Juggling Fire Irons

Can you believe it’s almost March? Usually this time of year is slow and boring and seems to go on forever, but that changes when you’re in post-production on your movie. We’re marching along – music is nearly finished, we’re doing a spotting session for foley next week, and we only have two reels of the film left to color-correct.

But enough about “Fugue;” this post is about other filmmaking news. The more I make movies, the more I realize it’s about having a lot of irons in the fire. If we only focused on one thing at a time, we’d finish one or two movies in our lifetime. So instead, the goal is to work on different aspects of several projects all at once.

Right now, for example, I’m pitching a couple new ideas, working on outlines for more movies, finishing a comic book adaptation, and working a full-time job in addition to the “Fugue” post. And all our film friends are doing the same thing.

Barbara, our talented director/producer, gave a great interview a few weeks back to the website “Fatally Yours.” It brings up a lot of intelligent points about low-budget filmmaking and women in horror. Check it out:

http://www.fatally-yours.com/interviews/interview-with-director-barbara-stepansky/

Also, our good friend-of-the-film Christoph Baaden has been working on a feature-length documentary at the same time we were making “Fugue.” He just found out his movie “Hood to Coast” got into the South by Southwest Film Festival! Not that he needs our PR, but go check out his website and support his doc:

http://www.hoodtocoastdocumentary.com

Last but not least, our lead actress Abby recently had her short film “Mercy” screen at the Santa Monica Film Festival. It’s Abby’s directorial debut and very mature, well-acted movie. There’s a great article about it here:

http://www.smdp.com/Articles-c-2009-11-13-65005.113116_Festival_features_films_by_locals_for_local_patrons.html

Congrats to all our friends, and hopefully we’ll have some good “Fugue” news coming our way soon!

Adjust Your Color

Hi Everyone! Sorry we haven’t updated recently, but things have been very busy here in the Fugue-iverse. A couple weeks ago, we started color correcting the movie. We found a very skilled friend who offered us his services for a bargain-basement price. We can’t thank him enough; when you’re making a movie at this budget level, you basically have to count on awesome people like Matt doing you favors.

But for those of you not in the film business, you may be asking what is color correction, and why do we have to pay for it at all? Good question! Color correction is a process where you go through every frame of the movie, tweaking the color, lighting contrast, exposure, and many other visual elements. Since all this is done on a high-end computer system, it’s impossible to do it for free.

Your goal is to not only get the film to look uniform, so it flows naturally from shot to shot, but to also subtly support the story-telling through your visual palette.

“Fugue,” for example, is about a woman who learns the truth about her past. To show that visually, we’re putting a bit of glow in the beginning of the film, to give it a hazy, foggy quality. As the movie progresses, we’ll slowly pull the glow out until by the very end, everything is crystal-clear.

We also want to amp up the presence of the garden as the movie unfolds, so we’re slowly bringing in more and more greens as we go on. Hopefully, all of this will be so subtle that no one notices it. The goal is to have it be seamless, and affect the audience on a gut level.

The amazing thing is how much you can correct nowadays with computers. There are so many filters and mattes and manipulations you can do to the image, it’s easy to agonize over every frame. In one shot, for example, we literally took an exterior of the house during the day, and made it into a night shot. We did this by amping up the contrast, darkening the edges of the frame, adding blue, and matte-ing out the sky. Now, it looks like we shot it at night.

While this is awesome, it reminds me how important it still is to think about what you’re going for while you’re on set. Just because you can tweak everything in the post process doesn’t mean you should wait until then. That leads to lazy filmmaking. Despite having all these tools, you still need a strong idea about what you want to achieve, and some way of communicating that. All this technology is simply a method of getting to that point.

We’re heading into the home stretch on “Fugue.” In the next couple weeks, I’ll do posts about the photography shoot we did for the poster, our sound mix, what DVD extras we’re starting to prepare, and there’s even some rumblings that we may have a sales agent. It’s very exciting, and we’ll try to keep you all updated.

Resolutions

Happy New Year from the Fugue team! Hope everyone had a wonderful holiday. I know we all took a much-needed break from thinking about the movie 24-7, and have returned with our batteries re-charged, and ready to race toward the finish line (I tried to mix more metaphors into that sentence, but couldn’t do it).

Hard to believe that at this time last year, we didn’t even have a first draft of the screenplay. Sure, Barbara and I had spent all of December breaking the story and outlining, but the first draft wasn’t complete until January 8. And we started shooting less than four weeks later.

Now, after much work from everyone involved, we have a picture-locked film, but we’re still dealing with other post-production matters. We have to mix the movie, which is expensive. We have to record foley (all the little footsteps, movements, and teeny sounds we didn’t get during production). We have to color-correct the movie (making sure all the shots look not only good, but the same).

But this isn’t about getting bogged down in work details; this post is about looking forward. It’s the time of year for resolutions, so here’s what we’d like to accomplish on with “Fugue” in 2010:

1) Finish the film. As mentioned above, finish the sound, color-correct the movie, and master it to DVD.

2) Screen the movie in film festivals. We’ve applied to 20 fests so far, and have heard back from two (Sundance and Slamdance, both of which passed, to their extreme and everlasting loss). We hear back from a couple more in mid-January. We’ve tried to apply to a variety of festivals, so hopefully we’ll get in somewhere.

3) Get distribution! With our without festival screenings, this is the true goal. Ideally, we’d like to get a deal that includes some kind of minimum agreement (or MG, which is the up-front money you receive). Worst case scenario, we can sell the movie ourselves through our website, which is becoming more and more popular among indie filmmakers, since you keep all the profits.

4) Start work on the next project. “Fugue” was always intended to be a jumping-off point for our careers. We’ve got some great ideas for follow-up films, and we’re hoping once this movie gets out there, we can find some real film investors/production companies who want to help fund the next effort.

Thanks again to everyone who supported or worked on the movie in 2009, and here’s to success in 2010!

We Regret To Inform You ...

We didn’t get into Sundance.*

We weren’t expecting to, but it was still disappointing to get that email. Every independent filmmaker dreams their movie will premiere at Sundance. They imagine going to Park City, answering questions from the audience, getting interviewed by entertainment journalists, attending the parties, and selling their movie in an all-out bidding war. So when you get that rejection email, that dream is officially dead.

The worst part is, you start questioning the quality of your movie. You start wondering if one more edit might have improved the film tenfold. If casting name actors would have made a difference. If, God forbid, your little movie is simply not as good as you thought it was.


This, my friends, is an evil path to start down. For one, you will never know with 100% certainty why another film was accepted and yours wasn’t. You will never know if you’d done such-and-such, if it would have improved the movie. All you can do is listen to the feedback you’ve gotten, and trust your own gut.

On top of that, the quality of your movie is only one of the factors. Personal relationships shape a large part of what gets programmed – name directors, name actors, filmmakers with a connection to the festival, friends of the programmers – these all stand a much greater chance of getting in than some yokel off the submission pile.

Another factor is sheer numbers. According to the Sundance rejection letter, there were 9800 entries this year. Out of those, a mere 200 films were selected. Roughly half of those are shorts, another half of those are documentaries, which leaves 50 narrative features. Fifty, out of let’s say 5000 submissions. That means 1% of those who apply actually get in.

The final factor is genre. Just cause we made a solid movie doesn’t mean every festival will program us. Every fest has its own vibe – Sundance focuses on unique artistic visions, Toronto likes polished, serious movies, South by Southwest favors scrappy, genre-focused fun films. Look over the list of the features that will be playing at Park City in 2010 – out of all the features, maybe 3 or 4 are thriller/suspense/horror. Two-thirds of the program are character-driven dramas. So looking at all that, we had even less than a 1% of getting accepted.

Am I taking comfort in these non-scientific, totally generic numbers? You bet I am. I’ll take refuge behind any thin scrap of an excuse I can find. Because the alternatives – to believe our movie is doomed, to think it sucks, to worry that it will never sell – are simply unacceptable. More importantly, they are patently UNTRUE.

As a creative professional, if you’re not getting rejected on a daily basis, then you’re probably not doing it right. The simple fact is that you will rejected 100 times for every one acceptance. That’s the life you signed up for when you decided you had something to share with the world. If you don’t like it, there are plenty of other jobs out there.

So it’s counter-productive for us to let this news get us down. It’d be great to have a distribution company buy our film, but that could happen in any number of ways. We still have high hopes we’ll get into some other major film festivals, but we have to remember they’re not the be-all, end-all. They’re not even the final goal. The goal is to get the movie before a paying audience.

And that is definitely going to happen, one way or another.



* Or Slamdance.

Critical Masses

Last week our trailer suddenly spiked 1200 views in a matter of hours. A little Interweb research revealed that somehow our teaser got posted on a Romanian entertainment link site. A little more research revealed it wasn’t “somehow”: another low-budget film called “THE Fugue” is being self-released on DVD, and it seems they mistakenly linked to our trailer instead of theirs.

While it’s great to suddenly have the trailer take on a life of its own (especially since we haven’t sent it to any news sites yet), with an increased audience comes an increase of opinions. In particular, we had some very angry comments from a couple of Romanian guys. I won't reprint them here, but they are still on our YouTube page if you're looking for some Pulitzer-grade critiques.


Now, I’m not posting this to wallow in self-pity or subtly ask for encouragement. In fact, we already had a boatload of very nice response comments to these guys. I’m writing this to illustrate that once you put your movie into the world, the floodgates of opinion swing wide. Anyone with a computer, anywhere on the planet, will have a reaction to what you made. They also have the freedom to post their thoughts about it. And those thoughts may not be very nice or constructive. Often, they will be tactless, cruel, horrendously misspelled diatribes filled with anger and cynicism.

(Side thought: Why is there so much anger and cynicism on the Internet? Probably the anonymity factor. Also, it’s easier to bash something than to praise it. I’m no linguist, but I’d bet there are more words for “dislike” in the English language than “like.” Finally, it seems the haters are more likely to leave comments than fans.)

The point is, as filmmakers we have to find a way to not let the negative comments bother us. The movie is done. Any remarks about how to make it better, or how low-budget it is, or why it doesn’t stack up to "Armaggedon," are moot. All we can do is learn from our successes and failures on this project, and apply them to the next one.

Secondly, we can’t please everyone. It is impossible. In fact, highly respected films will usually garner backlash specifically because everyone likes it. We can hope that more people will like it than not, and that people will want to watch it, but that’s all. We’ve already had people refuse to see the movie simply because of the genre.

Finally, the film doesn’t exist in a vacuum. There are any number of factors – the timing of the release, the nature of the screening, the attitude of the viewers when watching it – that are going to affect how audiences receive it. Once the movie gets out there, we can’t control any of that. We can only hope people will like it and respond to it.

Being an extremely low-budget movie with no stars or a big studio marketing budget, any way “Fugue” gets out there has to be looked on as a success. Already, the trailer has been watched by more than 5000 people – far more than we know personally. Simply the fact that our little backyard movie is pissing off some guys in Romania means it’s grown beyond our little circle.

And hopefully, this is just the beginning.

Fundraising

I hate asking people for money.

As a filmmaker, you’re constantly in a state of selling – whether it’s pitching a movie idea, or talking to investors, or showing your movie to distributors – every step of the way, you’re trying to convince someone else to give you money.

And why? Because filmmaking is, bar none, the most expensive artistic medium there is. It’s pretty cheap to paint a picture, or write a novel, or even sing a song these days. But making a film? Even as inexpensive as the technology has gotten, it still takes real dough.

Take the process of applying to film festivals. Not only do you have to buy and print DVDS (we got ours for around a buck apiece – killer deal), you have to get envelopes, mail them to faraway places, and cough up the festival entry fees. Which routinely run between $40 and $100. We just sent the movie to Berlin, and their entry fee is 125 Euros, or $185 American. Literally, we’re spending more on applying to festivals than it cost us to feed our crew for 17 days of shooting!

Still, it’s an important thing to do. Screening at a high-profile festival is our single best chance of getting distributors to see the film. And that will hopefully lead to getting a distribution deal, which is our main chance of paying back our investors and the crew people who awesomely deferred their salaries (pretty much everyone).

So we have to ask people for money. Since we don’t know any millionaires personally, that leads to us begging our friends and family. Which, during the worst economic recession since the Great Depression, makes me a tad guilty to say the least.

To make the whole process more palatable, we decided to a hold a fundraiser screening. All our friends have been asking all year to see the movie, so why not charge $10, raffle off some items, and let them take a look all at once?

We found a club called Busby’s East that rents out its ballroom and video projector (for free!), sent out the Evite to 300 or so people, and gathered some film-related items to raffle off. And on Sunday, October 25, we unspooled (or un-video projected) the current cut for a crowd of 73 people.

And it went pretty great. Being in a bar, the lights weren’t all the way down and the ice machine sounded like an Imperial Walker, but that kind of added to the whole “work in progress” feel. But people still managed to get into the movie, laughing at the jokes, jumping at the scary parts, and keeping up with the story. Even the bartender liked it – she told me she’s worked a lot of screenings in that room, and ours was one of the best she’s seen.

All told, we raised about $1300. And some donations are still trickling in. It’s not enough to cover all our upcoming post costs, but it will certainly help us get the movie to festivals. Just goes to show that even if you don’t like asking people for money, there are ways to do that make it more comfortable for everyone. Thanks again to all our friends and family members who donated!

(And if you’d still like to kick us some dough, there’s a Paypal button on our website: fuguethefilm.com.)

"Paranormal Activity"

Have you guys been following what’s happening with “Paranormal Activity?” It is INSANE – five weeks into its release, it lands in the number one box office slot, ABOVE “Saw VI!” And on nearly half the screens, as well. Do you know insane that is? How freaking unpredictable and AWESOME?!



Quick sum-up for those who don’t know the story: The director, Oren Peli, wanted to make a cheap movie. He came up with a great hook, found a couple actors, and shot a creepy psychological in his house for $11,000. Sound familiar? It went to Slamdance two years ago, was purchased by Paramount/Dreamworks, and is now on its way to being one of the most financially successful films of all time.

So what can we take from all this? It’s hard to say. Certainly, I think it’s great news for "Fugue." When we approach distributors, we have a very fresh example of a low-budget thriller with no stars that made tons o’ cash. But Hollywood is a fickle town, and some similarities on paper are not enough to seal the deal. You could release two nearly identical movies within six months of each other, and they could perform vastly differently.

What’s happening with “Paranormal” is a cinematic fluke – it was brilliantly marketed, had a unique concept with a built-in advertising hook, and it hit at a time when audiences were tired of traditional, big-budget scary movies. The cool thing is, one of these flukes seems to show up every couple years – “The Blair Witch Project,” “My Big Fat Greek Wedding,” “Open Water” – the list goes on and on. You can hope it will happen to your film, but there’s absolutely no way to arrange it. The only rule in Hollywood? There are no rules.

For right now, it’s just cool there’s another example of huge success we can point to. I’ve seen the movie, and while it’s not fantastic, the scary scenes are legitimately scary. Which, for a jaded cinephile like me, is saying a lot.

As an example of how inspired and unusual the marketing for this was, check out the trailer below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_UxLEqd074

There’s more footage of the audience than there is of the actual movie! Very gutsy. (And also, very jealous of the 4.5 MILLION views. I was happy that we just cracked 1000, especially considering we haven't done any publicity yet.)

If you haven’t already, go see “Paranormal Activity” this week. Help make it into a cinematic success story, so we can hopefully follow in its footsteps! (And barring that, leech off its notoriety in any way possible.)

PICTURE LOCK

We picture locked the movie last week! It’s taken me awhile to actually write about it, because we had to send the latest cut off to some festivals, and frankly, I needed a couple days off. The last few weeks there, we were editing for 10, 12 hours a day, looking at takes and line readings over and over, and generally thinking about the movie non-stop. My head was so occupied with the movie I was having insomnia. Any time someone would talk to me, random words would make me think of lines from the film. It was definitely nice to be done.

For those not in the movie business, let me explain why picture lock is such a big deal. It basically means the end of picture editing. Everyone agrees it’s done, and the film is handed off to the sound designers, composer, and color correction people. Once it’s “locked,” you can’t make any more changes in the timing or shot choices. This is so the sound matches up. If there’s a huge error or fix needed, you can alter the soundtrack, but it’s a HUGE hassle.

Emotionally, picture lock is very similar to finishing principal photography. You’ve reached the end of a very intense working relationship, and are moving on to the next stage. It’s relieving and worrisome and bittersweet all at the same time.

In terms of “Fugue” specifically, I feel good about it. I feel like we took the time to get it right, and we did the best we can with the footage we had. Yes, it could be better or different, but it could always be better or different. At a certain point, you have to trust the work.

There were some very last-minute changes. A lot of them entailed going back to how things were originally, but there were some additions. We added a creepy sound design moment in the very first scene, which had never been intended when we shot it. We took out a beat in the second act that was kind of cheesy. But the greatest change was finding some different takes of Victoria in a crucial third act scene. We’d gotten so used to the takes in this scene, we forgot to check the other performances. And we ended up finding something that completely altered the whole tone of the moment, and definitely for the better. It was a huge relief to find something like that in the eleventh hour.

All in all, we feel good. Stephanie our editor did a great job, and was extremely patient and dedicated over the last five months. We’re taking her out for a celebratory dinner tonight, but there’s still plenty of work. Our composer Dana is starting to work on the score, Adrian and his sound team are beginning their work, and we’re still finishing up the visual effects.

We’ve also started applying to festivals. The movie has gone to six so far, and we’ll probably send it to another ten or so before the year is out. We should start hearing whether or not we’re in toward the beginning of December.

In the meantime, we’re working on sound and thinking about ideas for the next project. Gotta keep the machine moving.

When to Stop

We’re up to 529 views of the teaser on YouTube! That’s pretty exciting, considering all we did is put out the word to our friends on Facebook. We haven’t sent the trailer to any press websites yet, as we don’t want the buzz to build too early. (Or, God forbid, to plummet before we screen anywhere.)

The plan is to apply to a bunch of festivals over the next four months, finish the sound, score the film, and color correct it. By December, we’ll know if we’ve gotten into some of these places. That’s when we’ll start up the hype machine. For right now, we’re focused on just finishing.

Updates: Juliane, our awesome production designer, made a great cover for our DVD that we’re going to be sending to festivals. Check it out:



Also, we held our fourth test screening on Sunday. The response was again solid, almost likes and really likes across the board. But again, there was the comment that the beginning is slow. We’re sitting in the edit bay right now, trying to address that very issue. We are killing babies, people. One of the things we just cut is the very first word: “remember.” As much as I love starting a thriller about memory with that word, it’s just too damn slow. We need to get into the meat of the story faster. So unfortunately, things have to go. I keep telling myself that’s what the deleted scenes on the DVD are for. And honestly, the movie plays better because of it.

My feeling is that we are close. We are close to locking picture, and we are close to getting this story where it needs to be. It’s not going to work for everyone, maybe, but there’s no way it CAN work for everyone.

Walter Murch (editor of “Apocalypse Now”) says “films are not finished – they escape.” That is absolutely true. We could edit this movie for another year and there would still be folks who won’t like it. We could go out and do a month of reshoots, adding scenes and changing storylines, and still the audience might want something different. I’m not saying that to be a whiny, lazy independent filmmaker. I’m saying that because I’m realizing you truly can’t please everyone. You can only please yourself, and hope others are on board.

And we are very close to being pleased.

TEASER TRAILER!!!

It’s finally here! We are proud to present, at long last, the first teaser trailer for “Fugue!"



You can also watch it on YouTube directly, where the number of views we get will directly translate into how much interest we receive from distribution companies. Also, it will just make us feel good.



We’ve been working on the teaser since we finished principal photography in March. We did a first cut, made some changes, took some time away from it, make a couple more tweaks, then finished the latest cut in July. Then we sent it to our composer for new music (which is seriously amazing, she killed it). When that was done, we sent it to Adrian, our sound designer, to sweeten the audio, add effects, etc. When we did reshoots a few weeks ago, we re-recorded a couple of lines to add in. We mixed the audio on Sunday, had Daniel our VFX supervisor put filters on it, and I did the final color-correction last night.

Yes, it was a lot of work. But this is by far the most important piece of advertising we will do. It’s the first thing most people will see about the movie, and it will form most of their opinion. The website, poster, and blog are also important, but the teaser really shows what the movie looks like. I can’t tell you how many trailers I’ve watched that, as soon as they start playing, you realize they’re low-budget, have bad acting, and don’t feel like a real movie. Hopefully that’s not what people will think when they watch ours.

It’s both cool and terrifying, what the Internet can do for a low-budget movie like ours. It’s cool in that you can reach a huge amount of people, all over the world, for absolutely free. It’s terrifying because once it goes on the web, public opinion takes over. One influential review could tank your entire project, like the way J.J. Abrams’ Superman script was savaged on Ain’t It Cool News, and the whole film was canceled.

But it can also go the opposite way, a la The Blair Witch Project. It all depends on how people respond. I hope people like our teaser trailer, I hope they think it’s professional, and I hope it makes them want to see the movie.

I posted the video an hour ago, and put the word out on Facebook, and it already has 37 – no, 59 – no, 73 - views. So at least our friends seem to be interested.