Good morning,
This is the first post for my short film "Bravura" so I probably should bring everyone up to speed on what has transpired so far (believe me, there is quite a bit.)
My name is Tony Query, I am the writer and director of this film. The story is about a successful chef/restauranteur who has received a prestigious culinary award. Since receiving the award, the popularity of his restaurant has grown immensely. The film takes place on one special night that Chef Conti has arranged for some of the wealthiest patrons in the town. He has also invited a respected food columnist to this event. For her, this is a chance to interview one of the best chefs in the country. To him, she is there to document what will transpire by the end of the night.
This is the biggest film I have made so far on many levels. I was able to raise $2,200 for the budget on Kickstarter, although the film ended up costing about $1,500 more up to this point. I also raised about $400 selling my homemade beef jerky (which I take a lot of pride in.)
It is also big because it is the first film I've shot on the Red Epic, which is the grand daddy of digital cinematography. It is currently the best digital alternative to 35mm, although I truly hope that medium doesn't become obscure. There have been pros and cons to shooting on the Epic. On the plus side, the footage looks phenomenal. This due not only to the fact that it was shot at 4k (which is 4x the resolution of blu-ray), but also because I had a very talented cinematographer, Christian Simpson, shoot the film. This camera is quickly being adopted in large Hollywood films, including the recent film "Prometheus".
The downside to shooting on this camera (I am learning) is that working with footage of this quality is proving to be difficult or impossible with many computers. The file sizes are simply gargantuan. To give you an example, we shot about an hour and a half worth of footage over the three days of the shoot and have about 700 gigs of information on the hard drives.
To be accurate, I should say that we HAD 700 gigs of information after the shoot. This brings me to where I am right now. I did pre-production on the film for about three months (the script I had been tweaking for about a year). Production of the film ended the morning of June 29th. I am at the beginning of the post-production part of this film. This is where I begin to assemble the footage, start editing, doing sound design, creating a score, etc. I will also be creating posters and production packets for festivals.
I am technically two-thirds of the way done with the film, and have had a ridiculous amount of hiccups along the way (which I won't trouble you with right now.) I have learned that this is no time to get comfortable. I said that I HAD 700 gigs of footage. This is because I lost 10% of it over the course of a few days. I won't bore you with the details, but will simply say that I had two hard drives, one with 75% and one with 100% of the footage. On the first day of my post-production class, I literally saw the slow death of the hard drive that had 100% of the footage on it. I can already hear you asking, "Are you stupid?! If I had all that time and money tied up in a film, I would damn-sure make sure I had a backup!" It's a valid argument. Everyone should have backups of important, irreplaceable information. My response is, "I tried." You see, a day after we filmed I turned on my computer to make a backup and it crashed. I've now learned this was a failure of some component on the logic board. The computer is about four years old and has never had a problem. The timing couldn't have been worse.
Anyway, all but 10% of the footage was recovered and this is where I currently am. I am not sure if the film will work without that footage, but the only way to know is to move forward with what I have and see what we got. (Note: I do have backups of all the footage I have now.)
This blog will serve as a forum for me to explain the steps I am going through to get this film finished. I will probably be griping and complaining at times, but hopefully this will be entertaining, if not informative to you.
Today, I will be converting my footage to Pro Res 444 so that it will be easier to edit in Premiere. This will be a long process I imagine, but I am simply happy that I have the footage to convert.
Tony
