Journal entries with ILY in the titles are about the short screen musical
I LOVE YOU, I'M SORRY, AND I'LL NEVER DO IT AGAIN,
now in post-production.

I've been receiving bids on some post-production digital retouching, which is the last major task before it all gets combined in Final Cut, trimmed by about 30 seconds, and exported to DVD.

Two of the retouch issues are artistic; two are legal. The artistic ones:

• There's a sequence in which the entire factory goes dark. Unfortunately, there's an EXIT sign in the actual factory location that wouldn't turn off. Our DP, Dave Berliner, started shooting around it, but I told him not to compromise his compositions, because I knew it would be easy to remove in post.
  
  You can actually see it in the storyboard/final shot comparison I posted previously, in the shot of Eddie whisking across the frame in his chair. It's the white speck on the left:
  
  
  
  Not a huge deal in that particular shot, but it annoys me in a lot of the others, so it must die.
  
  
• In the Lizzie Borden sequence, Lizzie's mom (played by a standing cutout illustrated by Ava Larkin) gets decapitated, and her head flies off. We rigged this with monofilament, which is unfortunately bright against the black background. I blacked it out somewhat for the trailer, and the illusion is helped further by so little of the shot being used in the trailer, but at full-brightness and full-run-time in the film, it's glaring (literally). You can see it about halfway through the trailer, right after the giant apple:
  
  
  
  

The legal ones:

• We shot in a real factory, and somehow we missed that there was a real phone number scribbled on a paper on a bulletin board. This is unfortunately the most expensive retouch of the whole job.
  


• We also missed that the bottle of whisky that Eddie keeps in his toolbox was positioned label-up, so the trademark showed. I cut around it to a great extent (it's only really in one shot, which goes by pretty quickly), but two seconds of whisky label needs obscuring.
  

That's about it. I've received several bids and expect to award the contract today or tomorrow, and then we'll go from there. The Clermont-Ferrand film festival (a prestigious short film festival in France) just extended their registration deadline to October 30, so we should be able to hit it. After that, we solidify our festival strategy and off we go.




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