On May 22, we held a screening at Adam’s high school, La Jolla Country Day School. It was great to meet up with former classmates, teachers, and family friends. All in all, about 200 people were present for the documentary, which was shown in the Four Flowers Theater. Back when Adam was a student at LJCDS, the Four Flowers Theater did not exist! The school has undergone quite a transformation since his graduation in the early 90s.
As we prepare for our upcoming two-week trip down to San Diego, we’ve been hard at work creating first version of the AUTUMN GEM DVD. This version contains the movie, scene selections and a support page. The Special Edition with photos and commentary will come out later.
Here’s what the DVD will look like:
Up till this point, we’ve been burning one-off DVDs using the SuperDrive on our Macintosh. We weren’t going to do that for 700 DVDs, so we went with DiscMakers to handle this job. With these DVDs, we’ll be able to give a version that we’re happy with to prospective screening organizations, donors, friends, family, and cast and crew members.
Here’s a photo of the DVD jacket. For eco-purposes, we’re avoiding the jewel cases and going for a paper jacket:
We’ll be screening Autumn Gem at Adam’s high school in San Diego:
There will be a reception around 6:00 pm prior to the screening at 7:00 pm. There will be a limit on the number of outside guests that can attend, so if you are interested in attending, please email Adam or Rae at info (at) autumn-gem.com.
We will also be screening the film at the D7 Conference in Carlsbad the following week, but that will be a private event that is not open to the public.
For the past several years, I’ve been running a camera user group called COBA, or Camera Owners of the Bay Area. We meet every month to talk about the latest developments in the digital camera space and feature presentations from photography-related companies and photographers. For the April meeting, we screened AUTUMN GEM to the COBA crowd at SmugMug headquarters in Mountain View, California.
Many COBA members have known that Rae and I have been working on AUTUMN GEM for the past year and a half. It was great to finally be able to share the documentary with them! We’re currently arranging more public screenings around the Bay Area and at universities and Asian-American/Chinese Historical organizations across the country. Soon, we’ll have a section of the site devoted to finding the next screening. Stay tuned!
Here are some photos from our screening at COBA.
Here are some photos by Timothy Chang from the cast and crew screening party held over the weekend. Thanks to the Domain Hotel in Sunnyvale for hosting and everyone who were able to take time out of their Sundays to come out! It’s now onward and upward with marketing and business development for the film.
How time flies! It was a year ago when Rae, Rae’s parents, JP, and I travelled to China to start production on Autumn Gem. Earlier last month, we’ve completed the final cut of the film. Tomorrow afternoon, we’ll be showing it to the first time at our cast and crew screening party!
An so begins the next phase — marketing and business development — for Autumn Gem. It’s something we’re both excited and scared about at the same time. On the one hand, we’re happy that we’re able to show a finished product that we’re proud of. On the other hand, there’s the chance that people who see it will not like it! We’ve already experienced a tiny bit of rejection with some of the film festivals to whom we submitted earlier in the year. I like to focus on the positive, however, and that’s the task of showing this film to as many people as possible who are interested in learning about this important heroine from China’s history.
We’ll have photos and a recap from the event after tomorrow!
Here is a list of upcoming screenings of AUTUMN GEM:
One of the very last things to complete with Autumn Gem has been the final credits sequence. I’ve been struggling mightily over the past few weeks trying to get the credits to scroll properly without jerkiness or stuttering. I’ve read all of the forums and tried many of the tips and tricks people have suggested, including:
Despite my best efforts and hours of render time, the credits never scrolled properly on our MXO-powered 23-inch ADC broadcast monitor or when output to a progressive QuickTime movie. They might start out fine, but every few seconds, the screen would suddenly jerk up a few extra pixels, creating an uncomfortable stutter effect.
At this point, I’ve about given up, and that’s a good thing, because I came up with a simpler solution that looks just as good. Instead of scrolling a 10800-pixel tall Photoshop graphic over seventy-two seconds, we’re cross-dissolving eleven credit screens over that same time. This comes out to about 6 seconds per screen, which is more than enough time for our cast and crew to find themselves.
One day, I’ll figure out the magical formula to getting silky smooth scrolling credits. I’ll leave that task, however, for the next film!
While we finish up the audio mixing with Matt this week, we decided to make a change to the look of our subtitles in Autumn Gem. Up until today, we’ve been using Final Cut’s standard Text generator to create our subtitles. Here’s a screenshot of what our subtitles used to look like:
This afternoon, I began switching over to using the Outline Text generator. This has a number of benefits, chief among them the ability to add a stroke around each character, which greatly improves readability. In addition, we’ve changed the font style from italic to plain, which reduce jaggies when displaying the film on lower-resolution monitors or on DVD. Here’s what our subtitles look like now:
I’ve been planning to make this change for many months, but I’ve been procrastinating until now, knowing that it would take me about nine hours to change every text clip in the entire film. Unfortunately, there’s no quick and easy way to batch convert from one text generator to another. I did find some shortcuts that helped speed up the process:
One annoying thing is that the placement controls are different between the two text generators. For instance, setting a center position of (0, 345) for an Outline Text clip does not line up in the same place as setting (0, 345) with a standard Text clip. This means I’ve had to manually position a number of text clips, a time-consuming process that I really don’t want to visit again!
So, the decision to go from straight text to outline text, while simple, requires lots of time, patience, and verification. In the end, though, it’s the right move, as our subtitles are much more readable now than before.
For those type-inclined, we used the classic font Helvetica Neue for main subtitle font. Hoefler Text was used as our serif title font, and ST Kaiti was used when displaying Chinese characters.
We’ve completed our ADR recording yesterday at Matt’s house. Preston was the final actor to come in and record his lines. Now, Rae and I are off to make the final picture lock on the film while Matt continues his audio mixing magic. Here are some photos from the past three weeks of ADR work with our actors and actresses from Autumn Gem.
Here are some photos from our ADR recording sessions.
Autumn Gem 