Film.. Finally!

The last 2 weeks have been non-stop. In the best of ways.
Despite months of testing and prep for a direct film to hard drive transfer of my footage from this summer, in the end it did not happen. The material was telecined at Match Frame in Burbank to D5, and from D5 to hard drive. In the end, odell's time was moving, and we just couldn't wait any longer. The colorist was Greg White, who did a fantastic job and was a pleasure to work with. odell had a few days to work with some of the footage before heading back up to Oakland yesterday. He will be returning south again in a few weeks to finish this edit. Our original timeframe to start test screenings was Thanksgiving; now it is Christmas, which really isn't so bad, all things considered.

In some ways, it was a blessing in disguise. As odell's time and flights were booked, some of the time we had expected to go toward working in the film material went instead into making structural changes to the film. Over the last week it has really evolved for the better. We have been struggling since Feb. trying to figure out the opening. I think we've got it now, after a major rework. It is getting better all of the time. Evolving, evolving, evolving. Natural selection takes time.

A word about the test footage from SpyPost - it blew Bonolabs out of the water. End of story. I'm going to write a more complete review about this later. If it hadn't taken them so long to work the bugs out of the system, I would have used this new service they are just getting online. Once again, the merits of testing come through.

Not to go overboard, but the film footage looks fantastic. It's going to be a real value add - especially if this film goes theatrical or bumps up to HD (which it very likely will). It's a whole level above the DVX100a footage, which also looks great. Despite the hiccups, frustration, and expense, in the end.. shooting some film was worth it all. I'm totally happy with it, especially the new Vision2 7205, which really just looks amazing. It has slightly more grain than the 7245, but so much more latitute. It survived underexposure well, and generally just looks terrific. I can't wait to shoot 7201 now. I'm sold on the Kodak Vision2 line.

Susan - the new Associate Director of FORGE - was here today. I helped her gather and prep some material (my photos) for the next FORGE brochure and website, and generated a copy of FORGEing Futures in the iPod Video format. It's nice to see that FORGE is still evolving and learning. Despite the fact that the focus of my film has shifted away from them as compared to my original intentions, it still makes the whole process more rewarding to know I am documenting an organization, and a situation, that still exists.

David