Director's Weekly Post Production Blog WEEK 64 Saturday January 24th...

I’ve now had my fill of the fresh and cold British air – its novelty has warn off!

By Monday I had caught up with all my e-mails and what had happened over the break. Thankfully not too much! It would have been better if more investment had been raised over that time. With the credit crunch I suppose that is to be expected though.

On Tuesday I saw Jonnie and we did admin for the company. That day Grace came to the rescue with some more investment. We wrote some cheques to Company X. We are now in the waiting game until the DCMS money comes through. When that happens we should be able to clear nearly everything outstanding.

Later that day I had meetings about “The Power” which now is being talked about as shooting in June. We will see if that comes about.

On Wednesday I met Mark Foglio and Andrew Dearnly who is doing the job at Molinare that Rebecca was doing at Midnight Transfer. It seems that despite being quite “dirty” reels 2 and 3 have been completely de-spotted and that reel 4 is being done presently. That puts us about 40% of the way with that process. They haven’t actually started on the titles yet.

Mark Foglio said “I’m sorry it has been so slow”.
I said “Don’t be. Compared to what we have been through that is quite quick! In fact it is so quick I should kiss you on both hands.”
“Just one would be fine” he quipped.
In any event, I hope to check some of the de-spotting next week.

The rest of the meeting was filled with talk of the bombshell that was dropped that morning. Deluxe have shut down their entire DI division. JC, Greg and the extremely hard working Rebecca have all been made redundant. Midnight Transfer has effectively now been neutered. A sad day indeed.

The only person that seems to be still there is Richard Fish.

My first thought was, “Thank God we finished grading before this happened” my second was disbelief and pity. I can only assume the decision was taken by an accountant just looking at the bottom line. DI is such an important part of any post production package these days especially with less and less people actually shooting on film and most producers now want to do a package deal for the whole of post production. Technicolor for instance are just about to open an all singing all dancing site for DI and Ascent and Molinare are now at the forefront of that business. How will Deluxe compete for overall packages without DI? I’m sure some people are now rubbing their hands together with glee!

At the end of the meeting I intimated that Mark Foglio should hire Rebecca!

Anyway, if all goes smoothly, we are still about 6 weeks from completion.

Things are still bad from a financial point of view.

I have drafted a Personal Guarantee contract between me and Company X and e-mailed it to them but have not yet had response from Creditor X there. The reality is that, having successfully raised enough money for the shoot and post production, we are only now making a dent in the overage we incurred on the shoot. Jonnie has under his own initiative put back-up the investment details back on the website. He is still working on our film, trying to raise more money, despite acting in another one.

I am still plugging away with the post production. While getting on a bus last week, Grace called me querying if we could enter a film festival because the rules of that festival were “only accepts films in year of completion”. I had to remind her that the film is still not complete. Like many people, once a film is shot, they think that means it is complete. That certainly couldn’t be further from the truth.

One good piece of news is that Julie Dray’s short film “Ralph” has been nominated for a Bafta. I hope it wins!

On Monday I was meant to meet Richard Fish to finally sign the Midnight Transfer contract but it didn’t happen due to a misunderstanding. In light of recent events I am not surprised that he is hard to get hold of now. I hope to do it next week now. There are also a couple of music contracts that I don’t have final executed contracts on and am chasing now with Steve Lindsey’s help.

Tuesday to Thursday were will full of doing things for “The Power”; meetings and calls. We currently have a sales agent and a MG in place. We hope also to get a UK distribution deal up front which would be a first for me for a UK film. We will see!

Yesterday I finally got the details via Neil of the end credits from Midnight Transfer. Now we only need the details of Molinare for the end titles. I am working on putting them in now.

Today I spoke to Andrew Dearnly at Molinare. Reels 2, 3 and 4 have all been de-spotted and they are half way through reel 5. It seems that reels 1 and 6 were slow coming across from Midnight Transfer and didn’t actually arrive until this week. So we are now about 55% of the way with the de-spotting. Steady progress. After that they will do titles.

I estimate we are now 5 weeks away from completion.

Things are still bad from a financial point of view but a little bit of money trickled in this week thanks to Jonnie. Still no word from Creditor X though.

I am currently reading Elia Kazan’s biography, a book given to me a couple of years ago by a young producer, Steve Di Marco. Its Rousseau-like frankness is affecting me quite profoundly, the struggles he had, especially with himself.

On Tuesday I signed another music contract. There is just one left now. Richard Fish hasn’t come back to me yet on an alternative date to sign the Midnight contract. I hope to sign the Synxspeed contract next week, though.

On Wednesday I went to see the de-spotting. With Kate, the operator, we went through reels 2, 3 and 5. They had been cleaned once automatically and once manually. They had been enormously improved but Kate and I still found 130 instances over the 3 reels that needed to be cleaned up.

There are two strange phenomenon’s when checking de-spotting and doing QC’s;

The first is that no matter how many times you see the footage there is always the chance that you miss something just by blinking consistently in the same place. Each spot or blemish only exists for a single frame. In fact sometimes you need four people all checking a quadrant of the screen at half speed to do it properly. Many times Kate and I were reduced to go frame by frame just to be absolutely certain.

The second phenomenon is that some times you see things that are not actually there. They look like spots but are in facts just bits of grain or the light catching something. It can become a little like chasing a mirage.

Midway through reel 3, Neil Harris and John Claude arrived to make sure the grade had been brought across from Midnight OK and help out with the de-spot checking. It had been brought across OK they thought. JC was more relaxed and in higher spirits than I’d seen him for a year. He was being coy about his plans post Midnight.

After they left I discovered that reel 5 had 8 missing frames. I immediately called Neil to look into it. How they had not come across I couldn’t explain, I just hope they are have not been lost and have to be re-scanned!!

The rest of the week I worked on other stuff while the de-spotting continued on reel 4 until Thursday evening when I got a call from my Father telling me my sister had been arrested for trying to stab someone.

What an idiot.

I think we are still 5 weeks away from completion but the de-spotting is about 60% completed now.