. That being said, we're getting pretty close to picture lock...

Stay tuned,

Kegan
 
Picture lock achieved and its off to audio post and the composer! Next step, colour grading and some simple VFX while sound gets worked on.

Kegan
 
Composer checked in today saying he's already scored some scenes and has tons of ideas for others. Great to see shared passion on this project from our sound guys.

Kegan
 
Haha. Vivica never turns the swagger off, when she's off camera. Gotta love 'er. And, looks like she brought her stylist/make-up artists with her! I remember shooting with her two years ago for an infomercial, great personalities all of 'em.

Hope everything's working out well for you guys!
 
Thanks Kholi! That's actually her hair stylist from Independence Day. Took out a photo from them on set to show the crew! Very cool.

Deep into audio post here and getting close to the TIFF deadline...let's hope we make it!

Kegan
 
Long time no update...


We've been working away hard to prepare for our TIFF submission and we're pretty much there! Finally got to watch the film all the way through today with our first pass of sound design done. All I can say is, WOW!!! Absolutely incredible work from our audio team. Couldn't be more happy with our submission at this point. Couple final tweaks and final export late tonight/early tomorrow morning and then next day delivery to hit the deadline of May 27th!

In case anyone's looking for a fantastic audio post house, look no further than:

http://www.timelineaudio.com/

Ask for Joe and tell him that Nadeem (mastermind) and I sent you!

Kegan
 
Kegan said:
Long time no update...


We've been working away hard to prepare for our TIFF submission and we're pretty much there! Finally got to watch the film all the way through today with our first pass of sound design done. All I can say is, WOW!!! Absolutely incredible work from our audio team. Couldn't be more happy with our submission at this point. Couple final tweaks and final export late tonight/early tomorrow morning and then next day delivery to hit the deadline of May 27th!

In case anyone's looking for a fantastic audio post house, look no further than:

http://www.timelineaudio.com/

Ask for Joe and tell him that Nadeem (mastermind) and I sent you!

Kegan
Click to expand...

Cool.

That's great that you've got a good sound design team.

Congrats on the progress.

-M
 
Thanks Martin!

Well guys, we officially hand delivered JANE DOE today to the TIFF people. We really enjoyed the quality we got out of the DVD. A lot better than we expected. A day before the deadline and the relief associated with making the submission date is indescribable.

Time to catch a nap...

Kegan
 
Thanks Brandon. Lots of interest in foreign markets according to our sales agent. Going to have a conversation with them tomorrow about what happened in Cannes and send them a screener on Monday.

Hopefully we start hearing some stuff back soon,

Kegan
 
Anyone have any experience burning blu rays? We're running into some trouble here. Here's the current workflow:

We export a self-contained QT file from FCP. It yields a 135GB file.

We then bring that into Compressor and select the Blu Ray option.

.m2v (average bitrate 29.5mbps and max bitrate at 35mbps)

Takes about 10 hours and then we have an .m2v and .ac3 file.

I use MPEGstreamclip to create the .ts file and then try to burn that in Toast Titanium 10 (settings as follows: video format MPEG-2, set to never re-encode, max average and maximum bitrate and Dolby Digital for audio).

It starts to multiplex and stops at 30%, goes straight to encoding, which takes another 10 hours and then finally burns it. The Blu Ray finishes and when popped into a player stutters on playback. I feel like Toast is where I'm failing, but I don't know what else to do. My burner is external so I can take this to a PC if I have to. Anyone on PC having better luck or perhaps I'm doing something wrong on Mac?

Kegan
 
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