Picture our delight in being contacted out of the blue, via the contact form on this website, by the Director of Reel Rasquache in California.  He was interested in programming The Devil’s Tail based on what he had heard about it at BLIFF.

Another great example of what’s good about being online, and what’s good about getting your feature on to the festival circuit. Once it’s out there, it starts to take on a life of its own…

So! The Devil’s Tail will have its West Coast premiere in Los Angeles at the 7th annual Reel Rasquache Art & Film Festival.
The trailer for the film festival is beautiful, and we’re honored to have a clip from The Devil’s Tail included in it.
If you go to this page, you can watch the trailer.

WHY WE LOVE BENJAMIN BRATT

Oh sure, he’s handsome and all that blah-blah-blah, but he’s also a great and we think, underrated actor. See his work in The Cleaner and Modern Family… and now La Mission. It’s with his new film, directed by his brother Peter Bratt, produced by and featuring Benjamin, that he helped RRAFF this year! La Mission launched the 7th annual Reel Rasquache, co-presented by Latin Heat, and Benjamin Bratt, with fellow actor Jeremy Ray Valdez, attended the screening and followed it with a Q&A.

What a great launch for Reel Rasquache 2010!

Jeremy Ray Valdez; Director of the Reel Rasquache Film festival, John Ramirez; Latin Heat’s Bel Hernandez and Benjamin Bratt

I read somewhere that in films, images convey information and sound conveys emotion. The week I’ve just spent spotting the 5.1 surround sound mix for The Devil’s Tail has brought this into sharp focus for me.

Post sound work is expensive. A feature generally costs between 25 and 50 thousand dollars. The initial sound mix on the film as it played various festivals was mine, a stereo mix. This feature was intended for DVD and we were never going to do a 5.1 surround sound mix. I’m a generalist though, I do a lot of things fairly well, which is why I had the confidence to take on the many various tasks involved in making a feature film myself. I know there are a lot of people who are much much better at all the various jobs I took on, but they were not available to work on the Devil’s Tail for the terms I was offering. So, DIY.

I’ve always been a bit of a sound geek. There are about 60 pairs of headphones in my house and I’m still not satisfied. I used to wander around when I was a teenager with a Sony Walkman Pro and a nice stereo microphone, recording conversations and ambience, which I would later listen to at home, either recreating the original scene in my head or free associating to the ambience. When shooting a movie, I take sound very seriously, and if I get a little more money for the next shoot, the first thing I’m going to do is allocate some of that to getting better location sound equipment (i.e., a decent blimp for my mics, a better mount, a four track recorder/mixer, maybe some lavs).

I did what I could with the mix of The Devil’s Tail, but I was more painfully aware of my limitations both in terms of equipment and expertise in this area than any other. Most people found the mix I did acceptable.

Those people were not professional sound mixers.

Then, Nathaniel Warsh said as part of our deal for him to act as sales agent for the movie, that he would arrange for a proper sound mix, and said he knew a guy who would do a great job. I was concerned, because I didn’t want some cut rate hack who didn’t give a damn just throwing my audio into Pro Tools, doing some auto compression and normalizing then arbitrarily splitting it all into 5.1 tracks just to make a few quick bucks. I mean, I’d already sweated over this picture for two years from pre-production through festival presentation, and I still haven’t been paid yet.

We were told that the mixer’s name was George Flores, that he’d watched the DVD and thought the movie was very good, and that he was originally from Mexico. We figured, well, he’s Mexican and has good taste. Sounds good to me.

I sent all the raw tracks over to George. I assumed that he would do whatever he felt like with the sound and that we would argue about it later. I hoped it would sound better than my mix, and that he would bring some creativity to it.

Three weeks later we got a message that he had finished the first pass on the movie, and needed to book me for a spotting session.

Thus began two of the happiest weeks of my life.

George is an acute man of boundless energy who is passionate about cinematic sound design. His studio is a large comfortable room with a terrific set of surround Tannoy speakers state of the art Macs and an additional sound proof room for ADR and Foley recording. Directly over the work surface is a 47″ flat screen TV.

Chris Comrie in foreground seated, George Flores, standing arms folded.

He welcomed us, offered us excellent coffee, and sat Samantha and I in rolling chairs. George told us he had done a lot of work on the mix and was pretty happy with it although there were still some spots where he needed my input. I worried that that meant he considered the job to be more or less finished except for a couple of questions and that my further input would not be needed. Was this the paranoia of a DIY filmmaker, that nobody cares about my movie but me? Maybe.

I couldn’t have been more wrong. George told me to listen carefully and bring up anything and everything that concerned me. It was immediately clear that George had used my mix as a template to build on. I noticed that he had replaced the coyote howl I had placed under the title card with a much more impressive one and so it went.

Over the next several sessions we went through the entire movie, frame by frame.  I was immersed in a beautifully balanced mix that enhanced the emotional impact of the movie incalculably.  I’ve probably watched the movie over a hundred times now, but the effect of George’s mix was to make it seem like a new thing to me.  He hand-sculpted every line of dialogue rather than using auto compression, so that the dialogue still breathes, has real peaks and valleys, and engages the ear rather than exhausts it.  His expert and specific use of noise reduction successfully solved many of the inevitable issues of sound acquired in many very challenging locations (windy beaches, crashing waves, noisy city streets) and made the sound of the movie much more transparent.

George paid particular attention to building environmental sound in the mix.  Our Mexican locations provide a lot of possibilities for creative mixing because there is a lot of life in them.  The Yucatan is remarkable for its profusion of bird species, and George did a beautiful job of weaving specific birdsong under scenes in a way that subtly enhanced the emotional dynamics.  It’s actually completely amazing what he accomplished in only 15 days.  I was struck over and over by details such as pieces of Foley that George had performed himself (footsteps, knocks, fabric rustling, etc) to fill in the soundtrack. Any suggestions or requests I had were acted on immediately and with great efficiency.  At one point our composer Paco wondered aloud if we could bring up the street sounds for the Merida city montage.  I had blown away all the original sound for this sequence, preferring to just hear music.  George asked me to provide the original files asap.  I burned them on a DVD and gave it to him the next day, but George had gone on a tear and created sound for the entire sequence of people partying in the streets during Carnivale from his sound library and his own Foley performances.  It was spectacular, and really made the sequence take off, far more than my original location sound.

I could go on and on, but this post is getting out of hand. In the end, the movie now actually seems to move faster and makes its points more effectively.  What more could a filmmaker ask?

Thanks George, for your superb work!

*Curry College images from their files

No April Fools at Curry college, Milton, MASS

Swan and I have returned from another Boston adventure.  This time we were presenting The Devil’s Tail to students enrolled in the film program at Curry College.

We’ll take any excuse for a road trip, so we drove down again.  We nattered for hours in the car about what we wanted to say to students who were preparing for careers in media, and especially those who had already been seduced by the idea of making their own movies.

We decided that the most valuable perspective we had to offer was that of two people with a lifetime of experience both as talent/crew for hire in the film and television industry, who had put that experience to the test in creating our own original theatre, short films, and now feature film.

There are a seemingly infinite number of books, seminars, and classes now which purport to give you the nitty gritty on feature filmmaking and how to become a Hollywood playa, but they tend to bog one down in financial, promotional, and technical considerations.  In other words, the machinery and so-called “rules” of the business.    This can of course be very helpful.  It can also be very discouraging.  For those of us who aren’t primarily motivated by money and fame (note that I said primarily – I would love to be rich and famous as long as I could keep my soul, or at least visit it on weekends) this completely leaves out the question of passion and expression.  You know – art.  One of the things that makes life worth living.

Sure, filmmaking can be like producing widgets in a factory.  Look at the typical formula Hollywood movie.  Steve Carell and Tina Fey plus guys with guns chasing them around Manhattan equals  a $25 million dollar opening weekend.  Fine.  By now everyone and their grandmother knows you put a couple of big stars in a wacky situation and promote it on every available surface, you’re likely going to make a mountain of cash.

But film is not just a commodity.  It is as much an art as it is craft.  What gets Swan and I out of bed every morning and keeps us up until the wee small hours is not imagined millions, but a shared passion for storytelling (verging on mania) using all the tools at our disposal as filmmakers.

What I really wanted to convey to aspiring filmmakers was this:  the obstacles to making a feature are less than they have ever been.  If you have something to say, you don’t need more than a script, some actors, a video camera, a mic, and a computer with editing software.  That, and a few work lamps from the hardware store is pretty much all we had, and with that we were able to make a feature length movie that has played at international festivals and won several awards.  But more importantly, we were able to tell the story we wanted to tell, the way we wanted to tell it.  And we didn’t require anyone’s approval.

But this is still putting the cart before the horse.  Why make a movie in the first place?  It’s hard and there are so many ways it can go drastically wrong.  Success in any case is the opposite of assured.

Making an indie film can feel like scaling a mountain. Or in our case, a ruined Mayan pyramid

For me, the big broom that sweeps all these reasonable objections aside is
that WE HAVE SOMETHING TO SAY, and the best way for me to say it is by making movies. Way too often I see shorts and features that are devoid of meaning.  Their message is nothing beyond, “I love zombies” or “I am a misunderstood genius” or “I want to shoot commercials for loads of money”.  What a waste of everyone’s time.  If you are not genuinely reaching out to an audience, and trying to connect with them in a constructive way, you’re masturbating.  Go on, enjoy yourself.  But don’t ask me to watch.

Do everything possible to get good performances.  Respect actors and what they do.  Acting – good acting – shouldn’t be taken for granted.  Not everyone can do it.  The production of any movie that is about people, as opposed to, oh, CGI creatures and explosions, should be geared towards making sure that the best possible performances are recorded.  This means the director has to know what good acting is, and not be unduly awed by such things as big tits and/or the ability to memorize simple dialogue.  I would recommend to any aspiring filmmaker that they take some acting lessons themselves, so they know what’s involved.    But let me say this:  if it isn’t completely obvious to you that Robert Downey Jr. is an infinitely better actor than Tom Cruise, then there is no hope for you.

When auditioning, make sure the actor has the ability to take direction, to perform a scene in radically different ways based on suggestion.  When shooting, remember that the most important thing is to capture great performances.  So don’t be distracted or derailed by minor technical issues.  Spend as much time as possible with the actors in front of the camera, not tweaking endless physical details that no one will give a damn about if the story and performances are lousy.

I used to think that indie filmmakers I worked with who spent all their time setting up shots were misguided perfectionists, or idiots who didn’t understand the importance of performance.  Now I believe that consciously or unconsciously, they are simply afraid of engaging with the real dynamic crux of filmmaking, which is the actual performance.  If the moments between your actors aren’t alive and true, it’s all been a hollow exercise, and your movie goes down the toilet.

Those are my main concerns as a filmmaker, and happily they work well with my current status as a do-it-yourself guy.  My films may not have big budgets, but they can afford what really counts:  meaning, story, performance, taste.  And so can yours.

I think we managed to put these points across at Curry College.  We really enjoyed speaking with the students, which we did for several hours.  They were intelligent and engaged and they gave me hope that they will be producing great work.  I hope they keep in touch, because I want to encourage them to be the best filmmakers they can be.   Many thanks to Professor Jerry Gibbs for inviting us.  It sounds like he and Bob MacNeil are doing a great job of providing students with a balanced and practical view of film production.

The work never stops: 1 sheet mock-up of our next feature

… BELOIT TO BOSTON…

Yes and on back to the Boston area where we’ve been asked to speak at Curry College.

We’ll talk about the mad process of putting this big little movie into production, screen it, and then take questions.

It all happening this Thursday April 1st from 6 30 onwards at Curry College in Milton Massechusetts.

You can read the official info here or for more information please contact Jerry Gibbs, Co-Chairperson of the Communication department at Curry College at jgibbs0902@curry.edu

The Beloit International Film Festival IS a great festival that lives up to its reputation. People that have seen me since or read Chris’ last post may think that it’s easy to say BIFF is a great fest because I won an award. Or because they start throwing booze and food down your neck the moment you arrive. Or because they ferry you about in limos. Or because of the Hospitality Lounge for filmmakers and press or because of the Awards event and Press Conference. Or because they throw a good party.

Becky Rogers and Fest Director Rod Beaudoin introduce the Press Conference and Honorary Chair Greg Lamberson speaks.

There’s no question, all of that IS fun. Damn fun. But that’s not what makes it a great festival. What makes it great is that there’s no question that it’s a festival made BY film lovers FOR film lovers.

Charmed by the Central Box Office in the town’s Visitor Center for Tourists

From the moment we arrived in town, we were welcomed and connected with a warm, enthusiastic festival staff and audience and filmmakers from around the world.

We barely had our first coffee the morning we arrived before this year’s Honorary Chair, filmmaker Greg Lamberson, came up to introduce himself along with his longtime collaborator, writer-actor Robert Sabin. I can’t imagine two nicer fellows than these two, who only reinforced that we were in for a great time at the festival.

We met dear Amelah Resnik in the flesh for the first time and checked into our suite at the hotel and attempted to get sparkly in time for the Awards Ceremony and Press Conference. Actor Rob Fulton was racing to meet us there after flying for a day from Santiago Chile where he had been shooting.

Any resolve to appear tough flew out the window when it was announced that I won the award for Best Screenplay. Cocktail dress or no, I blubbed teary eyed at the microphone, twice, at both the private and public presentation. New friends Greg Lamberson and Robert Sabin cheered and clapped like old friends when I made my way back to my seat. Nothing cynical about those two. Between them and Amelah Resnik, I truly felt like I was being cheered on. Several people came up to me over the course of the evening’s reception to congratulate me, but I was very touched by Heidi, a local student who wanted to introduce herself and congratulate me because she thought it was really cool that a woman won the screenwriting award. She had noticed that film seems to have more men than women – or she felt at least, that men seemed to get recognized more and that you don’t see a lot of girls up there at the awards. Heidi wants to write herself, so I thought it best to include a snapshot of us together here. So that we can all recognize her in a few years when she starts to win her awards.

Across the board, filmmakers are treated as artists with something of
value to contribute to the community – and by extension – the culture,
from the very first invitation to screen at the festival.

In the Hospitality Lounge on Saturday, I thanked a volunteer for looking
after “us” – meaning all filmmakers at the fest – and for working so hard.

He smiled with real warmth and said “Oh I’m just a volunteer. Thank YOU
for bringing your work to us here”. I apologize that I do not remember the
gentleman’s name.

BIFF is a new festival, and I will admitthat we have had screenings at other festivals that have also been full and sold out – but that was at least partly down to an extraordinary amount of advance hustle and effort on our part. Certainly I do think that it’s part of the filmmakers’ job to be “good festival attendees”; that is to say, promote your film so that your screening and the festival gets an audience; be available for panels & Q&A’s, etc., and just be “present”.

But sometimes, it feels like we do that in a vacuum. Not so in Beloit. Combining the awards with a press conference was brilliant – as is broadcasting radio live from the Hospitality Lounge. Thank you WCLO’s Stan Milam Show and Ron Nief for inviting us to the interview line-up. Thank you Becky Rogers.

We have the excellent Craig Allen who designed new smaller BIFF-specific posters along with our standard larger poster, which we had printed & shipped to the fest arriving a week in advance of the festival. Volunteers were in place to poster the town with our 200 posters… easily paving the way for our arrival with t-shirts and buttons in hand. Thank you PR Volunteers.

The community of Beloit made us feel so welcome, and that goes beyond festival staff and volunteers. Audiences attended screenings. Residents offered rides. The foursome representing our feature would gather back in our suite at the truly comfortable Beloit Inn and say to each other “Are these the nicest people you have ever met?!?” and compare stories. Robert went to the bank simply to change currency and got asked by the tellers if he was in town with a film. When he told them yes and gave them Devil’s Tail buttons, they said “oh yes, that sounds like a great movie, already have that circled in the schedule” and showed him a copy they had handy!

A final sweet note on which to end: a member of Housekeeping at the Beloit Inn came to clean the room on Friday, while Chris & I were at work preparing for our first screening that night. I apologized and told her I hoped we weren’t in her way and she said the same. We all returned to our work and as she was leaving she said “I saw you won Best Screenplay last night; congratulations!” Chris and I stared at each other, jaws dropped. “I never want to leave this town” I said.

Director snaps another shot of me with award in the sunny hotel room before the Friday night screening

Thanks finally to Festival Director Rod Beaudoin. He signed correspondence to filmmakers “thank you for your art”. Maybe it’s best to just say “You are most welcome.”

I think I have finally recovered from the whirlwind of the Beloit International Film Festival (BIFF), where The Devil’s Tail played last weekend.

We got in the car Wednesday night around nine, and picked up Ryan Greig, our producer for the next feature project, Nothing To Declare.  Rob Fulton, the only actor who has been in everything I’ve ever shot, and the lead in Devil’s Tail, was originally going to be doing the drive to Wisconsin with us, but booked a commercial shoot in Chile at the last moment. Now he was going to have to fly from Santiago to Madison and pray that his connections worked and he would make it to the festival in time for the awards.  He was adamant that he be at the awards, because he said he wanted to see Samantha win for best screenplay, for which she was nominated.

The next ten hours or so are a blur of white line fever and an insane number of toll booths. It was great having another driver in the car for a change, and I handed the wheel over to Ryan and fell unconscious immediately after entering Michigan.  I woke up near Chicago around 3 am and took over while Samantha and Ryan fell asleep.  I spent the next couple of hours conducting imaginary interviews with myself, something I often do while driving, in the hope of sounding coherent and intelligent should someone ever ask me a question about making movies.  By sunrise I was sounding pretty suave, if I say so myself.

I looked over at Ryan, his handsome bald cranium bouncing gently against the window as he slept.  I experienced a moment of dread as I realized that I hardly knew the guy, and here we were about to spend nearly five days in close quarters, either sharing a car or a hotel room.  How long before we started to get on each other’s nerves?  Or would one of us just suddenly decide that the other was a complete tool?  I’d been down this road before, many times.  But, you have to keep trying.  Give people a chance to surprise you.

We finally arrived in Beloit, about three hours earlier than we had anticipated.  It’s a very pretty little city of about 36,000.  We were booked into the Beloit Inn, which is where the filmmakers’ hospitality suite is, i.e. free booze, coffee, breakfast and snacks, as well as a parade of press opportunities as reporters from local media set up one after another to interview festival participants.

I can’t say enough good things about this festival.

It was extremely well organized.  The venues ranged from decent to very good.  The organizers put money and effort into making sure even the ad hoc venues had good sound and picture.  Help was never more than a phone call away.  The attitude overall was very positive, with absolutely no whiff of cynicism from anyone involved.  From the festival staff to the citizen on the street, everyone was great.  I find it hard to believe as I write it, but here’s an example.  Our group had to get from the awards ceremony to the hotel.  I called Melinda Schumacher, the Artists’ Liason, and asked her for local transportation – in this case, a limo that they provide for filmmakers at the fest.
A Beloit local saw us waiting and offered us a ride.  We took it and called off the limo.  I just realized I never took a single limo ride because the locals kept taking it upon themselves to ferry the filmmakers around.
I know, I know, never get into cars with strangers.
But this is cheese country.

Rob Fulton, our lead actor, made it to the awards after 24 hours of travel just in time to see Samantha win for Best Screenplay.  So here’s another great thing about BIFF:
they have excellent taste.

This all happened within our first few hours in town, so we were on a very pleasant high for the rest of the festival.

SAMANTHA SWAN, BEST SCREENPLAY AWARD IN HAND

As more news from the Beloit International Film Festival makes its way to us here in the Ontario cold equal to Wisconsin’s… we discovered the fest’s hottest tix, published by the head of the Selection Committee and the Executive Director who say:

If you can’t decide which film to see first, those wtih their finger on the pulse have selected their Top Ten Films, which are decidedly the hottest tickets of the festival…

This most important nod comes straight from the Chair of the BIFF Selection Committee after months of screening hundreds of film submissions .

and

Previous films on Rod’s Top Ten list have gone on to screen at prestigious festivals such as Sundance after winning their first of many coveted awards at BIFF!

Yes, both Steve Fass and Rod Beaudoin have included THE DEVIL’S TAIL in their top 10!!!

We are absolutely delighted, to say the least.

Rather interested in this piece in The New York Times; yes it’s already from back in 2006 when the festival was considerably newer, but it gives people a chance to to check the temperature of the water and read about comparisons to Sundance.

“The Beloit International Film Festival in Beloit, Wis., has a loftier goal — to return to the spirit of film festivals’ golden era, when guests talked film all night with directors and writers who were on hand and available for questions. “And I’ll bet no one else has limousine service for their guests,” joked Ron Nief, the festival’s public relations director. This year’s lineup of more than 100 films is from 26 nations, and many fall under themes like human rights, food-based films, or an international genre called neo-noir.”

To read the original article, you can follow it here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/15/travel/escapes/15ahead.html

As we move forward on our preparations for BIFF – the printing of big Devil’s posters, the consulting with the designer on BIFF-specific posters, changes to travel plans, etc. – we have to say a word about Beloit and fellow filmmakers.

Amelah Resnik will also be in Beloit with her documentary THE FLOWERS OF MADISON. In this case, Madison refers to Madison Wisconsin, where some of the doc was shot. Because of Resnik’s familiarity with, and her movie’s relationship to the area, she has been in Beloit this week to attend the festival’s Reveal Parties and to do some advance promotion of her film.

Like THE DEVIL’S TAIL, THE FLOWERS OF MADISON also has some Spanish dialogue, and both movies have their Wisconsin premieres in the same venue at La Casa Grande. But before we even knew about sharing a venue, Amelah got in touch, having discovered some of our filmmakers’ posts on WithoutABox. She emailed to congratulate us on playing at this great festival and just to say that with both movies having Spanish language content, we’ll be bringing some different flavour to the area.

After a pleasant email exchange, we asked her about how the first Reveal party went etc.; we just hoped she could be our ears and eyes, given that she was there and we’re operating from a distance…

Not only did Amelah get back to us, she got back to us IMMEDIATELY, volunteered some advice, and started talking up our movie. We wished her well and cheered her and her film on… imagine our delight that when she gave a radio interview about FLOWERS, she also urged listeners to see THE DEVIL’S TAIL and sent us the message that at Reveal Party #2 in Janesville, when they thrust the mic in her hand, before she talked about her own movie she announced the dates and times of ours, that everyone should see it and “Go Canada!”

Like Amelah, we’ve contacted fellow filmmakers in the past prior to other festivals, but have been met with an underwhelming response. We’d like to take this moment to point out that she did not HAVE to contact us at all, and she certainly is not required to do anything on our behalf. Instead, we’ve been contacted and aided by a warm, fellow festival filmmaker, and it must be stated again; if this is the kind of generous person Beloit attracts, it’s no wonder they have such a sterling reputation.

*THE FLOWERS OF MADISON is a documentary that plays
Friday February 19th at 5:00 PM @ La Casa Grande
and
Saturday February 20th at Noon @ Domenico’s

at the Beloit International Film Festival

*And while visiting the FLOWERS website, listen to that gorgeous atmospheric Latin guitar theme by Joe Myers.

We’re delighted to announce that The Devil’s Tail has been nominated for BEST SCREENPLAY at the Beloit International Film Festival.

The awards will be presented at the cocktail reception on Thursday February 18th, 2010.

Happy New Year!