All screenplays on the simplyscripts.com and simplyscripts.net domain are copyrighted to their respective authors. All rights reserved. This screenplaymay not be used or reproduced for any purpose including educational purposes without the expressed written permission of the author.
Very thrilled to see this come together after all this time for you, Pia. Creating such a mood piece is a Herculean task on a tight budget. I'm sure the experience will serve you well in future productions.
Maybe you should fall in love with a talking heads in a bar script next.
But seriously, super proud of you guys and the production!
Keep Directing, Brett
LATEST NEWS CineVita Films is producing a short based on my new feature!
What an ambitious project! Awesome to see this one.
Great choices with the actors. Is that the young guy's real voice? It's a great pirate-movie voice.
I found the woman, L'Tanya Van Hamersveld, particularly entertaining -- really consistently committed, and the DP did some particularly good work with her, I thought, as in the shot at 8:40-ish.
This was a fun story told with aplomb. Props to Pia and Bert and the whole cast and crew.
Nice work. I'm in the process of shooting something at night as well and I'm running into the grainy problem too.
I'm following you on Vimeo to make sure I catch all your newest work.
A couple questions:
• • What model of camera did you use? • What ISO did you shoot at? • What lights did you use? • What software was used to de-noise the footage? • Did you color correct? If so, what software did you use, or was it done in camera? • Did you record sound on set or did you foley everything in post? • Did you use ADR? • How did you record sound? Mic? Recorder? • If a train leaves Boston traveling 30 mph...actually forget this question.
We used my now old Panasonic HVX200 which was hot shit in -06 when I bought it. I love working with it, but it is notorious for its bad performance in low light situations. I thought we would be safe though since I hired a DP with years of experience with the same camera. We just didn’t have enough lights for the location even though I had rented extra lights. This was filmed at Anastasia State Park in Florida and at night it is really really dark. No lights around whatsoever. To have done this location justice, we would have needed lights suitable for a stadium or concert. We had a second camera as well. You can probably tell which clips are from that camera. It was some kind of DSLR Canon. Surprisingly though, it didn’t do any better than my camera.
What ISO? Don’t remember. I would have to look that up on the media.
We used my light kit which is most suitable for indoor controlled situations and then we rented two cases of lights. I don’t remember exactly what kind of lights they were, but I know they were bigger than mine. This was handled by the DP so I didn’t really worry too much about it. Even though we had those though, it wasn’t enough.
The software we used was AMAZING! It’s called NeatVideo. The media we had was unwatchable before we ran it through NeatVideo. One problem with the denoiser though is that you have to use that first in the editing before you add add or do anything else. This becomes a problem, because the rendering times with the denoiser was about 11-15 hrs!!! Each time!!! So after we had cleaned it up so it was presentable visually with less grain, we were not able to color correct and do a lot of the other stuff needed because, Like I said, every time we had to render it would take up a whole day. Not to mention how many times the computers crashed in between. Hope that answers the question about the color correcting too.
We recorded sound on set with my Sennheiser shotgun mic, which I love! I considered re-recording all audio afterwards because there was a horrendous sound of the waves on the beach. Instead of nice ocean waves hitting the beach, it was a constant LOUD crashing sound, but I fixed that by adding nicer sounding stock audio of ocean waves underneath as ambient sound. Some sounds were obviously added later like the spooky sounds and thunder. At the fort, the second editor, Nicolas, did a lot of foley work with footsteps and creaky sounds and that sort of thing.
Very thrilled to see this come together after all this time for you, Pia. Creating such a mood piece is a Herculean task on a tight budget. I'm sure the experience will serve you well in future productions.
Maybe you should fall in love with a talking heads in a bar script next. 
But seriously, super proud of you guys and the production!
Thanks Brett! It’s been a long time for sure. When did we even have that OWC?
You are right about the mood thing. Something very hard to do…I found out.
I actually asked Phil if I could shoot his bar script awhile back. That seems like an easy thing to do now. Ha!
Thanks again!
More later, but I have to get back to work here for a bit.
After staring hopelessly at the rough cut for a month when nothing I had previously written worked a tic with the final product, I found my muse and started sketching it all out. My primary "final" compositional tool is a Yamaha SY-85 keyboard that I've had since 1994 that contains some of the best sound samples I've ever heard. MIDI sounds can't hold a candle to it, and I can't even get Finale to sound as good as that keyboard. I program it note by note, which is tricky sometimes, but it has been good to me over the years. I really, really need to fix the disk drive at some point, but after 20+ years, it is holding up well.
Because there is really no screen to follow the music on when I program it, this time, I wrote everything out in Finale first and played it along with the rough cut to check timing and tempos and such to ensure that everything lined up. I exported those as MIDI files (which sounded awful), and made my own rough cut of it to recheck my timing. It was then that I programmed everything, double-checked my tempos to make sure the clock in the computer didn't differ somehow with the clock in my keyboard (it didn't).
Once that was done, I balanced it all out, forgot to put in a little reverb (so Kevan threw that it when he added it), exported the max quality MP3s, and sent the dropbox links for the music and my rough cut along with the time markers.
Overall, I was happy with the way the score turned out. I was really worried for awhile there that I might not be able to. I did not have writer's block, per se, but everything I did write was wrong for the material. It was good when the right muse finally hit.
Chris, that young pirate is Micah. I liked what he sounded like there at the end. I told him to lower his brow and look a little bit like Frankenstein’s monster. He’s a supr nice guy. Very tall too. I used him in the short film Old Wounds too. That one didn’t finish due to the location being a disaster. What is it with me and picking bad locations??? Anyway, I appreciate you being able to tell it was an ambitious project. It was. I just didn’t know better.
This is in response to Kevin’s comment in the other thread before it was deleted. He made some good points about the film and I wanted to explain why some things ended up the way they did.
One thing he mentioned was the purple smoke effect. He thought it would have been better without it. First off, the purple smoke was in the script. But also, while editing we realized that the scene wasn’t lit enough for details and with the actress being really dark skinned, we couldn’t really see her talking or what she was doing anyway, so the smoke was added.
Another thing mentioned was how they go to the fort and down some steps and voila, there’s the chest sitting in a room. Well, we had something different in the script. The characters, led by Rhiannon were going down a narrow tunnel type thing until they come to a fork and they find a shark tooth on the ground that points the way. We had all that planned and were going to use one of the turrets and the narrow walkway to it at the fort for that scene. We were going to cover the open space over the walkway with tarp and netting and cover the netting with moss and such to give the illusion of it being underground. When we got to the fort for our shoot Saturday evening, we were told that we could not use the turret. They had discovered a crack in it and were afraid it might fall off the fort! So, that’s the reason for the “easy find” of the chest.
I program it note by note, which is tricky sometimes, but it has been good to me over the years.
Impressive.
I have an old Casio keyboard that I used to program note by note and that was a pain in the ass. God forbid I had to edit something in the middle of a track.
Now I use FL Studio 10 and an Alesis Q25 controller to lay down my scores. I'm still learning how to use it all, but it's a lot better than a 4" LCD.