Production Log LOG UPDATE We have moved our log over to our Facebook page and will be updating that as we carom about the world in in various Film Festivals and complete the Bi-Coastal tour of the film! Keep up with us on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube! February '08 Well, I think the last update you got from me regarding BlueGreen was in November, so I apologize for the slackery. I have a zillion excuses, but I am sure you don't want to hear them, and, well, none of them are really good anyway! But rest assured, we have been busy with the film! To start with, we have had the good fortune to get Robert 'Wingnut' Weaver to do the VO for the film. His voice is very distinct and he is fairly well known, especially in surf circles. It's definitely a bonus for the film, not only making it more polished, but also carrying some name recognition. Very excellent. We also have been working on the website a bit, and have posted a new trailer to the site. It is a more surf-centric trailer but we have been getting really good feedback on it, as it does capture the spirit of the film. We'll be posting it up on youtube as well. Additionally this weekend or in the upcoming week we will be filling in the pages with the information on the folks in the film. The film has also been subtitled in French! Yeah I know, not the first choice of languages but there is a reason for it! The film has gotten into a festival in St. Jean De Luz in May and so it needed to be translated for the audiences there. We are trying to figure out a way to get to the festival, but with such a weak dollar, we'll see. Ý Speaking of festivals, we have had a pretty mixed response on the festival circuit. We seem to be doing better with more targeted festivals. We can't figure out if this is because more mainstream festivals don't want to program surf heavy films, even if the subject matter is more broad than just that, or if it's a comment on the quality of the film. We have been getting good reviews from people, so we're not sure it's the film. But who knows? Only a few festivals actually give feedback on the films they reject, so who knows? It's also tougher than ever out there right now, as the documentary and action sports world increasingly is drawing attention from folks like Russell Crowe and other Hollywood heavies. I am not complaining, just observing the realities of the environment. Still there are a number of really great festivals still coming up that we think we have a good shot at so more on that later. As the film festival strategy starts to wind down we are going to be looking at distribution, and a possible tour for the fall or late winter. We'll see. We are currently in development on a surf oriented TV show, so that will have some bearing on the dates of an ostensible tour. We won't be updating on a monthly basis right now as things are moving a little slower now that production is finished. But we will be updating when we have handfuls of news- like today! So we hope everyone is doing great, and that the Holidays went well. Also good luck to anyone heading to Noosa! And let me know if you have any questions about how things are going! .....October? (07) So I was sitting at my desk this morning, going over all the things I had to do today, and for the rest of the month and was thinking, wow, November is almost halfway over! I can hardly believe it! The snow is going to be flying and it's going to be freezing before you know it. Sigh. Holy Crap! I never wrote the October BlueGreen update! So here it is! A mere 10 days late. I have no excuse, just busy busy busy. And as far as BlueGreen goes, it's a major holding pattern right now. For all intents and purposes, the film is done. There are still a few tweaks that can be made but essentially the film is where I believe it should be. I have sent it out to a few people, highly critical folks who like documentaries for their feedback, and it's all come back primarily positive with the expected criticisms.Ý I know, when I approached you about this film I told you I planned on getting a Hollywood VO. Well, we are still trying for that, but we couldn't hold up the submission process any longer, without risk of the material becoming outdated by a lot of Festival standards. So armed with the positive feedback we had about the current read, we started submissions (I mentioned that last dispatch) but are still hoping this one lead we have comes through. The person has the script, he's just very busy so we'll see what happens.Ý As for submissions, October's submission list reads as follows: The San Francisco Ocean Film Festival, Santa Cruz International, Cinequest, Victoria Independent, Full Frame Doc Fest, Santa Cruz Environmental Film Fest and The Big Sky Doc Fest. So it's out there for sure. Of course the processes take a long time so we won't even start hearing about last months submissions until early December. Keep your fingers crossed. Everyone says it's beautiful and interesting, so that is a good sign. That's about it from here for now. Onward and upward. We continue with the submission process this month, make a few audio tweaks, and so forth... Of course, now is the time I need to start thinking about a tour and distribution for this puppy.... SEPTEMBER '07 Whew! What a month! Mentally I feel like I have run a marathon, physically I think I gained a ton of weight... September is quickly turning out to be my favorite month here in the Northeast and this year it validated my feelings. Beautiful and warm and well, with exception of our waveless coast remaining waveless, pretty much perfect. Of course I didn't get to see too much of it as I was glued to the edit desk.... As you know we booked a 'fundraising for completion' screening at a local art gallery called SPACE. In order to pull this off, I needed to get the movie pretty close to final. SO there were marathon post sessions and I pretty much put everything else on the back burner in order to get it to the showing version. Graphics were completed, audio was sent to a sweetener in town here to clean up the issues and it really felt like it was coming together. In order to get some press around the screening I sent out press releases to lots of folks, local papers, television, radio, surf sites on the web, colleges, everywhere I could think of. The local free weekly and the local PBS radio requested screening copies as they wanted to do something on the show. So they were delivered. The thursday before the showing, the local 'hipper than thou' free weekly wrote a review that was, well, to put it bluntly, unkind. This was unfortunate as I know lots of folks read this paper and it didn't really do a lot for the promotion of the show. Of course, you need to take the good with the bad, but it just seemed weird to me. The editor (who I actually know) didn't seem to really like surf-y movies, and got really nit picky about weird stuff. In checking out the archives of the paper on line, I did notice that they don't like anything. The one movie they sort of liked in the past year they didn't even write a favorable review of. What bugs me about the review is that when this editor was at another paper he had a whole different demeanor, more affable. But now that he works for this 'cutting edge' paper here, he sort of takes on this other personality in order to be what he thinks the papers personality is. Does that make sense? You know what I mean. Anyway, so be it. However, the Bowdoin paper, the Lewiston Sun Journal, the 2 other free weeklies all wrote favorable reviews and excellent little blurbs about the movie. Additionally I was interviewed on Maine Things Considered, a PBS news show which went really, really well. Look for these tidbits to be up on the website soon, yeah even the bad review. Any press is good press right? Of course I had a knee-jerk reaction to the review and immediately dove into the edit and tightened it down even more, cutting an additional 15 minutes from the film. I know this probably wasn't the most sensible time to try to clean it up, but I just had this need to. SO the evening of the 23rd arrives and I am worried that the bad review in the paper is going to keep people away. So I can't eat, I get really nervous and wow it's just not a good feeling. However, a half hour before the showing there is a line out the door, down the block and around the corner! I couldn't believe it! I was so psyched. We had raffles and give aways and I left out a basic questionnaire for feedback on the film. The version I showed that evening was the same version that the paper reviewed, not the newer shorter cut, as I wanted to see if the feedback I got was in line with what I had done in my knee-jerk edit. The crowd loved it! It was great! Applause, good feedback, and it was just a huge relief. The questionnaires I got back pretty much re-affirmed what I had done in the knee-jerk cut and so after an additional audio clean of that cut, I basically called it done. Look again on the site for a couple quick comments from some of the crowd that evening. While I am still waiting for a response on a couple of the celebrity VO personalities I have approached, the feedback on the current VO was good enough that I decided to move ahead with the first round of film festival submissions. So as of this month submissions to Sundance, Slamdance, X-Dance and The Victoria film festival have all gone out. Whewph! Now while the bulk of the movie is finished there are still a few issues that need to be taken care of and they will be. But for now, it's nice to take a little breather and walk away from the edit desk for a week or so to catch up on some other things. So allright! What a feeling! The big hump is over and let's just hope it makes an impression on the judges for the film festivals. Fingers crossed! AUGUST '07 Ok, really late on this one. I have tons of really good excuses, wanna hear 'em? I didn't think so. Just try to imagine something along the lines of hardware issues combined with crazy food-borne illness, and looming deadlines. Super fun!Ý Regardless of all that, the movie is so close to being done. We had a hard and fast deadline of September 14, but got a reprieve and now have another week to suss everything out. We are very very close. We ended up having a second secret screening in August and it went well. This one was a lot more low key, and more surf-heavy in terms of audience. Their big issue with the film was that it wasn't surf oriented enough. But my response to that is, that it isn't necessarily a surf film. There just happens to be some surf personalities in it. You can't please all of the people all of the time... But they did give some other good feedback that was not too dissimilar from the first screening. So we went back to the edit and started hacking away again!Ý We had a few issues with some of the audio and we took it to the local audio wizard and he worked wonders with it. We are just now finishing up the very simple graphics that we opted for after our first secret screening, and of course finishing the credits. The VO is being re-written one more time to fit another style. One of the main comments we got was how approachable the movie was so we wanted to re-write the vo so that it fit that style as well. We have a couple of people set up for the VO talent and we are now just trying to figure out who would be best, and can get done on time. More on that later.Ý The big news is that we grabbed a last minute spot at the SPACE gallery in downtown Portland to have our 'fundraising for completion' showing. Yeah, it can't be a 'premiere' due to rules for film festivals and the film can't be completely finished, but it is still going to be a grand night out. We have a single sponsor (a great local shop) and we're raffling off a surfboard, a wetsuit, and all kinds of schwag. It's a much more relaxed atmosphere than a theater setting. It's a great excuse to get the local community out to socialize, have few drinks, see a great movie, and just have fun. It's on Sunday September 23rd, at 6:30 pm. If you are in town you should definitely come out to see it!Ý I know some of you wanted to be here for this event. But I would rather show you a premiere than a 'work in progress' kind of thing, so if you can wait, I think it would be way better. And we may even try to do one out in Southern California as well. So that is about it from here. I am currently in the process of removing this crazy hiss from one of the interviews. SO I better get back to it! This is the big month! Gotta get it done!Ý JULY '07 I have a good excuse for blowing the deadline on the July update.... I have been working on the film! Let me explain further. We had the preliminary pre-screening this month (July I mean) and it went very well. We had a woman whose work has appeared on National Geo and Discovery channels, a surf industry writer, a couple of producers from lifestyle channel RSN, a local marketing guru and a handful of other surf friends and documentary enthusiasts. The night went very well and the showing came off with out a hitch. Of course the hardest part was to turn the movie off, turn up the lights, and say 'So ok, what did you think...?' from that session I turned right around and got mired deep in the re-edit for the second screening and I haven't looked back. So what did they say? Well anyone who has ever created something and asked for critical comment knows that you can never get all the varying different comments on your piece fixed, nor would you want to. But there usually are some glaring issues that are mentioned by all and in retrospect seem pretty obvious, and these are the ones we concentrated on. The main comment was order of appearance, which affects the story line, followed by identification of characters, followed by vo issues followed by graphics. Then there were some detail oriented things that had to be taken care of as well. So it was a little tough to take because I was hoping I would be closer to getting the result I wanted from the audience, but it was also really good, because I have been staring at this project for over a year now and I feel like I don't always look at it with fresh eyes. It was also a load off to a degree getting the first prelim screening out of the way. I immediately started planning for the public 'fund raising' showing in Portland which with luck will be early September. But we'll see. Also based on the comments and the amount of post we feel needs to be done to the film, it looks like we will be pushing the drop dead completion date to September 14th, the deadline for our first round of festival applications. Of course we can still monkey with it after that but the film has to be pretty close to it's final draft at that point. With all this on our plate, you'd think we'd stay glued to the computer as well. Well, amidst all this we decided what better time to take a vacation. So we closed down shop for a week and took a couple of DVDs of the latest version with us and set of for sun and sand, and a family wedding. So while that may ding the production timeline a hair, it's probably good to get out of the edit suite and view the revisions in a different environment, and not looking at the film everyday. So when we get back we'll be all over it. So there is your July update, my apologies for not getting it to you in, well, July, but look at it this way. Now you will get another update sooner in this very crucial phase of the production! Woohoo! JUNE '07 Jeez! I just can't seem to get a months update in the correct month! So ok, here is the June update for BlueGreen even though it's July... Big news! The first and foremost is that the rough cut of the film is done finally! Whewph! It took a lot but we got it in under the wire. It's pretty rough and still runs about 15-20 minutes long so we need to get in there and start hacking away, but it's all finesse from here, the hard labor is done. Which is great. Secondly! The website is up! It's very basic but it gets the point across. There are a couple of technical issues with it but is should be functioning no problem. We haven't been able to construct a full trailer yet so we just put up a simple teaser we made a little while ago (notice the wrong time frame at the end). The trailer will be up soon. SO you can check it all out at the following address. Any comments and suggestions are welcome: http://www.bluegreenconnection.com Thirdly! We have scheduled the super secret sneak preview of the film for July 21. There is a select group of 12 folks who will be participating in the screening. These folks have been selected from a group of documentary buffs, industry folks and friends whose opinions we trust. These folks will be expected to give full critical commentary on what they believe will improve the film. We will take from this session notes to better streamline the film. It's a very exciting time, but also very nerve-wracking! Finally, after moving ahead with our artist, she bagged on the film. Her excuse was that she was just accepted into the Boston Roller Derby League, which is a pretty excellent excuse! Except that she isn't going to have time to work on the film. However after a quick visit to the Maine College of Arts Student Affairs office has given us a couple of very solid leads on that front with some promising up and comers. So this could actually turn out to be a good thing for the film. So For July, we have the screening on the 21st, which I will report back to you on, and further finessing of the rough cut, including the addition of the art. With luck we should get the final fund raising screening together by mid August with our first batch of Fest entry deadlines starting August 21! Yike! We better get back to work! MAY '07 May! It's over! And well, we're on track with the revised completion date. We are looking at the end of June for final completion of the project. It's going well right now but we have a couple of major hurdles coming up. The first and foremost being the quest for a celebrity VO. We have had some pretty solid leads but they seem to go up in smoke when the rubber hits the road. SO we are still searching and have a few more leads to follow up. But if any of you know any hollywood celebrity types you think might be interested in an indie documentary project let me know. We are moving ahead with schedules for a couple of events regarding the film. The first one will be a very small pre showing with just a few folks whom I trust locally to be good critics of my work, and not just be friends that will automatically say that it's great. That will happen in mid July, and then at the beginning of August I intend to have a pre-showing fundraiser open to the public to help with completion costs on the film. I will keep you updated on those dates as they approach and let you know how they go as well. The film itself is coming right along. I was worried initially about the mixing of formats, to be up-rezzed to HD but it actually flows quite well, and in the world of documentaries it will fit right in. I met up with the artist this past week as well and the whole thing seems to be coming together. In fact it's going so well, that I am sort of waiting for the other shoe to drop. But why think that way? Let the good luck roll! The website is in development as well. It's hard though because the trailer will be the centerpiece of the site, and we haven't had time to get that together yet. But it will be up soon, as we know what an important part of marketing the whole film it is. Again, once we get more solid on that we'll let you know. APRIL '07 What, you mean there aren't 31 days in April? How does that rhyme go, '30 days hath September, April, Ju.... doh. SO ok, you'll get 2 updates in May then. Just pretend you got this one last night and that way it'll actually be the April update. But you know, the good news is that we are so busy with BlueGreen that we haven't had hardly any free time to get an update out. And it's true too! Though it hasn't just been the film. Some of you might have heard about the wicked Nor'Easter we (the North East) got hammered with, well the studio flooded and it took a while to clean that up. Luckily there was no equipment damage. But things with the actual film have been going swimmingly. We have got all the interviews down to the essence of what was being said, which is, quite frankly, one of the more laborious part of the post process. We also brought another band into the BlueGreen fold- The Baltic Sea, from Portland Maine. That pretty much completes our music roster. Over the next month we will be winnowing down the interviews to their core points, and then it's full speed ahead getting all the pieces in place. We will be diving head first into the art as well, the first pieces to be worked on being delivered to the artist this month. We have made a few strides towards finding a voiceover talent, but we aren't quite there yet. We found a couple of well known surf oriented talents which will go on the list, but we are still gunning for a hollywood talent. More on that later... We also came upon some footage of one of our interviewees that we are trying desperately to acquire, but are meeting with a little resistance. It wouldn't be that big a deal except that the footage goes directly to the point of what's being said. SO we are trying to overcome that challenge. It's really exciting, and the way it looks is just cool. We have everything from HD to POV to low res home video. IT sounds like it doesn't work but all together it is looking excellent, really telling an interesting story. MARCH '07 Happy April. March came in like a lion and left like a lion, and now we have April showers for the foreseeable future. Could there be any other maxims ringing true this year? Well how about Murphy's law. Is that a maxim? Because we certainly were on the short end of that stick all month. You may remember that we a had a small bit of technological difficulty last month with some drives. Well, it got worse in May and finally, after 3 weeks of going back and forth, we discovered that it was something in the firmware that the manufacturer was putting on the drives that was communicating incorrectly with the computer. Snore. We are using some new technologies over here so one is bound to run into this kind of stuff, it's what happens when you try to get on the 'cutting edge' right? Anyway, we switched our Hitachis for Seagates and everything seems to be right as rain now. However it really did mess with our time line. We are now hoping for an end of May, early June completion, which is fine, because it plays right into our film festival strategy. It also bought some time for us in terms of some other elements for the film. We were able to write the opening VO, as well as some of the connective narration. We recorded some incidental music for under interviews, transitions etc. And most importantly we forged a deal with another band for a piece of music for the film. The Last Town Chorus is a Brooklyn based band centered around this woman named Megan who writes some really interesting and amazing stuff. They seem excited to be part of the project, and we are psyched to have them. So life rolls on and we are madly working on the edit. It's all starting to come together and I am really really psyched. We have been keeping what we have done under pretty close wraps for a variety of reasons, but most importantly, being a documentary, we don't really want any outside opinions to color the first edit. After the story is set we'll start running it past some test audiences, but that won't be until June. FEBRUARY '07 It's been a crazy month on the BlueGreen Front, characterized by 3 simple yet fairly significant words- Catastrophic Drive Failure. Yeah it's too long and boring a story to get into but a frustrating component to non-linear editing is that the technology sometimes gets in the way. In this case a new Raid array with just over 2 terrabytes of information on it went out and in the blink of an eye all the information was lost. But! All is not lost, as this project is extremely well organized and backed up with some excellent customer service, so while this was a time burning and frustrating issue, it was not insurmountable. In fact it is still acting up to a degree so it may cause a few more delays as we move forward here, unless I replace the array, which may have to happen. Before that happened however a ton of progress was made in roughing out the film. The intro sequence is solid and a number of the interviews have been assembled. It's coming along great. We even have found a couple more pieces of music and are in negotiations with the labels for rights. One of the ideas we have been playing with is that after the movie has made a significant run in the Film Festival circuit (with luck), we might put interviews in full on the website. The reason we are thinking about this is that in the process of culling each interview down, we get to the meat of the issue but cut out some really interesting stuff to do it. Each one of the interviews could be a short in and of itself. Coming up in March we intend to finish the rough, and add in a lot of the art, some through a new process we are working with, and the start of polishing the 'working version'. Onward and Upward! JANUARY '07 The production of Bluegreen moves along at a steady pace. However we had a technological hiccup in that we ran out of HD space, and were delayed in getting the new storage in, so we are off the timeline a bit (the 1st rough was scheduled for the end of January, now we are looking at the end of February). And due to that hiccup, we started a little future planning. We gathered together a lot of the music into a coherent soundtrack and are considering releasing the DVD with an accompanying soundtrack, as a little extra bonus. We need to get few more music releases for that but we can definitely work that out when the time comes. We also started working on our Film festival strategy, which includes documentary fests, actions sports fests, and regional fests that have a coastal setting, and the right demo. The film fest strategy is like an entirely different beast, and is sort of the second stage in the production of the film. Of course there are a few tomatoes we'd love to get into that don't necessarily fit into the strategy, so we'll give those a shot as well. On a side note, as I go through the interviews for Bluegreen, I am blown away by the depth at which each participant is connected, and regardless of how they express it verbally, it really comes through in amazing ways. This is going to be a really great film. DECEMBER '06 The BlueGreen machine is chugging along just fine! Our biggest project on the film currently is uprezzing all the SD DV footage we have to true HD. There is quite a bit of it, and it is sort of time consuming, but we are making headway. There has been discussion as to whether or not the footage will stand up against the HD footage that was shot, but so far most of it looks pretty decent. It will certainly make shot selection a bit easier, as a small forgivable glitch at 720x480 can become unbearable at 1920x1080. It looks pretty good and we are confident we can make it all so that it flows nicely. (I know, I know, enough tech geek talk...) The artist for the film is on vacation until the end of January, which is actually pretty good, as it buys us time to get the film roughed out and a VO script drafted. Then artwork and the true search for our VO talent can begin. That search is moving forward albeit slowly. As indicated in our last missive, we have our feelers out in the world trying to track down a 'hollywood talent' for the VO. It shouldn't prove too difficult to get someone and we are well on our way. We have made a number of connections and with luck by the end of January we may have a line on someone. If anyone knows of agreeable 'movie star' talent they think would be interested, let us know, we'll add them to the list of possibles. We also have had very mellow weather out east, as opposed to the rest of the country, so we have decided to keep shooting b-roll until we don't need any more. We have decided to try to upgrade our water housing too, and the reason I bring it up is if anyone knows of a custom housing maker, we'd love that info as well. We have one last interview we are trying to get and once we have got that bagged that portion of the film will be done. We are just waiting for the perfect timing, and then we'll get it done. NOVEMBER '06 Things have been jumping for Blue Green! We have finally gotten all the bugs (or so we think) out of the production system and have started bringing in the footage. And what good footage it is! We have definitely scored with some of the footage we have recorded and that a few other sources have provided for us. Blue Green is definitely shaping up. We have met a few times with the artist and are excited about moving forward with her, and she seems very stoked about the project as well.. Unfortunately for her, it's more sort of a 'hurry up and wait' scenario as she can't do much until the rough edit is done. A lot of the footage for Blue Green was shot HD, but some, because of mechanical necessity was shot on a variety of other formats. We are bringing that stuff in first because we need to up-res- most of it to HD standard, which takes space. In fact, HD takes space in general! 1 minute of HD takes up 3 gigabytes of space! We should eat through our 2.5 terrabytes in no time... We still have a couple of interviews we need to conduct before Christmas. These last few are like pulling teeth trying to get them done, but we are almost there, I can feel it. Once they are done, I will probably keep shooting water footage until the new year, whenever the opportunity arises, but then will concentrate on the edit for January/February, and we are still planning on a May completion date (fingers crossed). OCTOBER '06 Almost all the interviews are in the can. We have a 3 more we are trying to conduct within the space of the next month and once those are in we are going to move immediately to post. Footage is still being shot, but we are pretty confident that we have enough b-roll to support the production. Still, we will probably keep at it whenever the opportunity arises right up until the final edit, in order to have the best we can get. Blue Green was shot almost entirely in HD so we had to upgrade the production facilities to handle this job. Parts were ordered and pieces cobbled together. By the end of this month the new HD studio will be on line and shot selection can commence in earnest. We currently have close to 40 hours of footage, b-roll and interviews to get through. A lot of Blue Green is going to be in conjunction with animative art, and we think we have found the artist for us. She hails from Gloucester MA, and once we hammer out the details, we think she is going to add a lot to this film. Most of the music has been selected as well, a few national acts as well as a few local acts to equal things out. The music tone won't be as subtle or muted as 'Ishmael' was, but it won't be punk rock either. We hesitate to say who's who on this roster at this juncture, but we will divulge that in another newsletter. To hedge our bets, we are still looking at a May release date, but it could happen any time between now and then. We'll keep you informed.