A Career In Momentum | A Poster Grrl's Story (Ason Intrigue edition)

Poster Grrl | By Fringe Life Squad

So, here we are, roughly 5 years in the making and my team @fringelifesquad is finally done with our new film Poster Grrl. This project, like all projects, has been a wild ride. We were faced challenges that were seemingly insurmountable, and somehow we surmounted them (to some degree). If you are reading this and you have made a film then you might understand what it means to deal with problems you never considered. The thing I am most proud about is how my team deals with pressure. We don't buckle, we strengthen. Today I am going to talk about the entire history of the making of this film and get detailed about all the work that went into it. You might want to grab some snacks if you plan on reading the whole thing, it's gunna take some time XD.

Before I get started I want to talk about the different online premieres for this. On June 19th (today) we will be posting an unlisted YouTube link here on Steem for anyone who finds it to watch for free. This will only be available for 7 days, after that we will be taking the film down for 1 month. After that we will be putting it on Amazon Prime and other VOD services. If you have an Amazon Prime account you will be welcome to stream the film. Otherwise you'll have to rent it (which we encourage jaja). So make sure you follow @fringelifesquad so you get your chance to see the movie for free. Or click on the play button above, just don't forget to follow my teams steemit blog. Ok on to the behind the scenes.

From The Streets To The Page

About 5 years ago Chelsea Anders (@cranders74) told me she wanted to make a short-ish film about her life experiences. I will let the film, and her, explain that part. But in short, she is one of the rare, amazing, humans who decided to recover from drug addiction. This film is lives in the period where she realized that rock bottom was as far down as she was willing to go. It takes a ton of courage to put your life story out there in art form. Especially when you have faced challenges like Chelsea has faced.

Pre-Production | Crafting A Street Life

When Chelsea finally turned a script in, she had about 15 pages. The general rule of thumb is that a page typically translates to about 1 min of runtime. Well...… we landed on roughly 45mins of run time in the end el-oh-el. But we had no idea that was going to happen when we started. When Chelsea and I sat down talk about some of the most important aspects of homelessness and addiction. One of which is, walking, wondering around throughout the day with no clear place to go or thing to do other than survive. We knew we had to really make the audience uncomfortable by how much walking is on screen. This aspect alone pushed our film into its long runtime. We really had to stick to our guns on this one because it is counterintuitive to what most people see in films. Normally you want to skip right over this stuff. Chelsea and I have both spent time on the streets and lived this realization. Our rational was "We had no option to simply skip over this part of our life." So it stayed in the film.

One of the other things we felt was important was to humanize this conversation. We really didn't want to use violence or shocking imagery to tell our story. Anyone can say, "Oh this story isn't about me, look how shocking this is." We wanted to make people realize that addiction is a sickness with real people who have real feelings, ambitions, desires to be accepted, etc. In the U.S. we tend to push our friends and family away because our culture spent a lot of time and money on criminalizing addiction. It's really heartbreaking because most addicts simply need someone to love them. Well, simply is an understatement.

While Chelsea was casting the film and finding locations in Ohio I was on another project back in Virginia. This was where I realized that Chelsea was a phenomenal producer. She found cast members that were so perfect and dedicated to making a great film. This is always the hardest part for me. It took us about 6 months to sort out everything we wanted and needed to make this film a success.

Production In High Anxiety

For this film we had to be really careful about carried the weight of which jobs. Keenan Parry (@thelocomotive) took on the burden of Director Of Photography. Chelsea and I were to direct while Angela Makeever jumped in as an Assistant to the Directors. We decided to shoot this project on the Black Magic URSA, the OG version that was like 20lbs. With a 4.6 sensor it's 4k footage is incredible. Coupled with BMD's huge file sizes (because it has such great dynamic range), we felt confident we would get the look exactly how we wanted it. We knew we were going to present in 2k, so shooting in 4k scaling down gives you great fidelity. If you want to learn more about what all that means I would recommend looking up the making of Gone Girl by David Fincher. They talk about this technique a lot. We shot on Rokinon Cine-lenses because we didn't want a super crisp looing feel. These lenses tend to be right on the cusp of really crisp but slightly rough.

Image Source

This camera set up was merely the beginning of our technical issues. It was only an issue due to it's weight. Keenan was exhausted 100% of the time from shoulder rigging this whole film. I was so proud of his dedication though, he didn't simply hand the camera off to me when he was tired. He would soldier through every shoot, accept 1 shot, when he was running up and down stairs about 15 hours into a 20hr day. Yes, that is correct, we woke up and shot scenes for 20hrs straight on 1 day. The really real problems began with the audio. Normally we hire an audio guy to handle all this. But our audio guy moved to Texas and we didn't have time to get someone to replace him. So we rented gear, which we do all the time. However, this time the microphone that was sent to us had a bad connection. There was no using it, there was nothing but pops and crackles. We had to make a very hard decision early on, ADR. ADR stands for Automatic Dialogue Replacement, which is the technique where the actors come in a record their dialog over their performances. Normally you would mix the studio recordings with the field recordings. We had to rely on the studio recording wholly. Luckily we worked with Joey Gurwin at Oranjudio, who is an incredible engineer. He made this process very smooth. So as you are watching this film, you may catch this haha.

Some of the rest of the issues were more so small nuisances in comparison to these major issues. But our team took each lick without skipping a beat. We moved from one fire to the next putting them out and staying creative. I couldn't have been prouder of the cast and crew when it came to being tough. Especially Keenan and Danielle (lead actress) because they were there for every hour of shooting, carrying the torch.

Post-Production Over A Chasm

Post-Production on this project began almost right away. I stayed a few days at Keenan's apartment in NYC so we could at least get the major organization goals sorted out. We initially thought we would knock this edit out right away. But once we started watching takes and figuring out how the film is supposed to flow. We knew this was going to be a much longer process. Something you care about tends to hit you in the gut when you have to cut it together. You start caring about every single second of runtime. Unfortunately this project was in post-production for years. We had to work around work schedules and limited budgets. But Keenan and I never lost our passion and we never felt the pressure to finish sooner than we could. We really wanted to make sure we did everything right. Keenan (@thelocomotive) plans on doing a blog about his work in this area and as a DoP, so stay tuned for that.

Sound Designing The Rough and Rugged

For all our prior films @illpoetic handled all of our sound design. For those who may not know, sound design encompasses all those sound effects and atmospheric sounds you hear in films. This was probably the biggest film we had done yet and Ill Po and myself underestimated how much work this would be. In the end both of us realized we don't want anything to do with that work again. Of course he did the majority of the work. But it was the bane of this film no question. The work is just far too tedious and not creative enough for us to be excited about it. We decided that we will find someone next time around lol. For the score though, we had a blast with this part. Our first goals were to reach out to my favorite rock band from Columbus Ohio El Jesus De Magico. I had them in mind for this project from the time Chelsea told me how she wanted the film to look, feel and sound. I sent several messages to the band until I got the dreaded, "Sorry we are no longer together." I knew they weren't doing much anymore but I was super sad to hear they weren't even recording anymore. I talked to a few friends I have worked on scores with before and everyone was so busy we couldn't get in a studio together. At this point the writing was on the wall, I had to write the score. I normally write very electronic based music and we had no intentions to do have that sort of sound. We wanted a grunge-sludge-punk feel and I hadn't touched a guitar in over a decade, even though I own one (actually 3). However I did not have an amp. Chelsea and I researched different amps the Kurt Cobain and other grunge artists used. We landed on a B-52 AT-100 half stack tube amp. It had a certain rustic vibe that made punk sound gorgeous. The good news is that I never lost my knowledge of how to play some raw punk rock. I also happened to meet my, now long term right hand in music Jay Beard (Justin Chomas). We were already in the process of forming our band Kindred Bay featuring Bobby Rangel and (at the time) Lila Luna Naniki. We all teamed up and put it down for this score. We worked super hard to create unique sounds. In the end almost every inch of what we recorded got used for the film while Ill Po added some soundtrack songs by artists on the label we are both on Definition Music (@definitionmusic). When all was said and done I am still most proud of the score. It went from "How can we even do this" to "Wow, this is better than we ever expected.

I plan on doing a separate blog detailing the work on the score as that was it's own project.

From The Streets To The Silver Screen

It took us so much time and so much work to get this thing to the big screen. We worked with Gateway Film Center in Columbus Ohio. It was one of those events that was both exciting and frustrating. We had the film at about 85% and we didn't realize it until the film was running. I am sure the viewers didn't recognize the issues I recognized. But that is ok, that is the curse of being a creator. Everyone had a really good time, the after party was a freaking blast. We had our friends and family there to celebrate our hard work and that is worth more than all the crypto on the planet. Thankfully my good friend Kasper aka @kasperjames shot and cut a little video for the event. I just dragged him here to steem so check him out.

To Sum It Up

Well this is what I experienced while making this film. There was so much more I didn't talk about and some more I plan on posting about, such as a deeper dive into the score. Also, the rest of the team plans on do deep dive article about this project from their own perspectives. I will be resteeming and helping them with theirs so stay tuned so you can follow the whole story of the film. I hope you enjoy the film itself and let us know on our teams newly formed steemit blog @fringelifesquad.

We are currently raising funds for our next film Sex & Violence if you want to help please let us know!!!! We want to see if Steem is a place where we can start a project and get it made with this communities efforts. We are looking for help, suggestions, ideas, paths, people to talk to. So please let us know what is up.

Namaste,
XD

A Career In Momentum | A Poster Grrl's Story (Ill Poetic edition)

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