My lat­est film “Mes­sage in a Bot­tle” is finally com­plete. As I write this post, the film is being ren­dered and exported to quick­time. After which it will pre­mier on the inter­net. As a stand alone film, I will be the first to admit that this project was a dis­as­ter. The story was shal­low, and non­sen­si­cal, the cin­e­matog­ra­phy is rid­dled with jump cuts and other con­ti­nu­ity errors, and over­all the film just isn’t that inter­est­ing to watch. As my lit­tle brother remarked two min­utes into the film “This is long, bor­ing, and a com­plete waste of time”.

With that being said, I am actu­ally quite happy that I did the film. First of all, “Mes­sage in a Bot­tle” acquainted me with my new pro­fes­sional qual­ity cam­era and now that I am com­fort­able with it, I will have no prob­lem using it for my sum­mer projects.  I shot half the film dig­i­tally via the camera’s two hard dri­ves, and through reg­u­lar DV tapes. The dig­i­tal footage is eas­ier to shoot with, rewatch,  import into the com­puter,  and it’s in full on HD. The prob­lem is that it’s a pain to edit with. The audio comes in with 8 chan­nels for some rea­son (which totally rapes FCP), the footage is dif­fi­cult to cut into indi­vid­ual seg­ments, and due to it’s nature in FCP my favorite tran­si­tion the “cross dis­solve” is hard to accom­plish prop­erly. While HD is nice, I truly can’t jus­tify all the edit­ing headaches that dig­i­tal brings for a mar­ginal (and to me, barely notice­able) improve­ment in image qual­ity and screen res­o­lu­tion. Of course good old DV tapes have their draw­backs as well, but I am much more com­fort­able with using them, so I think I will stick with those for the remain­der of my time with this camera.

As far as cin­e­matog­ra­phy is con­cerned, the film starts out atro­cious, but towards the later seg­ments it really improves to the point where I want to be at. The rea­son for this is the fact that I was study­ing up by read­ing cin­e­matog­ra­phy books as I was film­ing this movie.  As I learned more about cin­e­matog­ra­phy, the actual cin­e­matog­ra­phy in this film grad­u­ally improved, so there’s a mark­able dif­fer­ence between the first seg­ment that I shot, and the last seg­ment that I shot. What I am par­tic­u­larly happy about is that I feel as if I finally have con­trol over the cam­era. I have a much bet­ter sense of get­ting com­po­si­tion­ally inter­est­ing shots and angles, my over­all shot selec­tion (vital for edit­ing pur­poses) is much bet­ter, and I think I have a bet­ter sense of pre­vent­ing match-cuts and con­ti­nu­ity errors. With that being said, the over­all cin­e­matog­ra­phy of this film is a mess, but it was learn­ing experience.

From a direct­ing stand­point I also learned quite a few lessons. We filmed this movie over two months, with a cou­ple con­sis­tent week­ends, then an inter­rup­tion because of finals and sum­mer vaca­tions, then we fin­ished it off. This pre­sented a lot of prob­lems. First, it was hard to get back into the groove and feel of the movie after such long inter­vals. Thomas’ hair grew and thus his hair changes size mid movie, scenery and set con­ti­nu­ity was also damn near impos­si­ble.  There was a lot of wasted time too, since we for­got vital props, cos­tumes, etc due to the long inter­vals between shoot­ing. I also couldn’t stand the thought of hav­ing an incom­plete movie loom­ing over me, as I pre­fer to stay focused on one project before mov­ing to the next, but I couldn’t move on to my other projects since I still had to com­plete “Mes­sage in a Bot­tle”. Over­all, given the way I make movies, it’s just best to pump out a film in the short­est, most con­sis­tent time possible.

To sum it all up, “Mes­sage in a Bot­tle” is more of an exper­i­men­tal film than any­thing else. I meshed musi­cal and cin­e­matog­ra­phy styles, it is based on an unortho­dox story, and it very much feels like I found my own style halfway through a rather bland and mean­ing­less film. I will be the first to admit that the story sucks, the film is unin­ter­est­ing, and it is just plain point­less. But it’s a major step­ping stone that I think will improve all of my future projects.  Stay tuned for me to post the actual film  within the next day, and also be ready for details on my lat­est projects.