It’s up. IGN has an exclusive first look. Stop reading and…
[Click Here](http://media.movies.ign.com/media/945/945609/vids_1.html)
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Then come back and tell us what you thought. Or better yet, check out the [Forum](http://www.lookforthenines.com/forum/index.php) at [lookforthenines.com](http://lookforthenines.com).
Update
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There’s a YouTube version as well. Not as big or sharp, but handier.
Looking through my [YouTube account](http://www.youtube.com/user/johnaugust), I realized that I’d actually posted (and [blogged about](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2006/location-scouting)) 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.
In preparation for the [trailer competition](), I wanted to see how footage from the movie would hold up when subjected to the Flash compression of YouTube and the other video-sharing sites. So I uploaded three clips in various formats to experiment.
The results? Two clips look surprisingly great. The third looks like ass.
The difference isn’t in the format, or the file size, but the background. The ass-y clip has a forest of sun-dappled leaves in the background, and the compression algorithms freak out trying to handle the level of detail. That’s not unique to Flash; sun-dappling is pretty much the bete noir of video. Several resources recommended applying a soften filter to tamp down the background noise. While it reduced the overall file size, it didn’t end up helping the video quality much.
In the end, the h.264 format ended up working out best for me, but as always, [YMMV](http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/your_mileage_may_vary).
The clips are from the DVD that goes out to television stations, for use in reviews and news stories. They show the three different looks in the movie.
* [A Medical Situation](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5tJKiIe-dQ)
* [Kill Off the Hero](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLLAes11LHY)
* [A Videogame God](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQAEIkzOwGY)
I brought my videocamera with me to Malawi, only to discover upon unpacking it that the main sensor was shot: it could record sound, but not video. In retrospect, this was a fortuitous failure.
Looking at things through a lens–or on a tiny flip-out monitor–creates a layer of distance, of safety. On a subconscious level, it feels like you’re watching TV. I would have watched, but not seen.
And given my obsessive need for coverage, I probably would have shot so much footage that I could never have begun editing it down.
So, lacking a proper videocamera, I just shot with my digital still camera. The clips had to be very short; I only had a 1GB card, and no way to off-load it. But I think it worked out for the best. What I ended up with are more like video snapshots. They don’t tell a story. They simply capture a moment.
I’ve posted a few more up in my [YouTube channel](http://www.youtube.com/user/johnaugust). Here’s a sampler.
Q: What side of the road do they drive on in Malawi?
A: The center.
There’s only one paved road in Mulanje, which has to be shared by cars, bikes and pedestrians. The dirt roads are strictly one car wide. They recently plowed the road towards Kumwamba Centre, so there’s hope it may be paved before too long. You can see the in-progress road on this second version of the drive to the church on Sunday, featuring the song that’s been stuck in my head for 10 days.