THE ALCHEMIST MAKES GOLD - VFX

Dino has has a hectic time of it, finishing visual effects work at his job, but he’s finally able to begin Alchemist VFX. Tonight he’s going to assemble the project into a Flame timeline and then we’re supposed to be meeting later this week to begin the actual effects and color correction work.

The Alchemist Makes Gold - Final Stages

On September 6th, 2011, which also happens to be my birthday, I dropped off my short film "The Alchemist Makes Gold" for post production work with Dino Tsaousis at Light of Day, VFX.

Alchemist Website!

The website for "The Alchemist Makes Gold" is now up and running!

The Alchemist Makes Gold - Final Stages

Dino is away on vacation until August 25th, which means that the color correction and graphics work has to be put on hold. In the meantime I'm prepping materials for festival submission.

Today I’m spending the day at the start of finalizing production packet materials for my alchemist film. I think I’ll make the production books essentially square with Peter Schafer’s alchemical chart as the cover to the book. Inside will be a few promotional images, info about the film, director’s statement, etc.
I feel like I don’t really know what I’m doing. But I often feel that way, ha!

I hope some of these festivals want hard copy materials and not just digital submissions. Hard copy is so much more enjoyable to make.

Hold. The. Phone.

Whoa, it's been a while since I even considered posting on this thing.

I've moved through(with?) a series of events recently. I was forcibly removed, along with my whole home community, from the large warehouse where I was living. There was no real notice(3 days, I think?), before the FDNY locked the doors to where we were living because the conditions we were under were supposedly "imminently perilous conditions". It's a fairly long story, one that has been well (mis)documented by various blogs, newspapers and magazines and it's gotten exhausting to talk about.

But, most recently, I've moved into a pretty awesome space with a full view of the river front. The rent is low, the company is awesome, and I'm hoping to settle in and re-dedicate my time to personal creative projects.

Helen is still moving along, so is Alchemist, and I have a few other projects in the works.

THE ALCHEMIST MAKES GOLD - Soundscape Design

Yeesh. I've been editing in Soundtrack Pro for hours now, my head feels foggy and my back is tired. I'm going to take a bath. I don't really know how to use Soundtrack, so I've been reading the manual and fighting with this program.

I've got 22 tracks of audio now, hopefully this will turn out fairly well. My plan is to do a bunch of "sound design" and then send it over to Jared and have him clean it up nice and add some extra touches to it, to make it sound better. Hopefully he'll add his own design to it.

Anyway, that's my plan.

THE ALCHEMIST MAKES GOLD - *Sound Design*

Jared finished a first complete sound clean up and it's sounding really great! I'm amazed at how much cleaner the audio is than it was. I watched it through and put together some notes with timecode markers which I sent his way. He's going to make changes and mess some more with the overall balance and then we'll be on our way to some serious soundscape design. Exciting!

By the way...

I bought a Go Pro camera, these things are pretty neat!

At the coffee shop

I met with Sara today and we talked about ideas for future projects. We may be collaborating on something in a little while, that would be great. Here she is at the coffee table...

A Few Life Movements

The whole of Project 61 fell apart yesterday, the other painter dropped out, so now it's just one mural artist trying to pick up the pieces. She's had the idea for years and still hasn't done anything with it, I don't imagine that she will be able to put it all together again. It's a shame, we were all really excited about the idea, but I think we had pretty differing views of what the idea was.

Now I'm trying to brainstorm a concept for a short film. I realized I haven't put anything new on my YouTube account in almost a year! And I did upload Astral Woman to Vimeo, so that's something, but looking at Astral Woman it feels almost like an exercise in aesthetic technique. That certainly has it's value, but I really want to tell a story that communicates something to people. It's bizarre to want to tell a story and then realize you don't have any stories to tell. The thing is, I do. I have plenty to say, but asking myself to structure it and put it into a container, that's where things get finicky. In some ways, it feels like anything is possible, but then that makes narrowing down the spectrum all the more difficult. I get overwhelmed by the breadth of possibilities and so instead I don't do anything.

I know that one thing lacking in a lot of my works is a connection to emotion. A friend mentioned that what I do is very cerebral, and that is something I have been noticing. I wonder if I start with defining an emotion that I would like my work to express, if I could then structure something around that expression of emotion.

Anyway, there's some stuff to think about.

Project 61

A project that I'm starting with two friends is finally underway. We'll be departing for New Orleans on October 23rd and staying a week where they'll paint a mural of Dr. John and I'll document it on video. Our goal is to travel the whole Highway 61 for a few weeks and they'll paint murals to honor the evolution of blues along the way while I document (I imagine I'll help paint also). We're starting small to work on financing the trip. I'm excited about this adventure.

The website is http://project61.net , we have a blog also: http://alongroute61.wordpress.com

The Garage - MUBI / Vimeo Plus

I was contacted by The Garage at MUBI (http://mubi.com/users/133502) to link 'The Astral Woman' on their site. I did so, you can see it's project page HERE.

I updated my Vimeo membership to Vimeo Plus a little while back to submit 'The Astral Woman' to the Vimeo contest, it didn't get in. Anyway, with Vimeo Plus you can view Statistics of your videos. The whole thing is a little disheartening. So far, 'The Astral Woman' has 487 loads with only 19 plays and only 2 played all the way through! Now, granted, the credits are a bit long for a 4min video and I will admit to often stopping a video when the credits start (terrible, I know), but still! Only 19 plays out of 487 loads! Jeeze. I don't know what the general statistics look like on Vimeo, but that's quite the average...

The Astral Woman

Here is my 4 min short, 'The Astral Woman'.

The Astral Woman from Cait Davis on Vimeo.

In many cultures, The Astral Man or The Cosmic Man is a symbolic representation of the human beings potentiality towards wholeness. The symbol can also be seen as a symbol of Self. "According to the testimony of many myths, the Cosmic Man is not only the beginning but also the final goal of all life--of the whole of creation." (Marie-Louise von Franz, “Man and His Symbols”) This symbol is sometimes represented as a hermaphrodite, to show the joining of opposites, though quite often is represented by a white male human being. In “The Astral Woman” I have begun what I hope to be a small series of various short films that start to re-define the masculine dominance in our cultural history. I want to take strong and meaningful concepts and replace the dominant image with something different.

THE ALCHEMIST MAKES GOLD - POST PRODUCTION in stages...

Jared has officially begun sound design on The Alchemist Makes Gold!

And then this happened...

Went to my parents house this weekend. My dad and I didn't talk much about the Helen script, mostly I just relaxed. I read a book, watched movies, took a bath, hung out with my dog and went out in the woods. I had an all around relaxing time.

In my last post, I mentioned that I would relay something further about IFP. IFP is Independent Feature Project and they host Independent Film Week. It's a week long event where filmmakers are introduced to agents, managers, distributors, producers, etc. to talk about a current project(for which the filmmaker submitted at an earlier date). My dad and I submitted to IFP film week back in...April, I think it was. They accepted 25 scripts in development for the Emerging Narrative section of the film week, and the script my dad and I have been working on was accepted! I submitted as writer/director, my dad as co-writer--though he wont be attending the film week. We are listed on indie wire here: http://www.indiewire.com/article/150_New_Films_IFP_Project_Forum/P0/

We're on the 2nd page, 8th project down.

I've been handling a few deadlines and prepping for the week event. I had my script consultation and I'm going to update the script soon. Most recently, I've been preparing "The Alchemist Makes Gold" and "The Astral Woman" to be burned to DVD so that I can share some 'past work' with any reps that might be interested in the projects I'm working on or have been working on.

The Alchemist isn't very far along. Well, I mean, it's edited--has been stitched together, but it doesn't have any sound design done and none of the graphics work or color correction. The DVD media is due by August 31! I've been doing some basic stuff and I gave all the sound over to some folks who said they'd be willing to help out, but as of yet we haven't been able to touch base about everything. It's a little nerve wracking to have all of this stuff going on and to be working a full time job, but I really feel like things are going well--or at least sometimes I feel that way. Today I feel that way.

Tonight I'm going to a meeting for an art project called "INTERSECTION" (project website: http://projectintersection.org/ ). I only joined forces recently and haven't really done a whole lot with them, but they seem like a neat group of people and the project is interesting. It's good to have some project distractions that aren't your personal burden. Plus, it's fun to spend some time with interesting folks.

Anyway...yep.

THE ALCHEMIST MAKES GOLD - POST PRODUCTION in stages...

The Alchemist is now in it's first official HD rough cut. I did a once over tonight, checking my cuts and tightening edits. Pretty soon we'll be starting on graphics and sound design. The goal is to complete at least one full, strong scene before August 30 so that I can submit a DVD for IFP. I'll discuss IFP another time.

Yay!

The Astral Woman - complete!

I found out about a festival Vimeo announced with David Lynch as one of the judges for the experimental category. As 'Astral Woman' is an experimental short and because I really respect David Lynch, I wanted to finish my short in time to submit it to the festival.

The short, mostly live action, involves a very short animated sequence that I planned to use After Effects to complete, but I really didn't know how to use After Effects. The short also was shot MOS, so it required an entirely fabricated sound scape. It took weeks for me to complete the animation as I stumbled over the large learning curve of After Effects and progressively decided how I wanted aspects of the image to look.

After completing the animation, I had one week to do all of the sound design. The short only came out to about 3mins, but I couldn't decide what I wanted it to sound like and I've been working a full time job and my work day ends about 6 or 7pm every week day. I'm also a morning person, my creativity happens mostly between 8am and 3pm. Basically, I didn't have much time and felt a lot of pressure to complete the film.

I started on the sound design and then called my friend Peter Schafer who lives in Rochester, NY and asked for his assistance with the project. From 7pm to 12am each evening, we sent files across the internet and updated the sound and image properties. Peter added sound to the sound I had in place and then I added sound to that, then I did the final mix, adjusting levels and adding filters. Peter created a quick animation for the opening title and I added the title itself. I completed the end credits, exported the video and finalized the upload to Vimeo at around 11:15pm on the day it was due(by 11:59pm). I paid the submission fee and officially submitted by 11:22pm. Then I biked over to Williamsburg and met up with a friend for drinks.

Whew.

The Astral Woman - The Shoot

The shoot went well. We shot from about 7pm until 6am and then I had to go to work. It was a rough day, but I feel good about things. Because we had a small crew and not a whole lot of pre-production work, set-ups took a fairly long time and we had to cut a number of shots to get finished even by 6am.

Last night and this morning I started converting footage and laying it into a timeline. The shots we got look great, hopefully it all comes together.

The Astral Woman - shoots on Tuesday

Hello. It's Sunday and The Astral Woman project shoots on Tuesday.

I've gotten most of it together. I still need to paint a box red and remove this wooden divider from the inside.

I got the ostrich egg. Here's a creep photo of me holding it...

The Astral Woman

The Astral Woman is a short short I wrote. It's a dialog-less film that symbolizes a woman moving towards wholeness. It's a reinterpretation of the classic symbols of self realization that were mainly masculine figures, at least in our (European/American) history. The Astral Man or Cosmic Man is a figure symbolizing the joining together of the different aspects of a person into a complete and whole being sometimes represented as a hermaphrodite and sometimes as a masculine figure. In the case of the short, the person playing the Astral Woman is a dark skinned woman who has often been referred to as androgynous. She's a beautiful young lady and I think her appearance adds a new reference for the concepts of how a whole self can be represented.

This past weekend, I met with a woman named Luiza who works one day a week at my job. She's interested in producing or production managing and she's on board with the short short, to help move it along into and through production. Then I emailed everyone in preparation for the shoot, getting together the minute details that bring everything towards completion. We plan to shoot at the end of May.

I'm itching to have more work posted. I haven't created any new videos for some time now. Some time soon I want to shoot the test roll of Super8 that I have, to find out if this Super8 camera my friend lent me works, since he wasn't sure. I just need to get some more stuff out there, for my own piece of mind.

Anyway...yep.