I arrived last Sunday to stay with friends in Wolfeboro. A lovely and quaint summer resort town that bills itself as America’s Original Summer Resort. On the shore of Lake Winnipesaukee, this is a town with no traffic lights, no fast food restaurants and postcard classic charm. It’s also probably the least socially diverse town I have visited during my 5 month tour of the eastern USA. But still, it is a visually stunning place. Staying with friends, after so many months of doing housesitting gigs in places I did not have any friends, has been amazing. Watching parents raise kids again and hearing all the conversations I used to have with my kids was wonderful and grounding.

I had planned on having the movie done before I got here. I wasn’t going to using my guest room as The Last Shark Movie Making HQ. But that’s how it went. I would work all day while my friends and their kids did their day to day lives of work and school. I would try to stop when they were home in the evenings, which was hard to do, with so much work still to do.

Where am I on the work? Hmmm….when I arrived I had done zero work on audio levels. I had done zero work on color grading.

Normally sound and color I would farm out to someone else. I know where my strengths are and these are not mine. But with a budget of essentially zero dollars…I kind of knew that these tasks would eventually land in my lap.

I had been looking at this movie for so long in its “as is” condition…viewing the footage and audio as originally captured, for so many months that my eye and ear had become accustomed to how things looked and sounded in our selected clips. Until I reached this point of making the movie, I had no idea how much help the look and sound needed. Also I have never been one to do much with sound or color grading for video. I have never had to really. I have always captured my own and therefore was controlling the quality of both so I didn’t have to do much in post production. But also, I just never have learned color grading. This movie also is the first that I have tackled that has underwater footage-a whole different kettle of fish. So in my time here the movie has gone through a huge transformation. Here the movie hit the long awaited “picturelock” milestone. Which also means timelock. Which means that the composers can now do their work second by second for each scene. The movie also locked in all the final narration. With those two pieces finally in place, we had a movie…just with wildly divergent lighting and visual elements and sound levels all over the place. Also…no OST or music yet.

As I leave today we now have a movie that has much improved color grading. I can’t claim to be great at this task. But when I drag the opacity slider down on the adjustment layers for comparison it’s rather astonishing at how much good color was hiding in those clips. The movie looks so much better now it’s honestly hard to believe. How much you can do with any clip all depends on how it was shot. If it’s overexposed in the pre you can’t do a full rescue in post. In all of these outdoor interview shots the sun was playing hide and seek with the clouds. The interviews also lasted long enough that the sun shifted quite a lot. This would be challenging for any Director of Photography to contend with. So for me, in post…it is what it is. For a first time color grader it’s been daunting to achieve any kind of visual consistency with those conditions. The name of the game is “I can only do my best”. So it’s both satisfying to improve the looks and also there are many moments where I am just like “WTF!!!??? I can’t do this!!!” There is a reason you hire the experts lol.

I am not yet done with the full grading. I would say I am about 75% done with the first pass. Then I will rewatch the export and just keep refining over and over right up until the Premiere date on November 7th. But overall I would say the movie literally looks 60% better already. And that’s a really good place to be. It’s a 1 hour and 21 minute movie and I have probably put over 20 hours into grading.

And as for the sound….wow. I am also not a sound mixer. Never have been. In that area things were much easier. Once I got the hang of things I was able to fly. I probably did 20 hours of sound. The sound is like 90% better than it was as received on the hard drive. Sometimes the voices, once repaired, were so rich and deep that I nearly cried. I had no idea how much good audio was hiding. And the reason it’s emotional is because I have put everything into this movie- the message is so important. Hearing the voices sound so good means the message gets across so much more powerfully.

That’s my story. I am truly so very exhausted. I am glad to be here with good friends but still…the final editing process of sound and color has been taxing and isolating and man…after 5 months of this I am definitely nearing the end of my ability to work without any kind of real breaks or time off from staring at screens. I only have to last until about November 5th.

Today I have what will be the second to last meeting with the composers and with the co director on the music being created. I am really looking forward to that. Dropping in their final OST will be a really huge and nearly final move to the work. Then it’s off to the next house. Vermont. Staying with good friends again. I probably won’t get much work done at their house unfortunately. I will mostly review the film many times and make notes of what to tweak.

And then we come to the final house. A mountain cabin in Bolton Valley VT. That’s where this I will have 5 final days, Nov 1-Nov 5, to finish everything that I can before the Premiere. My plan is to just work around the clock, once more, to march out onto the timeline and get the movie made. After that all I can say is that I did my best under the circumstances as a full time volunteer for half a year. If you can’t tell from my tone, yeah…I am beat. I can still rally and I do but yeah…wow…I am tired.

At least yesterday I did force myself to take a small break. My friend here convinced me I needed one, which obviously I do. I hopped onto a paddleboard and she in a kayak and we spent 3 hours floating around on a gorgeous NH lake. The wind would rise and a school of golden leaves would swim through the air around us, shimmering in the dappled light. At one point I just laid down on my back on the board and let it all go. It was a good time. Then I went back to the house and worked til midnight.

And because I have now color graded I have to say no…I did not color correct this snap that Julie took LOL. But yep. that’s me playing around with crossbow strokes and sculling away for fun.