The super-deluxe HD version of the trailer is now up at Apple. Me like.
It’s not showing up on AppleTV yet, for whatever reason. I don’t know what subset makes it through, but I presume it’s coming at some point.
The super-deluxe HD version of the trailer is now up at Apple. Me like.
It’s not showing up on AppleTV yet, for whatever reason. I don’t know what subset makes it through, but I presume it’s coming at some point.
Just so you know, the radio silence around the trailer competition is not for lack of interest or intent. Stuff got very crazy, very quickly, and we had a hard enough time getting the real trailer finished up. (Plus there was other stuff going on.)
We have all the clips ready to go, but we’re going to delay the launch until sometime early in September. That will give people — the New York and Los Angeles people — a chance to see the movie. And it will give us about five seconds to breathe.
Because I’m a curious geek, I threw all the trailer competition footage into Apple’s new iMovie 2008. The good news is that the application seems optimized for MP4 footage — it was really simple to throw the clips together. The bad news is that the program is almost unusable, at least for anything beyond the most basic vacation footage.
Some frustrations:
I really wanted to like the program. It demoes well. But it’s a disaster.
It’s up. IGN has an exclusive first look. Stop reading and…
Then come back and tell us what you thought. Or better yet, check out the Forum at lookforthenines.com.
There’s a YouTube version as well. Not as big or sharp, but handier.
Looking through my YouTube account, I realized that I’d actually posted (and blogged about) our location scouting footage more than a year ago, shortly after we’d wrapped shooting.
I thought I’d go back and grab screencaps from the movie to show you what some of these places looked like as shot. (The following are in the order of the clip, not the order in which they play in the movie.)
No, it’s not a plate shot. The trees really are that Burton-esque.
Half an hour outside of Los Angeles. If those mountains look familiar, that’s because they were featured every week on M.A.S.H. Yup, it’s “Korea.”
Securing a “forest road” was surprisingly difficult. Bonus note for the DVD: Everything green on the ground was poison oak. We had to destroy some padded blankets afterwards, because it was impossible to get the itch out of them.
Probably our single most difficult location. A blind curve, and a 360-degree shot, on a hot day without shade.
Yards away from the previous location was this great trail. The biggest challenge was keeping the wireless mikes in range during a two-minute walk-and-talk.
The Hearst Building downtown stood in for several places. A sheriff’s department booking area…
…an adjoining hallway…
..and a very seedy Hollywood motel room.
I scouted New York locations while meeting up with Hope Davis to pre-record a song she sings in the film. That’s when we picked the Millennium Broadway Hotel as our base:
Keep in mind, the location scouting clip only includes the places we ended up shooting. It took us weeks to find (and secure) the places we wanted to film. This was my first time scouting with a videocamera, but I can’t imagine doing it without one. Photos alone don’t give you a sense of what the lens will see, particularly when it’s in motion.
It’s also worth noting what a huge difference proper cinematography (and color timing) makes. Some of these locations look vastly different based on how they were shot, and how they were timed in post. I never signed off on a location unless my d.p. had seen it and approved it. She was the only one who could really anticipate how it would look when shot.