I spent the last two days in Dallas with our DP Steve Acevedo supervising the color correction process. For those who don’t know, Color correction is the process of adjusting the color, contrast, and light of each shot in order to attain a certain look. It’s amazing what the colorist can do and the power that they have. They can pick a single point in a shot and add light to it… or make a sky red, or orange, or blue or green if you so desire. The goal is two-fold here, to make the overall film look good as well as to make sure shot by shot the colors and light match up. 

It looks like we will be done in couple days and I am jacked about it! All that’s left is the sound mix and compositing. I can’t wait… I need a vacation and a lot of sleep.    

With the SXSW deadline looming I’ve been stretched thin and stressed out trying to get Cowboy Smoke completed. Thanksgiving was a much needed break. Prior to leaving for El Paso for the Holiday I spent two and ½ weeks logging keycode for the final transfer. What is keycode you ask?

KEYCODE refers to the latent edge numbers put onto the negative film at the manufacturers. When the film is processed these numbers become visible. They aid the negative cutter in his/her ability to match your film back to A&B rolls from a cut film workprint or video daily. Keycode is made up of a string of number and digits and look like this: FN 63 0799 8319+06 D3 Each clip in the film (1653 to be exact) has an IN and OUT keycode. In addition to this each clip has an IN and an OUT source code which looks like this: 01:02:30;01In addition to logging the source code and keycode IN and OUT points for each clip I had to log clip name, what roll each clip was on, shot number, Timeline IN and OUT points. This was probably the most mind numbing, boring process of the entire film and I ended up hiring six people to work Saturday and Sunday a few weeks back with me to help me. The final list is called an EDL or an Edit Decision List. This is used by the transfer house as a guide when selecting what clips to pull from the 15+ hours of footage. The Film Workers Club in Dallas began transferring the footage to HD on Monday and should be completed no later than today. Once I have received the transferred footage from I will conform the clips. On December 11^th I will be traveling to Dallas for the final color correction. Once this is completed the film will be roughly 99% finished. We will only be waiting on a few cues from Composer Brian Satterwhite. Brian has been busy creating an amazing score and I have been more than happy to give him the time he needs. His notes from his blog read:Whew! What a weekend. After spending a great Thanksgiving day with my family in Houston I came back here to Austin on Friday morning while my wife and son stayed in Houston for the weekend. I took advantage of the empty house for three days and got a lot of work done. I composed four cues for Cowboy Smoke in about three days. Not bad. I wrapped up 3m8 “Cowboy Smoke” which could be one of my favorites of the lot. It’s ambitious and has probably the most tracks of any cue so far in the whole score. I’ve sent a rough mix off to my friend Matt in NYC who is going to lay down a drum part and some guitar as well. As I type this, he’s in the process of uploading the finished tracks to my FTP server. I can’t wait to hear them.I also completed cues 2m2 “Tivoli Motel Raid,” 2m12 “Wesley Takes a Ride,” and 3m2 “Hijacking.” How much do I have left? Honestly I don’t know and I don’t really want to know. I know I’m a good chunk over halfway but I can’t be thinking about how much I have left. I just keep taking it one cue at a time until eventually there won’t be any left.On Tuesday I’m going back into the studio to record Javier’s violin parts for the next round of finished cues. It’ll probably make up a third of the score. We recorded a third already so after this next session I’ll probably just need one more to finish everything up.

More to come!