PRODUCTION JOURNAL

Last night I hit up Ry Russo-Young's birthday party. It was a blast, and it was really nice to see Ry again. It's been a while. Good things are happening for her first feature, ORPHANS, and I'm really excited for her.



We finished up the color correction today, and Jay Van Hoy swung by to take a look at the movie. It was nice to have someone see the final version with the color correction. I can't believe how good it looks. I'm really thrilled to show this final version to people.



Yohance Brown, our colorist, did a great job and was really fun to work with.



Anish was with me every step of the way, making sure I was happy with the process and the results. It's been fun to spend 3 days in a dark room with Anish looking at the movie. I think we're both going a little crazy.



Tomorrow morning I'll head into Williamsburg to finish the sound mix. Then I'm hoping to go over to Dia Sokol's house to hang out and possibly talk about the next movie, NIGHTS AND WEEKENDS, which I start shooting in 10 days.

Here's a recap of what I've been up to. I played a weird game with Katz, McFadden, and Ben Stambler where you build roads and houses and try and score 10 points. I hadn't ever played the game before, but I won. I built a long road. That ended up being the key to victory. Katz was mad.



Then I went over to Chris James' place to work on the sound mix, but I couldn't concentrate because he has an 11 week old French bulldog that is the cutest thing I have ever seen. This is just one of the many pictures that I took with this adorable little creature. Look for this dog in my next movie.



I attended the DANCE PARTY, USA party, where the dudes were all psyched over their great NY Times review.



Man of the hour, Aaron Katz.



Man of the year, Chris Wells.



Today we started color correcting. Meg DiGiovanni is doing the post production supervision for us, and has been incredibly helpful in setting everything up. I just met her today and she was a big help during the first session.



Fixating on color and light quality for an intire day really wears you out, but it's totally thrilling to see how good the movie can look. I'm totally psyched!



We got through most of it today. Thursday and Friday we will finish the rest and then go back through it with a fine tooth comb, making all of the little tweaks to make it perfect.



Maybe Anish will let me take a picture of him for the blog tomorrow.

A few weeks ago I was in NY acting in Aaron Katz' new film, QUIET CITY.



The reason I'm mentioning this now is because Katz' first film, DANCE PARTY, USA, opens in NY tonight.



Make sure you get out there and support the film!



And look for QUIET CITY on the Festival circuit next year. I've had the honor of checking out some footage and it looks incredible.



More updates about the mixing and HANNAH post soon!

Im in NY working on the final sound mix and color correct for HANNAH. Expect updates over the next few days on this process. In the meantime, here are some pics from my recent opening credits shoot. I'm not sure if we'll use these credits or traditional digital credits, but I wanted to take a stab at doing something with texture.



I built this little homemade animation stand and shot the credits in my office.



These clear sheets had the credits printed on them, and the background was made of constrution paper.



Whether you'll ever see the actual footage remains to be seen.

I left the cold of Chicago for the beautiful of Austin yesterday, and here I am back in Chicago today. I popped down there for a night to show off the "almost final cut" of HANNAH to a bunch of friends at the Austin Film Society screening room.

Since my last post, Kevin has moved down to Austin, so he picked me up from the airport when I got into town. We went over to his friend Virginia's place, where I also met her cat, Dante.



We walked to Spider Lounge for lunch, where VA and I surfed the free wireless. I tried repeatedly to get Kent Osborne on video chat, but it wasn't happening. His connection at Disney seemed to be having some issues. Eventually we gave up.



The screening was a great success, with lots of really good friends in attendance. The reaction to the film was exactly what I was hoping for, and I got some great feedback that I can use to make my final adjustments.

A great big group of us went out to dinner after the screening, where we spent the rest of the night talking about how exciting everything is. There are so many good vibes in this little film world right now. There's so much to be happy about.



Bryan Poyser offered Kevin and I a place to crash. Kevin found an apartment yesterday, but he wasn't able to move in yet. We did a quick photo session to document our fun sleepover, then we all went to bed.

Kevin and I met up with Matt Dentler this morning at El Chilito, one of my favorite Austin restaurants. We got coffee and talked about the SXSW Festival Trailers that I did this summer. Kevin will be writing the music for the trailers so we wanted to get everything figured out and set a timeline to have it all finished.



Kevin took me back to the airport and now I'm home in Chicago. Almost exactly 24 hours in Austin. What a great trip. In less than 2 weeks I go to New York to do the final sound mix and color correct for the film and I will definitely be documenting that process.