The Shriven

Brian Schiavo's The Shriven is available for preorder at Amazon.

The movie is also available in Japan.

Any Japanese speakers out there wanna tell me what the cover art says?

Again, the Japanese doing great cover art.

According to Google Translate, which I trust about as far as I can throw it, the Japanese title is "Whisper of the Parasite Species XXXX" or some such. Which isn't a bad title, honestly.

 The distributor is apparently amg-films.co.jp

Trailer for The Shriven

Here's the trailer for The Shriven. (I don't know if there are actually any shots in there of stuff I shot. ;-)

The Shriven trailer from Brian Schiavo on Vimeo.

Shriven Artwork

Here is the final key art for Brian Schiavo's picture, The Shriven.

Shooting and Logo

We used my new apartment for reshoots/inserts on The Shriven. The apartment works well for that. It's easy to get to, there's lots of space, there's 80 amps of power.

I thought I had to send a picture of myself to Inktip.com to announce Clonehunter. But it turns out that I only had to send in our logo. Oddly, the first time I did a "save as" in Photoshop it came out this very very blue. I did a "save for web" and it's the correct colors. No idea why.

This is Christine and Christina getting makeup ready to shoot.

Title: Untitled

Today was spent being exhausted and working on music cues for Solar Vengeance.

Maduka made some changes to the robot fight very late last night which makes the robot fight much much better.

Here's a still of Lucy Rayner from The Shriven.

Am rendering out footage as fast as I can for actor's reels before Brian picks up drives.

But now. Must. Sleep.

Whew, Big Sucky Day

Well yesterday sure sucked! In short, I've left 0704 The Shriven project because it's a trainwreck-in-progress. I feel guilty because I knew a long time ago that the train was going to run outta track but I just kept thinking "Oh, it'll get better." It didn't. Ick.*

So now that's what? I have to do only 4 movies in the next two years, or do I still have to do 5? Hmm... I dunno, gotta run the numbers.

In the meantime, lotsa post to do and I still have to run off dailies for reels for actors. It takes an overnight render on an Intel quad-core machine to make h264's of an hour of footage. There's gotta be something wrong there.

*As an indicator of the trainwreck it was going to be, I offered that they get another cameraman and finish the show. It's about 1/2 shot and could be finished theoretically. But the other producer rejected that idea. Which is, of course, because getting another cameraman would finish the movie and that just ain't gonna happen.

Image

I actually have a bit of a late call today on The Shriven. It's very unusual for the director to get a call later than any other part of the cast/crew but today is a big makeup day and Brian estimates it'll take 5 hours for them.

So I'm in my studio doing some rendering of both audio and video for Solar Vengeance before making my way to set.

Here's a composite still from Solar Vengeance. I actually like this particular image better like this, in 16x9, rather than the 2.35:1 it'll be in the final. But for most everything else I prefer 2.35:1.

Yes, Exactly

From The Shriven, here is a classic "Maiden and the Beast" - type image. Steve Nauss is doing the menacing.

This still is, I believe, un-color-corrected.

Looks like a DVD box cover to me...

A closeup. Here we're doing virtually everything wrong from a classic lighting perspective (no kick in her eyes, all side-lit). But I love the chiaroscuro (doesn't that mean "barbecue" in Portuguese?) and the "painterly" quality of the image.

The medium shot of her is color corrected. I think we'll want a bit more background visible in the final version. Those "cat eyes" are a pair of streetlights outside. They amuse me.

The last image has heavy color-correction. I think the blacks are too crushed and we need to get some more detail back but there are some things really lovely about the skin tone and texture which I'd like to keep. We may end up with a power mask on her which has a different "look" than the rest of the room. Luckily the camera doesn't move in this shot!

Noir Light

Nadia Dassouki in The Shriven. We shot two days this weekend in an apartment in Bushwick. Fire department came. Maduka talked them down. Now we keep the door closed when the hazer is on.

Maduka also acted as acting coach and did the back-lighting for both these setups. (Note that the second picture has Brian's character, Ben, sleeping in the background.)

These shots are not color-corrected. They're just clipped off the P2 card reader on my laptop.

Seokjun Lee and Tony Kenner were our boom ops this weekend. More stills to come...

Independent Filmmaking

Eric Bailey put this picture up on Facebook, I figured I'd steal it. Here's a classic view of independent filmmaking -- shooting with a boom in one hand. If I'm lucky, Brian is slating but I don't see the slate so it's probably sitting by the recorder just off camera to the left.

Andrew Bellware, Brian Schiavo, and Cheutine Fong shooting The Shriven.

Shoot me!

Here's a shot from yesterdays enormous outdoors shoot. None of the score of extras we had in this still, just Brian and Nadia being shot at by a passing car...

As always, these stills are just a tad darker on your computer monitor than they are in "real life".

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I have every reason to believe that Planar RGB compression is lossless. There is very very little information about it on the netterwebs. But we certainly lose a lot of file - size "weight" by using it. I can't see any difference when looking at individual frames between uncompressed video and Planar RGB. I suspect that it does a great job at compression because it sees that letterbox which is just black on the top and bottom of the frame and doesn't need to re-render that part of the image.

If anybody knows anything about Planar RGB (which is a standard Quicktime preset) please tell me. It seems to be able to handle 32-bit float (I know, I could do some tests, but I haven't yet). And it doesn't seem to cost a lot of processing power. I tried to read the white paper on it but I didn't understand it. Is it really lossless? Is there any reason not to deliver in it rather than uncompressed?

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Big Shoot Day

We must have had about 25 extras today. Out on the streets of Cobble Hill. The only reason Brian and I aren't dead is that we had Tony Kenner handling sound and the angel who is Maduka doing 1st AD duties and directing extras all day. Really, it would have been a nightmare. But now that I have two zombies in me everything's all right.

Tomorrow we'll find out about schmutz on the lens adapter and how to rid ourselves of a few pixels of guk in the lower right quadrant. At dinner I was able to take the adapter apart -- and the schmutz just disappeared, I didn't even blow it off with air. Feh. Well, we'll be using the paint tool on those frames in After Effects and taking some adjacent pixels. That's how the big boys do it...

Looking for the Mouse

Here's an article by Clay Shirky. When talking to a TV producer about projects people are doing on the interwebs, she says:

"Where do people find the time?" That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, "No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you've been masking for 50 years."

This made me for to laugh.

He also mentioned LOL cats and Gilligan's Island. Go ahead, read the article. It's short. You'll like it.

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Yesterday we shot car inserts on 0704 The Shriven. We'll see how those go in the cold light of morning when I transfer the footage and color correct. Some of them definitely worked, some might need some tweaking and matting.

DFN test

Here's a test of day-for-night with Cheutine.

You can see the vignette, and we'd have to motion track her face (perhaps) but it's interesting that the sky has some color.

If there were any lights in the background though, there'd be no bokeh blur the way you'd expect there to be. I think I shot this with an ND filter on...

I feel like we're shooting at approximately 200 ISO.

Update: wow, I wish the letterbox came out black rather than white. Is that because I originally output to .png?
In any case, be sure to double-click or open the image in a new window to look at it for color-correction evaluation.

Oh and remember, it's always somewhat darker on a computer monitor...

Shriven Color Tests

Final Cut Pro does not export still images that are at the same aspect ratio in square pixels as the image is in the camera. Thanks guys! Who would ever want to export images from the timeline to use on webpages or anything? I know you probably don't want to change the aspect ratio of any still image sequences, but someday you just might want to use images from the timeline for other purposes. But you know what they say, Apple is Perfect. And thanks for not making that an option!

So far all I can figure to do is to export the stills from the timeline and then open them in Photoshop and stretch the 960x720 image to 1280x720 in order to create images for web pages and blogs and suchly.

This is the "Cold and Hot" (or the "Hot and Cold") look from Magic Bullet. I made a version which is two stops brighter and two stops darker in order to cover our bases. I dunno, it might make a decent look for the whole picture.

Brian Schiavo.

Nadia el-Dassouki.

Cheutine Fong.

Brian and Nadia.






I got all the footage of Solar Vengeance out today to our sales rep so they could cut a trailer. He gave me plenty of time to get that material rendered out and delivered to him. He told me on Friday.

Aargh -- there's a bit of vignetting on these shots. I saw where it happened too. Brian asked me to go in to be an extra in a shot so I had to tell him where the "big red button" was on the camera. But after hitting it he also hit the zoom on the camera, which yanked it slightly out of alignment. Poopity. I didn't notice it (because you can't see the problem in the viewfinder really) 'till working with this footage.

I'll reset the camera for next week.

More and more

From The Shriven, here are some screen grabs (no color correction, no letterboxing):

Lucy Rayner

Nancy Melleo, Eric Bailey, Cheutine Fong, Dan Berkey. (Yeah, it looks a bit dark on a computer monitor because the gamma on your monitor is different from real-life, that is to say NTSC).

Eric, Nancy, Cheutine, Dan, looking at device.

I've got two Macs here, almost ground to a halt over these renders. That's why I'm not color correcting this first reel. Plus, silly Final Cut Pro doesn't output stills at the correct aspect ratio just by default. I gotta go smack it later. Better yet, I'll tell it how much better PC's are. Yeah, that'll get them to shape up...

Shooting this weekend

We shot some this weekend. Some exteriors, some interiors.

Here are some stills from Saturday.

This is Cheutine Fong posing with some art which Laura put together.

Our wonderful makeup artist Cristina Atkin flashes a peace sign.

We really overworked the actors here. What are they doing, watching a movie?

Eric Bailey (who pitched in and helped build those dang shelves), Cheutine Fong, Lucy Rayner, and Dan Berkey.

Vinnie Marano

Why isn't this guy a movie star already? Vinnie Marano as Charlie the pimp in The Shriven.

Shriven Shooting

Here are a couple stills from the shooting we did yesterday (Sunday) in the beautiful community of Gowanus. That still of Brian walking in front of the eloquent and erudite graffiti is the kind of look I was sort of fantasising about getting on this picture.

This eye closeup is of Shelleen. Got me one of them fancy-pants macro lenses on eBay and I gotta say: it does the trick.

Yesterday was a hard day but we learned that our makeup artist, Cristina Atkin, is as brilliant as we thought. This broken open head gag looked awesome.

Here she is working on Shelleen. And then putting blood on Brian. To render out one reel of dailies, I've got a Mac G5 doing a 19-hour render. Same thing, I'm sure, to get the second reel up.

5 in 2 or Two at Once

So what's it like being in production of a new picture, while in post-production of another picture?

Well, it's busy. But fun. And not entirely impossible. I try once a week to get a day off. Today is that day, for instance. "Day off" might just mean that I work from home and have scheduled heavy computer-processing work to occur all day, but it's a day off to me! ;-)

Two things make this "shoot 5 pictures in two years" plan (as it's going right now) easier:

1.
First of all, the new picture, The Shriven is a co-production between my company Pandora Machine and Brian Schiavo's company StrangewerksFilms. So we split up a lot of the work. (Sure, sometimes we do a lot of redundant work... Brian! ... ahem...) And as long as Brian isn't re-writing the schedule that works out fine. Brian knows much more about effects work and has assembled a team of talented yet sans-website-owning people.

Cristina Atkin is sculpting the pieces for the monsters our leads turn into. This is an enormous amount of work, taking weeks to make all the pieces (and duplicates of pieces) for each character. These images are of spikes and "brow piece" which are being molded using the cast of the actor's hand and head. (That's good, because I believe that our actor, Nadia el-Dassouki, is in Germany right now. ;-) Cristina has been enormously helpful -- she even came out and shemped a bit for us last weekend. Her work is really beautiful.

B.
Secondly, we're shooting primarily on weekends while scheduling and doing post-production on the weekdays. This makes everything much more do-able. The Shriven shoot is scheduled as a 20-day shoot. In other words, it's a standard low-budget shoot. That's about what they do for Movies-of-the-Week. For us, it's pretty luxurious. But we're spreading it out over 3 months.

Hmm... maybe we'll have a rough cut of the picture by the time we're done shooting. That would be tres cool. I doubt it'll happen but it would be tres cool if it did...

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Day off -- right now I'm working on three computers. One is in the middle of an 8-hour backup of all the working data for Solar Vengeance. One is rendering out audio and video files for Solar Vengeance. And this one I'm blogging on and writing dozens of emails back-and-forth to Brian regarding scheduling and suchly.