Remember westerns?

[Yammeryammeryammer]

Hello,

This past year my production group and I became more ambitious than usual and decided that we would attempt to shoot a feature length western. We applied for a production grant from the Foundation for the Arts and were approved. So we had a little bit of money to play with for a change, and we are now finishing dialogue replacement on the project. It currently runs 2 hours and 3 minutes, but I am going to hack 10-15 minutes out of it. I posted some stills up on the photo site at the following URL:

http://public.fotki.com/eXposure/yammeryammeryammer/

The stills are a telecine transfer from a Super 16 neg. Most of the stock was the new Vision 2 250 Daylight, but we used some 500T for night stuff as well. Let me know what you guys think of the visuals.

[miker]

Looks ambitious .... looks like it had money spent on it .... looks like you might've pulled it off! Congrats!

Do you care to divulge your production budget?

[eddie123456789]

Whats the story like?
Looks like quite an acheivement, although the sets all look a little bit souless and bought in to me.
Never the less its down to what you did with it. Congratulations on getting funding and a 16mm film shot.

[twister!]

Looks very good. The locations look fantastic - where are they? I guess the town is some kind of permanent 'old west' style film set somewhere...

[Patriarch]

wow congratulations..looks quite cool.

But I guess the ultimate test is seeing/hearing the film in action. But sure looks promising!

[Generic Skinhead]

[img]graemlins/thumbs_up.gif[/img]

Looks great! And good on you for shooting film and being ambitious!

[richard.fisher]

Great stills. would love some more details.

[Yammeryammeryammer]

Thanks for the feedback guys! The story is about two horse thieves who inadvertantly kidnap the daughter of a Hudson's Bay land governor. We ended up spending a little over $40,000 Canadian so far, most of which was equipment, film, horses, wagons/stagecoaches, and other things we couldn't avoid paying for. The good part is that we won't actually end up being in debt after all is said and done because it is all covered by the AFA grant.
Eddie, thanks for the honest feedback about the sets looking a bit souless and brought in. Some of that actually works for the movie because it takes place at a time when those locations are basically deserted.
The set is called the CL Ranch (located in Cochrane, Alberta, Canada) and was built for the TV Series Lonesome Dove, and since has been used for a bunch of westerns (Shanghai Noon, and Brad Pitt's latest one about the death of Jesse James are probably the most of note). The other location is the John Scott Ranch (located in Longview, Alberta, Canada), owned by John Scott who is a guy who handled wrangling for Legends of the Fall, Timeline etc. It is a nice looking grassland type place, and is convenient because there are a lot of screen horses around.
Beyond that most of the crew/cast were university aged people in various programs, none of which involving film. Most of the actors are doing Bachelor of Fine Arts in acting, and the older actors are mostly career theatre actors who run an improv company. There should be a website up in a week or so with a trailer that I will post.

[Patriarch]

Thats really great. Looking forward to seeing it. Who is doing the music? What are your plans with the film? How has the shooting turned out - the satisfied?

[Yammeryammeryammer]

I am actually pretty satisfied with it. Some parts of it I am more pleased with than others, but overall it was a great experience, and it is going over pretty well as we do our final editing revisions. The music is being done by a few different people, large sections are shaping up to be simpler acoustic/violin stuff and a lot of the town section is piano based ragtime. We can't really afford the operatic western score on our budget, but it would be nice. Oh well.
My contribution was director/writer/camera op. I also tended to do a significant portion of the producing end of things by virtue of the fact it was my name on a lot of the lines of credit. Regardless I think we had a pretty good crew that was very enjoyable.