"Nailed" Shut!

Well it's done. NAILED has wrapped...at last.

After the grueling multi-interview fest that was AFTEREFFECTS, I figured NAILED, with its single interview format, would be a nice little job with little or no real roadblocks or problems.

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

Believe me, when you are a producer or editor, you gain an immediate sympathy for anyone who ventures into this profession and can somehow manage to not only keep their sanity but actually turn out decent work. The time pressures, the technical demands, and most importantly the creative decisionmaking can be overbearing to a large degree most of the time.

With NAILED, I was in an awkward situation. The interview in question was with writer/director Terry Lofton. It was originally filmed for the director's own limited edition DVD of NAIL GUN MASSACRE which was released late last year before Synapse acquired the rights to do an official special edition release which is due in October.

The footage was shot by Loyd Cryer of Dallas, Texas and was filmed on location in Seagoville, Texas in the general store where a couple of the film's scenes were shot. The footage was then edited into a 25 minute piece which appears on the aforementioned LE DVD from Lofton.

This is the same footage that was sent to me to create my own featurette, since the distributors wanted something new to promote this upcoming remastered DVD with. Understandable, but a little problematic. Was I to take the existing featurette (which wasn't bad at all, to be honest) and just remaster and tinker with it a little bit, or should I start from scratch? As good as the interview was, there were many questions I would have asked that weren't, and I felt that I might not have what I needed to do the piece.

It was this debate that held me up on this project for a while. Briefly I seriously entertained travelling down to Texas to re-film Terry Lofton therefore avoiding this issue altogether, but personal and budgetary restrictions put a kibosh on that plan.

So in the end, I decided to simply re-trace the steps of the original featurette and essentially remaster the whole thing from scratch. All the film clips used in the first featurette were off an older master, so I would be able to use the new HD 16x9 master to replace those old clips with brand spankin' new ones. Speaking of 16x9, I decided to reformat all the interview clips for the widescreen format, since the film was going to be presented that way for the first time.

This is a tricky proposition since anytime you blow-up or otherwise mess with exisiting 4x3 video and try to adapt it to new anamorphic 16x9 dimensions, you run the risk of creating a seriously softened or grainier image along with the potential for reduced definition and an overall lackluster presentation. Fortunately the interview footage survived the transition very well with just a hint of softness on the edges.

What also helped is that the interview originally had very intense and colorful lighting which for reasons unknown to me, was leeched out of the featurette on the LE DVD. Although at times the hues on the footage were a bit much, I ended up keeping the rich colors at the original intensity which helped brighten up the proceedings immensely.

Here's a comparison to help illustrate what I am talking about.



Fortunately for the purposes of the 16x9 conversion, the interview had been largely framed in the camera with a great deal of headroom or space at the bottom of the frame which allowed me to repurpose all the shots in widescreen without sacrificing any compositional integrity. Ooh that's a pompous phrase isn't it?....Compositional integrity...man I'm high-falutin aints I?

I have to give props to Cryer and his cameraman for the interview. The various questions were all good and they seemed to get a lot out of Terry Lofton, who comes off as a very genial and good-natured guy. Hopefully they'll like the new featurette. I ended up dramatically altering the structure and the editing of the piece as I went along, so it doesn't bear much resemblance to what came before. Some bits I left out, and I added back in about 3 minutes of footage that went unused before. I ended up shooting a cool title sequence in my basement for it, which involved eight boxes of nails...but I'll let you find out more about that when the DVD hits this Fall.

Ironically after all was said and done, NAILED is almost exactly the same length as the previous featurette, but contains about 4 minutes more of Terry Lofton's interview than the other one? Just goes to show you how inexact a science editing can be sometimes. Personal styles and preferences can radically change the content at any given stage. In a way, I wish the old featurette could be included so people could see two different shots at the same material, but I think NAILED will satisfy. I'm happy with it.

I also put together an expanded section of outtakes that runs longer than the previous DVDs selection. Since the outtakes' original audio tracks are long gone, I ended up cutting together some unused comments from Terry's interview into sort of a makeshift commentary for the outtakes. Turned out pretty good actually.

Well NAIL GUN MASSACRE has now officially left my radar....on to other stuff. I'm getting ready to start posting clips of the various Red Shirt projects on the website. In case you haven't noticed yet, the Our Projects and About Us sections of the site are finally finished.

There is a major new documentary project on the horizon, but I can't talk about it yet. Hopefully for the next update.

Thanks for reading, and I appreciate that you keep coming by to read this crap!