Film Festival
Werebeast has been accepted into its first film festival
Getting accepted is a battle all on its own. On the road to winning awards for a film, the expert judges are the first hurdle. Reel East Texas Film Festival had to assessed almost 200 films, and then selected those that would compete for the available awards. So, it’s a success just to be selected.
Now it’s up to the audiences. Hopeful they will have as much fun watching it as we had making it.
WereBeast will be shown at the in Kilgore during the festival, which is November 14th -17th. Show time is listed below!
The audiences actual decides what films win in which categories by voting.
So come on out and support us!
WereBeast’s showing time for the festival is November 15th at 9 PM at the Texan Theater in Kilgore, TX.
It’s part of the Friday Night Frights block of films!
The Texan is located at:
Kilgore, TX 75662
Check out the detailed festival film screening schedule.
Here is a detailed list of the films, locations, times, lengths, and categories of festival’s selections.
The Making of WereBeast
It might look like camping out, but as we wait for nightfall, the stories that evening were all about werewolves.
One challenge we faced was that every single scene had to be shot at night!
This was our first foray into 4k. We shot on the BlackMagic Cinema 4K camera. Even with their new BRAW video format, our average shoots were 100GB a night.
If you look at our tripod set up, we use a very sturdy Manfroto, and then layer a slider and another head on top of that. That setup gives us a lot of flexibiblty without any additional setup time.
Also, we used a gimbal with a 5th degree of montion rig to stabilize it further. This allowed us to implement our prefered shooting rule of ‘if the actor is moving, so should the camera.”
No mater how good your camera is, lighting is all important. For much of the inside work, we used c-stands with LED softboxes both as key and for a rim light.
Outside we used 2 – 6 9000 lumen LED lights with a 6000K color temp. To light the woods we were able to just use c-stands. But to light the field for the drone shot required using an A-frame ladder strapped to an extension ladder. We used 6 sets of those to light the whole area sufficiently.
When we shoot we use a combination of boom mic and lapel mic under the clothes. The lapel mic is close to the actor’s chest and delivers more low freqencies.
The boom mic is usualy well ballenced, but at the limits of its distance range tend to lose those low frequncies. Mixing the two channels usual cross corrects any problems.
We use the Tascam 4 channel field recorder, noise canceling head phones for field monitoring.
We used both digital and physical special effects in the flim. Several of our actors had to play rolls much older than they really were. In particular, the Adam charater needed to be a very old man. We grayed him up, and then used latex to add a layer of uber wrinkles.
Some of the fog effects were from a fog machine and others were digital.
If you are wondering about the ‘guts’, they are real intestines, but stuffed with oatmeal!
This was also our first film with some composed music!
Music is so important! It tells the audience how to interpret the scene. There were 22 pieces of music in the 30 minute film.
Editing and mixing is the final stage. The is were it all comes together. We use Davinci Resolve as our end-to-end solution. All editing, digital effects, color grading, and audio mixing happens within the tool.
WereBeast spent about 6 weeks in post.
The Release Party
To celebrate the film’s release, the club threw a party!
We cooked up a mess of tacos, drank sangria and beer, then nibbled on popcorn and showed the movie. It was great to get together and look back on diffculties and finaly see how it all came out.
This was our first film in which only a few folks had been present for every scene. So seeing it all come together in the end was a bit of a suprise for everyone!
Looking Forward
What comes next?
Each year, at the completion of a project, and after the party .. we get serious again. It’s time for Lessons Learned. We analyze the film and identify what we did right, so we can repeat that. And we take a hard look at what could have been better, and then devise processes that will elevate our next production.
Then comes the planning for next year:
- Selection of next years project(s)
- Membership Drive
- Fund Raising
- Selection of Department Heads
We complete pre-production in the months leading up to the new year. And then begin auditions and filming after the first of the year.
If you intertested in being a part of these activities, we’d love for you to join us. Right now we have about 35 memebers. We’re hoping for at least 60 for the projects we have in mind.
Join the Club
If you’ve ever had a wish to be part of making a movie, now’s the time, and we’re your partners!