Guerrilla Productions presents
The Statement of Randolph Carter
This is a short adaptation of H. P. Lovecraft's story of the same name. The Statement of Randolph Carter is an incursion into ancient terror in the middle of a lost cemetery deep within impenetrable woods.
The Statement of Randolph Carter was shot in a single evening, with a stalwart and hearty crew that survived all the way through dawn. Unlike most movies, The Statement of Randolph Carter was shot in sequence, that is to say that the scenes were shot in the order they happened in the script. This turned out to be quite fortuitous, because as the movie ended and dawn approached, the light changes made sense in the context of the story. in other words, we picked shooting-in-sequence for no particular good reason, just because, but we lucked out by doing so.
Cast
Crew
Production Diary
07-25-2007: In a glorious victory for the People's Republic Of Scary Movies, The Statement of Randolph Carter has won Second Place in the Horror Division at the Conestoga Film Festival.- 03-11-2007: Dropped in the new footage, cleaned up the audio, solved the problem with the color flare at the crypt, and even solved the "hot" pixel issue. The new footage is troublesome, because it's so dark. I'll have to watch this version on the projector and see if that lightens up a bit. If not, then I've got to go in there and lighten it up in After Effects. I'm already using After Effects to fix the "hot" pixel and to drop in the new opening credit sequence. After Effects is nice.
- 10-12-2005: Mark and Barclay and I set the tomb back up and grab a few minutes of various pickups. Nothing special, mostly just replacing really grotty footage that I hacked together before flying off to Germany. The new footage looks very good, though, so I'm anxious to cut it into the project and see the result. Gotta fix some of those audio glitches, too.
10-07-2005: Premiere night at the H. P. Lovecraft Film Festival. In general, it seems to be well-received. I can tell in the theater, though, that there are a few sound glitches still (easily correctible), and one annoying video glitch. I tried adding a cable to some second unit footage and it just looks like hell, so I think we're simply going to have to set the tomb up once more and shoot the cable scene. It looks good overall, though, and we receive many compliments.- 09-11-2005: Done! At least for the film festival. Christian came over this morning, as well as Mark and we laid in the music tracks and balanced all the audio. Sounds great! Passed a copy to Andrew for the film festival. Woo-hoo!
- 09-08-2005: Mark and I do a final review of the files. We discover the same problem I ran across with Dream-Quest, that the finished sound levels would be different than the ones I edited. It turns out that if I export a WAV file or an MPEG file, the sound levels are the same as I set them using the rubber bands. However, if I export an AVI or a Quicktime, they're all messed up. Aiiiiie!
- 09-07-2005: Finally finished all the fine edits. Only have the music to add now... Yay!
- 08-28-2005: Did a number of edits to the main timeline, including adding a tiny scene of rope uncoiling, and correcting (as best I can guess) the color levels, brightness, and contrast. Also fixed a few sound glitches. More to go, more to go, but it's all right there on my list. No problemo!
- 08-25-2005: Mark comes over and we shoot a couple of pickups. Just a scene that I think we needed. We watch the rough cut again. I have more suggestions to work with...
- 08-24-2005: I show the rough cut to Andrew Migliore -- he seems to think it's pretty cool and offers a couple of suggestions for improvement. As far as it making the Lovecraft Film Festival, he says "It's in like Flynn." Errol would be proud.
- 08-23-2005: Sound effects and ambience laid in. Maybe Travis and Christian will provide music such that I don't need the ambience. That would be cool.
- 08-21-2005: I finish the final video cut. I like this cut much better. Sean's second-unit stuff helps tie it tight. I also finish the basic audio edits, meaning making everything stereo and applying a bit of filtering. I like the new headphones. Makes things much easier. I start hunting for appropriate sound effects.
- 08-19-2005: Sean and Brooke and I go out wandering around to capture sounds. Some of them are quite good, such as the vault sounds. But some of the swamp sounds? Not so good. The distant rumble of the traffic is just really problematic. We also pick up a couple shots of the crypt.
- 08-18-2005: Still sick as a dog. Yuck. Finished the video edit, though. It looks really, really good. I've seen a lot of adaptations of this story, but this one is just my favorite. Got about a quarter in on the first-pass audio edit before I crashed. Only good for short runs while sick. Ack! Ack! Sound is somewhat troublesome because of the noises of distant traffic on 217, but I can apply a light bit of filtering and a lot of the drone goes back. When I bring in other sound effects, this should be much better. Tomorrow, more audio recording and audio work. Fun, fun, fun!
- 08-17-2005: Okay, I think I'm about talked into taking two takes of everything in the future. Actually, we have lots of good footage, but there are a few takes that are really crucial and we only have one. And in one take, you can see a member of the crew, just hanging around in the background... In another take, the microphone droops in and hangs just in the edge of frame for the rest of the take. I was able to crop around these things, happily enough. I seem to have a nasty cold. I'm very unhappy with that, as it makes my brain run slower and my body get tired and then I have to close my eyes and not move for a while. How do ordinary people cope with this? Gr...
- 08-16-2005: Still cruising on the video. Hit a few snags. One technical glitch -- my computer crashed after I'd finished a fairly complex cut and of course, I hadn't saved. So, now I have "Save your project NOW!" written on the fascia of my monitor. Usually the match-on-action is working out, but there have been a few glitches in the video. One piece of video is really, really good, except that for a few frames, you can see the slate moving out of the way. Whoops! Got tired early tonight.
- 08-15-2005: It's so annoying to edit a dark movie. On the monitor, it appears nearly black, such that I have to kick the levels up to an absurb amount, just to be able to edit. But I know the footage will look great when viewed in an NTSC monitor. The opening scenes come together very well. I would have kept going, but I realized I was falling asleep. Darn sleep. Craig at Unfilmable.com asks me to write up a little thing about the shoot and I end up just going to town and writing a darn essay. Happily enough, he decides to publish the entire thing as its own document, Transformation: a new look at "The Statement of Randolph Carter". Wow!
- 08-14-2005: Finished digitizing the footage. All looks really good! Started building the master timeline. Mental note: "I can pick this up later" is incorrect. Always shoot everything I can while the lights are set up!
- 08-13-2005: Lots of sleeping, but started digitizing footage.
- 08-12-2005: Shoot day! We get a slow start -- mostly a few technical issues, finding bad batteries, cables with problems, breakers popping, etc. Eventually, we get it all started up hurky-jerky, but running. We try very hard to make sure that each scene is lit with character and that movement and motions in particular take shadow and light into consideration. The shots are really good and some of them are just fantastic. We shoot in sequence, which turns out to be a good thing, as we shoot all the way through to a beautiful dawn's light. The final shot in the movie changes from the one in the script, which read well on paper, to a completely different shot, which was only possible because it was dawn. There was a lot about this shoot that was different than previous shoots and although it felt like a different sort of speed, it was still shooting, people were still laughing and having a good time, and the stuff looked spectacular. Props, setting, makeup, acting, photography -- everything just seemed really on-track this evening and the whole combination seemed to have its own life. At the end of the shoot, we managed to clear out most of the yard (although it's fun to leave the tombstones there for the moment), and do a pretty decent job of cleaning up the house, too, although tomorrow will see me finish it all up. It's hard -- everyone's wiped out from shooting through the night. A number of us have been up and runnning for twenty-four hours straight.
08-11-2005: Greg, Barclay, and Andrea bring over the tomb and the other tombstones and we arrange them accordingly in the backyard. Doug brings by the wire-phones so we can fiddle with them. Mike and Sean come over and we run the lines a few times and discuss character and trim up the script. We block out a few tricky scenes in the backyard while the others keep working on finishing the tomb. Late, Sean and I head out deep west on Scholl's Ferry Road to record some audio of him running and yelling. I expect some poor farmer is probably a little annoyed and mostly puzzled at the sound of a fully-tool-laden man running down a dark country road shouting "Seal the tomb! Seal the tomb!" We shoot tomorrow night. Much to do, much to do...
- 08-10-2005: I head over to Doug's to check out the tomb construction and possible finishes. Looks really great!
- 07-20-2005: Greg comes over and we set up the cemetery and try out the cold-fog generator. In general, the fog machine seems to work quite well, but a few bugs in the system prevents the fog from chilling sufficiently such that it creeps as close to the ground as we would like.
- 06-28-2005: Started storyboarding. It's tricky because this is in conjunction with editing Flesh of my Flesh.
- 06-22-2005: Script complete.
