Conversations With Other Women

Conversations With Other Women is a quite remarkable film, for two reasons. Firstly, it has one of the sharpest and best scripts for ages, superbly acted, and utterly convincing. It's a character study of two people who meet up at a wedding, and, well, I really can't say any more without giving away the plot. The whole film basically consists of just these two people, played by Aaron Eckhart and Helena Bonham Carter, and it takes place in a single night. The emotional intensity they deliver is something you more normally associate with the stage, rather than the screen. However, they don't act like they're on stage; they make the events seem completely real.

The other thing that makes Conversations remarkable is that it's filmed in split screen throughout, one half focused on each of the two protagonists (mostly). It takes a little while to get used to, and I have to confess that after about 15 minutes I really wasn't sure whether I was going to sit through the rest of it. But I'm glad I did. Unlike Mike Figgis's Timecode, which is incredibly clever but unwatchable, this works really rather well. You just get used to having two viewpoints on the same scene, and effectively doing your own editing. Your eyes naturally flick between the two sides of the screen, depending on who you're interested in at any one moment. This is occasionally disorienting and disconcerting, but as a story-telling device, it's really rather effective.

Conversations is more than just a piece of technical trickery. In its way, it's as intriguing a piece of work as Memento, albeit with a focus on romance rather than action. It won't be to everyone's taste, but I'd strongly recommend that you see it and make your own mind up.

It was all a dream...

I dreamt I was about to release a movie, and then I woke up.

In a strangely self-referential approach to machinima, I decided yesterday to treat the rough cut of Cormorant Close as a pre-viz exercise, and reshoot the whole thing from scratch. I was going to have to redo so many little things that it was looking like it would be quicker to start all over again. The movie is constructed out of several scenes using the same set, so I was having to make the same changes to each copy of the set, and try and match them. (And nope, turning it into a stock set doesn't work, because of some quirks of the Moviestorm architecture.) And there's a load of other stuff like that.

I was looking forward to getting this out and moving onto Stalker, dammit!

This time, though, I should know exactly what I'm doing. I know precisely what will be on screen, so I won't be wasting effort on building gestures or set dressing that will never be shown, or framing up cameras that won't be used. I know exactly how many cameras I need in each sequence, and I have a nice little shot list and full shooting script that tells me exactly what I have to shoot. Doing it this way means it should be much easier to light each shot separately, pull some tricks with props, and get frame-level precision by doing much more of my editing in Premiere.

It also means I can use this as an interesting test case for the next version of Moviestorm. Cormorant Close is made entirely with the release version, and just one tiny mod (which doesn't need the modder's workshop), so there's nothing in there that couldn't be done by anyone else. But then I plan to reshoot it, shot for shot, with the newest version and see what difference that makes to both the shooting time and the finished film.

When I'm done, I plan to release not just the finished movie (in both versions of MS), but also the pre-vis version, the Celtx project, the screenplay, and the shooting script if anyone would be interested. And, perhaps, the original voice recordings, with all the retakes and bloopers.

Cormorant Close - the first trailer

OK, 26 minutes later, here it is. It's still rough and ready, but it's the first trailer for Cormorant Close.



(I really must sort out that blasted teddy bear!)

Cheezy!

Just got the first draft of the intro music for CC through from Tash, and it's perfect. Real daytime soap fare. I'm all excited now!

If I have time before I leave work, I'll cut a quick trailer together.

How hard can it be?

I just read Movie Magic, by John Brosnan. (Now out of print.) Whenever you start to think that making movies is getting complicated, sheesh, just go and read a book on special effects. That should put everything into perspective. The lengths some people will go to to get a single shot is just awesome, particularly in the early days of film.

For Cecil B de Mille's Ten Commandments, they had a team of 80 people working for 6 months on the parting of the Red Sea. That's 40 man-years of effort for a single moment of movie magic, folks! (Not including the time it actually took to shoot, post-produce, and edit the scene.)


All of a sudden, "can I be arsed to spend an hour redoing that shot?" seems like a damn stupid question.

Reshoots

I started re-editing bits of Cormorant Close yesterday. There's one weak bit early in the scene which just has too much waffle. So I cut out a few lines, but now the conversation doesn't flow right. For the first time, I've hit one of the limitations of RealFilm, and it's come as quite a shock after being used to the luxury of machinima and endless reshoots. I need to re-record one line of dialogue. Just one. But David, the actor, is away for the rest of the summer, so I'm stuck with what I've got.

I can rebuild and reshoot every other damn thing in the movie: I've already replaced the original characters, redesigned the set, reblocked the whole scene (twice), added in whole new shots and tried several different edit patterns to give different emphasis to the scene. I've switched lines around, I've cut lines, and I've experimented with various different takes of each line. But the one thing I absolutely cannot do is change "I grabbed a pie and chips on the way home" to "I have." It's a tiny change, but the new line neatly segues into the next sequence and hides the fact that there's about half minute of dialogue missing. (Incidentally, the original dialogue worked fine when we did the piece in the style of a stage play, and when we did it as a radio play, just doesn't work on film. It's too much of a digression, and we need to get to the meat of the scene quicker.)

Hmm. Some creative editing will be needed.

Woo! Music!

The first draft of the music for Cormorant Close arrived last night. It's certainly got a lot of promise. We're getting together tomorrow afternoon to go through and really hammer the sound and music design into shape.

And the crew is growing, little by little: Tash dragged in a friend of hers, James, to play some guitar. It's all good - the more skills we can bring in, the better, as long as we keep things moving and don't get bogged down in too many ideas, endless discussions, and logistical nightmares.

Somehow I need to find the time to reshoot a few bits, work around some of the glitches, and tighten up the first cut of the editing. And, ideally, relight the whole scene. Oh, and, of course, redo the credits and add more people in... Not sure when I'm going to fit that in, though, as the next week or so is seriously hectic.