One Night With You
I was driving along listening to WNJR my local funk radio station--this was in 1975. Suddenly there’s an announcement. “If you’re interested in learning about filmmaking, are currently unemployed and are a resident of Newark, New Jersey you can apply to the Filmmaking Training Program at the Theater Of Universal Images on Broad Street right next door to Symphony Hall. Manpower will pay trainees $80 a week to learn a skill.”
Joe D’Augustine
Indie filmmaking is not just twenty-somethings packing MiniDV cameras and laptops loaded with Final Cut Pro. Joe D’Augustine, a film editor for nearly three decades, just completed directing, writing and editing his first feature, One Night With You, with nary a skateboard or tattoo in sight.
Joe’s story, replete with his own version of how digital technology allowed him to make his first film, is really a story about how Joe and his wife and producer, Heather, steadfastly pursued a dream to make movies their own way and on their own terms. As the saying goes, Joe and Heather D’Augustine are an overnight success 20 years in the making.
Independence, however, comes at a cost. Heather explains it this way, “A piece of advice you always get from people “in the know” is “never use your own money.” It’s not bad advice. The only problem is that as soon as you go to outside sources for funds you’re suddenly answering to someone else. If we were going to go out on our own we wanted to at least do our first film the way we felt it ought to be done which meant somehow or other we’d have to find a way to pay for it ourselves”.
Unlike most new indie filmmakers, both Joe and Heather had years of filmmaking experience. Joe started in NYC in the late 70s working as an editor on commercials. After a few years he graduated to feature projects for directors such as Robert Downey Sr., Michael Cimino and Quentin Tarantino and television programs such as MONK. Heather, a production coordinator and production manager became a paralegal well into her career to learn more about entertainment law particularly accounting, talent payments and taxes. Both Joe and Heather were respected in their fields and could easily have been content to continue working on other people’s films with great success. But Joe had always wanted to direct. And there was something more; they both have a passion for film that goes beyond their areas of expertise. Simply put, the D’Augustines have stories to tell.
Heather talks about the genesis of their independent plans, “Joe wrote several scripts and began focusing on affordable in-house (literally, in our case!) post-production solutions. It was imperative for us to turn out a highly professional product, but we had to do it within a very modest budget.”
As an editor Joe was very aware of the latest developments in technology and was well versed in digital tools. Joe decided to shoot MiniDV and assembled a nonlinear system he could use at his home studio, “I put together Final Cut Pro on an Apple G5 equipped with a Blackmagic DeckLink Extreme card. I used the card to monitor the image via SDI on a Sony NTSC monitor. I color corrected with FCP and the Blackmagic SDI gave me a great image to work on”. This process was all familiar ground for Joe, but directing actors on a limited budget (and his own money) was something else entirely.
Joe received his, “trial by fire” on the second day of principal photography. “We were shooting in a rundown motel; some of the other rooms were occupied by people that looked like they had reached the end of the line--no checking out of this place for them. We set up to do our big climactic dialog scene. This is where the two main characters really have it out after torturing each other for the first two acts. The two actors really got into character for this scene, not only was it over 100 degrees in the room, but we had our crew (shooting two cameras) crammed in there as well, raising the temperature even higher”.
The goal that day was to cover 15 pages of script (double that of a blistering TV schedule) so Joe shot two cameras and ran very long 10-minute takes. “I was worried how long could I keep everybody in this sweatbox and how long I could keep the actors from each other’s throats. I knew I had great stuff but I also knew I didn’t have the entire scene in the can. Somehow between moments of impending violence, great acting was coming through. Finally all the pages were x’ed out and I knew we had it. I was able to call Cut, that’s a wrap!”
Forty locations later Joe called the final “wrap” on ONWY and dove into editing the video footage. Most of Joe’s experience was with 35mm where the finishing was handled by the lab. Indie filmmaking is about doing everything yourself and Joe found himself working out his own workflow from digital cut to 35mm. “After finishing the cut I created a 10-bit uncompressed 23.98FPS timeline in FCP, copied and pasted the film (by reel) into it and used a plugin from Nattress.com called Chroma Smoother to uprez the image. Chroma Smoother allows you to break down the 4:1:1 components of a shot then tweak the Chroma elements effectively mimicking 4:2:2 color space and getting rid of stairstepping or jaggies. (I highly recommend that interested filmmakers check out Graeme Natress’s writings on Black levels and 4:1:1 color space.) Then I output to DigiBeta through the DeckLink SDI connection for the best picture quality”. Joe was very pleased with the visual workflow he devised, but he was only half finished. Now Joe was ready to tackle the audio.
The old days of analog sound may be behind us, but transfer and mixing costs can still be a burden for indie filmmakers. One way to keep costs down is to be absolutely buttoned up when bringing files to facilities that charge hourly rates. Joe found that the right hardware made this considerably easier. “I used DeckLink’s audio ins and outs for monitoring thereby avoiding the added expense of a separate audio card and freeing up a PCI slot in my G5”.
Joe then brought the 12-track audio files to mixer Stan Kastner. “We mixed on ProTools in Stan’s garage studio. We printmastered at MonkeyLand Audio just to be safe and DJ Audio shot our optical tracks. Pete Oreck at DJ told me the Domino sometimes repeated frames. I resolved this problem by creating compressed QT’s of each reel with a footage and frame burn-in. I brought these QTs on my 12’ Powerbook to the lab and literally checked each cut, thereby ensuring sync. With audio completed, this left only final output as the last step to getting ONWY to an audience. Joe converted his 10-bit reels ending up with 400GIGs of data which fit on a single Firewire 800 hard drive. Joe took the drive to Triage Motion Picture Services where his movie was filmed out via a Domino to 35mm color negative.
Joe’s expects his next project will be on HD, but his post production system will only need a few modifications—Blackmagic’s hardware handles so many formats that Joe has all the acquisition flexibility he needs. His main concern these days is story, casting and a few dozen creative concerns. Best of all, the only other decision maker he has to please is his wife and partner, Heather. He wouldn’t have it any other way.
One Night With You is beginning to make its way through the festival circuit. It has already won a Spirit Of Silver Lake Award at the 2007 Silver Lake Film Festival and was just selected to screen at the season opener of New Filmmakers- L.A.
