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I’ve been keeping a post production journal...

Because of the pace of post production it usually feels like nothing’s happening, so I decided to keep a little journal to help keep track of my goals for the day and to allow me to look back on what (if anything) was accomplished.

I thought it might be of some interest to post some of the journal entries to give you an idea of what I’ve been up to…

2/4/08-
Backing up computer, prepping for log and capture, booking flight to Lafayette, Louisiana.

Backing Up:
Like most people, I’m terrible at backing up my computer. Finally, after losing everything on my laptop after a hard drive failure, I decided I needed to buy drives to back up everything on my computers. I took care of the laptop right away. I dawdled on the other.

Until Now! Today, I finally, finally back up my big computer. The one with all the valuable, irreplaceable shit on it. To make this happen I ended up buying four 500GB drives. Two externals that were on sale and two internals which I bought enclosures for and can easily swap with the drives in my computer should they fail. I’m using the program Super Duper! to clone the original drives so that my back up drives can immediately take over if any of the originals fail. Most of the back up drives are also larger than the original drives, so that when my 150GB "Macintosh HD" fails, I’ll replace it with the old 250GB "Media" drive (now "Macintosh HD (backup)"). "Media" was cloned to a new 500GB hard drive which has its own 500GB back up. The last two drives are project only drives for The Mountain, The River and The Road (which I'll just call MRR from now on).

If you’re not totally bored to death by this computer stuff I can get into more detail. I figure I lost most of you at the first instance of GB. Also, since I’m no expert, feel free to ridicule and correct me if you have a better way of doing things.

Prep for Log and Capture:
I’ve never worked on such a huge project before so I figured this time I’d do it right. On shorts, the time you waste looking for poorly organized footage can be a pain in the ass. Multiply that little pain in the ass to the size of a feature and you have one epic sized pain in the ass. So I’m doing it right.

First step – Ken Stone’s FCP page. Good info and a nifty Excel template for logging footage that’s much easier than the clunky logging feature of FCP.

Once that’s all done I’ll need to synch up sound and determine my “selects” before sending it all to Louisiana where my buddy Deep will be handling the editing proper.

Deep (full name Jaideep Dasgupta). He shot my short “Driving Around, Following Strangers” and will be editing MRR. Because of his location (he just moved back to Lafayette, Louisiana where he plans to make his first feature) and his schedule I’ll be logging and capturing footage here and will ship it to him there. It’s shit work, the part that every editor hates, but it’s gotta be done and when you can’t afford to pay people there’s a lot of shit work (and shit eating) that you have to do yourself. But oddly enough, I’m looking forward to it [It's a nice change from the chaos of production - 2/12/08].

In the past, Deep has gone through version after version of my films with me, including “Driving Around” and “Small Little Thing,” offering feedback and advice and the always valuable 2nd pair of eyes. He’s also helped me out on some work-for-hire stuff I did in LA, and for a short time he made good money cutting wedding videos until the total brain sucking mundaneity of it finally got to him and he quit, still lasting far longer than I ever could have. His editing instincts are much like my own, but even better. Just what you want from a collaborator.

Plus it’ll be fun to kick it in the dirty dirty for a few weeks.

Do you have the bug now?

It isn't about fame or fortune or f**king movie stars!!!

Making films is about having an addiction to collective creativity.

Working, eating, sleeping, partying and -- above all else -- experiencing a group of kindred spirits of all different backgrounds and personalities who have come together, either by luck or design or both, to create something truthfully organic.

It's as primal as early man inventing the first drum and showing it off to the rest of his tribe.

And in a day-and-age when cellphones and computers coldly disconnect us from each other, it's nice to know the arts is one haven where the human spirit still exists and thrives and will continue to do so.

So, do you have the bug now?... I think I can honestly say the whole cast and crew of "The Mountain, the River and the Road" does. (Or maybe it was just forgotten and revived?)

Cheers!

See ya all in prison (or the next shoot)...

“Fuck me, he cleared it!”

So says Christian Slater in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and so says I after completion of principal photography for The Mountain, The River and The Road. Except I says “Fuck me, WE cleared it!” Somehow, we all survived this shoot and managed to capture some really great stuff in the process.

Sure, we’re not out of the woods yet. Just as Robin Hood still had to face Alan Rickman and his creepy witch, so do we have additional photography, editing, and quite a bit of “cross your fingers that nothing’s wrong with the film negative” in front of us. But we made that leap of faith, we made it to the other side. We faced our own sneering guy from The Crow, got a little battered and then we jumped into Christian Slater’s catapult and went back for more, muttering witty things along the way.

We’ve got our war stories: broken down vehicles, questionable planning, clashing of egos, unsleepable beds soaked with urine, frozen toes, and broken flashlights. But it wasn’t any Filmmaker’s Apocalypse. In the end, to me at least, everyone seemed happy and proud of what we had managed to accomplish. Or maybe they were just drunk. Either way it doesn’t matter. We made a road movie under extremely trying conditions. We shot it on film with a relatively tiny budget. And we kept it together.

This cast and crew braved long hours, long drives, hands crushed in car doors, involuntary vomiting, crippling allergies, the freezing cold Kern River, driving to and from LA with just my dad for company and still they came out smiling. Mostly. I’m extremely grateful for their hard work and dedication and unfailing spirit. Those smiles, persistent through the toughest of times, helped keep me going. I kept waiting for the floor to drop out from under us as it so often threatened to do. But it never did. Sitting here at home writing this, I’m just as amazed as I am relieved.

A huge thanks goes out to the cast and crew of The Mountain, The River and The Road. It was a difficult journey, but I think we were all participants in something special. Your hard work made this adventure possible. I really could not have done it without you, my band of merry men and women.

[Photo by Kirsten Barber]

remember when...