• Blogs
• Forums
• Tradeshows
• Partners
• White Papers
• Events

 

Big-Screen Dream

Sep 1, 2005 12:00 PM, By Michael Goldman

The documentary My Date with Drew mocks the notion that ultra-low production values will inhibit getting your movie a major theatrical release. In fact, the movie’s mere existence proves that extremely low-budget, guerilla filmmaking and bare-bones consumer production equipment are not impediments to earning theatrical release, if cleverly combined with a good story, business ingenuity, and lots of hard work.

Drew relates the tale of aspiring, young filmmaker Brian Herzlinger and three of his closest friends, who now call themselves “The Drew Crew,” as they document Herzlinger’s attempts to somehow land a date with actress Drew Barrymore—the object of his affections since childhood.

A major story point is the fact that Herzlinger, old college buddies Brett Winn and Jon Gunn—all three of whom co-directed, edited, and produced the film—and a fourth friend, producer Kerry David, didn’t have enough money to buy or rent a camera, pay a crew, or provide even the most basic lighting or audio setups.

At their disposal was a mere $1,100, which Herzlinger had won on a game show, and enough credit on Winn’s credit card to temporarily “purchase” a consumer-level, 3-chip, MiniDV Panasonic PV-DV953 camcorder at Circuit City. The scheme they hatched: to devote 30 days to shooting Herzlinger’s quest using the Panasonic camera and no other tools. (Thirty days, at the time, was the length of Circuit City’s return policy. When that period expired, they simply gave the camera back.)

Almost miraculously, the Drew Crew finished their movie, edited and mixed it themselves on Apple Final Cut Pro (v. 3), dubbed it to DVD and Digi Beta SP, got it into festivals, and earned enough buzz to eventually secure limited theatrical distribution from DEJ Productions, a subsidiary of Blockbuster. The movie debuted in limited release nationwide in August.

Considering all imagery was recorded using the DV camera’s auto-focus feature; all audio, except for one sequence, was recorded to tape through the camera’s onboard mic; basic color correction and the original sound mix were both done entirely in a now-two-year-old version of Final Cut Pro on a laptop; and the fact that the crew “didn’t realize it would actually end up in theaters,” according to Winn, DEJ took a major risk as it set out to finance improvements to the overall look and sound of the piece. But even that effort was modest, and it succeeded largely because of sister companies EFilm and Deluxe. “[They] did a marvelous job for us,” says Gunn.

Generally, on the image side of the equation, the biggest problem was the fact that the Drew Crew shot the entire movie using their camera’s auto-focus feature.

“Interlacing was a big issue,” says Winn, an editor by trade who normally works on theatrical trailers. “EFilm not only had to go from 30fps to 24fps, but since video plays in two fields [60 per second], they also had to blend those two fields on a frame-by-frame basis. Since we shot autofocus, on the run, with no setup time or lighting, just rolling camera, some image fields were soft, and some were sharper. At times, for certain shots, when blending the fields, that could cause the image to look even softer. Therefore, we went shot-by-shot with the guys at EFilm to decide which shots to use field blending on and which shots not to.”

Aaron Dorn, EFilm’s project manager for Drew, says EFilm took the Digi Beta master provided by the Drew Crew, loaded it onto its network, and ran it through a Teranex Xantus format converter box, performing frame-by-frame conversions of the entire movie.

“The Teranex box [converted] each frame to 24fps, but we also used it to alter settings for each frame,” says Dorn. “How much we altered the settings, though, depended on each scene’s needs—some needed more alteration than others. Then we blurred the fields together and smoothed it out as best we could.”

Given the project’s scope and budget, filmmakers originally color-corrected the movie themselves within Final Cut Pro, and that was the version screened at most festivals prior to the theatrical distribution deal. After they earned distribution, they hired a company called Film Pool, Hollywood, to perform a video color-correction pass using a Da Vinci system, leaving EFilm to simply mimic that palette.

“We used proprietary look-up tables [LUTs] created based on tests with shots from the movie in order to map their digital file to film, keeping true to their original color correction,” says Dorn. “The movie is documentary style, low-budget, and not stylized, so there was no need for heavy color correction. We eventually shot it out to film [on an Arrilaser film recorder], to Kodak Intermediate [2242] Estar Base stock, and sent it over to Deluxe to develop.”

There, while developing the newly struck film negative, Deluxe colorist Randy Anderson performed a series of modest tweaks to accommodate the Drew Crew. But Anderson says those tweaks were minor, at best. He adds, “It is essentially crazy that young people could use a camera from Circuit City to shoot this thing, color-correct it themselves on video, and then have it end up looking as good as it does on a movie screen. We fixed a few things, but the final timing is really their digital timing, and it’s sharp enough that it does not take your mind off their story.”

Gunn points out that the original color correction, as well as the original audio mix, were both done in what is now an older version of Final Cut Pro. He says, “You would be surprised how much you can do in Final Cut Pro. We certainly made it presentable enough for festival screenings and DVD screeners. With the tools available off-shelf today, it would be even easier to do it.”

On the audio side, once DEJ provided funding, the Drew Crew finally brought the project to a small Hollywood mixing facility called Sonic Pool, after showing the film for a year at festivals and private screenings with no professional audio mix beyond what was done originally in Final Cut Pro. Patrick Bird, supervising sound mixer at Sonic Pool, says the company used Digidesign Pro Tools, plug-ins, and some proprietary techniques to remove problem sounds, restore and improve dialogue and ambient sounds, and create an unorthodox 5.1 mix.

“All production audio was off the [original tapes], even the narration,” Bird recalls. “It was up to us to clean it all, balance it, and create a 5.1 mix that would sound natural. The problem was, normally, when you do a 5.1 mix, you put most dialogue on the center channel. But with in-camera audio, the whole movie would have been mono, just coming out of the center channel, and, combined with the ambient sounds, it would have been a wall of noise. We could have created new ambiences to place in the right and left speakers, but that would have taken forever, and it still would have been difficult to hear the dialogue. So, for most of the movie, we kept the stereo tracks from the camera as stereo: we put dialogue in the left and right speakers. This gave us a decent ambient bed with some sort of stereo spectrum to it. Consequently, the movie’s dialogue is in stereo, with light ambience added here and there. We mixed in the music at true 5.1, and it all came together. It was a little risky in terms of not being a true 5.1 mix, but I think that when it plays out in a movie theater, the dialogue is clearer, and yet, the overall track is raw, which fits their approach to the story.”

© 2009 Penton Media, Inc.