Hunting Humans - The Saga: August 2015

After twelve long years we have the license back to our film. (well, technically they still have six months from July for sell-off) But for all intents and purposes it's ours again.

The question arises...what are we going to do with it?

I haven't taken a look at the film is many years. The crew wanted to watch it one night on the set of "Garden of Hedon", and I was there but I'll tell you now that my brain wasn't and I was exhausted so didn't pay much attention.

I took a look at the original master files I handed in to the distributor and the first thing I thought is, "Man, does that need some color correction". Back when I finished the film(1999) I had no idea what color correction was, and even if I did the software didn't really have any tools of value.

Would color correction really improve the picture enough to merit me going through and scene by scene fixing?

If you take a look at the sample I think you'll agree the answer is yes. The right side is the original way it was, the left is corrected.

The image is never going to look amazing because we shot on 16mm film and only got the one-light transfer. But clearly I can improve the picture quite a bit.

Here's a second quick piece. This is how it originally looks:

This is how it looks with some simple color correction:

And this is how it would look with some color correction plus denoising, though too much.

So I'm definitely going to go through and color correct the whole film for my own release to Amazon streaming, and also a dvd. If a Blu Ray seems warranted then I'll do that too.

But you know what's great about looking at a movie you made around fifteen years ago? You get to see just how little you knew about making movies.

We jumped the line a TON of times, resulting in eyeline mismatches. You may be like "What the hell are you talking about?", so let me show you.

See how these two are supposed to be facing off? The problem is that Rick on the left is aiming his gun frame left. But Bubby is frame right, so it doesn't look like they're facing each other. It looks like they're both looking in the same direction.

I can fix it this way:

See how they appear to be looking at each other now? The cut works now. Granted, now Rick is using his left hand to fire but as long as it's not a continuity error you can do it like this using the horizontal flip.

Oh, and if you wanted to see what it looked like before I corrected it.

Here's another scene where we screwed up. You can't quite tell but Joe is frame right looking in the same direction as Rick(frame left). When this cuts together it doesn't feel like they're looking in the same direction.

So a simple flip of Joe, and it's okay. Sure, the part in his hair flips, but most audiences won't even notice. (trust me)

Finally this one, which isn't correctable but is acceptable as is. See, on the left half he's driving frame right. But on the cut he's driving frame left.

It's pretty bizarre, but clearly we did it because we couldn't get a great shot through the passenger side(we were driving parallel to it in a minivan), so we drove on the other side.

It's little things like this that make you cringe as a filmmaker.

Finally I've decided to go ahead and redo the end credits because they're hard to read, and if I do a Blu Ray at some point I'm going to have to redo them as they're super blurry when blown up.

Here's the original creds followed by what they may look like in the future. Unfortunately I didn't have the original After Effects file I used, so I had to do it manually. Luckily I'm a really fast typist.