End of the Year for "ABBIE"

Erin and I have had a really busy couple of months since finishing the final deliverables of “Abbie” for Metro Screen. Here’s a quick update on some of the things we’ve been up to:

On the 11th Nov: I jetted over to NZ to watch my first short film “Driven” screen at the Show Me Shorts Film festival.

On the 29th Nov: Erin and I spoke on the Metro Screen panel at the AFTRS foundation industry day. It was great to meet everyone who came in for a private interview with us afterwards.

On the 4th Dec: We had our cast, crew, friends and family screening of “Abbie” at the Tap Gallery on Oxford Street. The night was such a reward after all the hard work that went into “Abbie.” Thank you to everyone for coming and showing your support!

On the 5th Dec: We were very excited to hear that our fabulous editor, Fiona Strain won a prestigious ASE award for her work on the television series “Whatever! The Science of Teens.” She was also nominated for in the short film category for “Driven.”

On the 16th Dec: We began work on the trailer for “Abbie” – we hope to have this available for public use early 2011. We’ll update the blog again when it’s ready!

During all this time, Erin has been busily sending screeners to short film festivals all across the globe, so fingers crossed we can have a confirmed international premier for “Abbie” by mid 2011.

Don’t stress if you can’t wait that long to see the film again! Metro Screen is still to announce their screening of “Abbie” at the Chauvel Cinema – predicted to be in mid January. Keep checking the blog for more details.

Until then, Merry Christmas! & Happy New Year!

- Taylor

Finished

Abbie is complete and whilst Tay is getting together all the deliverables to be handed over to Metro Screen this week, my mind has very quickly switched to the best part of making a film, the screening! We plan to have the screening followed by an afterparty in about a months time and we'll be inviting cast and crew, friends, investors and industry cohorts. If you're interested in coming please contact us.

- Erin

The finishing line is in sight!

The deadlines are encroaching! Animation has been composited, credits locked off, sound mix booked and the sound design and music are close to fully developed. The next to be booked in is the grade, of which I haven't thought about it a while, so the other day I watched the edit (for about the zillionth time) with the grade in mind. It was very exciting to revisit my initial ideas with an almost complete film and as each element develops in post my ideas and hopes for the film become increasingly tangible.

I can't wait to see it complete!

- Erin.

Lots of Exciting News - Animation

Animation has taken us through an interesting couple of weeks. We were so excited when Mark finished the Stop Motion paper man, who looked so great and was loved by our test audiences when we added him into the cut.

Irene has now finished the 2D animation for the credits, it looks really lovely, some examples of her tests for it can be seen on the Animation Page. We have now handed that over to Chris to composite.

Chris has already composited the Paper Man, which looks fantastic! Chris has now also agreed to work on the 3D Animation we’re sure he’ll do just as perfect a job as he’s been doing with his compositing.

Everything going to plan, we hope to have all the animation done to hand over to Geri and Chris within the next couple of weeks.

- Taylor.

Lots of Exciting News – Sound

Over the past few weeks, Erin and I have been very busy as we bring “Abbie” closer to it’s finish. Since our last post we have had several more rough-cut screenings before locking off the cut apart from the animation.

We were both very pleased that both Tony Vaccher and Geri Green liked the cut enough to attach themselves to Abbie. Yay! Tony to do the sound mix and Geri to be our Music Composer. Since that time we’ve had several sound meetings with Xavier and Geri, both of whom have had some really exciting ideas.

- Taylor

Sound Screening

On Wednesday evening we had our first sound screening with myself, Erin, Fiona (our editor) and Xavier (our sound designer) the evening was a really great opportunity for us to evaluate how much work we really have ahead of us, and it's a lot! Xavier is now going away to create a test scene of sound design and music composition so we can better determine how much time we need to spend in the sound design process. Realising all the possibilities we have with sound made the evening exciting yet simultaneously daunting. We have a lot of work ahead of us, but I am so grateful for the amazing ability Erin and I have harnessed by bringing both Xavier & Fiona on board on the project.

- Taylor.

1st Screening

Yesterday Erin and I had our first rough cut screening with our Editor Fiona Strain, our Executive Producer from Metro Screen David Opitz and a special guest Ian Brown from AFTRS.

The day went really well: David said it reaffirmed that he had made the right decision in choosing to give "Abbie" funding and Ian said it was a charming, sweet film, very slick. Aside from niceties, we had some really good constructive comments which are going to help us move forward in terms of refining the cut and the pace.

Bring on sound!

- Taylor.