Sydney Film Festival opening night

While you guys were all milling about in your lounge-rooms last Wednesday night, Krew Boylan, Matthew Moore and I were working our asses off on the red carpet. We were toiling to lay down a solid foundation of 'buzz' and 'hype' for the upcoming launch of our film... though we didn't actually have a film to show just yet.

You can catch a glimpse of our efforts here:

Go forward to 01:10 to skip the B-listers and get straight to the As.

We have a date for The Premiere

Some very good news.
We have a date for the premiere of ‘The Mind Job’.

It's going to be big. We have the main theatre of the Chauvel Cinema booked, and plans are afoot for a large after-party nearby.
We'll be sending out a proper invitation shortly, but I just wanted to make sure you block that night right out. And don't plan to operate any heavy machinery the next morning.

The details:
Chauvel Cinema
Wednesday, June 27, 7pm.

The film is in the final stages of development, and we're racing to get the last stages completed in time for the big screen.
I'm really pleased with how it's all come together – a true product of all the awesome peoples who've worked on it and supported it.

Stay tuned for the invite proper.

Picture is locked

I am very pleased to let you all know that we have completed the offline edit for the film.
This means that editing stage is completed and we can now begin the last stages of the process.

The editing has been a huge phase of the project, and I've been working very closely with Seth Lockwood from Method Studios in Melbourne. We've been working both remotely and together at Method's Sydney studio when Seth has been able to come up to Sydney. I can't praise him enough for his work, Seth's been a great companion on this part of the journey. He's been a rock of professionalism, a tower of editing knowledge, a pillar of wisdom and a mountain of story-telling strength – if you'll allow me to extend a metaphor that far.

I'm really pleased with how things are looking. We've had a few test screenings with people both inside and outside the industry, and with a mix of people who knew the project intimately and others I had never even met before. The responses have been awesome. I'm excited. I look forward to rolling out the red astro-turf for the premiere. The troubles we had with all the footage are now a distant memory. By some considerable amount of luck we have been able to cut together the film from the usable footage without ever having to use an inferior piece of footage.

Now begins the last phase: the final sound mix, adding in the visual effects, the music composition, colour grade and titles. And I'd better start looking a venues. You'd better start picking out frocks and socks.

Once again, I'll keep you posted on developments as we go, but we're definitely on the home stretch. Thanks to everyone for bearing with us – we're nearly there. I haven't forgotten all the goodies promised to those who have contributed to the film during our fund-raising phase. Stay tuned.

The Cannes Cut

First thing Monday morning a little package was picked up by international courier and whisked off to Cannes.
It should arrive in France on Wednesday, a day before the submission deadline.

Last week was crazy, a series of late nights of furious editing. We managed to get a rough cut finished just in time. It's pretty rough, which means our chance of being selected for the festival is somewhat reduced, but it's worth giving it a shot. Who knows? And if we do make the selection we will have the time to submit a finished version.

It's a huge relief to get it on its way. We can now concentrate on the finished version without such a hectic time-frame.

I'd like to thank Seth Lockwood, our editor, once again. He worked with me every night, despite having spent the day in the edit suite working on other jobs. Legend. For a while we thought we wouldn't get it finished, but fortunately we covered a lot of ground in the last couple of nights.

I'll keep you posted. Fingers crossed.

Time for an update

It's some time after 11 pm and I've just arrived home from the edit suite. That's when I thought: it's high time we had another one of those update things. The film is still very much underway, and we are getting closer by the minute. We've got another few nights of editing ahead of us. The plan is to get a working edit of the film off to the Cannes Film Festival by the end of the week. It'll be tight, but it's a good one to aim for.

I've got to say it's  a pretty big buzz to sit in front of a large telly and watch the scenes start to come alive and the characters come to life. Each step in the process now is about making it better and tighter and more awesomer.

Seth Lockwood, our editor, has been great. Editor by day, editor by night. Working into the night without a grumble. Seth's up from Melbourne this week so it's great to finally be able to sit in a room together and start to really refine the scenes. The Cannes short film duration maximum is 15 minutes, but thanks to everyone who contributed I've got about 14 minutes of credits to roll at the end. So yeah, thanks a lot contributors.

I'll try and keep you posted as the week goes on, and will let you know if we make our Cannes deadline... it'll be a squeeze. Once the working edit is sent off, we'll get back to finishing the film proper. And once we've done that we'll let you know. You might want to start to think about what you're going to wear.

Talk soon.

Wendy Ford Jewellery – a wee plug

I just wanted to put in a good and much deserved word of praise for Wendy Ford Jewellery. During our shoot they let us completely take over their shop in Randwick for a few hours while we filmed one of our scenes. Virginia and Wendy were both extremely accommodating and enthusiastic about the whole project, and were a pleasure to work with. It was very tricky getting access to a jewellery shop, particularly with the security issues of letting the likes of us around so much bling, so it was huge relief to get Wendy and Virginia on board. Thanks to Zoe Marsh for making this happen.

If you're a little short in the jewellery department, I encourage you to drop in on Wendy and Virginia and peruse their range of goodies. Here's a little bit about them:

Wendy Ford has been in the jewellery industry for over 30 years. Now working with daughter Virginia, their boutique offers a wide range of jewellery, specializing in one-off creations and made to order pieces. In addition to custom design diamonds, pearls and semi-precious stones, they also stock men’s & children’s jewellery and gifts as well as offering repairs and redesigns.

Contact:
36 Clovelly Road, Randwick
Ph: 8021 8228
www.wendyfordjewellery.com

The Mind Job – a post-production update

It's likely you've been thinking you haven't heard much about The Mind Job lately. Well there's a reason for this.

After an amazing, crazy week of shooting, just as we were about to crack into the editing process with all guns blazing... we hit a snag. A fairly hefty snag. I didn't think it was right to trouble you all with it until it was resolved, one way or the other.

When we started processing all the footage, we discovered we had some serious corruption issues with the footage which had somehow evaded detection during the shoot. I won't go into too much detail, but a significant number of takes were affected, and for a while it looked like we had lost so much footage that we weren't going to be able to finish the film with without a pretty serious reshoot. It's worth noting that the main location was demolished a couple of weeks after we shot. So someone was having a bit of a laugh. Ha ha... keep smiling, keep smiling.

We're still not sure exactly what happened, it's possible we never will, but it looks like it was a problem with the camera and how it was recording files while we were shooting. What we do know is that it's an extremely rare problem which practically no one in the industry had ever encountered. We had all the right measures in place, but somehow... it happened.

At the risk of sounding a bit soppy here, I've never been involved in something where I've felt so much support and enthusiasm from so many people. Everyone has been incredible and I have to say, during the last few weeks, that's really helped.

Since we began trying to recover the damaged footage, it's been a roller-coaster ride of breakthroughs and setbacks. I have to give a massive shout out to Nikki Rubino at Fanatic Films who has been absolutely incredible in doggedly looking for ways to save the footage. I'd also like to thank Suga Suppiah at Method Studios for all her hard work over the last few weeks, and thanks generally to Fanatic and Method for being absolutely incredible with their support.

As I mentioned, I didn't want to bring you all down with this news until we knew whether it was all over or all on... Well I'm pretty damn overjoyed to let you know it appears to be ALL ON. Last week we finished retrieving the last of the salvageable footage, and it's looks like we've saved enough footage to finish the film. And not only finish it, but finish it very close to the standard we have always envisaged (that's extremely high if you weren't sure). It might even give the film a certain quality otherwise unobtainable with uncorrupted footage.

This footage is now heading to the edit room, and we're back on track – a few weeks later than we'd planned, but back on track.

It was all going a little too smoothly, I must admit.