Hole In The Wall

AS PROMISED, MY NEXT BABY! anyone...still...there?

Fri, 17 May 2013 22:16:00 -0500

AS PROMISED, MY NEXT BABY! anyone...still...there?:

http://burntpeanuts.tumblr.com/

7th Public Screening! Another amazing little festival - Big...

Fri, 09 Nov 2012 10:57:06 -0600

7th Public Screening! Another amazing little festival - Big Waters Film Festival.

I’m honored to share “Hole in the Wall” with these great people of Washburn, WI.

They have a BEAUTIFUL theater where they show all the films and where everyone gathers around the bar, sharing stories and hot toddies! If you haven’t been before…GO!

http://bigwaterfilmfestival.org/

Sixth Public Screening! Tomorrow night, Friday, 10/26, 7pm Edina...

Thu, 25 Oct 2012 20:33:27 -0500

Sixth Public Screening!

Tomorrow night, Friday, 10/26, 7pm

Edina Film Festival

Fifth Screening!

Thu, 12 Jul 2012 19:35:00 -0500

Hole in the Wall is in the line-up for this year’s FREE RANGE FILM FESTIVAL (one of my favorite ‘cause it’s IN A BARN!)

http://freerangefilm.com/

Saturday, July 28th at 2:40pm

The address of the big old barn is 909 Cty. Rd. 4.

Here’s how to get there.

From Duluth:
Travel south on I-35. Take Exit 239. Head south on Highway 45 through Carlton. Through no fault of your own, Highway 45 transforms itself into County Road 1. Take County Road 1 through Wrenshall and beyond to the intersection with County Road 4. Take a right and look for the barn.

From Minneapolis:
Travel north on I-35. Take Exit 227. Head east on County Road 4. Follow the signs to Wrenshall until just before you get to the intersection with County Road 1. The barn will be waiting there for you.

Fourth Public Screening!

Thu, 05 Jul 2012 08:03:00 -0500

HOLE IN THE WALL was invited to screen at Cinema & Civics - movies and music in Stevens Square Park!

Wednesday, July 11th, movies start at dusk

http://www.cinemaandcivics.org/site_12/main/?p=home

NEW portfolio website!!

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 16:34:48 -0500

NEW portfolio website!!

3rd Public Screening

Fri, 16 Mar 2012 16:00:49 -0500

HOLE IN THE WALL just got invited to the Mpls/St. Paul International Film Festival!

Monday, April 16th, 7pm

St. Anthony Main

*tickets on sale soon at mspfilmfest.org

Video

Wed, 29 Feb 2012 21:36:23 -0600

2nd public screening!

Sat, 11 Feb 2012 15:22:01 -0600

Cinema Lounge; Bryant Lake Bowl on WEDNESDAY, Feb. 15th - 7pm!

FIRST SNEAK PREVIEW!

Mon, 05 Dec 2011 18:13:12 -0600

IFP MN

NOT on December 9th - NOW scheduled for Friday, January 13th as part of their Member Photo exhibit and MNTV shorts program. Stay tuned for more details…

Thank you so much to all the guys at Pixel Farm - Joe...

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 16:25:00 -0500

Thank you so much to all the guys at Pixel Farm - Joe Mechtenberg, Dave Sweet, Bill Kruse and Paul Clark - but ESPECIALLY to Mark Steele. rock star.

IFP SCREENING

Fri, 07 Oct 2011 16:38:30 -0500

First official screening of the film will be at IFP Members’ Show

Friday, December 9th, 2011. Time: TBD

IFP: 2446 University Ave W, Suite 100, St. Paul, MN

I lied. It’s so not the end. Here, watch some of the...

Fri, 07 Oct 2011 16:22:00 -0500

I lied. It’s so not the end. Here, watch some of the middle! Compliments of Melody Gilbert, documentarian extraordinaire.

(On one superficial note, I hope you will all recognize how much more important it is to me to share the behind-the-scenes than it is for me to vainly dwell on my low-angle double chin)

"In my end is my beginning"

Wed, 28 Sep 2011 16:44:49 -0500

“In my end is my beginning”

- T.S. Eliot

This is me. Getting off this drug called, “making a...

Wed, 28 Sep 2011 16:38:48 -0500

This is me. Getting off this drug called, “making a movie”.

The end.

Wed, 28 Sep 2011 16:37:00 -0500

Not really. With all due respect, this project is NOT finished, per se - in the sense that…it literally is in a few pieces, waiting to be assembled - and then there are festival submissions and screenings…and, and…BUT a new Fresh Filmmaker has been crowned and the reality is, it’s time for me to sign off. Seriously. I’ve had my time. More than my time…and I’m all set to pass the torch. Honestly.

This blog (god, still not digging that word..) has been a great joy to uphold - whomever is out there…hello? thank you for following. I WILL continue to post screening announcements - you will be able to find them here! And I’ll probably be starting another blog…all about my next baby. If you just want some food to fodder, I posted it before, but here’s my original b_og, that I really need to update:

http://www.adamandeveandalltheseotherpeople.blogspot.com/

In honor of all those FRESH FILMMAKER applicants, frantically...

Sun, 11 Sep 2011 15:19:00 -0500

In honor of all those FRESH FILMMAKER applicants, frantically revising their scripts today for tomorrow’s deadline:

Running on sand is hard. So is making a movie. If it doesn’t ever hurt, you’re not doing it right.

Navigating the Landing

Sun, 11 Sep 2011 15:09:00 -0500

Good Lord. Seriously. Why did I think the Post production on this project would be smooth sailing? I’m a total delusional idealist ~ emphasis on the delusional.

Carrie Bush, my 1st AD (and an accomplished director in her own right!) and I were having a “catch up” the other day and I heard these words fall out of her mouth, “Didn’t you say we were going to see a rough cut of the film in May?”….uh. really? What month is it? Who said that? For future reference: Do NOT listen to nor believe anything that comes out of a director’s mouth within the first 48 hours of wrapping a shoot. I would imagine it’s like asking a woman who’s just given birth if she wants a beer and a bag of Doritos now…or in six months.

After months and months and months of editing this baby, I finally had a day when I just watched the film, BY MYSELF, for myself and I said TO MYSELF, I’m done. PICTURE LOCKED. Because, at the end of the day, everyone is going to have an opinion, a thought, a suggestion, a realization - and it’s all WONDERFUL, but as the director YOU really need to have the final say - and that can be really hard to hear with a thousand other voices ringing in your ears.

I took my picture lock EDL/XML (?) upstairs to Pixel Farm where the wonderful colorist, Dave Sweet, was going to reassemble my film transfer according to my final digital files, and then we could start color correction. A couple days later I get a call from Mr. Sweet saying, “you know, I think your time code is messed up. I’m having trouble reassembling your cut”. Cue technical mudslide.

With the unrelenting help and assistance from Mark Steele and Carl Jacobs, editor at Splice Here (that was a PLUG in case it didn’t read as such…) - I was able to figure out what went wrong (my timecode in my Final Cut project got messed up when I did the synching work, i.e. matching up the sound files and picture files, and then REIMPORTED them back into Final Cut) - it was a manual task that only took me about 2 hours to fix!

Then Mark Steele realized my frame rate was incorrect, than John Sims (sound mixer/designer extraordinaire) realized the frame rate of the sound files were no longer matching up to the “fixed” picture, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah…seriously. It felt like the mud slide of tech words that would not end. BUT the learning curve was also fast and furious. I have great respect and appreciation for everyone who kept me calm (Mark Steele/Dave Sweet/John Sims) - this process has been no less harrowing (for me) than what I can imagine it was for those guys landing the 25th mission of the Memphis Belle. That’s a complete exaggeration, but I refuse to erase that last statement.

…and the reality is, I’ve been through so much on this marathon of a film that it seems perfectly within the natural order of things to have to push and struggle through these last few miles. I’ve run marathons before, and I have to admit the harder you have to push at the end, the more it hurts, the sweeter the feeling of crossing that finish line!

Cut Cut, So What

Thu, 11 Aug 2011 12:41:40 -0500

I asked Kevin Russell - the editor I’ve been working with - to give his perspective on the whole (in the wall) editing experience. His words (all of them, I swear) below:

I’ve worked with very few people like Amanda Becker in the local film community. She’s a director that’s somehow able to give you just enough information without those fruitless details that can restrict your own thoughts on the project or process. Where she leaves off in her critiques is a very conscious moment to give you open room and welcome new ideas. I was very appreciative of her willingness to continually look at her film, her story. and her process with freshness.

As for ‘who in the world is this guy and what does he have to do with this project anyway’, well… I began editing “Hole in the Wall” about a month ago. She came to Splice (a post production house in downtown Minneapolis where I work as an editor) with some heavy concerns about the structure and strength of her film. Helping to solve these issues seemed promising for me, as someone who jumped into editing for the analytical side, and I think exciting for Amanda to have someone external look into the post work. As for my openness to work on a project that was already well under way in the edit, I must say that I’m quite intrigued by the thought of helping a director figure out exactly what kind of film they may or may not have on their hands. That kind of exploratory process doesn’t necessarily happen too often in some of the more commercial work I deal with day to day, where you might have strict guidelines for the outcome. So I started from the beginning with her edit to figure out just that: what kind of film she may or may not have.

From the first day of editing, one of the focal points was to try and develop a more abstract nature to the form. Since I’ve worked in music videos for the last few years, it came naturally to try and bring out the ambiguity in the story and lessen the literal aspects. So I took about a week on my own to work with the film and sent Amanda a rough cut soon after. Initially, I think it was refreshing for Amanda to see a very different approach to the material and the story and overall it felt like the original feeling of what she was trying to accomplish was still intact.

Cut after cut, we developed a more abstract, tightened, and ambiguous short film. I let the visuals tell more of the story, removed quite a bit of dialog, and worked to build a fitting mix to the audio, complete with strange hums and children’s voices. This lead to a shorter and seemingly moodier film then the original version, which was longer and fairly linear. This also lead to a much different version of the film then I think Amanda was ultimately intending.

Throughout this entire process, Amanda was fairly open to manipulating the material in new ways, whether it was working for the better or worse, and she was always aware of the general direction she wanted to take the film, so I wasn’t wondering in the dark. Eventually and inherently with editing in that style though, the abstract nature was pushed too far and we needed to bring it back to a more formal approach so the audience wasn’t lost. I did just that and we ended up with a hybrid version. This new and currently the most recent edit, incorporated many of our individual ideas into one fairly cohesive short film. The only thing that was missing was just a touch of that initial feeling in the original cut Amanda had put together.

That’s where I left off. Right now, I would imagine Amanda is eating some kind of nut mix and drinking a lot of coffee wrapping up the edit and finding that last little touch to make it her unique approach to storytelling. I was very supportive of this collaborative process and more then happy to have Amanda develop the final feel to her film. Throughout the last month, we both stretched ourselves to find out what was possible after the production. I think sometimes you can go into editing expecting it to be an easy ride with lots of options, but it’s when you really push the material beyond even the only options you thought you had, that you find out just what you can accomplish with your work.

"Perseverance is the hard work you do after you get tired of doing the hard work you already did"

Tue, 02 Aug 2011 15:59:15 -0500

“Perseverance is the hard work you do after you get tired of doing the hard work you already did”

- Newt Gingrich