AUGUST 2024
August 31, 2024
OVERVIEW
Welcome to the second monthly report - series of reflections surrounding AUGURY HOUSE’s growth and developments as a production house. It has been a very productive month for us and each day we get closer to our releases!
ACCOMPLISHMENTS
This month, we finished the final shoots of the film. The filming took nearly 20 days and the final size of the project is over 2.7TB. We’re nearly finished with the second major cut of the film which is now around 25 minutes. Now, the big focus is post production and figuring out our release materials!
On top of this, we are nearly ready for the release of our new website and the rebrand of the AUGURY HOUSE image. We have also been working on some more screenplays that we can shoot as well so we will always have a strong project to work on.
We’ve also started a concept for a new short film! Binh is going to be in town next month for two weeks. We need a little more time to work on our upcoming HEI TU shorts so have a new short film that we will be able to shoot within only a couple of days. With less settings and a more imperfect shooting style, it will be a dialogue driven film that is more energetic and precarious than our more introspective works. Super excited about this!
DIFFICULTIES
One major difficulty has been determining the true length of the film. There is a voice over throughout the entire film, but it turns out Chinese is a lot more dense than English. Generally, one can expect a 1:1 formula where one page of screenplay amounts to one minute of footage. In this case, the ratio is closer to 1:2 meaning that some of the scenes we thought were going to be a lot shorter turned out to be longer than expected. As we were developing the voice over through the early half of production, a lot surrounding our vision had evolved by the end of the shoot.
On a similar note, we had to schedule quite a bit of additional scenes - often adding to scenes that we already had. Some of these scenes were shot in fall, and we had another shoot three months later in Early August meaning that continuity was tricky to dial in perfectly - especially for the outdoor scenes! It helps that we were shooting on BRAW for more flexibility over color, though the lighting and hair was slightly different than we originally had it. Also, the weather was a lot hotter than we initially shot! The wardrobe was designed for more mid 70s late fall weather, but the time we were adding to the outdoor scenes, it was still very much summer weather in the 90s!
BTS
Carissa got her gimbal working with the blackmagic! We shot some pickup scenes using a focus pulling attachment that thankfully worked the first time we set it up. It seemed pretty simple to use and Carissa also picked up a strap and handle attachment for ease of use. When we first used the gimbal, it was for a long 56mm lens, but this time we used 18mm which was much better suited to the movements of the gimbal. Super excited to use this feature more and eventually try out the vortex mode!
Welcome to the second monthly report - series of reflections surrounding AUGURY HOUSE’s growth and developments as a production house. It has been a very productive month for us and each day we get closer to our releases!
ACCOMPLISHMENTS
This month, we finished the final shoots of the film. The filming took nearly 20 days and the final size of the project is over 2.7TB. We’re nearly finished with the second major cut of the film which is now around 25 minutes. Now, the big focus is post production and figuring out our release materials!
On top of this, we are nearly ready for the release of our new website and the rebrand of the AUGURY HOUSE image. We have also been working on some more screenplays that we can shoot as well so we will always have a strong project to work on.
We’ve also started a concept for a new short film! Binh is going to be in town next month for two weeks. We need a little more time to work on our upcoming HEI TU shorts so have a new short film that we will be able to shoot within only a couple of days. With less settings and a more imperfect shooting style, it will be a dialogue driven film that is more energetic and precarious than our more introspective works. Super excited about this!
DIFFICULTIES
One major difficulty has been determining the true length of the film. There is a voice over throughout the entire film, but it turns out Chinese is a lot more dense than English. Generally, one can expect a 1:1 formula where one page of screenplay amounts to one minute of footage. In this case, the ratio is closer to 1:2 meaning that some of the scenes we thought were going to be a lot shorter turned out to be longer than expected. As we were developing the voice over through the early half of production, a lot surrounding our vision had evolved by the end of the shoot.
On a similar note, we had to schedule quite a bit of additional scenes - often adding to scenes that we already had. Some of these scenes were shot in fall, and we had another shoot three months later in Early August meaning that continuity was tricky to dial in perfectly - especially for the outdoor scenes! It helps that we were shooting on BRAW for more flexibility over color, though the lighting and hair was slightly different than we originally had it. Also, the weather was a lot hotter than we initially shot! The wardrobe was designed for more mid 70s late fall weather, but the time we were adding to the outdoor scenes, it was still very much summer weather in the 90s!
BTS
Carissa got her gimbal working with the blackmagic! We shot some pickup scenes using a focus pulling attachment that thankfully worked the first time we set it up. It seemed pretty simple to use and Carissa also picked up a strap and handle attachment for ease of use. When we first used the gimbal, it was for a long 56mm lens, but this time we used 18mm which was much better suited to the movements of the gimbal. Super excited to use this feature more and eventually try out the vortex mode!
We went to the swan island Dahlias to get some general B roll for the film! It was a really nice day and Carissa got some great footage using the gimbal. One thing we will need is a solution to shooting under glare! There was a lot of overhead sunlight which meant that we couldn’t really see what was on the screen. By closing up the aperture, we were able to keep focus on point for the most part. We forgot the focus puller for the gimbal which wasn’t a terrible thing since we couldn’t see the focus peaking on the monitor in the first place!
RESEARCH
We’ve been getting a better handle on the capabilities of our equipment with the gimbal setup. Carissa got some new attachments for ease of use and has overall gotten a lot faster at balancing and setting everything up. On top of that, I’ve been doing more research into acting in reading the Stanislavski books. For our new upcoming short, I’ll be acting with Carissa and I haven’t really done it before so this will be a very new experience! We’ve been writing a new script inspired by Sam Shepherd’s True West and are excited to have more of an energetic and dialogue driven film.
GOALS
In the next month, we should be a lot closer to releasing The Filial Brat, and we will hopefully have made a lot of headway into this new short too! We are also aiming to get our social media up and going once more!