SINISTRE Revisited

Man, it's been a long time since my last blog post! Busybusybusy! Supplements for LUNG II will include a feature-length variant of the movie composed of deleted scenes which we couldn't resist titling LUNG ONE. This was the biggest editing project since completing the main feature and there will be more bonus goodies for the official Unearthed release. All that stuff got delivered in April. Also, I edited composer Mark Kueffner's annual show-reel. That was a fun little change-of-pace. Ever since, I've been concentrating exclusively on SINISTRE, which seems to be taking much longer than my work on either of Phil Stevens' latest features. This feels like a fan-edit of my own movie. It's been a very long time since I've watched SINISTRE, but every time, I got an increasingly nagging sense that it could be edited much better, especially with the technical advances since 1997. Some of you might be familiar with the concept of fan edits. A movie that's been modified by an amateur editor using deleted scenes, had scenes rearranged or eliminated, sometimes shots from other movies edited in, etc. to create a unique unofficial version, many times, actually improving on the original. The granddaddy of 'em all is known as STAR WARS: REVISITED, which was created by a very skilled and dedicated fan-editor known as Adywan. I've done a couple of fan edits myself for fun. Hell, even a fan-sub of a favorite old Hong Kong horror flick. As predicted, additional photography was shot for SINISTRE. I bought a couple of SVHS camcorders so that the footage would match, quality-wise. But I'm getting ahead of myself.. These camcorders served another purpose. Part of the problem with the raw footage came from my old SVHS VCR. I guess the heads were simply worn out. I opened it up and gave everything a good cleaning but it didn't improve playback quality. So I began to wonder if a different playback source would yield better results. Viola! Sure enough, each camcorder produced varying appearances and anomalies, but without many of the glitches from the VCR. Most of the raw footage got digitized and imported a second time. Some shots, multiple times with tracking adjusted until I got the best result.

I've mentioned previously that the old raw camera tapes had been through the ringer and probably have been deteriorating over the decades. Some damage and a couple of lost shots required use of the 1997 edit master, but those instances were quite rare, thankfully. More than 99% of this new version was sourced directly from the original raw camera tapes. There are about a dozen new shots added either to enhance the existing scenes or to replace compromised scenes that were shot ineffectually in 1994. A couple shots were done to replace deleted bits where I made minor changes to the flow of a scene. There's more gore too. After all, this is horror exploitation right? Mike Strain, the original special effects artist who was there in 1994 was willing and eager to create these new fx that I'd dreamed up. Everything turned out great and seamlessly merged into the film. I'm very pleased with the results! The film feels less compromised now because a couple of these shots were things I wanted to get 22 years ago but wasn't able to back then. In addition to the newly-created shots, there will be several shots from the original production that had never been used before. The clip in the first half of this restoration demonstration video is an example.

With the time taken to physically shove the raw tape cassettes in and out of playback decks during the previous analog edits, it was difficult to keep track of every subtle moment, despite a very thoroughly detailed log of what was on each one. A huge benefit of non-linear editing is the ability to find any shot at any time immediately. Now, with instant access to the entirety of the production footage, I had a much better overview of what I was working with. Having a whole lot more editing experience also helps. Also with non-linear, I had much more flexibility with the dialog so I was able to separate audio and manipulate lines from different takes to accompany the picture. Wasn't able to do that with analog cutting! I haven't added the end credits yet, but as it stands, this new cut is about a minute longer than the previous version. And that's despite the deletion of an entire scene! Here's a screenshot of the editing timeline before restoration.

After the first pass on fixing dropouts and glitches, there were 3400 items in the project. When I threw in the towel last week, the 2nd restoration pass yielded an additional total of 4113 elements. Whew! Over 7500 picture elements! Madness!!!

This isn't to say that there will be zero gaffes. Occasionally, I made the mistake of shooting only a single take of part of a scene, which definitely would have benefited with more footage. Awkward continuity from one of these shots to another is frustrating to my eyes, but hopefully to an audience watching with less scrutiny won't notice. But some of those single-take shots have unfortunate, unfixable video glitches which will probably get dissected by reviewers. The primary complaint for SINISTRE's video quality was the darkness of many scenes. I've done everything possible to remedy that. An audience watching in a very bright room on a poorly calibrated monitor will still likely have difficulty with some shots. (Why would you watch a horror movie with the lights on anyway?) The original photography is to blame. We were shooting day-for-night many times and I underexposed too much. Other times, scenes were under-lit and I over-exposed, resulting in excessive graininess. Again, with the tools available now that didn't exist before, I've concentrated extensively on improving the video quality as much as possible, softening the harsh grain, boosting contrast in the dark shots, stabilizing jittery shots, and color-correcting everything for a more consistent presentation. Sound effects have barely started, but I've already made some impressive changes to the audio, if I say so myself. Specifically, the voices of the supernatural characters got a big improvement. In the analog days, audio was even more limited than video during post-production. That is, with my non-existant budget, it was. I was never happy with the voice of the villain before, but now it's sounding better than I ever imagined it could have. FLOWERS and LUNG II had wall-to-wall artificial soundscapes because there was no dialog in those features. With all the chatter in SINISTRE, I won't have to create so much atmosphere throughout. I've already recorded a bunch of natural ambience, footsteps and whatnot to enrich the effects track. Multiple people have suggested that I have a new score composed. That's a possibility that's still being considered but there's nothing official I can comment on yet. Regardless of whether it happens or not, the Clark Carter score will certainly be an optional audio track. Anyway, the weekend's finally here and I'm anxious to continue building the SINISTRE soundscape! The next time I post a blog entry here, it'll probably be an announcement that the movie's finally done. ..again.