Mood:
celebratoryTopic: Makin' Movies
Well, after working Friday and Saturday like mad, the "Fabulous Edition" of our short film "Secret Identity Crisis" is in the can. Director Scott Cummins was making tweaks to the edit and the sound in preparation for turning in a copy to the Portland Gay & Lebian Film Festival, where it will be screened on Suday the 21st.
My—self inflicted—job was to draw create new graphics for the opening and closing of the film. The original cut of the film made for the 48 Hour Film Project had a pseudo comic-book style image under the titles that then dissolved into the actual scene. That image, created by NEO f/x, was a crude digital processing job that looked enough like the newsprint image to sell the idea. However, when a similar image was tried for the last shot in the film for the final edition, the weakness of this approach became apparent. That, and the film was ending on a image of an empty room.
I was adamant that the images needed to be replaced because they didn't match each other stylistically, the looked like Photoshop work instead of a comic book, and the last shot should be the hand clasp, not the empty room when the characters leave.
So, starting Friday I processed frames of the film to punch up the contrast, printed them large, slapped them on a lightbox, traced the important contours, then threw the frame grabs aside, and went to town with pencil and pen and drew the images from scratch. Once that was done, I scanned them back into the computer, cleaned them up, then painted them in.
The building was a lot more work than the hands, just because there was a lot more inking, and I had to spend a lot more time figuring out how much detail was needed and what was too much.
Fortunately, Scott loved them, and they're in the final cut of the film. And now we have the right ending shot.
Whew!
A week from now I'll see it in a theater with an audience!
