Without a constant barrage of problems to solve, human beings would have a hard time living up to their potential.
There is a lot that goes into the making of any feature film and proper planning helps to mitigate the vast array of hurdles you must overcome in order to make it all the way to the finish line.
Inevitably, no matter how much planning you have done, unforeseeable obstacles will pop up and smack you right in the face.
When making a feature film, there are always going to be problems. It’s how you deal with them that matters most.
I’m going to tell you about the pitfalls I encountered while making The Devil’s Instrument, as well as the creative solutions I came up with to solve them.
This Video is Not Going to Work
In the months leading up to the production of The Devil’s Instrument, I was pretty confident that I knew how I was going to shoot everything except for the title sequence (the main credits for the film).
I thought about driving around with the camera and shooting the title sequence that way, but I’ve seen all those shots a million times before.
I wanted the title sequence to be unique.
I’ve been drawing for as long as I can remember, so I thought to myself, “Maybe I’ll do a few drawings and put that into the title sequence.”
But what was I going to draw?
The film is about a wealthy novelist trying to get out of a deal he made with the devil. It’s also about the protagonist’s struggle and regret.
So, I decided to draw hell. That would at least be interesting. I wanted to draw two separate instances of hell.
One being of the people suffering and being tormented in hell, and the other would be of all the demons in hell.
However, I didn’t want the pictures to just be stationary during the title sequence. I wanted the pictures to be dynamic.
I thought about shooting the pictures in a variety of different ways while moving the camera.
In order to do that, however, I knew the pictures would have to be pretty big.
I constructed two canvases out of watercolor paper that were about as big as the table I was using.
They ended up being about five feet by three feet. I like to draw on watercolor paper from time to time because of the texture and the specific look it gives me. I did end up getting the full use out of the paper eventually, though, as I’ll explain in a moment.
I did some initial sketches on both and then I went over the lines with a sable brush and India ink.
They were looking pretty good, but I still felt they were missing a lot of detail.
I decided to turn them into paintings, more or less, using the India ink.
You can mix different amounts of water and India ink to create all different shades of grey, and this is the technique I used to fill in all of the details.
I’m glad I decided to use watercolor paper, otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to use the water and India ink together to complete the job.
After I was finished with those two, I still felt I would need one more piece.
I was pretty tired from completing the first two, and I didn’t want to put in the time to make the third one as detailed as the first two were, so I created symbols for the third one.
This also differentiated it from the first two and would add more variety to the title sequence.
Once we got on set, I would shoot these pictures in a variety of different ways before everyone got there and after everyone had left for the day.
I did this until I felt I had more than enough footage to complete the title sequence.
After we wrapped production and I was in the middle of editing the film, it was now time to do the title sequence.
I took the video of the pictures and put them on the timeline in Adobe Premiere Pro CC, but I was less than thrilled with the results.
The video just didn’t look good. It was shaky, out of focus, and even after some color correction and grading, it still didn’t look good.
I’m all about putting lipstick on a pig if I’m already in love with the pig, but in this instance, I was not.
I finally came to my senses and said, “This video is not going to work.”
But what was I going to do?
This video was all I had for the title sequence, so, I had to find some way for it to work.
I thought the pictures were good and that they could still work for the title sequence.
So, I put the video into Adobe Photoshop CC and grabbed some stills from it.
These stills looked pretty rough and I had to do a lot of work on them.
I added some textures and adjustment layers to make them look old, as if they had come from some ancient, forbidden text.
Then, I had to add some filters to sharpen them, but even after all of that, they still weren’t working with the titles.
I ended up inverting the line art and I turned the black lines into white. This did the trick.
Yet, it still wasn’t dynamic. Instead of the video, I now had stills.
What I ended up doing was going into the Effects Controls panel in Premiere Pro and adding keyframes to the Scale and Position of each of the stills.
If you increase the Scale of a clip as time goes by, it looks as if the picture is coming towards you.
You can change the Position and Rotation as well, to keep a point of interest toward the center of the frame. This gave me the dynamic look I was after.
It was a lot of work, but I got the title sequence I wanted. Disaster averted.
What else could go wrong?
Well, I Guess We Don’t Have a Film Then
Most of the problems you will encounter when making a feature film usually won’t become evident until you get into post-production.
I found this to be the case while I was making The Devil’s Instrument.
I was editing a scene and I couldn’t find the right shots that would enable me to end it properly.
I had been at it for a while and I decided to move on to another scene, and I would return to the other one later.
Everything was going fine until I got to the end of that scene. I couldn’t find the right shots to transition from one scene to the next.
I couldn’t understand it. I got all the shots I needed and had filmed everything in the script.
Why wasn’t anything working?
The problem was that the script said something to the effect of: They walk back to the desk and sit down, or: They move away from the desk.
This is one line in the screenplay, but in the film, it turned out to be long, slow, and boring.
It was just dead, and every transition was like that.
This was bad.
It didn’t matter what I put in there. The transitions weren’t working and they weren’t going to work.
After a while I just said to myself, “Well, I guess we don’t have a film then.”
I took a week off and tried to think of anything I could do to save the film.
This was not going to be an easy fix, and I wondered if it could even be fixed at all.
I don’t know what made me think of this, but I started thinking about some of my favorite films and all of the creative ways in which they told their stories.
I realized that in some of them, they utilized chapters to serve as transitions and keep the story moving forward.
I didn’t know if it would work or not, but it was the only potential solution that I had.
So, I went through the script to see where I could add chapters. I had to come up with titles for each of the chapters that subtly described the scene(s) and then insert them into the proper place.
Amazingly, they seemed to work well enough, but they were also missing something. The black background under the chapter titles just wasn’t doing it for me.
The story is about a famous novelist, so, I decided to put those pictures that I had drawn for the title sequence under the chapter titles to make them look like they were part of a book.
If I wasn’t glad that I had drawn those pictures before, I sure was now.
Everything fell into place and now I had a film again.
This was really amazing because in the original script, there is no mention of any chapters. I had to make them all up to act as transitions for each scene in order to save the film.
To everyone who has seen the film, the chapters seem natural and give the impression that they were part of the plan all along.
In reality, however, nothing could be further from the truth.
Can I Do That?
If the video doesn’t give you enough problems to deal with, don’t worry, there is always audio.
I spent a lot of time cleaning up the dialogue in The Devil’s Instrument. That is just part of the job. I did automated noise reduction and then I went in and manually removed lip smacks, clicks, and pops.
But, at one point, I noticed that one of the actors said something that was just a little off.
He used the word “just” in a sentence, which changed its meaning. And it was the wrong meaning.
He said something “just” happened, when in the story it had happened a long time ago. This could potentially confuse the audience and mess up the story.
I couldn’t belief I hadn’t noticed it before.
I didn’t think it was going to be all that difficult to fix. I just went back to the audio files and looked for the other takes.
To my surprise, however, he said the line the exact same way in all three takes we had filmed.
I was surprised that I didn’t notice this on set, but, in my defense, it is just one word.
The only problem is that it just takes one word to completely change the meaning of a sentence.
I thought about calling the actor and rerecording the dialogue.
Before I did, however, I thought I might just try to take the word out.
But I thought, “Can I do that?”
Wouldn’t the audience notice if I completely took a word out while an actor was speaking with a camera right in his face?
I decided to give it a shot.
I took the word out, did some cross-fading, and then came the moment of truth.
I played the video and, much to my amazement, it worked.
The way in which the actor moved his mouth or didn’t move his mouth completely masked the fact that I deleted a whole word out of what he was saying.
It’s really amazing what you can do with the technology available today, but the greatest tool that you have to solve the problems in front of you will always be your own creativity and your ability to think outside the proverbial box.
Use that creativity to its fullest and it will never disappoint you.
