Saturday 14 September 2013

I aten't dead. Also, project updates (The Shadow Over Innsmouth), a workprint snippet (Oblivion) and some images

I've been distracted from writing anything recently by a combination of working on various projects and being on holiday.

I'm mainly focusing on The Shadow Over Innsmouth at the moment, which is fun though there's a lot of work ahead - I've been splitting the scenes up and applying tinting based on a location/time key I devised. Once that's done and I'm happy with it, I think I'm going to put together some filters for certain scenes to try and push for more of a 20s-style silent film feel (I'm still working for that effect, though there are far too many anachronisms featured in the film for it to be more than a lofty ambition...). Once that's finished, I need to finalise a script to use (the goal being to bring it much more in line with the original Lovecraft story) and then create and insert the intertitles - I've been looking around through things like this Tumblr page for ideas. After that I need to work up a full score - which will be interesting, since my first instinct was to use a combination of songs from ISIS, Pelican, Godspeed You! Black Emperor and so on (with added videogame soundtracks where they fit well, such as the OST for LIMBO), but I've also discovered Alexander Mosolov's music in the interim which seems like it might well be suitable.

Anyway, while that's in progress I knocked these images together to give some idea of what the end result might look like:

Innsmouth Tourism Board 01 - Fishing Harbours Innsmouth Tourism Board 02 - Ancient Temples Innsmouth Tourism Board 03 - Friendly Locals Innsmouth Tourism Board 04 - Picturesque Streets Innsmouth Tourism Board 05 - Unique Local Fauna
On a different note, I've put together a workprint of an alternate opening sequence for Oblivion, progressing on from the ideas I posted previously. I'll upload it here soon, but I'm still not decided on whether I'll bother doing it. I've seen a couple of the deleted scenes floating around and they look quite nice, but the film's already quite bloated at 2 hours long, because for the story it's telling and the paucity of character development it really shouldn't be more than about 90 minutes. So I'd need to figure out where I can jettison that much material, especially since thus far I can't see much I could rip out of the third act. (I'd absolutely love to completely dump the attack on the Scav base, for example, but I suspect that it's not possible to edit the existing footage so that they accept that the drone can't be fixed). And, frankly, it's a mediocre action film that rips ideas and visuals from a bunch of better films, so it's not really something I'm interested in prioritising.

Here's the first six minutes of how it would play, including changing the title to Titan:

Titan - Alternate Opening from That One Guy on Vimeo.

The password, astonishingly, is "titan".

I'm also in two minds about my Saw project; one idea being a bit more radical and time consuming (not to mention quite likely to fail without a lot of work) and the other being lazy and so minimal that it's barely worth calling an edit. The time-consuming one being basically to use the Full Disclosure feature in highly edited form along with a substantial amount of cutting to turn the entire film into a videotape that Jigsaw has created - and at the end of this videotape, Billy would pop up saying "I want to play a game", with the camera sweeping back to reveal that the viewer is yet another victim in a trap (using footage from the Saw II trailer). But nice though that idea is, it would be a lot of work, so for the time being I'm going to think about it and probably just finish off the easy idea (which is basically "remove the bit where Jigsaw tases Adam and triggers an improbable dream/flashback sequence explaining that Jigsaw is John Kramer, terminal cancer patient").