SR Production Updates

Mission Accomplished

Spirit’s Requiem is finally complete.

After months of script writing, a false start, filming an as-yet unreleased short film, more months of altering the script, filming another short movie, three months of pre-production, 10 weeks of filming, and over three months of sound wrangling, it ends nearly two years to the day after it began.

Clocking in at 47 minutes 12 seconds, Spirit’s Requiem is the longest movie Basis has yet made. Indeed, it’s the longest movie that most of the crew has been involved in. Is it a long short or a short feature? That’s for you to decide.

When do you get to see it? For the cast and crew (and their family and friends) you get to view it at the premiere this Saturday, December 10th. Everyone else will have to wait until later in the month for the movie to appear online. Do not fret, you won’t have long to wait as the movie will be online before Christmas. You might even be able to make it a part of your holiday festivities. I’m not sure if Spirit’s Requiem has any relevance to the Christmas season, but for those of you who live in cold places it will remind you of summer’s warmth. Huddle close to it as you would a fire.

Thanks to everyone involved in production. It was a hell of a thing.

Basis Weekly Update 12/2/2011 – The Final Countdown

The turkey has been in the oven for a long time now, simmering in its juices, absorbing the aroma of the spices stuffed up its…well, you know. That delicious looking bird is almost ready for you to gobble up.

Okay, so maybe it’s a week late for a turkey analogy. But as Sir Alfred Droxshire once said, “The turkey, while best suited for the giving of thanks feast, can be utilized for any meal during the autumnal season.” And since autumn doesn’t technically end until December 21st I will continue to use the turkey until then. Gobble gobble. Where was I going with this?

Spirit’s Requiem is now watchable from the opening titles to the end credits, complete with all the audio: dialogue, sound effects, ambiance, and (best of all) music. Why don’t I release it yet, you ask? Because as it is now portions of the music drown out the dialogue, dialogue obscures sound effects, and ambient noises sometimes trump all other sounds. Much adjustment needs to be done so that all the sound is in its proper place and the audience isn’t deafened due to volume irregularities. Once the sound is ready there will be one final round of color correction before the film is finally finished.

The journey from script to screen is nearly complete, and your journey alongside the Girl and Shade approaches. I hope you’re ready.

Basis Weekly Update 11/18/2011

Three weeks until the premiere and there’s still a lot of work that needs doing. It’ll be another short update this week.

The music was delivered a few days ago and boy is it good. Jon truly outdid himself, he’s an excellent (and patient) composer. I can’t wait for the movie to be done so you too can experience his music. The score will also be available for sale as a digital download in the not so distant future. Once it’s up I’ll link you to it, though your earliest chance at hearing it will come when Spirit’s Requiem is released online.

That was a really short update. I suppose it leaves more time for drinking…which is something you don’t want to be doing at your office Christmas party. Is it really only 5 weeks until Christmas? That doesn’t leave us much time to get the DVD stuffed into your stocking.

Basis Weekly Update 11/11/11

It’s the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh year of the third millennium, or at least it is here in St. Louis, Missouri. Time for a production update, however brief it may be.

The end is in sight. The audio is being worked on, a slow and painstakingly boring process. Yet now most of the movie is watchable and hearable, albeit without a musical score. That will be added next week, the last major piece of the puzzle.

It’s been a long journey from idea to paper to film, one that you’ll be able to experience sometime next month. The premiere date has been set for December 10th, and while I wish I could open it to all of our faithful readers, we only have a limited number of seats that are reserved for the cast and crew. Do not fret if you are neither of those – the movie will be available online shortly after its premiere.

I leave you with this video, which I believe is appropriate for today:

Basis Weekly Update 9/16/2011

Before I begin I must ask that any of our Kickstarter pledgers out there should check their email for a survey. Most of you have responded, but there are a couple of hold outs. If you pledged at the $5+ level and didn’t receive a survey please send me an email at basisproductions@gmail.com.

So what’s up this week? Audio. Film festivals. Deadlines.

Audio: The last of the music is being scored. What’s been produced so far is terrific. I’m hoping that we might be able to sneak a little peak at it soon. Last weekend we recorded two more of our actors for dialogue dubbing, and this weekend we’ll be recording two more. Audio is probably my least favorite aspect of filmmaking at the moment.

Film festivals: Spirit’s Requiem has been submitted as a work-in-progress to a few film festivals, most notably Sundance and Slamdance. As a poster in one of my middle school classrooms once said, “Shoot for the moon, even if you miss you’ll land among the stars.” I’ve always interpreted that statement to mean that if you miss your landing on the moon you’ll be lost in space and eventually die once your ship’s life support systems fail. We’ll hear back from most of the festivals by early December. Cross your fingers.

Deadlines: Foiled again. It seems like every time I set a deadline something goes amiss and we can no longer meet it. Such is the trouble with projects of this nature. I am currently predicting a release date of late October, just in time for Halloween. Also just in time for Halloween – Spirit’s Requiem costumes. Dress up as your favorite character!

Basis Weekly Update 9/9/2011

When they said that I’d better “lock that down,” I thought they were referring to my girlfriend. Turns out they were referring to the movie.

The picture has been locked in. No more cuts, no more additions, no more changes.* The movie as I see it now will be the same movie that you see. Except that I still haven’t added the credits. Our crew continues to grow even as we approach the end, meaning our credits continue to grow longer. No use putting the credits together if I’ll just have to go back and add someone else (and move the other names around and render it all again).

The first ADR session took place on Wednesday, and it went much better than I thought it would. For those of you who aren’t familiar with ADR, it is automated dialogue replacement, often called dubbing. Actors rerecord their lines in post-production while  having to sync their vocal performance with the performance they gave on set. It is commonly used when the audio captured on location is unusable due to poor quality or unwanted background noises. We filmed with a shotgun mic attached to the camera, which picked up other sounds besides the actors (and often instead of the actors). Chirp chirp chirp chirp chirp.

Elizabeth (the Great Spirit) came in and re-dubbed all of her lines, taking only 90 minutes to do so. It is an odd experience to have to sync your voice with an onscreen performance, or so I have heard. I found it strange to sit there watching the mouth move in the movie while hearing Elizabeth speak the words right next to me. It’s a little disorienting. The rest of the actors will be coming in for ADR over the next week or two. Here’s hoping that they’re all just as quick and painless as this first session. However, Elyse (Shade) has 7 pages of script to record, as opposed to about 2 pages for Elizabeth and the rest of the cast. That one could be painful. Why does she have to talk so much?

This week we have some new photos uploaded to our Flickr account. About a month ago we had a photo shoot to take some pictures for our press kit. These are the ones that didn’t make it into the kit. They’re still pretty good, though.

Next week we’ll have more news concerning our upcoming fire sale. Take it away, Tobias:

*Unless deemed absolutely necessary as decided by a panel consisting of three men and a rubber duckie.

Basis Weekly Update 8/26/2011

We had a complete viewing of the rough cut earlier this week, and it looks mighty fine. It’s 47 minutes (about 3-5 minutes longer than an episode of Lost), but it doesn’t feel as long as it is. The pace is nice and brisk, like an autumn’s walk, except without the walking or the scent of fallen leaves. We are working on a smell-o-vision version of the movie, to be released once we perfect the technology for transmitting scents through Quicktime files.

Not much more editing work needs doing. There’s one brief shot from one brief scene that we’re having trouble working around (thank you tape-eating camera), though I’m sure we’ll figure out something. Certainly there will be a few more bits to trim up, but everything is pretty much set. All we’re waiting on now is the audio.

We’re getting ready to enter the movie into a couple of film festivals as a work-in-progress with a temp soundtrack. We’re aiming high and heading straight for Sundance and Slamdance. You’ve probably heard of the former, though maybe not the latter. Suffice to say they’re both pretty big festivals. Will we make it? The odds are definitely stacked against us, it’s best not to get excited. But the first tenet of the Basis Creed is “Nothing ventured, nothing gained,” and if we break the Creed then we get stabbed in the stomach, lose our equipment, and have to start over as a novice. Or maybe that was the Assassin’s Creed…

There isn’t any new media I can offer after last week’s trailer, so I’ll just go ahead and post it again. Good, ain’t it?

Rough Cut Complete

That’s right folks, the rough cut is complete. It clocks in at just over 48 minutes. Altogether we filmed 385 minutes of footage, meaning 12.5% of what we shot made it into the cut. For Castle Town that ratio was 18% – we shot 36 minutes and put together a 6.5 minute rough cut, which was later trimmed down to 5 minutes because of time requirements for the festival we entered. The rough cut will face further cuts, primarily because many film festivals have set the maximum length for short films at 40 minutes. How we will ever shorten it by almost ten minutes (did I forget to mention that credits will be an additional 2 minutes?) is still unknown.

The plan right now is to tighten the rough cut into a director’s cut, which will be the version shown at the premiere and on DVD. After that we’ll do some additional cuts to make it in under 40 minutes. While I hate having to cut a movie short simply for the sake of getting it into a festival, most festivals show less than two dozen features (US narrative features, to be precise), while showing upwards of a hundred or more shorts. The odds of getting in as a short are much larger. Plus our story doesn’t quite have the grand arc required of a feature film. It was written and filmed with the intention of being a short film, now it simply must be edited as such.

The coming week will see the reveal of the teaser trailer. It’s looking good, there’s just a couple more things that must be tweaked before it can be released.

Basis Weekly Update 8/12/2011

Second unit photography continued with some of our last shots on Tuesday. We ran around in the forest (quite literally) filming stuff for the montage of traveling. Yes, we have a montage, just like Rocky. Ours features significantly less Sylvester Stallone, 100% less to be precise. Dolph Lundgren makes a brief appearance, however.

There is but one more day of filming left, which will double as a photo shoot for some promotional images, including our poster. We’re looking forward to the action and final wrap of all filming for the movie.

The rough cut is 95% complete, with a run time of about 46 minutes. That’s almost a third longer than my most liberal estimate. Longer isn’t necessarily better, and when the rough cut is complete the editor and myself will be sitting down and seeing if we need to make any cuts in order to speed the plot along. No cuts will be made simply for the sake of making it shorter, but we have to figure out why our 26 page script is now going to end up being almost 50 minutes long. Normally one page of script equals one minute of the movie. It’s a curious situation, and I’m interested to get to the bottom of it.

Stayed tuned for the premiere of the teaser trailer next week. Pop yourself some Jiffy Pop and gather the family round the computer, it’s the movie event of the summer.

Basis Weekly Update 7/30/2011

Better late than never, that’s what my doctor always used to say.

It is strange to think that there will not be any more major filming days for Spirit’s Requiem. In fact, there might not be any more filming days with actors, as it appears that all we have left to film are establishing shots of nature. It all hinges on whether we got everything we needed, and whether everything we got is usable. So far so good. Knock on wood.

Filming this week consisted of “second unit photography,” which wasn’t actual second unit work because on most films the second unit would be filming simultaneously with the first – principal – unit, and it would have a different director. I can’t think of a better name for it (b-roll, perhaps?) so I’m just calling it second unit. We filmed Aster running around in a field, running around in a forest, running around in another field, and some clouds. It was much easier than our previous filming days as we were able to run around freely, unconstrained by the script. We did have a list of shots we needed to get, but we mostly just meandered about the countryside until we found a spot we liked and got out the camera to start shooting. It was far more relaxed. Plus we got a 6 minute long shot of clouds in the sky. What for? Who knows. It looks pretty sped up, like those cloud shots in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Good movie.

Close to 70% of the film has been edited into a rough cut, and it’s beginning to look a lot like a movie (and Christmas). Depending on how quickly our editor works we might be able to have 90% of the movie assembled in a week’s time.

Hopefully we’ll be able to have some more edited movie footage for you next week, and maybe some sort of trailer in the coming weeks. For now we leave you with some brief behind the scenes footage of our night shoot, lit entirely by firelight. Our lighting technicians had fun running around with torches. They did a great job, the footage looks gorgeous, if a bit (or very) chiaroscuro. Wish we had those wide aperture lenses Kubrick used in Barry Lyndon.