CRACKCOON

Wrapping up my 10th year of editing/sound designing movies, I find myself almost overwhelmed with movie projects. I recently finished editing CRACKCOON for West Virginia director, Brad Twigg and he's got a few other gigs for me lined up. Brad's a fan of my old movies and was one of the few people who purchased an autographed copy of my self-authored SINISTRE Director's Final Cut DVD in 2017. The first thing Brad hired me to do was sound design/fx for a short film. There was no title, we just referred to it as "the alien short." Brad's got it on the back burner until he gets more content for the anthology it'll go into. Soon thereafter, he asked me to do sound fx for the teaser trailer of his newest feature, CRACKCOON. The only real challenge there was finding a voice for the title critter. He was pleased with the results and the trailer helped fuel quite a bit of anticipation for the crowdfunded movie. Brad's quite a prolific filmmaker with seven feature-length movies completed under his Fuzzy Monkey Films banner and several more he co-directed. He asked me to edit CRACKCOON because he's quite busy writing and doing pre-production on yet more movies. Also because he was confident I'd do a competent job. I named my price, he agreed and sent me a hard drive with a whopping 7TB of raw footage.

Brad shot in 4K with two Blackmagic cameras but the movie only had to be rendered in 1080 HD. Here we had a big snafu. FCPX, the editing software I use can't read the BRAW codec Brad's cameras shot in. The fix was another program called Color Finale Transcoder that converts the BRAW footage to Apple's ProRes. This process took a LOT of time. The transcoder would only preview still frames of each shot so I couldn't see anything in motion or hear the audio until after it had been rendered. I could do a pre-grade before encoding but this didn't always work out. Most shots had to be re-encoded because they were either too dark or over-exposed. That little thumbnail preview window wasn't very helpful when trying to determine the best grade for each image. It seems nowadays, filmmakers' state-of-the-art cameras all shoot LOG or RAW footage where the dynamic range is expanded. This is why you see hazy images in so many movies, commercials, documentaries and whatnot. The editors apparently were too lazy to grade the footage correctly. It's designed to be used with various LUTs that change the image for whatever "look" is intended for the final video. I didn't use any LUTs. I simply set the output to old-school rec.709 which rendered a pretty good starting point. FCPX has excellent tools for video color/exposure/saturation. This situation was rather like my experience with FLOWERS, navigating through the learning curve while editing the movie.

There's not a single night scene in CRACKCOON. The whole movie takes place in broad daylight with a lot of sunny exteriors. A complete 180 from the usual dark gloomy Borderline Cinema features. A few scenes had characters split between shade and direct sunlight which gave me fits! The crew didn't always bounce light onto the shaded actor and it wasn't always possible to find a happy medium with the grade. So I had to re-import a shot at a higher exposure, which would bloom out the sunlit character. Here's a glaring example:

I'd match the frame and animate the shaded character over the graded shot. Here's the final composite:

I'd hoped that I could simply split screen the shot but the characters run up to their mark, speak and then run past the camera. Too much movement for a split screen, which would be obvious. Frankie had to be isolated in a draw mask and composited over the shot. His movements were animated frame by frame. This one shot took about 7 or 8 hours to "fix." Hopefully nobody notices the dancing feathered halo around him that spills onto the background briefly. There are times when an editor's craft becomes show-offish but we're most successful when the audience is so absorbed into the flow that they don't notice the slight-of-hand tricks. Another time-consuming chore was making crew members and various behind-the-scenes gear disappear from reflective surfaces. For instance, the windows of a house on a long drone shot and the mirrored sunglass lenses of this character.

Poof! They're gone!

Brad was well aware of this conundrum and had the actor remove those glasses after this scene.

CRACKCOON is quite a change-of-pace for Borderline Cinema! This movie is a spoof; a horror-comedy with a cast of cartoonish characters, excessive gore, fart gags and more screaming (human and animal) than all the other movies I've edited combined. I laughed out loud several times just reading the script! Those moments, thankfully, were very well performed and translate to the screen perfectly. But that damned raccoon puppet... We all (counting myself among the puppeteers and CGI animator) did out best to bring that little sonuvabitch to life. It's basically a muppet, rarely seen full-bodied, head-to-tail. The animator and I had our work cut out for us, erasing control rods and glimpses of the puppeteers. There are five shots of a fully-CGI Crackcoon that don't really look like the shaggy puppet but, well, here's a peek.

Brad shot several takes of the cast struggling with an invisible animal but none were used because it wasn't possible to spend the gazillions of dollars it'd take for a Hollywood-level CGI artist to provide a convincing coon. Luckily, there were alternate takes most of the time with the puppet and lots of shakey-cam to help obfuscate the artifice. Not to mention several gallons of spraying, spurting fake blood to catch the audiences' eyes during the Crackcoon attacks. Brad and I also discussed using live raccoon footage as well, which I experimented with early on to make a couple of pre-vis shots. The challenge here was finding the correct angle and movements of the animal for the shot it would be composited into. In the end, I only managed to accomplish two very brief moments of a live raccoon appearing in the movie. Not gonna show it here because, spoilers! No doubt, there will be complaints from reviewers over the cheezy raccoon fx. Whatcha see is whatcha get folks. Personally, I consider the Crackcoon puppet to have it's own kitschy charm. You get a good look at it in the crowdfunder trailer that Brad made so audiences should be well aware of what to expect.

But I still had to make this little bastard a threat. As usual, after the movie's edited, sound effects are applied to flesh out the experience. Back when Brad sent me the trailer, my main concern was the Crackcoon's voice. Raccoons have quite a large vocabulary! But the Crackcoon is a violent, vicious little beast and raccoons aren't really that aggressive. There are very few online sources of actual raccoons fighting with clear sound. But when they do, it's pretty disturbing. A few years ago, there was a family of raccoons in my neighborhood that was a cause of concern because I let my cats out in the back yard; but only during the day. Raccoons are nocturnal animals and are rarely seen in daylight. One evening after dusk, I observed three raccoons climbing down from a hole in the trunk of a big maple tree in my front yard. Another time, as I was rolling my trash dumpster to the end of the driveway, I saw two of them watching me from that same spot up in that tree, about 10 feet up from the ground. I got the bright idea of relocating them for the safety of my cats so I purchased a live-trap and quickly caught one. Lemme tell ya, the sound of that angry raccoon shouting at me when I got too close was nightmare-inducing! Too chicken-shit to attempt to carry it anywhere, I carefully opened the trap door to release the little devil. Ever the voice of reason, my wife said it was not a good idea to separate all the young ones from their mother. There are no raccoon sanctuaries so where the hell was I to take them anyway? This was way before CRACKCOON. If only I had my digital audio recorder during my encounter with that caged beast! Sorry for the digression. The upshot is that the Crackcoon's voice is provided by lots of different animals (mainly small wild cats) besides raccoons. Bobcat, snow leopard, ocelot, serval, oncilla, even a vulture and my Maine Coon cat, Ezra provide the Crackcoon with his distinctive voice. i.e. after I've applied certain filters and pitch adjustments. Somehow, I've maintained my sanity after several long weeks of listening to screaming animals. btw, with CRACKCOON, this was the first time I made a 5.1 surround soundtrack. I wish I'd have done that with all the previous movies I've edited/sound designed!

Brad was kind enough to spare me the trouble of creating the end credit scroll. You'd think it'd be an easy chore but it takes a lot of time to format the text. Any adjustment forces a complete render of the file, which takes more time. I'm very grateful to him for sending a completed file that I could simply stick at the end of the timeline. Time is the greatest gift anyone could give me and that bought me a full day or more. Brad gave me "Post Production Supervisor" credit but it should really be his name up there since he did all the correspondence with the composer, animators and the bands that contributed original songs to the soundtrack. But he likes for his credit scroll to look professional and I ain't gonna argue the point. He also included a credit for an "Online Editor" in the Post-Production section. I had to ask him what that was. He replied: "An online editor polishes the final edit of a film." Oh. The final film is exactly what I delivered. However, during the post-production phase, I always send the director clips of the work in progress. There are always corrections and adjustments along the way. For example, an early dialog scene was so well performed by the actors that I let the master take play out uncut. But Brad insisted that I stick in close-ups and b-camera angles so the audience wouldn't get bored. This can be tricky because the actors' subtle expressions and movements need to match shot-to-shot. Before the movie was "locked" I had sent Brad a proxy master that he watched with his wife, who spotted a couple of continuity errors that needed to be fixed. So it's always a good idea to get an unbiased opinion from a fresh set of eyes. We can get kinda tunnel-visioned when we're navigating through the post-production weeds. Finally, I wanna mention one scene in particular runs a lot longer than I had originally edited, at the director's insistence. It's not padding, it's gratuitous exploitation. You'll know it when you see it. And that's I'm gonna say about it.

Speaking of credits, Brad wanted a cool main title credits sequence. The original idea of a crack epidemic featuring gritty crime-scene stuff got nixed in favor of a Robert Rodriguez inspired retro-'70s scheme. He even sent me the same font that RR used in his MACHETE trailers.

This was a challenge to create and took a full week to design and animate but I'm really proud of how it turned out. It runs pretty long at two full minutes because of all the obligatory crowdfunder producers. Composer Mike Trebilcock provided a lively, jazzy score to accompany the high-contrast, high-energy sequence.

CRACKCOON will be released on blu-ray by Cineverse in August. There will be a theatrical premiere on May 25, 2024 at The State Theater of Havre de Grace in Havre de Grace, MD. I'd love to be there but it's about a thousand miles away from here and I'm not much of a traveler. CRACKCOON is a really fun little movie, if I say so myself. No doubt the audience will have a blast!

I also edited a different trailer for CRACKCOON's official release but I gotta keep it in limbo until the distributor decides it's time to promote the movie. You'd think they wouldn't mind the cast and/or crew contributing to the hype of an upcoming release, but no. We're contractually obligated to sit on our hands and keep mum until they launch an official promotion. This is why I haven't blogged or posted anything on socials about the last few movies I've edited. By the time one of those movies gets a blu-ray release announcement, my enthusiasm has waned, replaced by whatever movie I'd currently be working on. I've got an unfinished blog written about my efforts on the new version of RAVAGE but by the time the blu-ray got released, I was knee-deep with another movie. Ditto VILE 21. And there area still two other features that are done, complete with bonus supplements, in the hands of the distributor but I'm probably breaking the rules even mentioning them. Y'all will have to just wait and see but if you're familiar with Borderline Cinema's repertoire, it'd probably be easy to guess...