Looks like 2007 was the peak for horror movie making with films tagged as "horror" on the IMDB accounting for 17% of all movies released last year.
Of course 2008 hasn't finished yet but IMDB shows only 11 films completed but not released so looks like number of horror movies this year has declined.
Wow, once again it's been a while!
I've been hard at work creating Google video ads and experimenting with Google adwords - nothing to to with the film business but for a family villa in Florida. Plus I've been playing with Flash Lite and developing some MindFlesh-related content.
For example, there are now a couple of animated screensavers (or wallpapers) that will work on any Flash Lite 1.1 enabled phones - which is pretty much most of the more recent cellphones. I've tested them in Adobe's Device Central and on a couple of phones - my Nokia 6500 and a Sony Ericsson W850i.
Here they are :) They can be downloaded from the main MindFlesh site - click the menu item "downloads".
Here's a couple of mobiles wallpapers too. Again, more at the main MindFlesh site.
Oh, and I shouldn't forget that I've created an iPhone-specific page for MindFlesh. It's not as content-rich as the main site but does allow access to the basics. The main site homepage checks the UserAgent property and switches to the correct page. Here's a look at it on my iPhone.
Oh man, I've been soooo busy these past weeks. Apologies to regular readers for the high self-promotional content - it's almost all I've had time to write.
In the other spare hour or two every day I've been subtitling London Voodoo in French. Now, of course, if the film were only to be show on DVD then I could have used Adobe Encore to add the subtitles automatically... well, kinda. I'd have to create a text script file of course but given I already have a spotting list with the dialog timecoded it would have been fairly straightforward.
But, although I was asked to do the work for a film festival in Canada, my plan is make the French subtitled London Voodoo available for download - hence, the text needs to be added as hundreds of title cards in Premiere :(
Just a final note on the translation. I used BeTranslated- very nice people, quick, accurate and about the cheapest. The most expensive quote I had was 50% more than BeTranslated's price - so quite some range. There's a lot of translation folks online and it's very easy to get a quick quote, it's pretty much just a multiple of x-cents per word.
London Voodoo re-cut and digital "remastering"
So, given I had to go back to the LV source files, I decided to give the film a make-over and cut out about 8 minutes. Anyone that's edited a film before will tell you how tough it can be to just cut out a few seconds, never mind 8 minutes. Still, I did it by removing a lot of voodoo explanations and "exterior interludes" I guess you could call them.
The primary reason for mentioning it here is a small bug I found in Premiere: my source clips are in PAL 25fps. When I export the edited timeline in NTSC mpeg format, not only is there a slight blending of shots between the cut - rather than a neat, clean cut - an additional frame is added from the outgoing shot! What? To overcome the problem I've had to export in PAL - works fine - and then import the exported PAL clip and re-export in NTSC.
I know that NTSC is a different frame rate etc. but the software should recognise the end of the edited shot correctly.
Dirt and scratch removal in Adobe Premiere
I've also been removing the odd blemish and scratch from the image. LV was shot in super 16mm and when the neg was cut before digital scanning (we have a hidef digital intermediate), the guy or girl that glued the cuts wasn't too fussy about where that glue went or how much dirt and crap the neg picked up.
Most of the main blemishes and glue patches were picked up and corrected during grading but I've noticed a few during subtitling so I've fixed them in Premiere.
Ok, so Premiere comes with a dirt and scratch removal effect but it's kinda like a Median effect - it slightly blurs all the image which is ok for small bits of dirt but I have BIG white holes in some places. What I've done is steal a technique from After Effect's rig removal effect.
First, isolate the frame with the blemish in the timeline.Then, in the clip monitor, find the same blemish and step back one frame - to a clean frame. Now take this one clean frame and add it to the timeline on the video track above the blemish. Hopefully, so far so good.
Now drag the Four-Point Garbage Matte effect and drop it on that clean frame in the upper video track. Drag the corners of the matte so that they crop out the whole frame except around the blemish on the video track below. Result - you should have now successfully plugged the blemish with a clean image area from the frame before.
I was concerned that I might have to feather the edges of the matte to hide the fix, but nope - works fine. It also sounds like whole load of effort but it's actually quite quick to do once you get familiar with the steps. Below is an illustrating screen shot. I'd recommend clicking to view image full size in a new window.
So last night was our USA premiere of MindFlesh in San Francisco at The Roxie down in the Mission district.
What a great turn-out and what a great audience reaction. I'd checked ticket pre-sales the day before and was delighted we'd managed to hit the top spot. So, with my expectations set, it was nice to see a packed theatre.
Regards the technical aspects of the screening, the sound was pretty good but the projected image looked darker than it should and I need to check if it's our tape or their projector. At the screenings in Cannes the image transferred from the hard drive to tape was too bright for some reason but I'm worried the post-production guys have gone too far in their corrections - last night was the first time I'd seen the NTSC version (the film is mastered in HD and txferd to NTSC digiBeta for last night).
My wife Helen and my nephew Anthony were there last night too. Here's some of Anthony's video work in the form of some audience feedback.
I was delighted to screen with Imp Of Satan which is an excellent short film (30 mins). It opens with some mesmerizing shots of SF's Castro and similarly scary/hypnotic music. All the direction, acting and photography is absolutely great. Check out the movie if you get a chance....
For those that came last night, and others I guess, here's the link to Bill's novel on Amazon.
NEXT SCREENING
MindFlesh plays for a second time in San Francisco on Tuesday 17th June 2008, 7:15pm. Again we're preceded with Imp Of Satan but be sure to catch both films - IOS is great.
For all those in Arkansas Little Rock, head over to the Little Rock Film Festival and check out TOKYO COWBOYS - it screens May 17th and May 18th
It's a superb documentary about ex-pat life in Japan and definitely not to be missed!
Here's the film website too: Tokyo Cowboys
I'm off to Cannes on Sunday where we'll be giving MindFlesh it's market premiere! The details are:
For those readers unfamiliar with the way this works, these screenings are only open to film industry insiders and intended primarily to showcase the film to distributors looking to buy new titles.
Unfortunately I'll be on my own this year as Helen has to stay back at base and man the fort. But to keep her in touch with developments on the ground I've agreed to post a daily report on Susan Ee's excellent blog - which has become an important resource for indie filmmakers - Feral Dream.
San Francisco Screenings
In other screenings news, MindFlesh will make it's North American premiere at Another Hole in The Head - the genre festival run by San Francisco Independent Film Festival. We have two dates:
The festival has a very cool line up of films including a British film I'm really looking forward to, The Vanguard.
So this was the week when we finally showed MindFlesh to a paying public!
I arrived in the UK at the start of the week and spent a couple of days with my mum checking through her bills, adjusting timers, fixing clocks and replacing her toilet seat – oh the showbiz lifestyle I lead ;)
On May 1st I travelled into London on a delayed train from the south coast and registered for Cine-Excess II the second international conference on cult films. Having been at the World Horror Con just a month earlier it was inevitable that I was going to be comparing the two. I have to say that this year CineXS won out by a long way: the speakers had prepared professional presentations, Roger Corman was guest of honour and the atmosphere was friendly and welcoming.
For most, the climax of the conference would most probably have been Kim Newman on stage interviewing Roger Corman at the end of three days of cult discussion. For me I’m afraid, my sights were on the MindFlesh world premiere – our first exposure to a paying public audience!
I have to say that the projectionists at the ICA were fantastic fellas and took the time to finesse the projection image and sound until even the most perfectionist director would be happy. So, even though we were screening from a digiBeta copy of the film (rather than the HDCAM SR master), the movie looked and sounded great.
Ok so here’s the truth: MindFlesh can be quite an assault on the viewer’s mind and body so I wasn’t expecting air-punching and cheers as the first end credit hits the screen ;) But as the lights came up and I made my way back to the stage to answer questions, gauging from the volume of the applause and immediate feedback seemed to be overwhelming positive. I guess we’ll learn more about the audience reaction as time rolls on.
The clip below is the 15 min Q&A after the premiere screening. It naturally contains spoilers because we’re discussing a film the audience has seen but if you’re someone that likes to know as much as you can about a movie before seeing it, or, if you’re someone from my future that has seen MindFlesh as screenings yet to be held when I wasn’t present then here’s what I might have said. [Apologies for the poor sound and picture quality]
A huge “thank you” to all the people that came to the screening!
I wasn't able to attend all presentations as there were always two parallel sessions in progress and I often got engrossed in conversation that carried on long after lunch had finished. The Saturday night conference party at the Curzon soho was cool too as I managed to snag a table close to the bar and close to free grub! ;) If we hadn’t been kicked out then I suspect that Stephen Parsons, long-time composer and recently the director of Wishbaby, and I would have still been there at daybreak.Just finished watching the Bullitt movie - oh man, what a superb film. Now my favourite film set in San Francisco is The Conversation but having just watched Bullitt I felt the urge to find out where in the city the various locations were or are - something I've never cared about doing before for any city.
Thankfully lots of other people have already done the hard work for me :) Here's a list of some cool sites:
I've finally finished the dialog list for MindFlesh. Not that it should have taken very long to do but it's just a dull job so I kept doing other things in between! :)
I thought other filmmakers might be interested to see how my spotting list is formated. I can't remember how I got hold of the format but it's one we've used for London Voodoo (and sold successfully around the world and now on Amazon Unboxed!) so I'm hoping it's still good for MindFlesh. Click the thumbnail below for a snapshot of the sample output.
If you right-click and "save as" on this link. You can download the Excel spreadsheet I used to create it. The idea is you can quickly and easily enter the timecode & dialog on the INPUT sheet ( it's quick because you don't have to worry about formatting) and then the OUTPUT sheet is what you print.
One small thing to note is that I've made the formulas as simple as possible so when a timecode flips over a minute (e.g. start 1:59 and end 2:01) you'll get a negative duration - just do the math yourself and over type the formula. It's much quicker this way than having to code (end_hour*3600+end_mins*60+end_secs)-(start_hour*3600+start_mins*60+start_secs).
