Print Complete

Coach Little (Steve Zahn) and Calvin (Alex Frost)


A 35mm print of CALVIN MARSHALL unspooled in 5.1 at Deluxe on Friday.

With the exception of 7 opticals, image color and density were corrected photochemically over five days. The blacks are black and the whites are white. Specific shots were corrected warmer or cooler. Colors are bold. All without a Digital Intermediate.

While this way of making films is dying, our experience demonstrates that a DI isn't always necessary. The evidence is in how gorgeous our print looks. Shooting 35mm and cutting the negative is still an effective/viable work flow for filmmakers.

We are now in the final stages. The next month we'll be completing our HD master. This is the copy that will live on -- TV, dvd, blu-ray, VOD, etc.

Lots of news to report soon on marketing, publicity, our premiere, and distribution.

Sound is Finished

Yesterday we listened to the final sound mix of Calvin four times. It was especially exciting because there are no more changes left to be made.

A Dolby Rep was there at our approved dubb stage to create an MO of our work. Only Dolby can do this with their hardware. The whole process feels dated in a way but it's quite effective. The MO is basically a cartridge that holds about 2 GB.

On the cartridge is both our 5.1 mix and a 2.0 mix. These will be striped directly onto our prints so that when our prints play in theaters they will be in Dolby SR and sound great.

More news to report soon.

Still in Post

Our theatrical sound mix will be completed this week.

Print mastering with Dolby is scheduled for Wednesday, January 14th.

Color timing at Deluxe for our prints will be completed the last week of January.

Shortly after, EFILM will give us our HD master so DVD screeners will finally look and sound like they are supposed to.

Also in the works...

1. New website, blogs.

2. Trailer, teasers, marketing materials.

3. Details on our premiere and release schedule.

Mixing

Last week we mixed the film. It was an exciting experience to hear it all for the first time.

Tomorrow morning is the first official playback of our new 5.1 theatrical sound mix.

The rest of the day will be spent making final tweaks. Sound mix will lock tomorrow evening.

Dolby is scheduled for Tuesday's print master.

Deluxe is handling our picture. Early next year we'll be doing the color correction for our release. Very exited for this process.

Soon after we'll have our 35mm answer print and marry that to our new sound mix. Getting closer.

Dubb Stage

Next week we're dubbing the film for our theatrical release. It will be executed in Dolby Digital (SRD) 5.1.

Hundreds of audio tracks will be mixed between 9 a.m. and 7 p.m. each day. Dialogue is generally front and center and everything else falls around the space between the 4 other speakers-- score, backgrounds, sound effects, foley, loop group, etc.

CALVIN MARSHALL is 5 reels long. Each day one reel will be mixed -- approximately 17 minutes of film.

Every little decision on the dubb stage is critical. Each has the potential to help (or hurt) an audience's experience of the movie. The goal, of course, is for the sound experience to help keep an audience engaged in this imaginary world and tracking the story emotionally. The wrong frequency or volume of something in the soundtrack can shatter the illusion of reality and take the audience out of your film.

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.