Wow! Congrats...and best wishes for the film in future festivals. :-)

Congratulations!

I just watched the trailer and it looks like the movie will be good.

Trailer link:
http://www.coloroftruth.com/coloroftruth/Trailer.html

Thanks guys, appreciate the encouragement.

A few techie notes: All the grass was green but is brown in the film thanks to Secondary Color Corrector. All color-cast shots are done with some settings in the Curves and Bump Map (by setting the bump texturer to zero it's good for a number of FX from color casts to brightening an area of a shot that's a bit too dark.

However, for the trailer I got the best picture quality by rendering to an avi file in Vegas and rendering that to a small mov file in Quicktime Pro.

Great trailer! Looks and sounds very nice.

Break a leg.*



*Because it's bad luck to say "good luck" in the theater.

Well done! What camera (s) was it shot with?
What has to be done to go from Vegas to film? Thanks.

Was shot on 2 Panny DVX100's, with a low-level Tiffen filter (to soften the sharp video outlines). To go to film, if that becomes necessary (if a festival accepts us that requires film for screening--fairly rare nowadays) we would likely go to DV Film and have them make the conversion. But for now, festivals almost universally accept DVDs as submission copies, and in this festival, the theatre has a digital projector that will project a DVD directly to big screen. I'll let you folks know how it went.

Why spend all that money and time on production design and locations and not shoot HD?

Why spend all that money and time on production design and locations and not shoot HD?

An artist will always come back to the same tried and tested tools - A brush with a few "worn" bristles; a palette that feels comfortable in the hand; an easel that creaks and sways against the brush; the smell of the oil paint as it sweeps across the canvas . . . . that kinda thing "artists" love. I'm guessing that it may or may not have been the money. There may well be another series of "vectors" to consider. I've put forward the "tried and tested" value.

Anyway, totally chilling trailer. At this time-distance I can only imagine the life-anguish and finality with which Jews had to suffer . . . . awful . . . . heart numbingly awful . . . .

VitalForce - I salute your work.

Best regards

Grazie

I am excited by this film. Thanks for posting, and the very best to you.

Congratulations

Look forward to your film.All the best

Hope to see more stuff like this on Vegas

My utmost thanks to all who are taking the time to look at the trailer and thanks for your thoughtful remarks.

P.S. Nearly all of the film was shot in 2003-2004, when HD was not yet commonplace. We knew HD was coming but didn't know when it would be commonplace enough to be a workable solution without going to a post house.

Starting 2005, we had problems with two successive sound designers, "names" in the business who never got around to finishing the work and lost a year in the process, so this film is getting born a few years later than it should have. All the same, the story (we hope) is timeless.

<Congratulations! I just watched the trailer and it looks like the movie will be good.>

Special thanks to Glenn Chan for his invaluable advice in recent years. Nearly all the questions I posed on this forum for his attention, concerned this project, and I learned exactly what I hoped to learn, particularly about curves and Computer RGB conversion.

Thanx also to Gracie for the artist-with-the-comfortable-brush analogy. That's the answer I should have given, since by now I have a command of progressive SD that I didn't have several years ago.

But being ultimately a writer, to me the story is everything. If you shoot on an old VHS recorder (yeah, an extreme example), the writer's responsibility is to draw the audience in. I also wrote the script of Color of Truth and we tested it on stage in small off-off-Broadway productions in New York before going back to page 1 and converting it into a screenplay. One night we invited several elderly ladies who were Holocaust survivors to watch the stage play, to see if we had walked the tightrope in an acceptable way, and they came backstage, thanked us, and commenced to tell their own stories from the camps. It was a moving night that night, and was the impetus for us to keep developing the story to where it is now.

Whoaa..!! What a knock out!

I'd be proud to even mention I'm on the same forum as vitalforce!

This work easily looks as good as European Indy Professional film makers. (which I consider a step above Lollywood films)
Hats off to you.
You just made my day.
Quoka

VF, what a superb example of a well thought out, organically grown project you have produced. Often it is through a/the "process" that this can be witnessed and seen as a sustainable and valuable filmic experience. If your trailer is the yardstick of the finished product then you have a majorally crucial creative piece.

But being ultimately a writer, to me the story is everything. - Yes, yes and yes . . . .

As an aside, I think a short doco on how your film was "born" would be a valuable work-book for any budding or not-so-budding film/video maker. When you described the off-Broadway experience and your group of elderly ladies - it wasn't difficult to imagine I was listening to them too.

Again, well done.

Grazie

Thanks.

Jeez, this film must've been a journey for you... you started in 2003?! (That's five years ago.) That takes some real dedication!!

Good luck with the festival- I hope you win!

Just got back from today’s screening of “Color of Truth” in Westwood. I’ll leave the creative critical reviews for the critics. I’ll just say I was very glad I went to see it. From a digitial post-production stand point this is an amazing piece of work demonstrating what Vegas can do – and perhaps demonstrating what Vegas cannot do.

For me, the weakest link was sound – but I realize how very difficult that can be on location shoots on low budget. Some of the live sound was very good – but not all. I just wonder if Vegas has all the tools needed to “clean up” less than perfect location sound. Sound did not always match up. This jars the audience. At least it jarred me. Mainly it was the “air” or “presence” that didn’t match up. I don’t mean to say this ruined the film or anything. I also felt that the dialogue tracks were being overdriven, clipped on the high end in some scenes (not many). I’m just not sure if Vegas could have done better to solve these problems. I wasn’t aware of any ADR. If there was any it was well done.

For the most part, the editing style was straight forward. Nothing calling attention to itself. I was unaware of what visual elements may have been corrected in post-production regards the shooting. This, to me, is success for Vegas. I thought, setting aside production weaknesses, the overall look of the film achieved in post was very consistent. Frankly I’m not sure HD would have added anything considering the subject matter. In fact, the best scenes were the flashbacks where I felt the look was softer.

Congrats to all who worked so hard on this project – and congrats to Vegas for being such a tremendous value in post. This was the first feature length production that I've seen projected in a real theater that was done with Vegas. Considering the cost of Vegas software, I was very impressed.

Yeah, five years. The time factor though, was partly a result of the lead actress having a neck injury which delayed filming of the remaining 2/3 of the film for about a year, the unexpected delays from the two sound engineers (mostly the first) who took way too long to return my project back to me, and the sheer obstacle of moving from NYC to LA while helping a pregnant daughter conclude her pregnancy (whew). Without those problems, this film would have been in the festivals in 2006.

Vegas, Sound Forge and Noise Reduction 2.0 are considerable tools, but were not quite enough to counter a few production problems, particularly in the first third of the film (shot on a practical set on location, at a small mansion in Rye, New York) that we are still addressing. In other words, I do not blame the tools but the original material. We had not heard the sound in a theatre setting since two years ago, and I noted a couple of spots where the room tone underlying a scene did not carry over properly, which I could not hear on my home-office system, and these will be fixed. Also, the theatre projectionist cranked up the sound to full volume for reasons I don't know, which managed to clip several loud lines of dialog. And yes, there was some ADR in post, but after viewing today's screening I wish I'd done more.

P.S. All the sound FX except airplanes and gunshots were done with homegrown instruments, Sound Forge plugins and Acoustic Mirror. For instance, Acoustic Mirror made the music dubbed for the camp orchestra sound like it was in an outdoor courtyard.

The editing style was definitely straightforward, this being a period piece which recalled that style in the 1940s. It was a choice to maintain an authentic environment for the story, though I don't claim to be a Fellini in any event. And yes, there were a number of visual elements needing correction (some of them endemic to the first version of the DVX100) and I thought Vegas held its own pretty well. This requires me to once again salute the Madison engineers for adding such great, simple features as colored cross-track guidelines at edit points, and being able to save FX settings individually and across chains. What I will remember most fondly about this film is that I was able to handle everything, soup to nuts, from initial script to output to projection format and even the movie poster, thanks largely to Vegas (and two script programs called Movie Magic Screenwriter, and Dramatica).

Thanks again to all who took time to review and comment. Any notes are always welcome.

P.S. To Grazie--A "howdunit" shortie film was actually on my mind by now and I'm thinking of adding that to the archive of this adventure. Thanks again for the encouragement. Hope I continue to get the chance to add encouragement to others on the forum.

- Fred B. Smith
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vf, this trailer is awesome! Good luck with your film and keep up your great work. I'd love to be anywhere near this level myself one day, it looked really really great.