Trailer for my new feature, THE WATERMELON!
 

This past summer we shot The Watermelon - a feature film based on an award-winning script by Michael Hemmingson. We just finished our first cut and are moving on to the polish. Brad - the director/editor - took time out to cut a trailer. I hope you like it.

http://www.bradmays.com/watermelonstream.mov

It's fugly.

I won't let you steal away the last thing my
 

daddy left to me!!!!

So, are you agreeing with the trailer?

Do you have a slow server? It took me ages to stream it. I gave up at the point they said fugly. I hope my connection is acting up.

Hmmm, it's on ATT, so I don't know why it would
 

be slow. It is a fairly large file. Maybe we should make the image smaller.

Thanks for the heads up. If someone else has this problem, please let me know.

I liked the trailer. The acting seemed appropriately over the top and the cinematography looked really good - well controlled.

There's just one thing... when I watched it, the audio had a weird, underwater, warble to it. I'm sure that it wasn't recorded that way, seeing all the care you took with the lighting and acting, but I couldn't get past it.

Also, I'll concur, it took a minute to stream, but it was worth the minute.

And yes... it's fugly ;)

I agree with Kevin on all accounts except it played quickly. Go figure. I'm in the middle of the Pacific ocean and it plays fine for me.

The audio effect sounds like the audio effect called a flanger. I think it is from two identical sources slightly out of phase. I have also heard a bit of this effect from audio noise reduction software. Was noise reduction used on the audio or could the L and R channels be out of phase?

Something must have happened in the conversion. The audio streams sound great. Anyway, I'm glad you like it.

We don't have any credits on the trailer so for the record, the DP is the brilliant Lawrence Malloy.
http://www.lawrencemalloy.com

And the rest of the credits:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0945521/fullcredits

Looks good.
What kind of camera did you use?

Not bad at all. Very strange, but probably in a good way. We'll have to see soon.

I noticed that effect too. It also happens when you use too much noise reduction, or too low a bit rate for encoding (the most likely suspect).

Loved the trailer about a trailer. What plans do you have for showing it? Or, more to the point what chance would an ordinary guy like me have to get to see the final product?

Emre - thank you. We're going to redo it today and hopefully that problem will end. We don't have a lot of experience preparing footage for the internet so your guidance is appreciated.

Jimi - we shot it on the Panasonic 24p system - it's a beautiful thing. Truly. It gets us so much closer to Truffault's dictum that cinema will be art when film is as cheap as crayons.

Bruce - as for seeing it, we're going to go the festival route. I knew the script was brilliant for festivals. An eccentric, well-written story filled with charming three-dimensional characters - it's perfect indie festival fare. As for distribution, we just finished our first cut this week. We still have a couple week of polishing to go. We'll take it from there. :) Thanks for asking.

How long do you think it will take from finishing the principal photography until you are done with editing, sound and music etc? How many months do you anticipate?

Brian, We plan on being done by the end of the year. We'll have the cut locked within a week or so. We have some special effects work we need done, and then we have to figure out the score. So overall, five months beginning to end.

New and Improved Watermelon trailer!!! I've got it up on YouTube because streaming it from our site seems to be causing problems for people. I think it's very good. it tells a lot more of the story.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDimaB95fK0

This looks really good (both the trailer and what you're selling with the trailer). Well done. Photography looks really nice.

Can I ask what procedure you used for the Youtube upload? (I'm also trying to get 24P HD uploads and they turn out like crap).

Greg

We down converted the footage from our main time line into DV Pro anamorphic 16:9 interlaced at 29.97. Then using that single file, we edited the trailer together. We then rendered that as a single DV PRO file, which we then compressed to Sorenson Three, medium resolution setting. And that's what we uploaded online.

We're not experts on preparing footage for internet streaming, by any means. Brad is not sure he even did it right but the results seems reasonable so he's fine with it. But there are people who know infinitely more about this stuff than we do, and we'd certainly like to meet a few of them. :)

Quite a cast of characters you got there. As you said, you may well have indie gold! I didn't notice any problems with the youtube version. Good luck!