blog Leap

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Backstory:
I've completed three independent feature films, plus countless shorts and adverts. My first feature was a no budget slasher I shot in 2007 for a budget of $600 called "Wulf". It played a few festivals and then I buried it, considering it my trunk novel. In 2009, I turned my back on horror and decided to be the Christian I considered myself to be. I still wanted to make movies and had an idea to combine parkour and the last days into a movie that was ultimately called "Leap".
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I shot it in 2009 on MiniDV (a Canon ZR800) for a budget of $200. I spent three months teaching my actors parkour and they did most of their own stunts. It screened at a local theater and we sold 200 DVDs. Let's be honest though- it's bad. My heart was in the right place, wanting to share what I was finding in my own personal Bible studies with the rest of the world, but it was poorly executed.
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In 2010, I made the sequel, "Leap: Rise of the Beast". It was the first feature film shot on a Canon Rebel T2i and we only had the kit lens. The budget was $2000 and continued the story I began in the first film: a group of college kids trying to save the world while the Vatican hunts them down. My goal was to make a Christian version of the Bourne series. We had a theatrical screening for it, sold 100 DVDs and then I stuck it on YouTube in 2012 and it now has over 1.5 million views and has made over $10,000 over the past ten years. Most of that money has gone toward purchasing better equipment because hey, tax write-offs :)
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Immediately after Leap 2 came out, I wanted to do something different before finishing the story. So I wrote a supernatural Christian thriller but everyone kept begging me to do Leap 3 next instead. I caved and wrote the script called "Leap: Revelation". It picked up in the middle of Leap 2, followed a new parkour crew and took us to the end of the world. The only thing stopping me from shooting it was the financing. I figured that I'd need $20,000 to do the movie on a "low-budget" while paying for actors and a few key crew members. Unfortunately I never raised the funds.

The past ten years saw me being homeless, getting a dream job as a VFX supervisor, losing everything I owned (including my dog) in a house fire, rebuilding my life, getting a wife, a new dog, and moving back to Montana. Now I run my own production studio called Pyro Studios and I feel like I'm at a point where I want to revisit this material again. I've grown a lot as a person and as a filmmaker and finally feel like now is the time. I've been keeping a production journal on my computer and I'll be sharing that here.

I hope it is useful and I welcome you all along this journey.

-Chris

Ten Years Difference
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With the disclaimer that I'm TERRIBLE at trailers, a few thoughts.

The images are great - really. I do think it would benefit from trying to tell a bit more of the story, perhaps a little bit more lighter stuff at the beginning (kids on monkey bars are great) building toward tenser moments. Perhaps the "I don't know honey" woman could come right after the young woman "the answers might be in here"?

Also the early music feels a bit intense. Maybe a bit lighter earlier and build it up?

Again, it LOOKS great but just feels like it could use a bit more emotional build, whether or not you decide to tell a bit more of the story.
This is great feedback, thanks!!!
 
Had McKenna come over today and do her ADR. Took us about two hours which isn't bad. I also showed her the new trailer I'm working on and she loved it. Now I have to go edit for a client which kinda sucks because my new soundbar came in today and I really want to test it with either Top Gun or Avatar.

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FINALLY got around to reshooting the final scene yesterday. Yeah, it's been a year, but it all worked out. As promised, here was the setup:

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It wasn't perfect, but it's good enough for what I need. Most of the scene is medium and close ups, so I don't mind a little roto for the two wide shots. Also, my actress is just having fun here. She does not make that pose in the movie!

I used two 4-bulb soft boxes to help light the screen, with my four footer giving a little extra light at 25%. I used an LED high on the stand to give her an edge. A C-stand stood in for the other actor, and as you can see, I have blankets everywhere for sound control. It's just a small, garage studio, but it worked well. The screen is ten feet wide.

The most challenging part for Melissa was getting used to the idea that to change camera angles, SHE had to rotate herself, rather than me move around her.

I've started cutting this scene and it plays WAY better than the original version from last year. I'm glad we got it reshot, even if it took a year.

In other news: found out that BluStreak Tracer (used to be $500) is now free, so I snagged that to help with when I'm ready for blu-rays. I had another radio interview with Omegaman, and he turned me onto a site called Suno where it's like Chat GPT for music. I really wanted that 2000's punk vibe for a few tracks, and I needed background music for bar scenes and that sort of thing. I had spent some time coming up with my own stuff, but it never had the right feel. With Suno, I tell it what I want, it makes it.

I'm aware that according to the Supreme Court ruling, I cannot copyright this music as it's AI generated, but I'm okay with that since I'm not planning to sell an album, and even if I did, it just means that I can't sue people for using those tracks. I just wanted good music for my movie. I'm still doing the score myself since I need it to have a consistent tone, but all my other tracks are Suno. Best part is the licensing: $10 a month gives me a commercial license to use whatever I create WHILE PAYING. If I cancel, I can still use the already created tracks, but anything new that I create under a free plan must be non-commercial. $10 for some great sounding tracks is a steal!
 
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Hard to believe October is half over. Time flies! I'm spending today designing the angelic being for the final scene. I wasn't able to find an actor that worked, so I'm taking a cue from a short film I did 10 years ago and doing an "energy" effect for the being. The process consists of taking a noise texture in Fusion, creating an energy look, putting that on a 3D plane, then randomly duplicating the plane in place. I'm rendering out 500 frames to bring into Blender or comp in Nuke, I think that should be plenty. If I want to get really fancy, I'll bring a tracked camera into this Fusion comp and have true parallax and perspective. I'll see how the 2D version goes first. On the 2010 film, "Monsters", Garreth Edwards did all his shots 2D, save for two, so it *should* work.

I also came up with a new poster today that I'm pretty happy with:



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After getting the "being" looking good, I've spent the rest of the afternoon doing slap comps for this scene. I made some really quick renders in Blender of the different backgrounds have just been speed comping in the Fusion page of my edit. They're not pretty, but definitely better than just looking at a greenscreen. If it counts, I'd be super proud of these shots back in 2003 lol!
 
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I haven't made this available to the masses yet, but wanted to get some feedback from people here first. This is what I've come up with for the new trailer. I think there's a few VFX shots that I'd like to touch up, and I might try having the trailer tell more of the story, rather than just be a montage of shots. At the end of the day, I'm realizing that I'm not much of a trailer editor. If I had the budget, I would totally hire someone to do this.
I know you've worked long and hard on this so out of respect i'll skip the pleasantries and just give you hard actionable feedback that I think might genuinely help your chances of success.

First off I would say that there's a lot to like about this, many aspects are done well, but simultaneously I feel there are a few things holding this trailer back from reaching its potential at the moment. The good news is that none of these changes cost anything other than time.

1. The music selection is excellent with great quality and some perfect moments of emotional crescendos that match certain scenes. It is not however dynamic and the emotional manipulation of the orchestral maneuvers only matches scenes once in a while. Near the end there were a few seconds where you really nailed it and everything came together perfectly. I'll give one direct example. When I'm listening to the music and watching the scene of the sink running with blood because the apocalypse is starting, The music is telling me that I'm going to Disneyland and the image is telling me that I'm going to hell. Basically you should be pushing the emotion fear in that moment, thus strengthening the impact of triumphant moments later in the film or trailer where I assume the protagonist's faith delivers him/her from said apocalypse. I'll note right here that I did not know from the trailer exactly who the central characters in the film were. To be fair this is typically telegraphed by the fame of the main star. It's kind of an invisible problem that indie films suffer from. A trailer with Tom Cruise in it doesn't need to spend time telling you which person is the main character.

2. This is more important than number one, don't know why I put it second. You should do a foley pass or three on this trailer. Get a twenty dollar artist subscription for one month, Spend three days combing through sound effects and specifically trailer sound effects such as risers and cinematic booms, And then do the following once you've collected up everything you need. Mute the music track and your editing timeline and begin creating the Foley for the trailer. Take a slow and methodical approach, And don't be afraid to use as many layers of audio as necessary. Add detail to bring your world to life by creating independent fully tracks for each element in the scene mixed at an appropriate volume level versus the master. Some scenes don't need foley, Some scenes could benefit from eight layered tracks. Here is the most important part of this section, Keep working on the trailer specific Foley until the entire trailer is entertaining WITHOUT the music. Think of trailer specific sound effects such as cinematic booms as "punctuation", helping to segment moments in the trailer. Then add in the music. If it was great before you added the music, It will be awesome after. Get it to 100%, Then push it up to 150% with carefully selected musical cues, Rather than one carefully selected unifying track.

3. Back to dynamics in sound, You might consider finding multiple tracks that work well together as opposed to just using one good track. In this trailer there are moments that should telegraph emotions such as fear, friendship, religious devotion, and hope. Basically I think that using one piece of music for a trailer that has this much emotional range brings out the best in some clips and greatly reduces the effectiveness of others.

4. A possible solution to this would be to sort of organize your trailer clips into mini chapters as it were. It's already pretty much like that, But starting to think of those many chapters as independent scoring opportunities, Which I feel might really enhance the dramatic impact of the trailer. While a significant number of shots in this are as I mentioned are a group together fairly well, There are a number of shots that seem to be out of logical sequence, In terms of creating a dramatic emotional pattern. We have the couple embracing on the dock as the music swells, And then immediately an angry man with a gun yelling at the sky. Here is the best piece of advice I can give you in this entire post, And if you look up documentaries on professional editing you'll find that this is rule number one pretty much industrywide. Every time you put a clip in a trailer the single most important thing is, " How does this make the audience FEEL". For example in the case of the swelling music and embrace on the dock you are building a good feeling. To give a positive example the last few shots at the end and the title are all pretty much perfect.

5. There are some issues in here with what I would call shot ego. One day over a decade ago I was out doing a time lapse shoot. There were many many shots in that film but on one particular shot I climbed a mountain and camped out on top with the time lapse cameras shooting down into San Jose. On the way up I tripped over a rock sticking out of the mountainside and shattered an $800 lens. It was freezing up there and the shot took hours. The shot itself turned out pretty good. Months later in the editing process I was trying to make a trailer for the film and I forced that shot into it because I considered it an important shot. it really wasn't though. I just wanted it to be in the trailer because it had cost me so much and I had spent so much time on it. Basically I was really proud of that shot and I wanted people to see it so I shoved it into the trailer even though it didn't actually do anything for the trailer. Respectfully I think it's possible that there are a few scenes in here where that may have happened with you. An example what does the dark shot with the northern lights communicate to the audience in the context of this trailer? I looked at it and I thought that's a cool looking shot and I bet Chris spent some time on this, but I had no emotional response to it and it did not illuminate the story. So from my perspective it simply watered down the reel rather than enhancing it. Why is the heretic in the forest shouting at God directly after the dock scene? Why am I more excited about seeing this film because of the inclusion of that scene?

I apologize for all the pedantic criticism, The intent is to give you my genuine feedback in a way that might be helpful.

My final advice is pretty generic, but it's good advice.

Spend one day watching movie trailers on youtube for films that performed well. While you do this take notes about METRICS. Really think about how they used their chapters, how the musical cues hurt or enhanced the impact of scenes in the trailer, How many of them focused on the characters? How many of them focused on the life changing event? What ratio of seconds utilized was put into each stage? Your trailer doesn't have to be and shouldn't be a copy of anyone else's style or work, But simultaneously I think it goes without saying that we can all learn something from people like Spielberg or Kubrick. Find a trailer that made you feel really excited or enthusiastic about seeing the movie, Then really nail down what that trailer actually did to create that feeling.

This means nothing, just my personal take, but here's how I would stage that trailer if I was trying to produce it.

A. Establish normalcy, A Christian family keeping the faith

B. Mysterious events occur, Normalcy is disrupted as strange signs begin to appear

C. Religious and family drama, Tension ramps and people clash as a result

D. The apocalypse hits

E. Faith family and love triumph, Even in the darkest time possible


It's not bad at all the way it is now I'm just pointing out a few ways where you might be able to enhance its impact and get a larger viewership with some simple changes.
 
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I know you've worked long and hard on this so out of respect i'll skip the pleasantries and just give you hard actionable feedback that I think might genuinely help your chances of success.

First off I would say that there's a lot to like about this, many aspects are done well, but simultaneously I feel there are a few things holding this trailer back from reaching its potential at the moment. The good news is that none of these changes cost anything other than time.

1. The music selection is excellent with great quality and some perfect moments of emotional crescendos that match certain scenes. It is not however dynamic and the emotional manipulation of the orchestral maneuvers only matches scenes once in a while. Near the end there were a few seconds where you really nailed it and everything came together perfectly. I'll give one direct example. When I'm listening to the music and watching the scene of the sink running with blood because the apocalypse is starting, The music is telling me that I'm going to Disneyland and the image is telling me that I'm going to hell. Basically you should be pushing the emotion fear in that moment, thus strengthening the impact of triumphant moments later in the film or trailer where I assume the protagonist's faith delivers him/her from said apocalypse. I'll note right here that I did not know from the trailer exactly who the central characters in the film were. To be fair this is typically telegraphed by the fame of the main star. It's kind of an invisible problem that indie films suffer from. A trailer with Tom Cruise in it doesn't need to spend time telling you which person is the main character.

2. This is more important than number one, don't know why I put it second. You should do a foley pass or three on this trailer. Get a twenty dollar artist subscription for one month, Spend three days combing through sound effects and specifically trailer sound effects such as risers and cinematic booms, And then do the following once you've collected up everything you need. Mute the music track and your editing timeline and begin creating the Foley for the trailer. Take a slow and methodical approach, And don't be afraid to use as many layers of audio as necessary. Add detail to bring your world to life by creating independent fully tracks for each element in the scene mixed at an appropriate volume level versus the master. Some scenes don't need foley, Some scenes could benefit from eight layered tracks. Here is the most important part of this section, Keep working on the trailer specific Foley until the entire trailer is entertaining WITHOUT the music. Think of trailer specific sound effects such as cinematic booms as "punctuation", helping to segment moments in the trailer. Then add in the music. If it was great before you added the music, It will be awesome after. Get it to 100%, Then push it up to 150% with carefully selected musical cues, Rather than one carefully selected unifying track.

3. Back to dynamics in sound, You might consider finding multiple tracks that work well together as opposed to just using one good track. In this trailer there are moments that should telegraph emotions such as fear, friendship, religious devotion, and hope. Basically I think that using one piece of music for a trailer that has this much emotional range brings out the best in some clips and greatly reduces the effectiveness of others.

4. A possible solution to this would be to sort of organize your trailer clips into mini chapters as it were. It's already pretty much like that, But starting to think of those many chapters as independent scoring opportunities, Which I feel might really enhance the dramatic impact of the trailer. While a significant number of shots in this are as I mentioned are a group together fairly well, There are a number of shots that seem to be out of logical sequence, In terms of creating a dramatic emotional pattern. We have the couple embracing on the dock as the music swells, And then immediately an angry man with a gun yelling at the sky. Here is the best piece of advice I can give you in this entire post, And if you look up documentaries on professional editing you'll find that this is rule number one pretty much industrywide. Every time you put a clip in a trailer the single most important thing is, " How does this make the audience FEEL". For example in the case of the swelling music and embrace on the dock you are building a good feeling. To give a positive example the last few shots at the end and the title are all pretty much perfect.

5. There are some issues in here with what I would call shot ego. One day over a decade ago I was out doing a time lapse shoot. There were many many shots in that film but on one particular shot I climbed a mountain and camped out on top with the time lapse cameras shooting down into San Jose. On the way up I tripped over a rock sticking out of the mountainside and shattered an $800 lens. It was freezing up there and the shot took hours. The shot itself turned out pretty good. Months later in the editing process I was trying to make a trailer for the film and I forced that shot into it because I considered it an important shot. it really wasn't though. I just wanted it to be in the trailer because it had cost me so much and I had spent so much time on it. Basically I was really proud of that shot and I wanted people to see it so I shoved it into the trailer even though it didn't actually do anything for the trailer. Respectfully I think it's possible that there are a few scenes in here where that may have happened with you. An example what does the dark shot with the northern lights communicate to the audience in the context of this trailer? I looked at it and I thought that's a cool looking shot and I bet Chris spent some time on this, but I had no emotional response to it and it did not illuminate the story. So from my perspective it simply watered down the reel rather than enhancing it. Why is the heretic in the forest shouting at God directly after the dock scene? Why am I more excited about seeing this film because of the inclusion of that scene?

I apologize for all the pedantic criticism, The intent is to give you my genuine feedback in a way that might be helpful.

My final advice is pretty generic, but it's good advice.

Spend one day watching movie trailers on youtube for films that performed well. While you do this take notes about METRICS. Really think about how they used their chapters, how the musical cues hurt or enhanced the impact of scenes in the trailer, How many of them focused on the characters? How many of them focused on the life changing event? What ratio of seconds utilized was put into each stage? Your trailer doesn't have to be and shouldn't be a copy of anyone else's style or work, But simultaneously I think it goes without saying that we can all learn something from people like Spielberg or Kubrick. Find a trailer that made you feel really excited or enthusiastic about seeing the movie, Then really nail down what that trailer actually did to create that feeling.

This means nothing, just my personal take, but here's how I would stage that trailer if I was trying to produce it.

A. Establish normalcy, A Christian family keeping the faith

B. Mysterious events occur, Normalcy is disrupted as strange signs begin to appear

C. Religious and family drama, Tension ramps and people clash as a result

D. The apocalypse hits

E. Faith family and love triumph, Even in the darkest time possible


It's not bad at all the way it is now I'm just pointing out a few ways where you might be able to enhance its impact and get a larger viewership with some simple changes.
Thank you for taking the time to reply and give feedback! I'm sorry I didn't respond sooner, it's been a rough week with my grandmother passing and then my wife's family dog passing too.

I love the idea of doing more with the sound and putting in some sound design. Also great points about trying to tell a story of sorts with it. And yes, totally guilty of shot ego. I think my main reason for it was to show some of the stuff I'd been working on over the past year and illustrate why this has taken so long to get completed.

I think some more planning will be in order for the next one. Thanks again!
 
Thank you for taking the time to reply and give feedback! I'm sorry I didn't respond sooner, it's been a rough week with my grandmother passing and then my wife's family dog passing too.

I love the idea of doing more with the sound and putting in some sound design. Also great points about trying to tell a story of sorts with it. And yes, totally guilty of shot ego. I think my main reason for it was to show some of the stuff I'd been working on over the past year and illustrate why this has taken so long to get completed.

I think some more planning will be in order for the next one. Thanks again!
I'm really sorry to hear about your grandmother's passing. Best of Luck in promoting your project. I know you worked really hard on this, and I hope it's a big success for you.
 
Making some real headway today on the end scene. Here's a work in progress:
FinalSceneFOG.jpg


It wasn't working for the longest time, but then I had the idea to add some volumetric fog. My renders are about 1.5 minutes per frame, so not too bad. This particular shot is the most complicated in the scene since it shows her standing in the CG environment and has camera animation. The rest of the scene plays out in mediums and close ups that will be a lot easier to deal with. A few final tweaks I want to make are adding vines and ivy to the rubble and buildings, and I want to use an AI tool I saw online that takes 2D image sequences (like the girl) and creates a 3D depth map that will allow me to light her in Blender with the same lights I'm using in the 3D scene.
 
Melissa and Steve came by last week to do their ADR. They only had two scenes that needed it, so they were done in two hours.

Also, I'd really been struggling with pulling keys on my close and medium shots for the last scene in Nuke. Just for fun, I decided to try it in the Fusion page of Resolve and it worked! I've managed to retain great hair detail using the UltraKeyer and then applying some noise reduction after the key is pulled. Here's what the nodes look like:

FinalSceneComp.jpg



The blue box on the left is my background from Blender. The tan box on the bottom is dust, the orange is my angelic being, and the green is the lady on the green screen. It's a pretty tidy comp, and I've got some amazing hair detail out of this. The cool part is that I'm not even using the Studio version of Fusion, just the built in one that comes with Resolve Studio 19. It's crazy what we can do these days with free tools.
 
Long time, no update! Been busy. And sick. I'm feeling better now though and back on track with this monster. VFX are done! My final shot was also one of the first shots I started - the horde of people outside the hospital. I tweaked the helicopter in that shot to look more natural and also added people running. And of course birds. Gotta have the background birds.

I spent today doing a quick sound mix. I wanted to integrate the ADR we recorded, as well as all the new music I've got. My computer is rendering the film right now, so I'm killing time by watching the DVD of the film that started all this: "Leap" 2009. We shot it MiniDV on a Canon ZR800. Did ADR for every line and every sound was re-recorded and added in post. Nothing of the sound came from location.

It's a fun, but also odd experience going back and watching the original film. It's fun to see the growth and improvement over the past 15 years, but I also miss the off the cuff shooting style I had back then. The film feels a lot more "free", if that's the correct term. I also realize that while that's part of the charm to me, it does make it feel more low budget. The original movie and this new one couldn't be more far apart from a style and quality standpoint, but I think that's a good thing.

In any case, wishing you all a happy holiday season!
 
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