The 24 Diary

jls4 said:
Thanks - but more is coming. I'm starting to talk with a few people now about moving this to a video format, so I can "show" people what I'm talking about. :)
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Excellent. I have compiled all the info thus far and will make a .pdf out of it if you like. I can send it to you, or even temporarily host it on my server if needs be such.
 
Matt Grunau said:
Excellent. I have compiled all the info thus far and will make a .pdf out of it if you like. I can send it to you, or even temporarily host it on my server if needs be such.
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Cool. I have no problem with that. I guess I can host it on my site too. It's better to have more than one site with info. That's great. Thanks a lot. :)
 
jls4 said:
Cool. I have no problem with that. I guess I can host it on my site too. It's better to have more than one site with info. That's great. Thanks a lot. :)
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Cool...post a link.

I'm loving this post because I thought i was crazy to try to a shot with no crew or 1 crew person, but after reading this,I'm inspired to continue with my movie..This is the Ultimate no budget users guide.
 
Chapter 16: White Balance Politics

Recently shooting “Voices” we decided to make the move and shoot the movie leaning towards orange. I did this because I wanted to make sure my skin tones were as warm as possible. I had done some testing before the shoot even took place. I would set up my lights and test the different looks of orange light (i.e. tungsten, incandescent) vs. Blue light (i.e. HMI, Sunlight). I had heard from professional cinematographers in articles / videos that they preferred blue light because it “wrapped better” around the subject. What I found was a more specific thing. What seemed to be happening is that the sensor would try to remove excess orange light from the picture under tungsten. Because skin tones are orange (tan, brown, etc are really orange) this would mute the red and yellows making skin look dull. Blue is the exact opposite of orange. Think color wheel for those who don’t know, or just trust me.

There are only 3 colors in the world, Red Yellow Blue. All are at 120 degree opposing poles from each other. Between Red and Yellow lies Orange, which is now opposite of Blue. If you light with Blue light, which I found in my tests, the sensor doesn’t have to do any extra work to remove the orange light from the scene, therefore the skin tones pop more. This is probably why the cinematographers I read up on said that blue light “wraps better”. But it makes since if you think about the fact that we are all orange people, so if you drop an orange fruit into a vat of orange liquid it’s hard to pick out, vs. dropping the orange fruit into a vat of blue liquid.

Edit: I've also learned that most Digital Chips are set for a Blue environment i.e 5000K to 5800K End Edit.

So knowing all of this, I leaned my white balance toward super orange. While this sounds awesome, and the knowledge above can stand on its own, this chapter is about white balance, not blue vs. orange lighting. So saying all of this, one needs to recognize the beauty of color correction and try to master it before you shoot your movie.

Tip: Test your Color Correction before shooting your movie.

Why? Simple, you need to know the pros and cons of what you can do and the final look so you can know how to shoot. The concept is this, if you’re making a pizza, you know what you want the final product to be, so when you buy the ingredients you do this with the final product in mind. We as ultra-low budget filmmakers generally have our eyes in a few places: how much this costs, trying to figure out production, buying a camera, and showing off to friends. We jump over the color-correction process and thus are not getting ourselves prepared.

Color correction, while it will be its own chapter, gives the final look and feel to your movie. Over do it and your movie looks bad, under do it and your movie looks amateur. But going in with the best image to color correct is super important.

I’ve heard of people shooting “flat” which basically means they turn back almost every setting on the camera: saturation, sharpness, contrast, etc. But one common item for ultra low budget filmmakers is we have a tendency to want to see the end product while we are shooting. We want whatever we see while we shoot, to immolate what we will see on the big screen. We don’t have enough experience to know this is wrong! Completely and utterly wrong!

What you see on the big screen WILL NOT look like what you see through your viewfinder of your camera. If it does, there’s generally something wrong. So right now, stop focusing on the cameras cool settings – cinelook and such. All that’s crap. Those are settings used by the manufacturer to sell you something. They recognize that most people who say they want to make movies, have no idea of what they are doing. So they have “boosted” their cameras in a way that is close to the “common look” of a Hollywood Cinematic Movie. The problem is that these "looks" crush and destroy valuable picture information that you could manipulate later.

Some things like cine-gamma you may not need to turn off. You may need the gamma to curve the bright lights bringing more stops of light into your scene. However, what you don’t need is the super saturation, etc. I’m not saying you can’t use them. What I’m saying is you need to shoot a few minutes with actors, friends, under proper lighting and whatever settings you are going to use. Then color correct those in the computer to test how well each one holds up, which brings me back to the beginning.

On “Voices” (soon to be named “Choices” Edit: Finally called "Coming Correct" End Edit) we shot with a color temp around 2900K (3200K is orange and 5600K is blue). This crushed my blues. Which means when you look at a histogram of my images, my blue channel had fewer values that what I needed. So when you watched through the monitor, the images were warm and skin tone looked great, but the blacks were also warm and so were the highlights. DANGIT!

So I go to blockbuster and get a movie to test my theories about my mistakes. I watch a movie close to my subject matter and like I thought, my movie doesn’t look right. Not to say my movie has to look like theirs, see Chapter 6 on Film Look. But I liked the way “their” skin tones looked – what was I doing wrong? Basically I white balanced based on what I “thought” I needed instead of what I really needed. So now in color correction, I had to re-interpolate my blue and green channels and hope that they would hold up to create a better image. This added grain and other undesirables to my finished product. If it wasn’t for some high tech software, I’d be stuck. Luckily there are more 32Bit smart software solutions that can “fix” many of the problems that I created for myself. But this problem doesn’t have to happen to you.

When you white balance, I encourage you to white balance for main color light you are using orange or blue when dealing with people (this differs when dealing with objects). Bring a white card along and make sure it’s showing white in your LCD. You also need to test your cameras blue and orange settings by testing a white sheet of paper under sunlight and a 60 watt tungsten bulb. Make sure your LCD is set properly, so it won’t confuse you later. The professional / high budget projects have plenty of cool gadgets to calibrate and test their equipment – you don’t. So use the sun at about 3PM and use a household light bulb (not the CFLs).

Make sure LCD is colored properly.
Make sure you bring a white card (sheet of paper, etc) .
Color correct so the whites are white on humans.

What I hope you take away from this Chapter is the ability and desire to shoot “flat” not leaning towards your color correction process. Instead try to see the image plainly, focusing on the lighting only. Don’t worry yet about dark blacks, or saturation, or a contrasty look. Allow yourself later the ability to “recolor” each frame. And while it may sound hard, it’s not. I’ll show you how in a later chapter.
 
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brdplya1 said:
Cool...post a link.

I'm loving this post because I thought i was crazy to try to a shot with no crew or 1 crew person, but after reading this,I'm inspired to continue with my movie..This is the Ultimate no budget users guide.
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Glad to hear it. I just hope it helps a few people. :)
 
All who are interested.

A friend of mine screened his movie last night. He used the same equipment that I used to shoot "Voices." (He rented my equipment) I had heard people talk about the EX1 and HVX200 on screen and many of them loved the quality. And talked about how good it looked. But it was interesting to see "my camera" at work.

For "Voices" we used the Sony V1U (HDV 25Mbps, 1/4 inch chips 1920x1080 24p saved to the HDV Codec 1440x1080), and Letus 35 Adapter Economy. Production quality aside - when all elements were aligned. when he got the lighting right, the aperature right, the shot right, the focus right, etc. The shots sang. They did. It's hard to describe because of people like me. I "hear" people say it looks good, but it's hard for me to believe sometimes.

I saw 28 Days Later on the big screen shot with an XL-1 (Mini DV camera and supposed "good glass"), now here I'm watching an indie movie that probably cost around the price of a cheap Lexus with production quality that was up and down - sometimes in focus, sometimes not, etc. They picked the camera and Letus up from me 1 day before the shoot and called me 5 times on the first day of the shoot because they weren't used to shooting with the camera, did no prep, and just started shooting. So they hadn't figured out everything. They didn't even know as much as I did when they started shooting.

So basically their usage was stacked against them. The camera was for the most part set at 9db (I talked with the DP) because one of the problems with using 1/4 inch chips is that they eat light. The lenses on the Letus35 were a Nikon 105mm f1.8 and a Nikon 50mm 1.4. Most of the time they had to be set to 1.4 or 1.8 to let as much light in as possible and the camera was set mainly around f2.0. So they probably at most were resolving 800+ lines of the 1080p possible.

So we're not talking DPs or ACs that analyze everything with pro knowledge and 10 years experience in Hollywood. We're not talking complex editing systems or super filters. We're talking more like Final Cut or Premiere. We're not talking back focus alignment, white cards, grey cards, sharpening cards. They probably had an average on technical set experience of 2 or 3 shorts.

For lighting they were using my kit of 3 - 1Ks, 3 - 650s, 3 - 300s, and 2 - 150s; most of which I could tell they barely used because of locations. I could tell they'd pop up in a location blast a 1K on the opposing wall and shoot - probably because of time constraints. They didn't use Dollies or the Jib. They simply went handheld when needed.

So I say all of this to say, that they weren't these super technical people that chime in from time to time (and blow us away with knowldge mind you). But they were just low budget indies trying to make a good movie. And it was definately funny. I'll say that.

Anyway, after seeing 28 Days Later on the Big Screen. I never cared that much about the fact that it was somewhat pixelated and grainy. I personally COULD tell that the source file was not large enough to be on the big screen. The image seemed pixelated, overly green, and somewhat grainy. When it was brought home (on DVD) it looked great and didn't have some of the problems of the big screen. After seeing his movie (name withheld) I can honestly say that HDV in the right hands can work wonders. When he got everything right and the contrast was low (i.e. he was indoors away from bright lights or windows) the image was colorful, well toned and it seemed sharp and full of detail. In fact, some of the shots were beautiful.

Did it look like 35mm?
Most people want me to say "no" here, but It didn't not look like it. It looked like a movie. If he had said he shot on 35mm, I'd have believed him. If he said he shot 100Mbps HD I would have believed him. (again this is when everything was perfect, not in the shots where things weren't perfect)

Did it look grainy?
No. It didn't. There were a few grainy shots, but the average shot was clean.

Was there enough detail?
More than enough to satisfy me and I'm a pretty tough cookie. This doesn't mean that I want to shoot my next movie on HDV. I plan to upgrade to at least 50Mbps 4:2:2; but if I had to, I can honestly say it would not bother me. He had no trees, no ocean, no large lakes, etc. HDV breaks up when lots of detail is present, or items go soft, like a large grassy field. He made a romatic comedy - most shots were indoors, primarily with human faces and not a lot of detail. And the 25Mbps held up very well.

For me this ends the whole High Definition, HDV, HD 50, HD 100 debate for me. At this point, unless you've got loads of detail or lots of outside shots. HDV seems to work fine. I'd still prefer HD 50 or higher because I wouldn't want to be in a situation where I had my actors walk thoguh a park, and now I don't want to focus on a large pretty tree with falling leaves, but the average person won't see the problems.

What about exposure blow outs?
All high definition suffers from blow outs, even 35mm tranfered to HD for editing. He had lots of blow outs. The above was when everything was perfect. When they were outside, the sky was... well.. gone. The EX1 has a gamma curve that will fix this problem for most shots. And with careful lighting, I think you can shoot around most blow outs with an EX1.

The V1U probably has maximum 9 stops of light. But in "Voices" not my firends movie, I bought ND Gels to make sure I could control most of my blow outs. And I did. Then when shooting outside, I tried to crop out the sky in shots where I had actors. And only show the sky in shots where my focus was a landscape, establishing shot. So for the most part the blow outs don't pop up as much in "Voices" as they did in his movie. Video Co-pilot also has a tutorial to bring the sky back in blown out footage - so it is possible to make the shots better - if you're willing to do the extra work.

All in all the V1U worked great! I'd guess that every HDMI Capable HDV Camera or higher would probably look good in the right hands. So I hope this will help anybody trying to figure out what HDV looks like on the big screen. And remember this wasn't the espertise of people like in Corrado, ALPFD or NGL. These were just people who wanted to make a movie.

EDIT (9/28/09): I did find something recently that showed me a place where HDV starts to break down, at least my camera. Remember in the above statements the HDV camera was going through a Letus35 Adapter, so in most shots i.e. medium/close on an actor half of the shot was out of focus anyway, so the camera has less "detail" to worry about. It's the detail that eats up the codec. On my wide shots however, when more was in focus, I could see the limitations of HDV. I didn't notice it until my project was 99% complete, because on the guy's movie above, so many shots were out of focus that I couldn't tell. On my project however I could. So HDV still to me makes the overall grade, but I think the HDV 35Mbps and higher would still be prefered so that wider shots would have more sharpness to them. End Edit
 
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filthrich said:
good informative stuff Jl. Keep it going. I'm learning a few things here.
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You guys - goosh.... I'd be all red if I wasn't brown. Maybe I can be magenta :)

slimchrisp said:
i gotta second that. glad you're keeping this up man. great thread and a needed kick in the butt to keep me headed down the right path.

:beer:
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I'm kicking myself in the butt too! Trying to stay motivated. - Glad to see you're back running around.
 
More interesting info for 24 Diary Readers.

Go to Creative Cow and Download their newest Magazine. Read the article called "Truth About 2K, 4K & The Future of Pixels" January/Feburary 2009 12th issue.
Creative Cow Magazine Link

Here are some high points.


  1. [SIZE=2]Information provided by John Galt Panavision’s Senior Vice President of Advanced Digital Imaging.
    [*]Historically, 2K and 4K referred to the output of a line array scanner scanning film. for every 1K scanned you ended up with 1K of pixels for each color, i.e. 1K of RED, 1K of Blue, 1K of Green. Any of the high-end high definition video cameras, they had 3 sensors: 1red, 1 green and 1 blue photosite to create 1 RGB pixel.
    [*]
    [SIZE=2]RED and Dalsa are Bayer pattern cameras which use sub-sampled chroma to create color.​
    ​
    [*]
    The Genesis Camera in Marketing Terms would be a 12 Megapixel Camera because Panavision sees each color needing it's own "pixel" space. So 4K worth of pixels for the Red values, 4K worth of pixels for Green and 4K worth of Pixels for Blue. (4K x 3 = 12K)​
    [*]
    Another problem is that through marketing people are confusing pixels with resolution. the more important thing is the optics, not the sensor. Example is a small 12 megapixel $200 photo camera VS a $4000 10 Megapizel Professional SLR photo camera. More pixels in the smaller camera, but better optics (delivery) in the larger one.​






    [COLOR=#ffffff][SIZE=1][FONT=MyriadPro-SemiboldIt][COLOR=#ffffff][I][SIZE=1][FONT=MyriadPro-SemiboldIt][COLOR=#ffffff]
    [*][SIZE=2]The move to 4K is all about trying to differentiate from high definition television. It’s too late. Talking about 4K belies the fact that most of the theater installations around the world are going in at 2K — but let’s face it, most of the time you get 1920x1080.    [/I]
    [FONT=MyriadPro-Semibold][SIZE=1][COLOR=#ffffff][FONT=MyriadPro-Semibold][SIZE=1][COLOR=#ffffff][FONT=MyriadPro-Semibold][SIZE=1][COLOR=#ffffff]
    [*][SIZE=2]Scanning film at 4K, means 3656 pixels. Scan film at 2K, you’re actually scanning at 1828     across.
    [SIZE=1][COLOR=#ffffff][FONT=MyriadPro-Semibold][SIZE=1][COLOR=#ffffff][FONT=MyriadPro-Semibold][SIZE=1][COLOR=#ffffff]
    [*][SIZE=2]from the lens of the camera, to the the movement of the light through the projector,     all slightly reducing resolution — you wind up with less than the full resolution you started with.    [/SIZE][/SIZE][/COLOR][/SIZE][/COLOR]    [/SIZE][/COLOR][/FONT][/SIZE][/COLOR][/FONT][/SIZE][/SIZE][/COLOR][/FONT][/SIZE][/COLOR][/FONT][/SIZE][/FONT][/SIZE][/COLOR][/FONT][/SIZE][/COLOR][/SIZE][/COLOR][/SIZE][/FONT]

[COLOR=#ffe173][SIZE=1][FONT=MyriadPro-SemiboldIt][COLOR=#ffffff][SIZE=2]When I took all of this and the article into consideration I came up with two impressions. If having 3 different chips multiplies the actual resolution, it would mean a camera like the EX1/EX3 are really 5.9Megapixel Camcorders, with slightly worse optics than the RED (because of the fixed lens or use of an adapter). This would also explain why in tests the RED (downsized to 1920x1080) and the EX1 can be edited back and forth. It also explains why Adam Wilt and others could only pull 3.2K from the RED, because while there are 4K pixels present, the offset of green pixels reduces the overall resolution.
But it proves that 4K could be pointless since major film distributors, i.e the theaters are set on projectors with HD requirements (1920x1080).

While most of us know the pros and cons to each major indie level camera: HVX200 (and equivs), EX1/EX3, and the RED. Each now makes since and proves why most of the manufactures stand behind their creation. What it says also explains why even the V1U (as I said above) looks great blown up. Sure the perfect optics weren't there and the expertise, but the resolution and color was. There's a lot more to this argument, which could span pages. But I'll wait to see how others feel after reading the article and their take on it.[/COLOR][/SIZE][/COLOR][/SIZE][/FONT]
 
Keep it up!

Keep it up!

This is an awesome thread, man, just wanted to let you know I'm enjoying it! Keep up the good work!
 
Chapter 17: Circular Stories

This concept goes along with storytelling/writing. I hope you’ll find it informative.

When we first started “Voices” renamed to “Coming Correct”, I knew I wanted to make my storylines and actions tight. I didn’t want a lot of “loose ends” which seem to find their way into most independent films. The loose ends occur because the writer(s) either don’t fully understand the concept of circular writing OR a mistake was made during the actual filmmaking process. Unfortunately I believe the former tends to be more prevalent, although I have no true facts to back up the statement, I just know from what I’ve read over the years.

While we were preparing the final draft of the screenplay for “Coming Correct” (at that time “Voices”) we also were finalizing the cast. A great actress named Tabitha Stallings was not going to make the cut. The reason was because at the time we were shooting she was 6 months pregnant and showing. The original character she was going to play was not anywhere close to pregnant, so now I had a problem. I like the actress, but I needed a non-pregnant actress.

To complicate matters worse the story line came from a Stageplay, so we had several problems: very few characters and very few locations. There were 3 very definite storylines in place and I didn’t want to interrupt that, but I wanted to “open up” the movie more – basically I wanted to show a larger world for the characters to live in. I also wanted them to interact with more people. Indie’s many times go with small casts which show limitations. I wanted the movie to feel larger and more broad. I also wanted each character to have more of a purpose. It wasn’t enough to say “I want a character in the movie” I needed a why. “Why are they there? What purpose do they serve?”

I noticed that the lead character was friends with another guy named “James”. “James” was a player by definition of the stage play and in the stage play we knew he had six babies by six different women. (This is a comedy – although unfortunately some people do have this problem) I thought, why not allow my actress, Tabitha, to be one of his baby’s momas. I mean if we bring that “fact” into the storyline, it needs to mean something – otherwise why bring it in? So now I have a pregnant woman in my movie playing a pregnant woman. But a new question arises, why is she here? From the stage play, a romantic fling occurs between the lead female, Val (who is married to the lead male Randall) and a young guy, Eddie in the neighborhood. We know that Eddie “fixes” things. So I thought why not have our new pregnant character, now named Rachel to break our leads Randall and Val’s faucet. So the new question arises: how to do it in a funny way (since this is a comedy) and why would our lead let his best friend’s pregnant girlfriend into his house? I then came up with the idea, why not have this girlfriend to be into “voodoo” and she tries to poison James with a concoction she’s cooked up. But when James advises Randall (our lead) to pour the liquid out – it breaks the pipe under the sink. Therefore requiring a plumber (i.e. the lead female’s love interest Eddie) to have a way to get close to her, since she needs to get the pipe fixed that Randall broke because his friend James has a baby by a girl Rachel who is into voodoo and is mad at him because evidently she’s not getting any attention, since he has 6 women (baby momas) to keep up with.

Whooooo! - A lot of info right. This is circular storytelling. Everything happens for a reason and everyone is there for a reason. Without this occurrence a part of the plot disappears.

In LOTR (Lord of the Rings), Gollum finds the ring which Bilbo Baggins had for many years. Gollum becomes obsessed with the ring, but it is technically “kept safe” because he’s harmless to do anything with it. He’s allured by the “bad magic” but he doesn’t use it to harm anyone except himself. When he, like Bilbo, looses the ring it ends up in Frodo’s hands while Bilbo is off and Gandalf the Gray is visiting. Gandalf recognizes the ring and encourages a mission to destroy it once and for all because if it falls into the wrong hands it can mean destruction. Frodo must join the mission because he’s so “innocent” that it will take a long time to turn him evil and the journey to destroy it is a long one. As Frodo starts the mission, Gollum finds that Frodo has the ring and plots to take it from him, but to do that he must be friend him and help him find the way to the volcano to destroy it. Sam comes along as a friend, but also to protect Frodo especially from Gollum. As the journey ends (spoiler alert for everyone who hasn’t seen LOTR) Frodo finally gets fully corrupted by the evil in the ring (we find out later the journey was 9 months!). But Gollum sees his chance, so evil and evil fight and in that fight the ring is destroyed. If not for Gollum, the ring wouldn’t have been kept safe then destroyed. If not for Frodo the ring wouldn’t have made it to the destruction place, if not for Sam Frodo would have been killed by Gollum. If not for Gandalf the journey would have never begun.

Everyone is connected to everyone. Every item is shown for its importance. If something shows up one time in a movie and there is no occurrence or statement about it later. Then your movie lacks good storytelling. If people in the movie seem to come by for no reason and have no connection, then again your movie has bad storytelling.

A feature is at its core several shorts put together where you follow one short and the other shorts are connected in some way to the main short, usually through characters with direct connection to the main character. But as more characters come into the movie, you need to give each one of them a purpose, such a purpose that the movie could almost not exist without them. Each idea, needs to be worked the same way. If a character’s car doesn’t start in the first scene, then we need to see it turn off or stop working in another scene. Everything happens for a reason and with a reason.

Thanks for reading. And thanks for over 5000 views!
 
Chapter 18: Making a Movie from the Inside Out

Hopefully this will be a throw away chapter for most of you, but through an experience, I have to admit it’s something I now pay attention to. If you stated with a great script and shot all of your scenes on time without any disruption then this chapter is a waste of time, but if you made a mistake and didn’t shoot a few scenes or had to “improvise” then you may learn something.

Making an indie film is a challenge. I think more of a challenge than making a Hollywood movie – but that’s my opinion, not a fact. The reason why I say this is that indie’s must go with the flow. If a location becomes unavailable, you have to figure something else out to get the “concept” of the scene into the movie. Maybe adding a line in another scene, removing a piece of a scene, shooting a scene at another location, etc. Every time you do this, you take the chance of destroying your plot line and making your movie feel choppy or unorganized. This happened to us, and was one of the major factors in the fact that we changed the focus of our movie. Originally our movie was about a young couple and the problems they were having in their marriage after the birth of their child. What made the story even more unique was that their “Voices” showed up from time to time. Their voices were simply more actors who looked nothing like the main actors, but acted as though they were their guardian Angel and Devil, so to speak. If you’ve seen any cartoon you know what I’m talking about.

Because of scheduling conflicts with both cast and crew we ended up with the “Voices” only showing up in about 8 minutes worth of scenes out of a 90 minute movie. To me this was unacceptable. The voices were already a stretch because the scene that we introduced them on, I was the only crew member on set that day. So the audio and video were just okay, not the best. All of this said, let’s cut ‘em. So now they are on the cutting room floor, but we have to rebuild the movie. And not just from the footage we had, but also taking in mind what we didn’t get.

Ahhhh me! I basically have to write a movie from the Inside Out. I have to take footage I already have and not only tell a new story (although it may be similar) but fill in gaps and make it seem as though that’s what I meant to do in the first place.

To do this, we need to rethink about the whole “Circular Storytelling” concept. What we DON’T want to do is introduce new storylines. This will turn the movie into a virtual mess of mini shorts that can get confusing unless you’re Quentin Tarantino. So what did we do? We first took the time to figure out where our first set of plot holes were, if any. Then we took the time to evaluate each storyline, cross referencing that with the actors who were the most readily available. After that we built more to each storyline, expanding it.

Example. In “Voices” Randall, a lawyer, has a young intern, Nicole, who works with him. In the original screenplay we knew the Nicole was interested in Randall because of 2 seperate incidents, neither one being a large incident - each was very subtle. We also had a case that Randall was working on which the screenplay never gave much information on. Nicole, the intern, says in the original screenplay “You know the Tonda case?” So what we did was expand the Tonda case. We first analyzed everything we knew about Tonda. He owned a perfume business and for some reason he needed a lawyer to look over his findings. We also knew that Tonda’s information/scenes couldn’t interfere with the rest of the movie. So it needed to be large enough to be included, but small enough to be over quickly – without it being it’s own storyline.

The Facts:

Randall and Nicole are working the Tonda Case.
Tonda owns Perfume Business
Randall has been working a big case all through the movie
Randall is trying to become a partner in his law firm
Nicole has a crush on Randall (we barely see in 2 scenes)
We can’t revisit any of our pervious locations (people have moved)

The Fix:
Insert Scene at beginning of movie where Randall talks with his wife about Tonda case on his way to work.
Insert Shots of Randall working, but now we see he’s working on the Tonda case – by shots of flyers, reports and binders that all say “Tonda Corp” (we even casted a model to take pictures for the flyers)
Insert Scene of Randall and Nicole watching a commercial for Tonda Perfume
Insert Scene of Randall talking with Tonda while Nicole is talking with Tonda’s daughter – We find out more about the case through Tonda himself, and find out Nicole really likes Randall through Tonda’s daughter.
Insert Scene of Randall and Nicole Celebrating the Tonda victory, but Randall and Nicole have an intimate moment where they almost kiss and Randall walks away while Nicole is slightly upset.

Technically what we did was give Randall both a high and low since characters need to experience something. Give Nicole more reasons to be attracted to Randall and make sure the audience knows it for the climax. Explore the main client Tonda more. Open the movie up with new locations. The problem in all of this, is trying to go far enough for there to be “more story” but not so far as to open new plot holes. In the movie, heading toward the climax Randall is at work with Nicole (this would happen after the above, intimate moment) but this scene is less than 25 seconds and we see Nicole “eyeing” Randall at the end of it. In the next scene she quickly makes her move on him, trying to relax him to butter him up. The concept is that because these “old scenes” happen so fast, the audience will believe the gap, which is “why didn’t they talk about the fact that they almost kissed and why would he be hanging out with her again since he's married and not interested in an affair?” So hopefully this small plot hole will go away quickly because we already had setup the movie for her to make a move on him.

This concept of filling plot holes from the inside out is a difficult concept to master. You must be careful because you can make more holes than what you fix. The motivation for each character needs to be there for later scenes, while non-existant in previous scenes. So be careful, and I hope this helps some of you.
 
Talk about dejavu! And I thought it was just me getting into these same situations. Just wrapped a movie where a couple of our lead actors were really slacking off... so we decided to kill them off and write them out of the script. Actually it made it a better movie, but the opportunities to really mess up the storylines become exponential. My hats off to you!
 
FrankC said:
Talk about dejavu! And I thought it was just me getting into these same situations. Just wrapped a movie where a couple of our lead actors were really slacking off... so we decided to kill them off and write them out of the script. Actually it made it a better movie, but the opportunities to really mess up the storylines become exponential. My hats off to you!
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Hey don't take your hat off yet! we're still finishing up the movie! LOL We did have our first "test screening" though and no one noticed the "plot hole" we created. Out of our 5 test subjects that was the fathest thing from their mind. Which was great! Now if we can just get our transitions right! LOL

How did you kill off your actors? Did you build up someone on the side or just go directly with somethign new like in GO or Pulp Fiction?
 
I was just reading about the value or non-value of test screenings in Tanya York's book (but that's a subject for another thread!), and it was mentioned that if your story is strong enough and the audience is engaged in it, they will forgive what otherwise might be glaring plot holes. They "want" to stay with the story and not get distracted by those holes. It's only when your story is not that strong that the holes provides the audience with a negative criticism opportunity... in other words, sounds like your story has them!

We wrote two lead actors out of our script by adding a big car crash during an already scripted driving scene. Once our two slacking actors realized the script had changed ( that was probably when they they couldn't figure out why I started to violently shake the camera at certain points while shooting inside the car...LOL !... which was to simulate the crash from the inside POV... big sound EX and CG in post). They then came around and helped out to make the car crash a good scene when they realized their parts in the movie were coming to an end.
Actually, the big fire ball scene is now going to become a high point of the trailer even though it doesn't have that much to do with the main plot line! It did force us to shift the focus of the story from these two characters to a third main character and make it more his story. We tied up some loose ends by introducing bits of voice-over narration by that character. It worked even though we had never orginally intended to use narration as a technique in this one. The picture is in first assembly edit now.
 
FrankC said:
I was just reading about the value or non-value of test screenings in Tanya York's book (but that's a subject for another thread!), and it was mentioned that if your story is strong enough and the audience is engaged in it, they will forgive what otherwise might be glaring plot holes. They "want" to stay with the story and not get distracted by those holes. It's only when your story is not that strong that the holes provides the audience with a negative criticism opportunity... in other words, sounds like your story has them!
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I'm confused by your last statement. Are you saying we do or don't have a major problem we need to fix. The reason I bring this up, is that no one noticed our plot holes. That's what I said in the post above. The test group mainly noticed the problems in transitions between scenes and everyone we brought out (which I didn't mention in this thread, but in another) we production people - other people in the industry, not the average everyday people. I thought it would be better to go through the roughest critics first. If they missed a few things, the avg viewer probably wouldn't see them a mile away! LOL

I went to a screener last night for another friend, and every technical problem I personally heard and saw. The plot was engaging enough for me not to worry about them, but if they had asked my technical opinion, I would have talked about the problems they had. I rarely walk away from a movie, even Hollywood films where I couldn't see something that could have been imporved on. I was watching "Twilight" on DVD this weekend with my wife and spotted a few audio errors. My wife barely noticed them, but I could easily hear the strained audio in a few scenes.
 
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