JUNE UPDATE: IN THE PIT

This entry was posted on 6/28/2007 3:44 PM and is filed under Post Production.

It's been almost two months now working in solitude in a small, dark room, lit only by the glow of the monitors. I work seven days a week for about 18 to 22 hours each day then stumble from my work station onto the couch against the back wall of my little office and sleep for two to six hours before doing it all over again until the days have blurred into months. I literaly jump off the couch once my batteries are recharged, eager to get right back at it. Sure, I've lost all concept of time, but I make each one of my progress milestones, excited to see everything taking form, coming together into something greater than the sum of its parts.

I asked my producer Gabriele Andres if she ever knew anyone with this kind of drive before so she gave me a DVD of Bruce Springsteen's "Wings For Wheels" video of the making of his Born To Run album. That guy did the same damn thing, living in the recording studio for a year, working around the clock to produce what he hoped would be his breakout hit. That kind of focus and dedication is how anything substantial ever gets accomplished, so it's good to know that I'm doing it the same way. It's a marathon that I intend to win by running though this work faster and with more drive than ever as I get closer to the finish line, long after anyone else would be stumbled and quit. I live that every day.

I just finished editing the second of three Acts of the rough cut, including the preliminary visual effects as I've been editing, otherwise I would have been done with a simple two hour rough cut a month ago. The rough cut is now at 1 hour and 23 minutes with another 40 minutes waiting for me to cut into Act 3. This film won't be two hours of drawn out talking head scenes on a handful of sets that fizzles out half way through the movie like most other low budget indie films you've ever seen. I'm cutting over 50 hours of footage into two hours of tight action scenes that run from one to two minutes each, averaging a cut every two to three seconds apart, except for a few dynamic steadicam shots.

To give you an idea of the density this feature has, we filmed in more than 40 locations for a 120 minute film. That means every 3 minutes or so, the audience is seeing something new while they are hurtling through the story with furious momentum that snowballs as the jeopardy escalates toward its climax. That's how blockbuster films are structured. Low budget indie films under $10 million usually lack that kind of production density and momentum, substituting expository for drama and jeopardy. There are a few exceptions to that, and that's usually when a low budget indie film gets it right and hits. This feature is coming together, just like one of those exceptions.

Sure, everyone has heard all of the ridiculous movie mogul talk around town, the weekly claims of getting "greenlighted" by one studio or another, unfunded movie projects in pre-production for years, the multi-picture deals, the "power lunches", and all of the other delusions of gradeur that always amount to nothing. But this film isn't about talking big, I'm not in the B.S. production business. I'm quietly going about the business of making a big feature film that has never been done before on this scale with a built-in profit margin. I'm not talking, I'm doing it. That's the distinction. Below are a few screen shots of my preliminary visual effects from "The Pit" scene so you can get an idea of the scope of Mary Shelley's THE LAST MAN:

Remember all of those corpses that the National Guard tossed into the garbage container trucks back at the hospital scene when everyone was dying from the pandemic and the corpses were piling up in the hallways of the hospilat? Here lies what remains after the mass cremation.

From the rim of the Pit, Lionel looks over the military operations where the corpses were being disposed of before the National Guard were overcome by the pandemic themselves. Intercut with the live footage we already filmed at the Pit with the dead soldiers and the military vehicles, the scope of the scene is epic on screen.

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