Double Feature

Synecdoche, New York and Happy-Go-Lucky are currently in theaters and make an interesting pairing. As you would expect, Charlie Kaufman's movie is a mind-bender and Mike Leigh's is a slice of life character study.

On the surface they seem like very different films and in many ways they are -- but I was surprised how they needled me in similar ways. Both grapple with fleeting happiness and the futility of our lives. Both put the main character's life under an uncomfortable microscope.

And though Caden and Poppy are polar opposites, our protagonists seem to press on through the squeeze of everyday life with their own brand of reckless abandon.

In the end, Happy-Go-Lucky has more silver lining.

We would do well to duplicate Poppy's ability to smile in the face of hardship and shake off Caden's grim, existential plight -- however unrealistic that might be.

Final Stretch

A set photo from 11/20/07, the second week of shooting. This is the opening shot of the movie -- little leaguers follow Calvin (Alex Frost) onto the field.

There are over 1000 cuts in our 91 minute feature CALVIN MARSHALL. This week a negative cutter will begin matching key frames to cut lists and chop up over 30 hours of film negative and fuse the correct shots in order with film cement.

From the very beginning we planned to avoid a digital intermediate. DI's are very expensive and we felt the old school way of doing things was perfect for an uncomplicated, realistic indie like ours. There is only one B-Roll fade in our film and just 7 opticals -- two of which are the opening and closing credit sequences. The other 5 are: one freeze frame, one sped up shot, one slowed down shot and two reversed shots. Nearly all of our effect shots were done in camera: one fade out and quite a few high frame rates for slow motion.

During production we were intentional about our color palatte and used natural light whenever possible. We shot with Cooke S4 lenses (which are soft) on the best 35mm Kodak stocks. Color correction will be done photo-chemically at Deluxe.

The negative cut will take about three weeks. Simultaneously we'll be pre-mixing sound, recording foley/FX, additional dialogue, etc at Larson Studios in Hollywood.

The final dubb and print master are scheduled for mid-December.

Throughout post we've built the film with one light DV dailies on a dual G5 in Final Cut Pro. That's all we've been looking at for over a year now. It will be amazing to finally see it projected on film.