Final Preparations for the Premiere

Hookman: Redemption is finished, and final preparations have begun for the premiere on Thursday at The Charles Theater.  The final rendering/export/encoding of the film to Blu-Ray for the screening took 36 hours of compute power to make sure everything looks as good as it can up on the big screen.  Then, we went to The Charles Theater to talk to the manager and test out the projection system to check image fidelity &  lens calibration.

It looked great! In an exclusive interview, the director said, "It's really exciting to finally see the finished product projected in a theater, like a proper movie. This is by far the most complicated and involved project I've ever undertaken.  It's almost surreal to see it finished because for several years now the end has seemed to be so far in the distance I didn't even think about it.  Now that it's really here it's hard to believe.  I think probably about halfway through the premiere it will finally hit me and then I'll be sad it's all over.  Thursday night will definitely be bittersweet because it marks the end of such a large and creatively satisfying project."

This is auditorium two of the theater, where the premiere will be held Thursday night, and where Hookman: Requiem also premiered six years ago.  Do you think 260 seats will be enough?

The screening starts promptly at 7 p.m., so be sure to get there early and grab a good seat. There will be a table in the lobby to purchase tickets (cash only). More details will follow regarding the DVD release, but we will begin taking pre-orders for them at the show as well.  Blu-Ray copies will be $12, DVD copies will be $10, and CDs of the soundtrack will be $8.  See you there!

Countdown to the Premiere

Unofficial movie poster created by Crazy Rachel

The Hookman: Redemption premiere is only 18 days away! The world is anxiously awaiting what has been touted as "definitely a feature-length movie" and "a sequel to some other movie, I think." With all the buzz about the movie itself, many have lost sight of an important part of the Hookman experience.  True fans know that often some of the biggest laughs come after the credits in the form of outtakes.

Past adventures in Hookman filmmaking have indeed included many quotable lines and gags outside of the main film, the most notable of which has got to be the Alfonso "alpaca" line.  The best part is even though he finally gets the line right, it was cut from the final film.  So here you have a joke that was arguably as funny as anything in the movie, is still referenced today (and Robbie still gets ridiculed for), yet it wasn't even in the finished film! (if you haven't seen it, check out the video below)

Hookman: Redemption is breaking new ground in a lot of areas for the world of Hookman films, not the least of which in the outtakes department. To give you an idea of the scope of these outtakes, let me give you some numbers.  We are going through all of the raw footage in sequential order, starting with the footage for scene one, finding the funny outtakes, then going on to scene two and doing the same thing, etc.  After going through the first 15 scenes like this, we have 20 minutes of outtakes.  That works out to a little more than a minute of outtakes per scene.  And with 52 scenes in the film, that means there should be over an hour of outtakes!

It is entirely possible that the outtakes reel will be longer than the film itself, which has a running time of 88 minutes. This poses a small problem for showing them at the premiere.  The Charles Theatre has allotted us two hours to present Hookman: Redemption (7pm on December 27th, by the way).  Therefore after the credits at the premiere, there will have to be an abbreviated outtakes reel - but don't worry, that will still be half and hour long of only the best and funniest slip-ups, gags, jokes, and lines that we could never get quite right.  The full-length outtakes reel will be available to watch (along with other bonus features like director's commentary and behind-the-scenes goodies) when the DVD and Blu-Ray are released.  

So be sure to stick around at the premiere through the credits to see what may be some of the funniest parts of Hookman! 

Hookman: Redemption premieres Thursday, December 27th at 7pm at The Charles Theatre in Baltimore.  It is open to the public, and tickets are $10 at the door.

The remaining post-production schedule, of sorts.   The outtakes are due to be edited by 12/19.

Premiere & Trailer

At long last, the premiere of Hookman: Redemption is upon us!

After more than two years of work, the feature film Hookman: Redemption will make its premiere on December 27, 2012 at 7 p.m. at The Charles Theater in Baltimore (Directions). Tickets are $10 at the door, and all proceeds will go towards the theater rental.

Hookman: Requiem premiered here on the same date six years ago.

'Wow', you say, 'that's awesome, I can't wait! What will I do to get my Hookman fix before then?' Well, do not fret.  Here for the first time is a trailer for the completed film:

So mark your calendars and tell your friends, Hookman is coming to the Charles on December 27th!

Post-Production & Visual Effects

This is the first post to the blog in a long time because we've been focusing on finishing the movie.  We are happy to report that principal photography is wrapped on Hookman: Redemption!

Now begins the long process of editing, visual effects, and audio mix for the film.  In this Hookman movie, we've really stepped our game up in terms of visual effects.  Hookman: Requiem had a grand total of three greenscreen shots - meaning actors were shot against a green screen and composited into existing footage to achieve a desired effect.  Bonus points if you can name all three.

Now, in Hookman: Redemption, we eat simple greenscreen shots for breakfast.  This week we're going to look at a shot where we put an entire car on a greenscreen stage inside a studio, shot a dialogue sequence on steadicam, then composited it to make it look as if the car were driving on a bright sunny day.  Let's break that down a bit to show how complicated it is.

wow, we're getting fancy

Step 1: Shoot the stuff.  In this case, it's four people talking in a car, pretending to drive.  We used a steadicam to shoot the opening shot of the scene because we're awesome.  That means the camera is seemingly floating around the car while it's driving.

Step 2: Remove the "green" from the background and replace it with what you want.  This is where we stopped in Hookman: Requiem, and can be fairly complicated.  But in this new shot, the hardest parts are ahead.

what the turd?

Step 3: Track the camera in 3D.  In order to make a shot look realistic that has a 'floating camera,' we need to create a virtual camera in 3D that moves EXACTLY the same way the real camera did.  This is impossible to do by hand because it has to be very precise.  We run it through a 3D camera tracking program that picks out hundreds of small details in the frame then tracks each one through the entire shot to reverse-engineer the camera move in a virtual environment (huh?).

Step 4: Backgrounds. So now we've got the car cut out from the green screen, and the virtual camera move matched.  For the background of the shot, we want the car driving on a nice country road.  So we physically go out and shoot 360 degrees around a nice country road while driving.  This required rigging a camera to shoot out of the trunk, side door, and on the hood of a minivan while driving 40 mph.  We shot this roughly six months after shooting the original car in the studio.


Step 5: Build the virtual world.  Now we bring those 2D background plates into the 3D world and line them up so they're seamless.  Do some final color tweaking, add a lens flare and some motion blur, and the shot is good to go!

I may have lost you after step one.  That's okay because you don't have to really worry about it.  If the visual effect succeeds, you'll never even realize it was a greenscreen shot anyway.  Hopefully you'll just watch the film and say to yourself, "Oh, they're driving down a nice country road, isn't that lovely."  

This shot took roughly 10 hours to get it to a "good enough for Hookman" quality level.  Watch the video to check out the original footage and the various stages it goes through to get to the final shot (watch it in HD or suffer the consequences):

Leaked Set Photos!

This week we have super top-secret photos from the set of Hookman: Redemption that offer and unauthorized look behind the scenes of the epic production this past weekend!