Archive for the ‘News’ Category

Last Breath: camera department

Friday, September 3rd, 2010 by Andrew

We have just fin­ished our first pro­duc­tion week on Last Breath. It’s been a lot of hard work, but also seri­ously fun. A typ­i­cal day for me con­sists of me wak­ing up around 3:30 or 4:00 in the morn­ing, rid­ing with Matt and our gaffer Randy out to some obscure loca­tion, build­ing up the cam­era pack­age, spend­ing the day cart­ing the cam­era around, chang­ing lenses, wran­gling cables and pulling focus, then break­ing down the cam­era, pack­ing it back up and spend­ing what lit­tle evening remains dump­ing cards, back­ing up footage and charg­ing batteries.

Here is our pro­duc­tion camera:

production camera for "Last Breath"

That’s a Canon EOS 7D, mod­i­fied by Präzisions-Entwicklung Denz in Germany to accept PL-mount cin­ema lenses*. We’re shoot­ing the whole thing on prime (non-zoom) lenses for their char­ac­ter­is­tic sharp­ness and clar­ity that zooms can’t com­pete with; our lens kit con­sists of six Zeiss primes in the fol­low­ing focal lengths: (more…)

ACing a feature: Last Breath

Thursday, August 26th, 2010 by Andrew

After a few months back home in Colorado, I have once again returned to Minneapolis—not to school this time, but rather as the first (read: only) AC for the fea­ture film Last Breath, a sort of post-apocalyptic road movie writ­ten and directed by Ian Hansing. Production starts tomor­row. By indus­try stan­dards it’s a tiny pro­duc­tion, but it’s still far big­ger than pretty much any film I’ve ever worked on, and all the depart­ment heads are really incred­i­bly on top of things.

Last Breath camera package, all packed up and ready to goIt’s a lit­tle intim­i­dat­ing being in charge of the cam­era depart­ment (read: being the cam­era depart­ment) for a real fea­ture with a siz­able crew and truck­loads of equip­ment rentals and all that jazz, par­tic­u­larly given that I haven’t AC’d any­thing in sev­eral months, but I’ve been get­ting my mojo back; label­ing cases, buy­ing a 100′ tape mea­sure (finally), and get­ting down and dirty learn­ing the film community’s own con­vo­luted pho­netic alpha­bet used for slat­ing takes (sim­i­lar to but not the same as the NATO pho­netic alpha­bet, it begins with ‘apple’ instead of ‘alfa’ and ends with ‘zebra’ instead of ‘zulu’).

I’ll be report­ing directly to cin­e­matog­ra­pher Matt Kane, who you might remem­ber as the übermen­sch who shot Discouraging Words, and I’ll get a chance to hang with a few leg­ends of the Minneapolis film world, so I’m pretty excited even though I have to wake up around 3:30 tomor­row for the long drive out to the loca­tion in time for the 5:30 crew call.

So expect to hear more about all this. In a day or two, if I can sum­mon the energy, I may give you all a peek inside those cases. For now, let’s suf­fice it to say that we’re shoot­ing dig­i­tal and I’ve got lots of toys to play with.

Another TV interview

Monday, July 5th, 2010 by Andrew

Back in May I was inter­viewed about Discouraging Words for the cable access show Filmmaker’s Studio. Not my best or most coher­ent inter­view, but in my defense I hadn’t slept more than about twenty hours in the week pre­ced­ing the interview.

Anyway, the show is embed­ded below:

[YouTube]

Post-CIFF notes

Monday, May 24th, 2010 by Andrew

Me with Vvinni outside the Atlas Theater in Cheyenne

Discouraging Words had its first western-states screen­ing on Saturday as part of the Cheyenne International Film Festival. I want to thank fes­ti­val orga­niz­ers Alan O’Hashi and Michael Conti, as well as all the good peo­ple who came out to the pro­gram. I was par­tic­u­larly amused to hear from a num­ber of peo­ple who are inti­mately involved in the Wyoming polit­i­cal scene who told me that we got the char­ac­ters exactly right.

Some peo­ple at the fes­ti­val have expressed inter­est in pur­chas­ing DVDs. Check back here in exactly two months—that’s July 24th—for more infor­ma­tion about how to get your hands on your very own copy of the movie. If you would like to receive an email when the DVD becomes avail­able, just leave a com­ment on this post and I’ll be in touch.

There will be screen­ings in Colorado this sum­mer, although noth­ing is set in stone yet. If you would like to arrange your own pri­vate screen­ing for friends, fam­ily, neigh­bors, pass­ing strangers on the street… please send an email to screeners@​discouragingwords.​com.

Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth…

Saturday, May 1st, 2010 by Andrew

…And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings…
…put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

Picture lock.

Two pieces of many

Tuesday, April 20th, 2010 by Andrew

Post-production on Discouraging Words is get­ting crazy (in a good way?) because I need to have a screener done by the sev­enth of May. Here’s where I with­draw into my hole and become an anti­so­cial her­mit until the movie is fin­ished, so if you send me an e-mail or Facebook mes­sage or the like, don’t expect to nec­es­sar­ily get a reply. Ever. Fair warning—that’s just the way I roll.

Anyway, here are two things that you might find inter­est­ing. First, a frame from some news graph­ics I’m cur­rently ren­der­ing out:

Jesse Griffith and Lawrence Levesque as cable news pundits

And here is an actual scene, pre­sented in its entirety: (more…)

Save the date: Discouraging Words in Wyoming!

Saturday, April 10th, 2010 by Andrew

Cheyenne International Film Festival - Saturday, May 22, 9:30AM - Atlas Theater, Cheyenne, WY - $10

No sense in keep­ing a lid on this any­more… (more…)