Blade Runner the final cut?

There’s a new Blade Runner DVD coming out in December, so they’ve released a print in limited runs to stir up interest. Blade Runner the Final Cut started a run at the Regent Theatre on Mt. Pleasant a couple of weeks ago. I ended up seeing it three times so far, the most recent on a dark and rainy Sunday night with a nearly deserted streetscape echoing the movie’s vision of a city.

If you haven’t seen Blade Runner before (any of the 6 versions of it floating out there), stop reading as I’ll probably give things away that are better witnessed first-hand. The Final Cut represents version #7, if you’re keeping score at home.

The Regent is a great little indie movie house. Originally built for live theatre, it’s a post-production facility by day and movie house by night, so the projection system and the sound system are amazing. The room is also acoustically fixed up.

I own the Director’s Cut (version #6) on VHS and on DVD, but I’ve seen Blade Runner onscreen a few times—there was a scratched print floating around, and I got to see a genuine 76-mm print at the late great Eglinton Theatre once, even if it was also the “happy ending” version with voiceover.

So, to see a fresh print, digitally restored and remastered the way Ridley Scott had intended (he didn’t have control until version #6), in a great theatre, was too much to pass up on 3 separate occasions.

Blade Runner is quite a bleak view of the future (CITY-TV used to run it right after its New Year’s Eve show as a subtle but powerful statement), with perpetual night and constant heavy rain dominating the formerly sun-baked climate of Los Angeles. Enormous refineries spout fireballs of gas into the air during the opening flight over the dark cityscape as drums hammer the audience into their seats.

There’s a great book written about the making of the movie called Future Noir—I’d recommend it to any fans who haven’t read it—which will keep this entry short.

The big debate amongst the fans for the longest time was whether or not Deckard, Harrison Ford’s protagonist, was a replicant or not. Ridley Scott ahs more or less confirmed that the character is a replicant, but Ford has been quoted as saying that Scott told him that Deckard wasn’t a replicant when they were shooting the movie. In version #7, Deckard is clearly a replicant: the unicorn daydream and the origami unicorn are proof, glowing red eyes aside.

In the end, however, it doesn’t matter whether Deckard is a fake or authentic human. The final scene is powerful regardless.

After meeting and facing down the last of the replicants, Deckard returns home to pick up Rachael, the femme fatale, so that they can flee together. As he gets her to the elevator, he spots an origami unicorn on the ground—a sign that fellow blade runner Gaff was there. He picks it up and holds it in front of his face as a series of emotions play across his face, and Gaff’s last line, “It's too bad she won't live; but then again, who does?” is heard.

That closeup of Harrison Ford’s face is one of Ford’s finest moments as an actor. And it gives Ridley Scott a great, low-key climactic moment. Because Deckard’s feelings are not explained with dialogue, it’s ambiguous. And it’s absolutely brilliant on all parties’ counts.

Here’s how I interpret that last shot:

For devotees of the Deckard-is-a-replicant school, Deckard realizes that he is a replicant at that moment: the unicorn daydream could only be known to Gaff if the daydream was an implant (either Deckard’s or Gaff’s, or both). He realizes that he and Rachael are both hunted—by Gaff and the other blade runners, by their built-in limited life-spans, or by both. But Deckard still turns and joins Rachael in the elevator. In the “happy ending” version, this is followed by the closing credits over aerial footage as though from one of the spinners (flying cars) fleeing the city. In the other versions, like #7, it goes to black and credits.

For Deckard as authentic human, that moment is still awful: he realizes they’re being hunted, either by Rachael’s best-before date, Gaff, or both.

In turning to join Rachael, he’s not giving up, he’s seizing the day, he’s alive, dammit. That’s the faint light at the end of the Blade Runner tunnel. How anyone felt it necessary to throw in the aerial footage that cheaply represented the POV of a fleeing spinner….

Regardless of how you see Deckard, this shot, to me, is great filmmaking: a powerful climactic beat, with enough ambiguity to leave the viewer debating with himself what the character is thinking and feeling, and wondering what happens next.

It’s also an instructive lesson in acting with the eyes and face for film, and how to capture that acting in order to give that beat its proper expression.

Ford is completely in the moment during that beat. He’s not telling us his emotions—he lets them come from within and they take him and us through the beat. The beat feels honest because Ford is honest in that closeup.

Ridley Scott held that shot to let the beat pass uninterrupted. Here’s what I remember of that last scene: Rachael steps on the origami unicorn—cut—Deckard comes out of his apartment—cut—closeup as Deckard notices the unicorn—cut—Deckard’s hand picks up the unicorn—cut—closeup on the unicorn—cut—Deckard holds the unicorn in front of his face and the great moment happens.

I don’t remember what shot is next—Deckard turning around? Shot of Rachael in the elevator?—because those shots follow the climax of the film. The few seconds of Deckard following Rachael are the epilogue, to make sure we know he’s going with her, regardless of what’s chasing them.

Watch Blade Runner the Final Cut and you’ll be transported to a dark world with a faint glimmer of hope, a powerful and disturbing story that resonates so much with what we face in 2007. There are some great moments of writing and acting in it—the Roy Batty speech before he dies is another great moment in acting—but the whole movie builds up to that final 10 seconds of greatness.

The 74-Minute Skeleton in Our Closet, 6: Revisiting the Past

We sat down and watched Babysitters recently. I hadn’t watched it since some time in 2003 or 2004, so I’d forgotten a lot of things about it. Come to think of it, I’d forgotten about most of it.

I have to admit I didn’t look forward to seeing it again. I’d been grateful that we’d left it alone for so long. When you’ve advanced ahead in terms of experience and knowledge, it’s not easy to go back and see earlier efforts and not cringe at the mistakes.

So, as we started the movie, I waited for the cringing to begin.

The first part of the movie ran surprisingly well. From the beginning to the opening credits, the pacing helps to hide the flaws. So far, so good….

The first scene after the credits, featuring a well-known ACTRA and SAG performer who donated his time, is quite slow, but after the buildup to the credits, it felt right to slow down before starting to build up again.

The middle of the movie had a sequence that no longer made sense to be in the movie (Mullet had to remind me why it was there, actually: to fit one of the plot points in Gulliver’s Travels), so we decided to cut it out. The rest of the movie builds up a bit and comes to an abrupt end.

So, we’ll be recutting it again, from 74 minutes to something much shorter, likely still over the Academy’s 40-minute limit to qualify as a feature, but under an hour and with most of the leaden pacing removed. There are some things we won’t be able to take out or speed up, so there will still be some loooooong moments in there.

The audio is out of sync in a few places, so I’ll have to spend some time playing with that to fix it. Fortunately, with Final Cut Studio, you get a marvelous audio workstation program, Soundtrack Pro, which allows this type of finessing.

Overall, I was pleasantly surprised to not hate it as much as I had feared before the screening. For a first project for a couple of guys who hadn’t been near film classes before, it’s not that bad. So, for once, I realized that the effort we had put into it, all the work our cast and crew had put into it, was worth it.

I think we should be able to put the opening sequence on the DVD, just to show the world what you can do with two clown, a baby, and a camcorder.

The 74-Minute Skeleton in Our Closet, 4: Post-Production

When we wrapped, of course, we had an enormous job in post-production ahead of us. We had over 30 hours of footage to on a large collection of mini-DV tapes. By then, I’d traded in the Powermac 8600 for a brand-new G4. I captured footage each week, once we’d watched our “rushes,” and I’d logged all the takes, but I did nothing more at that point until we were wrapped.

Mullet and I spent one memorable week sitting in front of that G4 trying to put together our first cut. It was sheer hell, so in a blaze of inspiration, we called it Hell Week.

Our self-taught shooting style came home to roost that week.

Our coverage was thin, so we didn’t have a lot of alternatives or any way of speeding scenes up—there was nothing to cut to. So… things had to stay as they were, usually as master shots. To match shots, we had to let things go on too long, and, to further complicate matters, very few shots matched perfectly (no continuity person to notice these things). We ended up using takes because they matched rather than using the best takes. That was the hell part of Hell Week.

There are a lot of first-time filmmakers who have made and who will make the same mistakes, but the silver lining is that we all learn more about putting moving images together when trying to solve problems than when something together easily (an equally important lesson is, of course, to learn from the mistakes and not repeat them the next time).

Today, we edit as we go, so as soon as we’ve shot something I start to put it together to see what we have. Otherwise, you’re blind to what you’ve missed, and your mistakes will likely not be fixable, unless your cast and locations are still available.

Another frustration appeared during Hell Week, something we couldn’t avoid that late in the project.

We’d started working on the project on with Adobe Premiere 6, which proved to be crash-prone and completely unreliable for anything other than crashing the computer at random moments. We had each scene in a separate project file to keep things manageable, but it didn’t matter how long or short the scene was—the software would crash regularly, and whatever work we’d done since the previous save was gone.

To be fair, we were probably demanding too much of Premiere. If we’d been working on a short, it probably would have worked just fine, but even keeping scenes in their own project files was probably too much at times.

Nonetheless, after the rough cut was done, I switched over to the first version of Final Cut Pro, which proved to be much more stable. I ended up using FCP to recreate the editing of a few scenes, and the rest I exported from Premiere as QuickTime movies. I stuck to the separate project files for each scene, but the crashing stopped and we were able to get through the rest of the process much easier.

Despite the obstacles, we had a 124-minute rough cut assembled by December, 2002. Technical errors, the lack of coverage, and the convoluted plot—for a first, student effort, I don’t think we did that badly. If you were to set a classroom full of first-year film students off and running for 8 months of Saturday shoots and the same budget, I think we would have held our own.

Some of the jokes were really good—a DVD gag played really well in particular, and we were complimented by a few people about specific gags that worked well. Some of it doesn’t work, and the story isn’t clear enough at times to make sense—we more or less walked away from the plot during Act 2.

The ending didn’t work very well, but it was because we made a classic rookie mistake when we reshoot parts of it to try to make it work. We didn’t reshoot the entire scene—just the specific shot needed. The retakes, naturally, didn’t match the original shots.

Lesson learned: any time you have to reshoot something, always look at the footage for the entire scene or sequence, print screen caps, and take them with you to the location. Or you can save yourself headaches by getting yourself a really good continuity person!

The project taught us things that we wouldn’t have learned otherwise.

The team itself was well-balanced. Mullet has a lot more performing experience than I do, so in our live performances he did better than I did because I wasn’t as experienced in improv—and we improvised almost everything on stage. With a script, I could hold up my end of the stick better, and the team was much more balanced, something that has carried on in our following projects and live performances.

We both learned a lot about storytelling with video, and the old saying about telling a story three times (on the page, in the camera, in the editing) is very true.

It was time to show our project to an audience to start working on pacing and structure. We had a Christmas Party at the now-defunct Tim Sims Playhouse for the cast, crew, and some invited guests, and we showed them the 124-minute version with temp audio tracks and placeholders for some of the graphics.

I remember not wanting to be in the room while it was playing. Surprisingly, the cast and crew were still in the room when the lights came up.

It was useful to see it with a real audience, though. Audience reaction showed us where we had to make cuts, and so, a few months later, we had a second cut running 74 minutes.

I moved onto the audio. All of our onscreen dialogue was recorded with a shotgun mike directly into the camcorder so the audio was, in theory, synched with the video, although the software occasionally disagreed and shifted things. Otherwise, all I had to do to was adjust volumes for individual clips until they were consistent.

On a dare from me, Mullet composed a crazy patchwork of a score, ranging from solo piano to a wall of indescribable noise. Dave Pearce recorded some songs that Mullet had written. Scott McClelland, a recording engineer/musician/music teacher, mixed and mastered the songs for us, and I used Final Cut Pro 1 to mix the final audio together. I exported everything as QuickTime movies.

We showed the car theft scene at Second Ciné, a show hosted by Andrew Currie, at the Tim Sims. Each month, AC screened a number of short comedies, having the director and/or performers come up after the short for an interview.

The Second Ciné audience wasn’t moved to violence, and I even got asked about what camera we’d used, likely because of the clarity of the image when we were shooting through the windshield (a Cokin circular polarizer and an ND filter, which made my one-chip Ultura look a lot better than it should have).

AC nominated us for newcomer of the year for the season-ending awards, but we lost out. Still, it was nice to be nominated, and, no, we didn’t prepare a speech in case we won. We would like to thank the academy….

Next time, the financial aspects of a no-budget feature….

Finally something in the can!

We finally have something in the can!

After all these months of moaning about preproduction and rewriting, we actually went out with camcorder and director in hand and shot stuff.

This past Saturday (May 12), Mullet and I were joined by Andrew Currie, esteemed grad of the Second City mainstage company, one half of the Devil's Advocates, blogger extraordinaire, and producer of the late Second Cine video show which played a couple of videos we did. AC is also a graduate of the Canadian Film Centre, so he actually knows what he's doing.
This was our first experience with a pro, and it was a good learning experience for us.

We shot it on location on a side street one block north of Queen West, between Spadina and University. Behind the Rivoli, really. In fact, we used their garbage cans for a few shots, much to the dismay of some tired-looking cooks and a bemused manager. The street had these great alleys and laneways, strewn with garbage, brilliant and mundane graffiti, and that big city grunge that can't be craeted by art directors (unless they have a lot of money or use the real thing...).

AC wanted to work chronologically as he was basically editing in camera with minimal coverage. He didn't need the slate as he'll be editing it himself, but I did grey-card the first tape just to make sure I can get colour-balance done later on. I brought along my usual continuity log sheets, but they weren't needed, either. This was one difference between how AC shoots and how we did it, but with a 5-page script, I guess the usual slate/log stuff is probably borderline overkill. We have shot stuff without logging it or slating it, like our Aristocrats DVD contest entry which was 5 takes of the same story with 2 cameras, so I only changed the take number on the slate to mark the start and end of each take.

We did a number of takes for each set up until he got one good one and one safety in the can. This is basically what we do, so this was nothing new --though he did apologize when making us do another take when hunched over or fumbling through garbage (not necessary --we've made ourselves do a lot worse for a lot more takes...). With the lines being minimal and me not having to do more than perform, I was more focussed on the performing than I usually am, so I believe I sucked less than usual.

Mullet was good, too,