Hope for a Thorn posed an interesting challenge musically. Aside from the score (I went with my go-to composer, the exceptional David Jones, who scored two of my shorts – Life to Go and The Girl Who Couldn’t Dream; you can hear his work in the Thorn trailer), I also wanted a lot of source music, music to be playing in the scene.

As Victoria is very stuck in her memories of a happier time, the 1940′s, I really wanted her house to be filled with the music of that era and earlier (what her mother would have listened to). For my temp music, I used a lot of Billie Holiday, Lena Horne, etc. However, music rights are a tricky business and with our limited budget, there was no way we could afford festival rights to these songs, let alone DVD rights.

This was the single most frustrating piece for me over the last two years, as I was haunted by the question of how to pull this off. I first attempted to find public domain music, but that is also incredibly tricky, as there are multiple rights involved (the song itself might be public domain but a particular recording might not).

Enter David Harper and J4U Entertainment. David and his team of talented musicians, vocalists, writers, and engineers were eager to come on board. They did (what I thought was) the impossible – wrote and recorded original songs inspired by my temp tracks that sound convincingly vintage.

I am thrilled to unveil the new songs to the world at Gasparilla!

Song Credits:
“I Wish You Were Near”
Performed by LaRae Gainey
Composed by LaRae Gainey, David A. Harper, Kenneth Crouch
Produced by Rob Gi’Hana Grissett, David Anthony
Published by Queen LaRae Publishing (BMI), J4U Entertainment (ASCAP) & yesssindeed publishing (BMI)
© 2010 J4U Entertainment

Well it has been a busy few weeks. Hopefully things will start to calm down a little, now that summer is here.

Jay and I have been doing a little a little of the festival thing lately. We were at the Sarasota Film Festival in April for the World Premiere of my short film Life To Go, as well as the Southeast Premiere of Not Your Typical Bigfoot Movie. We had a great time, but wish we could’ve been around for the whole festival. The most fun thing about the festival circuit is running into the same filmmakers. Several of the filmmakers we met at SXSW also played Sarasota and the Maryland Film Festival, which we went up for a few weekends ago.

We had a quick trip to Baltimore, which is a great city and a great festival. Hopefully we can make it there again.

In Thorn news, we’re still editing and getting it out to people. We held a test screening last weekend. While it’s never painless to put a film out there for the sole purpose of having strangers tell you what’s wrong with it, I’m really glad we did it. We had about 17 people watch the film and then answer a questionnaire and participate in a discussion about what can be improved on the film. It was very informative for us and helped shape our editing plan for the next several weeks.

Marco and I spent Monday and Tuesday back in Deland where our exterior locations are, shooting a few additional shots, for transitions and establishing shots. It was kind of surreal being back there. I also had a meeting with our sound designer last week. We watched the film together and talked through some ideas. I’m really excited to see how some of our ideas play out.

In other news, I am now finished with teaching and with school (save the 1 hour of thesis I am enrolled in over the summer) and have relocated to St. Pete. Hoping to get a little bit of fun summer time in, amidst finishing the film and working on my festival strategy, developing a few other projects, and finding some way to pay the bills…

Below are a few pictures from the festivals:

The editing process can be a time-consuming and lonely one. There are moments of extreme frustration, but also times that are incredibly rewarding. The postproduction phase is really about deconstructing the entire film and then constructing it again. The past few months have been spent re-evaluating the story, characters, and themes. I can no longer rely on what my intentions were when writing the script. All I have is what was shot and now I have to let the film speak for itself. I now serve the film, rather than the other way around.

I’ve lost count of exactly what cut I’m on now. My guess is somewhere around 4 or 5, but it could actually be more. I’ve been meeting regularly with two advisors, Ula Stoeckl (my mentor throughout the film and a brilliant director) and Mark Gerstein (who taught me everything I know about editing). My skin has gotten much thicker throughout the course of our screenings. The film already varies quite drastically from the script, but it has all been for the past. I’ve had to cut some of my favorite shots and some really good scenes, because they ultimately didn’t add to the film as a whole. But that’s what the Deleted Scenes feature is for, right?

In the next few weeks I will be at a point where I feel comfortable enough to open the film up to other people (as opposed to the 3 that have seen it now) and get more feedback. We’re still on target to have a completed film by the end of the summer.

Thursday afternoon my rough cut is due. I find I work much better with deadlines, so it’s been good having that looming over me for the last couple weeks.

I’ve been working pretty hard, spending many hours hunched over a computer (and I’ve got the back pain to prove it!). My strategy has been to attack the film in segments – I’ll take 5 – 10 scenes, depending on length, and cut them together and then move on to another segment. I only have a few scenes left – 5 or 6. They are the ones I’ve been putting off because they scare me the most. They are all really important scenes and also have the most footage so they’re rather daunting.

I have yet to put all those pieces together though. That’ll be the real test. Individually, I’ve been pleased with the sequences overall. A couple scenes have proved problematic but for the most part, they’re working out well. This weekend I will string everything together and then I’ll be able to see how the film flows and where the problems are. That’ll be a scary day!

Hopefully I won’t find that we need to reshoot anything, as that’s pretty much an impossibility. Our primary location has been transformed back to a normal home, but we could do some exteriors if we needed to. I’ve got my fingers crossed that that won’t happen though. We do, however, have to reshoot some stills we staged for the poster and publicity images. We snapped a few rolls of really great stuff inside the house (the only stills of the parlor, a crucial location), but the lab botched them. So next month I will be taking Sarah and Pat out to DeLand to shoot the image for the poster.