Straightblog

final post

Only kidding...we're talking final post (as in final post-production). By the way I'm going to the UK Screenwriters' Festival tomorrow in Cheltenham and I'll be talking about the making of Straightheads, the blood, script, tears, the agony and... well, the agony. The audience will be (I'm told) a couple of hundred new screenwriters. I didn't know we even had that many on this little island... So anyway - Straightheads' final post is going v well so far, but then as the man who jumped off the top of a building said as he plummeted past each floor on the way down - this is a rare quote from one of my favourite films (you Frenchies will know this) "Jusqu'ici tout va bien... Jusqu'ici tout va bien...  mais c'est pas le vol qui compte, c'est l'atterrissage!" with apologies to the non-French speakers out there, just bear with me, after all it's my blog and I'll break into French si me da la gana, caramba. So we don't really know till July 15th - the date when Straightheads scream past the finishing line, whether final post really is final, whether our luck has held or whether... Well, stuff happens. I mean, you can never take anything for granted. The little room where they keep all the film might get contaminated with an unknown flesh-eating bacterium, twenty times as voracious as Marburg's, and... whatever, you get my drift, providence etc... Anyhow,  the dialogue tracks are sounding superb, they've been cleaned up and the ADR dropped in where needed by our dialogue editor, the implacable and wonderful Michele. Howard the re-recording mixer began deftly pre-mixing them today, and will continue till the end of the week, when I will enter his dark palace (yeah, I'm a little tired, it's been a long day) and review reels 1 through 5. On Wednesday my fearsome DoP will go into a smallish, darkened room in West London and sit down with a man called Adam, and together over the course of many days they will individually colour and grade every single one of the hundreds of shots in the film - a bit like when you adjust colour and brightness on your TV set, but with a lot more control. I will join him there on Thursday to review reels 1 and perhaps some of reel 2... Is this too much detail? Oh what the hell, it's what's on my mind right now. Then there's the SCORE which sounds FANTASTIC (Ilan and Steve - if you read this before July 15th, ignore those caps and get back to work!), I heard reel 1 last Friday, I'll go in Friday after dialogue premix review to listen to some more cues... I try to be around whenever the post-production people need me, but actually most of the time they'd rather just get on with it and be left alone as they don't really have enough time to humour the director (which they do anyway, very nicely). The important thing for them is to know what I think of the work they've done, and to get that info clearly, in a short space of time, so they can make adjustments and then carry on as fast as possible, because we don't have enough money in the budget to do a whole lot of prep...  Anyway, suddenly things are going very fast, and before I know it we'll be final-mxing and then... bang! Straightheads will be finished and complete. And I will be left with no purpose in life and... gaaah shut up! Pull yourself together for f..! Where was I? Oh, yeah, we did a photo shoot for the poster with G and D, that was a laugh, and it was poignant to see them both again, looking fit and well and back in character for the very last time...  Dyer's new movie, Severance, directed by Chris Smith, might be heading to Toronto, rumour has it - great news for Danny, and there's a fantastic buzz around that film. As for Straightheads, we've had no news from Toronto yet, but the deadline is somewhere in August so I'm not holding my breath. Do skorovo, vedite sebya prilichno.

return of the Dan

I know it's been a long time, and thanks for all those messages of encouragement... so many in fact that this morning I started feeling deeply guilty for not posting, and tonight instead of putting my head down before tomorrow's day-long ADR session with Gillian, I'm staying up to post, and I know I'm doing the right thing, although if I'm dopey tomorrow and not up to scratch on a crucial post-production day it'll be... well, my fault for not posting earlier I suppose.

Okay, now: Cannes - this went really well, according to Sam our glamorous sales agent. As you know I didn't go to Cannes because... well basically I couldn't afford to go, and more to the point until Straightheads is completed in all its finished glory there's no point my hanging around festivals being the director of a film no one has seen yet! Interestingly, three or four US theatrical distributors have indicated very strong interest in taking on Straightheads, but of course they won't buy until they see the finished movie at Toronto (the selectors now have a rough copy of the film - an AVID output with no visual effects and a temporary score) or wherever Straightheads gets its first major festival screening. Sam reports there has been strong interest from all territories but as I say she's waiting until we have the real thing, so we can get a really good buzz going. I hope all of you people, Gillian and Danny fans and just plain shameless Straightheads obsessives out there will help us any way you can.
Right now we're in the midst of some serious sound post-production sessions, adding in sound effects, foley, atmospheres and so on, and cleaning up the dialogue tracks. We're also inviting the cast back for ADR (Additional Dialogue Recording I believe that stands for) sessions to replace bits of dialogue that were badly recorded / glitched / drowned in aeroplane noise etc... and adding any additional bits we need. We've got a great sound post-production team who really like the movie, and know their stuff, so I feel very relaxed about that side of things. I haven't really tuned into the picture post-production yet, that's happening at a different post-production facility in London - and at the moment the negative is being scanned into a computer at some huge resolution, which has to be completed before we can start having ideas about brightness and colour etc... let alone making a 35 mm theatrical print for all you lucky people who will get to see Straightheads at a local cinema.
We've had some stunning front titles done by Matt Curtis, a very experienced London-based designer of movie titles - I couldn't believe how fast he came up with just the right concept, put it together and bang! suddenly we had titles that worked beautifully. Just like that. I think you'll love them, I certainly do. The score is also coming on nicely, though I think that Ilan and Steve, respectively the composer and the score producer, are discovering that the soul of Straightheads is strange and complex and tricky to set to music, so they've been experimenting for days and days locked up inside the small but perfectly-formed studio at the bottom of Steve's garden. I have to say they're starting to come up with some really exciting stuff and I'm looking forward to my next studio visit this Friday to hear what will probably by now be a full set of music cues.
OK I'm running out of steam now. It's a hot and humid night in London, thankfully summer has arrived at last, and I'm going to pass out and be fresh for tomorrow's all-day ADR session in a big dark room with a huge screen and a microphone with just Gillian, Michele (dialogue editor) and Gareth (recordist) for company. Viva Straightheads! Hasta la victoria siempre, but always via the scenic route.

Merci a tout le monde d'avoir patiente, et ne vous genez pas les francaises (y'a pas d'accents ni de cedilles sur mon clavier)! I'll leave you with a parting image of Alice and Adam, at the edge of the forest as Misha's party carries on in the distance. They're lit by the flames from a huge stone urn at the outer edge of Misha's gardens, and in front of them is the deep, dark forest, which they are about to step into... who can guess what will happen next? Anyone?
Till the next post, good night.

Soon Come

Hi everyone, sorry not to have posted for a while, where did the last two weeks go? I'll write properly at the weekend, maybe earlier. I've got a busy one today, checking the dialogue tracks in the mixing theatre to see which bits of Gillian, Danny and the other cast's dialogue recordings might need replacing (mostly technical reasons - helicopter circling overhead, echoey room etc...) then on to the composer's studio to hear some of the latest score tracks, which Ilan sounded excited about when we chatted on the phone yesterday. Meanwhile I'm also trying to write the next movie! Hasta pronto.