Rogue Cinema - An Interview with Patrick Keith

An Interview with Patrick Keith - By Duane L. Martin
Posted on Monday, September 01 @ Mountain Daylight Time by Duane

Recently I reviewed Patrick Keith's first feature length film, Bloodwine. It was a very well done vampire tale, and I was amazed at the fine work and all the attention to detail that was put into the film, including great locations, costumes, effects and more. In this interview, Patrick talks about the making of the film, and just some of what he has planned for the future.

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DM - Let's start off as always by having you tell everyone a little about yourself.

PK - Well, I'm an artist, sculptor and filmmaker in the Dallas area. I grew up making 8mm sci-fi and animated shorts with my school buddies. In high school we had the opportunity to attend the Skyline Career Development Center where Cinematography was one of the offered classes. We got to shoot and edit 16mm film which was a great experience. That, of course, is all moot now that the digital revolution has begun but the principles are all still the same. After that I completed certification as an audio recording engineer but promptly moved from that into retail and sort of got stuck there. From that I moved to tech support and another decade passed. It wasn't until a couple of years back I saw that the possibility of doing a movie was really starting to become feasible again with the availability of this new technology. I dusted off a little sci-fi short I'd written and started in high school and decided to shoot that on DV. All of the post for that was completed on my iBook and it gave me a benchmark of what I would need to take the next step. My side work as a freelance artist allowed me a chance to work on a couple of other indie productions in the Dallas area.

With the advent of digital technology, access to what I like to call "desktop moviemaking" is rapidly becoming more available. The same process that allowed the desktop publishing boom and bands to create their own albums for digital delivery direct to the public is now a reality for filmmakers. New developments are announced every day that provide indie filmmakers with exceptional tools to give them professional results from a fraction of traditional budgets. This can be access to software like Final Cut Studio that provides high end editing results or it can be digital delivery over the internet that circumnavigates the traditional reliance of a cumbersom distribution strategy. In the future, acquisition will be state-of-the-art with new digtial cameras like the RED One and Scarlet which will provide super high resolutions with minimal cost compared with film or HD equipment.

With this in mind, I wanted to take advantage of the opportunity to make my first feature while the technology was still in transition. I have been a film buff my entire life. One of my earliest memories is of a screening of Mel Brooks' Silent Movie with my dad. I was also a huge fan of the original Planet of the Apes films & TV series and what 10 year-old wasn't affected by Star Wars when it came out? All of this prompted me to experiment with Super 8 filmmaking and effects then eventually on to 16mm while taking film class in high school. Cinemagic Magazine also had a huge impact on me showing that you could do a lot with very little. After graduating, creativity never stopped and I continued to pursue many avenues of related art, even though not directly in the film medium. After seeing what was possible following a screening of Jurassic Park, I knew it was time to transition back into some aspect of the filmmaking process again.

DM - When you decided to do your first feature, Bloodwine, what were some of the factors that led you towards doing a vampire film as opposed to say a slasher flick or a zombie movie?

PK - Logisitcs. First off, I'm not a fan of slasher flicks. That's not to say they are bad, I don't like cauliflour either. Just a personal taste. Zombies scare the shit outta me. I think I have had more nightmares that were zombie-related than pretty much anything else. But, after working on another indie production that had lots of zombies in it, I just didn't want to have to deal with the amount of work or expense that would to go into creating hoards of zombie extras. I really felt that the story I wanted to do could best be served as a vampire tale.

A friend of mine (who makes an appearance as the Space Rogue in my short film) loaned me his entire collection of Buffy the Vampire Slayer before I had any idea about writing a feature script. After watching that and doing some time on these other productions I really had to fight the urge to jump into doing a feature of my own. The more I saw released at the video store, the more those around me goaded me with, "You know, you can do that!" So, with a couple of weeks to spare, I sat down and churned out a first draft. I think it was about 80 pages or so. With no real idea about shooting it, and lots of other things going on at the same time, I let it sit for over a year. Late in '07 when my wife and I were making the last preparations for Dragon*Con, we started discussing what we wanted to do next. It was then we decided to greenlight Bloodwine, with the intent of doing a total rebuild of the script once we returned from the show.

There were some things I specifically wanted to carry over. I wanted a predominantly female cast. Andrea was always a brooding Goth character that would be neither a sidekick or comic relief. Brandy would be the collateral damage and both of her deaths would be very specific. There are other elements that also arose but the logistics of shooting dictated the extent of what I wound up getting in those areas. I basically wanted to do a story with really interesting female characters like you don't normally get in other horror movies like this.

DM - How long did it take you to cast the film? Did you find that, because it was your first feature, that you were being overly picky about the casting, or did you get lucky with finding the right people for the roles right away?

PK - I had some very specific ideas in mind about how I wanted the characters to be. The casting was really easier than it should have been. One of the producers, Eric Gray, had a fantastic network of actors he had worked with since college and set up all of the auditions. We were able to cast all of the principles and supporting cast from our first auditions. We read each of the actors in several roles and then it was just a matter of placing who fit what where. We had a tough time getting the supporting cast locked down and a really tough time finding the right male actors. After attending a performance of My Three Angels at the Collin Theatre Center we picked up Corey, Chad and Melissa for some smaller parts. Due to a hiccup with our original lead as Andrea, we replaced her at the last minute with Melissa. That was probably the best thing for the entire production. Melissa stepped up and really was a trooper. She was always prepared, always in good spirits considering the rigors of our tight shooting schedule. I feel they were a much better cast than I could have hoped for.

DM - Now let's talk about locations. Tell us how you went about finding the locations you shot in and if you had any particular problems in any of them, in making the arrangements to shoot there.

PK - That was a major case of stress all through preproduction. When we brought Eric on and he read the script, he could have sworn we wrote it based on the campus where he attended. Fortunately, he was still in contact with the head of the theater department there and through those channels we made arrangements to shoot on the campus over spring break. We gave then the dates we were shooting and didn't get the signed release contract until the week before! That was a lesson learned. Always pad the deadlines well in advance for contracts so that if something unexpected turns up you have time to make other arrangements. Fortune favored the foolish, and nothing bad came up. The other locations were a matter of just asking if we could shoot there. We presented ourselves in a responsible and professional manner and explained exactly what we were going to do. Most people watch movies but don't have any knowledge of the process and are very curious and interested to help out. Our other producer, Chris Frazee had connections with the San Francisco Rose where he'd done karaoke through his mobile DJ service Party Tunes. He asked if we could shoot there on a week night when they were usually pretty quiet and the owner jumped at the chance. The same was true for the Landon Winery. We were in downtown McKinney, TX looking for locations and wandered in there to see if they'd talk with us about the production. Bob, the owner, was very gracious and saw the cross-pormotional possibilities of the idea. He agreed to let us shoot there, use their logo and even appears as an extra sitting on the patio outside the shop. We set all of that up months in advance.

That's really the key to a lot of this is planning and preparation. We had these locations for a set period of time in order to cause as little impact to their normal business as possible. We kept in touch with them throughout preproduction and made sure all the dates were still solid. We explained what would be required of the cast and crew and had releases and agreements signed in advance. We arrived on time and were efficient in getting the scenes completed on schedule and made sure to clean up after we wrapped.

DM - What camera did you use to shoot the film. What were its strong points and were there any aspects of using it in various situations that you had any issues with?

PK - Since the prospect of shooting on film was completely out of the equation, I knew I wanted to shoot at least in HDV and I wanted it to look like film. The likelihood a wide release for this was pretty slim, hi-def DVD was still a possibility so I wanted the extra resolution, even if it was anamorphic.

I did quite a bit of comparison shopping throughout pre-production and there were several new cameras available since I had made "escape". I shot that with a borrowed Cannon GL2 and was really pretty happy with it's performance. The 24p feature gave me the look I was after but I wanted the higher resolution HDV offered. I saw a few web pages that compared and contrasted the features of the Panasonic camera with the new Cannon XH A1. I wasn't too hip to the price of the internal memory cards for the Panasonic camera and needed to funnel that money to other aspects of the production. So, we got the XH A1 and it has been really awesome. I was able to download pre-settings for the camera from DVinfo.net [http://www.dvinfo.net] onto its memory card that mimicked several different grades of film stock. I shot a few tests and settled on one I liked.

The only down side to the Cannon is that it doesn't play well with Final Cut. It's like a ritual rebooting ceremony to get the computer to see the camera. Once it does find it, you damn well better get all your footage captured. I had a couple of power outages during some storms that caused problems with my firewire ports. That involved disconnecting everything and then hooking it all back up. Then it found the camera and drives and all that again. It doesn't do that with my little Sony handicam. The XH A1 is still an awesome camera and the features are really geared to my shooting style. It was quick and easy to set up. We connected a 30-foot composite cable to it and ran that to a 20" LCD so we could monitor and check focus. Tyler, our production sound mixer was kitted out with an awesome rig that is designed for ENG use. He was able to feed two channels to the XLR inputs, one for the boom and one for the lavs. We also fed a line-out from the mixer to a backup M-Audio MicroTrack 24/96 Mobile Digital Recorder. That saved our ass on a key scene and kept me from having to do ADR.

DM - The set design and costuming were really important to you in the creation of this film. Tell us what went into those things and how you went about achieving the look you really wanted for everything.

PK - Wow. That's loaded! Well, as an artist I had very specific things I wanted for the characters and locations. I made color charts for Stacey and Heather to go by for all the wardrobe and makeup. I scoured the internet for reference material of all things Romanian, Goth and winemaking for months. Carmilla is all about browns and natural colors, so I even went so far as to add that to the color grade for scenes she appears in to give it a sienna-like appearance. To contrast the two main characters, Brandy is all about whites with pastel accents. Lora's auburn hair really accents that in a very vampiric aesthetic to me. Andrea was all about blacks with purple accents and played directly opposite of whatever Brandy was in the scene. Typically the vampire is the one who is all Goth and in black, but my intent was to come at that from a completely different perspective in terms of both character and design.

The locations we chose pretty much dictated the rest of the look except for the wine cellar in the opening sequence. We couldn't get that as a location and so I commissioned my brother-in-law to build us a set on one side of my garage. Again, using downloads of reference material from sites like Corbis, I made a little mock-up in foam board based on measurements taken of the space. He framed out the walls and we applied a vacuformed styrene molding of stonework over that and then painted it. We ordered the stone molding from a theater supply company online. He also built all of the bottle & barrel racks and the cabinet. We lucked into getting the barrel pieces from JoAnne's Fabric while shopping for costume materials. They are foam planters. I had to score the bottoms to simulate a wood grain and then paint them. The false door next to the barrel racks is also completely foam carved to look like wood. All of this took months to complete on our days off. Heather came out and helped quite a bit to get the set painted and the racks stained. We were all sick as dogs by the time shooting rolled around.

DM - What were some of the more difficult aspects of getting this film made, and how did you overcome them?

PK - I think it really went as smoothly as we could possibly make it. I started preproduction in November 07 by doing a detailed script breakdown of all the props, wardrobe and effects pieces. We did all of the really hard stuff up front, like solidifying the story, gathering all the items, crafting the props and costumes and sticking to it. The last thing we could afford was script changes and creative differences during the shoot. That would have been a train wreck and I've seen that happen a lot on other productions. There's nothing wrong with making decisions early on and then sticking to them. By doing all of the crafty creative work on paper first, it saved us a lot of time standing around scratching our heads trying to figure out how we were going to do something.

The enemy from the beginning was time. I absolutely refused to schedule it over months of shooting on weekends and opted to go for a rigorous two-week, no-holds-barred, production decathlon. We shot a few things, like all of the movie-within-a-movie stuff prior to the actual schedule. Once we got rolling it took on a life of its own. The residence that is featured at the end of the film was one of the first locations where we shot. The owners were gracious enough to let us shoot there but I don't think they realized that the night shoot meant "at night", like when they needed to sleep and such. That was a tough two days. Fortunately that was early on. It got easier the further we went along.

But, even with all the planning, every day required thinking on my feet to get it done. Weather was certainly an issue on some of the days. We were fortunate to get gloomy overcast light for the cemetery stuff. The day we shot the professor in the car, it had rained all day. As night got closer I tried to figure out how were were going to shoot the car stuff. One of the dorm buildings on the campus had an awning over the entrance. We pulled the car up as close to the curb as we could, shot through the driver's side, pulled the car around facing the opposite direction and shot though the passenger side. With a different angle of the camera lens, you can't tell it was shot from the same vantage point.

I wanted a tub for Brandy's conversion scene. We had showers in the dorms. That's stuff you make-do with. The other issue was getting all the hair and makeup changes done for each scene. Heather did all of that stuff by herself. Sometime we had four or five changes in one day. Brandy had a natural look, a sick look and a vampire look. We did our best to schedule those changes to be the most efficient way we could but it still required long nights and lots of painted veins. Heather won the award for Best Makeup fron Indie Fest USA so I guess it worked out after all.

DM - What were some of the biggest lessons you took away from this film that will help you out with your next one?

PK - Get the paperwork done as early as possible. Again, we didn't experience anything untoward happening but that doesn't mean that it couldn't have. Another thing would be to make more allowances in the schedule. We were shooting 12 to 14 pages on some days and that was pretty hard core. It's not like it can't be done. We proved that. Frank Darabont proved it on The Mist. But, I'd like to work on something where the crew is twice as big and days are 6 to 8 pages. We had to shoot it under a tight schedule to accommodate me and some of the other people on the production. Another thing would be to get all of your key props, items or tricky effect things working well ahead of the shoot day. I wasted a lot of money on materials that were not delivered or worked as expected, although the allowances were made well in advance. Test shots are not unheard of. We rehearsed with the actors and tried to prep them on some of the more complicated things.

DM - We briefly talked about how many first time film makers make a lot of common mistakes in their films because they come out of film school or whatever and think they know everything and won't listen to the advice of people who've been out there getting real world experience. Do you think, that it's actually more beneficial for people to go through the process of making these mistakes as part of the natural learning process, or would they be better served to listen to the advice of more experienced filmmakers?

PK - That depends. If I had listened to our most "experienced" producer, we wouldn't have been able to make it at all. He is used to big union shoots and was very skeptical about what we were planning. I had never shot a feature before but my approach was to break it all down into manageable sections. A lot of other micro-budget productions are so rushed to get to the shooting part of it, planning normally goes out the window. It's best to do as much prep work up front as possible, like - have a script! Then, once you have that, and everybody agrees, stick to it. That's not to say you can't improvise a bit if necessary but at least you have a good blueprint to work from. Even if you are planning to schedule weekend-shoot production, don't start it next weekend. Give yourself some lead time to get as much prep as possible before the camera actually rolls. Rehearse with your actors. Block the scenes out and follow them around as they walk through it to see where you want to place the camera. Decide how you want to cover it THEN, not when you're standing around with twenty other people waiting to roll. Find out what difficulties other productions have had, and avoid them! Well, do your best to minimize them. We suffered a bit from headscratchitis for time to time, but having a good clear direction on the rest of it allowed us a lot more leeway when those difficulties did arise.

DM - The Doom Bunny logo character appears numerous times throughout the film. Tell us about the character, who designed it, who made the stuffed animal and the puppet, etc...

PK - I drew the original art around the time I wrote the first draft of the script back in ‘05 with the intention of having it printed on a t-shirt for the main character, Andrea, to wear throughout the film. Once we started the re-write in August last year, Vicky came up with the idea that Andrea should also have an actual Doom Bunny plushie as well and set about the task of hand crafting two props. When were going through casting in November, I was so taken with Nicole Godwin's audition I created the prospect of Lady Malicient the Haunted Hostess character for the scene in which she appears. In the script, Andrea is watching TV and is interrupted by a phone call. We were going to shoot some original content for the playback on the TV rather than use some canned licensed footage. It kind of snowballed from there. Vicky crafted a puppet with the other props and the Doom Bunny became the co-host of the Haunted Hostess show. Since Andrea is a fan of the show in the story, she has a stuffed Doom Bunny in her dorm room, a t-shirt and autographed pictures of the Hostess and DB. We even shot photos at Texas Frightmare Weekend to use as props so it looks like Andrea met her TV heroine at some convention. all of this stuff is supposed to be pretty subtle to what is actually going on in the story and is really only meant lend background details. The book Andrea's uncle wrote "Families of Romania" also appears several times in the film, and the photo of him on the back cover is next to her bed in the dorm room. I would have probably used existing properties for some of those things if I could've gotten the rights to them but it was really more fun to invent all of that stuff. When it came time to register the name for the production company LLC we felt Doom Bunny as a mascot was a natural fit. Uncle Walter Films just didn't have the same appeal. I have the original Doom Bunny art posted up over my editing system so he can oversee all of post production.

DM - There were some special effects in this movie that looked really nice that are a great example of how you can make your film look really cool on a micro budget. Tell us about some of the effects, what software you used to create them, how long they took to put together, how difficult it was, etc...

PK - It's a tradeoff on movies at this level, and a bane of films at higher levels. For films in the micro range, you can either have really crappy effects all throughout your movie because you don't have the time/knowledge/money/resources/gear needed for blockbuster level effects or you choose your battles and pick the really necessary places they are needed most and focus on doing those the best you can. In bigger budgets, just because you can do something doesn't always mean you should. For example, in my short "escape" it is loaded with really mediocre and sub-par effects for all of the mentioned reasons. Now that I have more time/knowledge/money/resources/gear I plan to go back and work on a Special Edition of that just to satisfy my own sense of accomplishment. For Bloodwine all I had to do really was focus on two scenes and sprinkle a few other things throughout the rest just to add touches because that was what the story dictated. This was another instance of the logistics of doing a vampire flick. Since I was doing all the effects myself in-house (meaning in my house) I didn't want to add on more complicated work that would prolong finishing the project. I had a list of festival deadlines I was working against and didn't have the luxury of massaging all the shots to a happy ending. What I wound up doing in addition to that was fixing a lot of things that showed up in the final cut which I didn't count on and that doesn't fall under visual effects. It's more like visual ef-fix.

Again, I was adamant about what kinds of gear I wanted for post just like I was for shooting. For "escape" I had Premier and After Effects and was moderately satisfied with their results. For this I knew I wanted the new Final Cut Studio. It's a complete suite that handles literally everything involved with the entire post production process. I won't go into all the details about it because the Apple website does that much better than I ever could but for the money, it is a complete solution from capture to delivery. I supplemented that with a few other pieces of software, QuickTime Pro, Photoshop, Illustrator and Garage Band with the Orchestra and Vocal Jam Packs. I also have Shake but the interface is so sterile I found that Motion does pretty much the same thing but was much more intuitive for me to jump into. Since I'd never used any of the FCS programs before, I also picked up a few training disks from Larry Jordan [http://www.larryjordan.biz] . This allowed me to get up to speed cutting and compositing in the shortest possible time.

I started post literally the week after we wrapped shooting. Once I got the effects scenes locked as a final cut I could then move the cuts of the shots into Motion and do the compositing that was required. I bounced back and forth between editing and effects work throughout the length of the post process. There were some things I should have spent the time to shoot a little cleaner and it made it really difficult to do a couple of the effects but that's one of the challenges faced by high-end effects shops too. A couple of the things I really nailed and was really happy with the result. The footage we got on location in the nurse's office had to be shot clean. There would have been no way with the carpet or the schedule for us to smear blood all over the floor. So, I scanned a few ink smears, color balanced it in Photoshop, then composited those into the shots with Motion. Of course, that required a roto-matte around the nurse's legs but, I got the shot I wanted. After Brandy awakens as a vampire she examines herself in the mirror. That shot was locked off and then I shot a plate of the empty reflection. These two shots were composited with a roto-matte around Lora where she overlaps the reflection in the foreground. I then finished that by applying a little random low frequency wiggle to it to mimic a handheld look so that it cut a little cleaner with the shots preceding it. A lot of times it's these extra little touches that sell the effect better.

The shots I'm most proud of are Andrea walking from the burning chateau and Brandy's incineration. For the chateau, I got it exactly the way I envisioned it. We shot Melissa locked off in front of a greenscreen in direct sunlight. The chateau is a license-free photo I bought from an online library of Bran Castle in Transylvania. I did a bit of tweaking on it in Photoshop to rearrange some of the towers. This was all combined with canned flame and smoke footage layered with particles. This was all combined in Motion with a bit of a soft lens flare coming from just off screen and a simulated camera move, again to tie it all together. For the incineration we shot Lora on the location and then a clean plate all locked off. I did a very simple animated matte of a random shape irising out from the center which reveals the plate behind her.

DM - After completing the film and having had time to look back on it now, do you spot things in it here and there you wish you'd have done differently, or things where you say to yourself, "Oh man, I could have done that better if I had done (such and such) instead of what I did," and when you have those moments, do you look at them with regret or treat them as a learning experience for things you can do better in your next film?

PK - Absolutely! I look at those moments with both regret and as a learning experience. I know in those instances that I could have done better than what I did, I could have taken more time to get more shots, I could have covered stuff from a different angle, I could have paid more attention to what the lens was seeing. I felt with post I had pretty much all of the control over the footage as is technologically possible but you can only stretch that as far as the footage you have. It is important to get the best work you can during the shooting process. I feel we got the best work we could working within the parameters we had and am still very proud of the accomplishments of everyone. But since everything in life is a learning experience there are definitely things I will adjust on our next production.

DM - Bloodwine was nominated for four different awards at Indie Fest USA 2008. Tell us about those and how it felt to have your work recognized like that. Also, is the film appearing at any upcoming festivals that you'd like to mention?

PK - I thought it was pretty awesome! We were nominated for Best Feature, Best Costumes, Best Effects and won Best Makeup. It was certainly a validation of sorts for all the hard work everyone put into the project and really means a lot to me that it was so recognized since it was our first feature. Although we piled on a tough job including full-body painting and maintaining the stylized designs of different looks for Andrea on different story-days, Heather worked like a trooper under an impossible schedule with tight deadlines to get the look required for the characters. We couldn't be more proud of her in this achievement and are especially impressed that the festival voters and judges recognized this particular achievement. Coming from primarily a theater experience, this is the first feature film Heather has worked on. While most of us had the flu during shooting, she pulled up her bootstraps and wrangled the wardrobe, handled all the makeup tasks and also performed one of the supporting roles. Even though we constantly goaded her with an "ETA" of when the actors would be ready to shoot, she delivered with great spirit and little grumbling of the grueling circumstances. I can't wait to work with her on a project again. Thanks again, Heather, you make us proud!

Bloodwine screeners are out to several other festivals and we're waiting to get word on the selections to see when it will be screening again. We do have plans to make an appearance at Texas Frightmare Weekend in May 09 to give members of the cast an opportunity to meet fans and hawk our Bunny wares.

DM - What's next for you? Do you have something in the works right now or are you planning something to start in the near future?

PK - We are currently looking for a distributor for both domestic and foreign distribution. There are also several digital-delivery options we are currently researching to decide which methods will be the most lucrative. I have an exceptionally extended amount of time coming up in a few days where I will have a completely open schedule to focus entirely on Doom Bunny projects. In that time we have a whole drawer full of ideas in development that we will begin to sift through and see what shakes up. Included in that are two or three different animation projects, one of which is being reviewed by a cable network, the other may be available as webisodes. We have a hilarious concept for a live action serialized mockumentary web series which would be released to collected DVD. Other features in development include a creepy ghost story, a couple of very, very different werewolf scripts and something that I am describing as my "supernatural erotic thriller". Along with that I have two very high-concept Sci-Fi/Fantasy projects that have been crawling around in the back of my head for some time. Some of these are suitable for micro-budget production but some of these could only be feasible with a more accommodating budget. So in that regard we would need investors and such to fund those particular projects. In the interim we'll be writing and producing concept art for these properties to give us something tangible to pitch. Some of these I will direct but I'd really like to pass the directing duties on to others. Vicky will be directing a few of them, and that will allow me freedom focus on other areas.

DM - Is there anything else you'd like to mention or talk about before we wrap this up?

PK - I wanted to thank you and Rogue Cinema for the chance to chatter on about the production. I encourage the readers to drop by and check out the web page at Doom Bunny Films [http://www.doombunnyfilms.com] and the Bloodwine Production Blog [http://www.bloodwinemovie.com] to find out more about the film. We will be announcing festival selections on the blog as we are notified. Also be sure to visit the Links page [http://www.doombunnyfilms.com/links.html] to see a comprehensive list of the resources that came in really handy throughout the entire process of the production.

Bloodwine was a very ambitious and challenging project. It, however, is a testament to the talent and dedication of everyone involved that much can come from little. It is the culmination of vast amounts of potential and talent from the entire cast and crew. I could not possibly have done any of it without their dedication and the belief that we were making something larger than the sum of its parts. Granted, Bloodwine is not intended as Oscar® material and was created for the love and passion for the genre and the medium by everyone involved. I certainly hope that is what shows more than anything.