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| BEHIND THE SCENES: The Making of FRAYED | |||||||||||||
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For lifelong friends Rob Portmann, Kurt Svennungsen and Norbert Caoili, Frayed represents their first feature film - a childhood dream they have shared since their elementary school days in Kent, Washington. (from left to right) Rob Portmann, writer, producer, director Kurt Svennungsen, writer, producer, executive producer Norb Caoili, writer, producer, director, editor, composer, sound designer/mixer |
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| It’s the stuff that dreams, as well as nightmares, are made of - the life-changing moment when one decides to produce an independent feature film. For Kurt Svennungsen (writer, producer, executive producer), this moment came in 2002 when, after a typical day of working construction, he became inspired to rekindle a childhood dream he and his friends had shared of shooting a feature film. He approached his friends, Rob Portmann and Norbert Caoili (writers, producers, directors), about making a horror movie. They enthusiastically jumped on board and formed their production company, Lock It In Entertainment, to make the film. THE SCRIPT Kurt’s idea was to begin the story with a brutal murder that is witnessed by the audience through the lens of a home video camera. Norb and Rob liked this voyeuristic beginning and immediately started hashing out ideas. Much of their inspiration came from true horrific crimes they would hear about in the news. They wanted to create a film that harkened back to the suspenseful style of the 70’s and 80’s horror films they grew up with - something they felt had been lost in recent movies of the genre - but with the frenetic energy of modern-day filmmaking. They wanted their film to be familiar in style, yet unpredictable in its storyline, with characters that audiences could relate to and care about. Most importantly, they aimed to bring back the fear of the masked killer. In essence, Frayed would be a slasher movie with a twist. Thinking up the concept was easy. Writing it was not. Juggling full-time jobs and families, Kurt, Rob and Norb wrote scenes on their own, then met once a week to discuss their ideas. Their friend, Dino Moore, and Kurt’s wife, Dana, also contributed to the script, particularly with character dialog. Since Frayed would be a film with mystery and plot twists, it was crucial to give the audience enough clues to piece things together, but not too many to spoil any surprises. It also meant that every script change would have a domino effect on previous or subsequent clues or scenes often requiring complete rewriting or deleting of those affected scenes. After months of going around in circles, hitting dead ends and being plagued with writers’ block, they slowly began assembling the separately written parts line-by-line, scene-by-scene, into one cohesive story. After a year of writing, their first draft was completed. The next stage involved fine-tuning the text while determining if they could actually afford to shoot the scenes conceived on paper with the anticipated budget. Certain scenes had to be simplified and others painfully deleted. Two more years and many rewrites later, they finally finished the script and the story of Frayed was born. PRE-PRODUCTION Pre-production began in May 2005. Knowing that most of the film would be shot at night, they chose September 12th as the shoot start date. This would provide the longest nights and the best shot at good weather. All of the pre-production duties were performed by the Lock It In team with help from family members and friends. Still working full time jobs and with only four months to go, Norb, Rob and Kurt found themselves staring at a checklist a mile long as they were hit with the reality that making this movie was going to be one of the biggest challenges of their lives. At the top of the list was finding the director of photography and crew. Norb contacted a DP that he had worked with before and arranged a meeting. A fee was negotiated and he agreed to take on the project, as well as handle hiring the critical crew members. Many of their problems had been solved, or so they thought. The next step was to determine the shooting format. They could not afford to shoot 35mm, so it was a choice between Super 16mm or HD. The Lock It In team chose to shoot in HD, because of its many cost-effective benefits and workflow advantages. They selected the Sony CineAlta F900 outfitted with the Pro35 adaptor and Zeiss prime 35mm lenses to give better depth of field and a more cinematic look necessary for the movie. The next item was casting. Kurt, Rob and Norb thought they could save money by bypassing a casting director and casting the film themselves. “How hard could it be?” they figured. What hungry local actors wouldn’t jump at the chance to be in a feature film? They contacted all the local talent agencies, sent them their requests and scripts, set up a casting call at Norb’s downtown Seattle production studio and anxiously awaited the hoards of actors ready to beat down the door. Not one actor showed up. They needed help badly. After reading the script, casting agent Jodi Rothfield (CSA) took the job and consequently helped assemble an outstanding local cast led by veteran actors Tony Doupe’ (Sheriff Baker), Don Brady (Deputy Denton), singer/actress Kellee Bradley (Jolene) and up-and-coming talents Aaron Blakely (Gary), Alena Dashiell (Sara) and Tasha Smith (Veronica). With casting completed, the Lock It In team began assembling the other necessary production roles. Tim Peirson, owner of Cast of Thousands studio, took on the job of special effects makeup. Shelley Clark took on the jobs of makeup, hair, and wardrobe. Dan Dusek came on board as location scout and secured all six of the locations for the shoot. Mike Lorrain, Norb’s business partner, handled location sound, utilizing a Mac laptop to digitally record 8 tracks of sounds from an arsenal of wireless and boom mics. Dana Svennungsen took on the job of prop master and set designer and assisted Kurt in the construction of the soundstage and the set pieces within it. Knowing how hectic things would get on set, the Lock It In team knew it would be imperative to be as organized as possible. Rob took it upon himself to utilize his artistic abilities to help organize shots by storyboarding the entire movie. Rob hand-drew over 1300 storyboards filling five binders of every shot in the film, creating a virtual comic book of the movie and an invaluable reference for the DP and lighting team. There would be no doubt as to what the filmmakers would want in every scene and shot. With a month to go, everything seemed to be falling into place, that is, until Norb called his DP to finalize the crew and lighting/grip package, only to receive some shocking news: his DP would have to take himself off the movie because a long-awaited documentary popped up that he couldn’t pass up. On top of that, he had lined up not a single crew member. The Lock It In team went into a panic. They had one month before the shoot and no DP, crew or lighting/grip equipment. They began making calls. Unfortunately, many local crewpeople were already booked on other productions that were shooting in town, including Grey’s Anatomy. Their luck changed for the better when Mike Lorrain looked up documentary cinematographer, Karel Bauer, who Norb and Mike had worked with on previous projects. Karel had just returned to Seattle after a long stay in Spain. Then they found acclaimed lighting director/gaffer, Neil Holcomb, who had just returned from New Orleans shooting The Skeleton Key. Both were between jobs and available. After reading the script, they jumped on board and helped secure the rest of the crew as well as the necessary grip and lighting equipment. All contracts and permits were signed and the Frayed production team was ready to go, without a minute to spare. THE PRODUCTION As with any indie on a tight budget, an extremely ambitious, if not insane, production schedule was required with Norb, Rob and Kurt having to wear many hats. They were sleep-deprived and exhausted well before they rolled their first shot. Principal photography began on September 12th, 2005 in Covington, Washington – the first day of three weeks of night shoots. Knowing that the entire 22-day shoot would be a long and grueling endeavor, the Lock It In team decided to shoot the most challenging shots at the beginning, while everybody was fresh. The crew was extremely nervous about this plan, as it meant their very first shot would involve shooting a one-chance-to-get-it-right car crash. Fortunately, they pulled it off, but they would also have to pull off moving to a remote highway near Mount Rainier National Park to shoot several all night scenes and then moving again to the next location - three location changes in the first three days. This resulted in the Lock It In team working three straight days with no sleep and the rest of the crew fairing only slightly better. By the end of the second day, the crew was threatening to quit. Kurt, Rob and Norb assured the crew that things would get better and they pushed on. “We were literally walking zombies, running on pure adrenaline”, recalls Kurt. By the time the third day came around, they had worked 72 straight hours with only two hours of sleep. The third location was St. Edward State Park in Bothell, Washington – the site of an old Catholic monastery surrounded by eighty six acres of wooded walking trails. This would be the location for the mental hospital and forest scenes and, for the Frayed cast and crew, would become home for the next five days. The company began to settle into a groove as everyone became more and more comfortable working together. The production still faced its share of setbacks including an unexpected rainstorm, multiple flat tires on the lighting boom lift which provided the key lighting for all the night scenes, and a run in with an angry nest of hornets that resulted in several crew members being stung. The next location was the home of Kurt’s mother-in-law in Ollala, Washington - a beautiful, three- acre property, which would be transformed into Sheriff Baker’s house for the next nine days of shooting. Night shoots turned to day as the company moved to the next location - Kurt and Dana Svennungsen’s home in Puyallup, Washington. Here they converted their 1600 square foot shop into a soundstage utilizing moveable walls and several set pieces constructed by Kurt and Dana to create the interiors of the mental hospital, bedrooms, hallway and interior driving scenes. The interior driving scenes were accomplished by front projecting prerecorded background driving footage onto foam core just beyond the windows of the car – crude, yet effective. A haven for many animals at the Svennungsen mini-farm, certain dialog takes had to be reshot when Kurt and Dana’s two ducks, Sara and Veronica, named after the girls in the movie, would occasionally squawk out of control. It would take five days to complete the shooting. The final day of production would bring the company back onto the rural highway from day two of the shoot to pickup some highway shots and into a gas station in the historic small town of Wilkenson, Washington. By sunrise the next morning, the Lock It In team called it a wrap as the production came to a ceremonious end finishing relatively on schedule, almost within budget and with over 32 hours of footage in the can. All that was left was one day of home video shooting of the opening birthday party scene at the Baker house and one day of re-shooting a bloodier, more brutal version of the crucial mother murder scene. After that, the Lock It In team was ready for some much-needed rest and some time off to spend with their families. POST-PRODUCTION In early 2006, Norb, Rob and Kurt began post-production on the movie. The two-man Quantum Productions team of Norb and Mike would facilitate the daunting task. Having just vacated their downtown Seattle studio, Norb had to convert the den in his Renton home into the edit, music and mix suite, squeezing in his Final Cut Studio, Digital Performer, and Pro-Tools systems along with an array of hard drives, music production gear and HD projection setup. Mike similarly utilized a spare bedroom in his Bellevue condo to set up his Final Cut Studio, After Affects and 3D-Studio Max visual effects workstations. This combination of hardware and software was all utilized to tackle the intensive post-production that would take over a year to complete. The Edit After a weekend of digitizing the 32 hours of HDCam and 5+ hours of miniDV footage onto multiple terabyte drives, the Lock It In Team was ready to begin the edit with Norb at the controls. The first scene of the shoot was the first scene to be edited – the car crash. From there, Kurt, Rob and Norb slowly but steadily tackled the edit, one scene at a time, often going back and re-cutting scenes as the movie began to take shape. At one point, the edit suite lost power for nearly two weeks during a destructive winter windstorm that forced the team to run a bare-bones setup off of a portable generator in 40-degree temperatures in order to meet the fast approaching festival deadlines. To overcome the fact that Norb’s edit suite and Mike’s visual effects suite were miles apart, they devised a simple solution of creating identical drive arrays with copies of the footage at both locations. Anytime Norb would modify or create a new edit on his Final Cut system, he would simply email that tiny edit file to Mike who would drop it into his Final Cut and have the edit instantly recreated on his system. This process simplified the setup for visual effects. As sections of the edit became locked, it became clear that dozens of visual effects would be required by Mike to fix and enhance many of the scenes throughout the movie. These ranged from “painting” out unwanted extraneous objects from shots to enhancing kills with digital stab wounds and shanks to creating entirely new shots that never existed. One particularly challenging shot involved compositing three separate shots from three different locations and making them look like one continuous jib shot that starts inside the Baker house, moves up through to the second floor then out the window and into the air without the aid of a motion control camera. Mike used a combination of 2D compositing and 3D graphics to blend the shots into a single, seamless take. As Mike slaved away on visual effects, Norb moved on to sound design. The first step was to export all of the digitally recorded location sound tracks from Final Cut into Pro Tools HD. The next step - clean them up and make them sound like one, nicely polished recording. The third step was to enhance the location sound with foley and sound effects, such as the subtle rustling of clothing, the booming of gunshots and the twisting metal and glass shattering of a car crash. In the case of dialog changes and less than perfect voice performances, actors were called back in to do ADR (automatic dialog replacement) utilizing a sound booth assembled in Norb’s garage wired into the Pro Tools suite. Once the dialog and sound effects mix was completed, Norb moved on to the final and arguably most critical stage of the post-production phase – music. As with any film, music can be the difference between a good movie and a great one, but with horror, it is even more critical, as some scenes often rely solely on the music score to create crucial moments of suspense and tension. Norb wanted to compose a score that had the orchestral feel of a traditional horror score with the added edginess of synthesized, sound design elements. To accomplish this, he used a combination of orchestra sounds and choir samples from Garritan Personal Orchestra and Gigastudio running Sonic Implants Symphonic Collection and Voices of the Apocalypse to create the traditional orchestral feel. The Sonic Implants library allowed Norb to create unusual and unconventional orchestral playing styles found in horror soundtracks. Norb utilized a plethora of Roland synthesizers and sample loops custom modified in Gigastudio to create the electronic edge of the score. All of these tracks were performed by Norb with an electronic keyboard, tracked into Digital Performer and recorded and mixed onto Pro Tools. Under pressure to meet their festival deadlines, Norb was able to compose and mix the entire Frayed movie soundtrack in just over two weeks. |
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Norb, Rob & Kurt on the last day of principal photography for Frayed, October 2005.
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