It's doing for camping what Deliverance did for white-water canoeing. Learn how Macintosh and the web helped launch the quintessential horror film of its time.
By Sam McMillan (onilne at http://www.apple.com/hotnews/features/blair/)
Hand-held and hand-made, The Blair Witch Project has Hollywood re-thinking the formula for blockbuster summer movies.
Certain films leave a lasting mark on their times. An entire generation of filmgoers will remember the shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho for the rest of their lives. A few decades later, Jaws made us all think twice about jumping in the ocean for a midnight swim. Today, The Blair Witch Project is the quintessential horror film of its time, doing for camping what Deliverance did for white-water canoeing.
In 83 minutes of relentless hand-held camera work and fever-pitch acting, The Blair Witch Project tells the story of three documentary filmmakers and what happens to them as they explore the legend of a 200-year-old witch in a remote Maryland town. In the process, the film leaves an indelible image of terror. When you consider that Blair Witch was shot for a paltry $31,000 by a band of unknown first-time filmmakers barely out of film school, their achievement seems all the greater.
By the time you read this, The Blair Witch Project will have earned more than $100 million faster than you can say Burkittsville, MD. The most profitable movie of all time, based on return on investment, The Blair Witch Project is more than a movie. It is a pop culture phenomenon, generating a firestorm of hype and buzz. Time and Newsweek magazine both ran cover stories in the same week. Independent filmmakers, who strive to tell their stories no matter how high the odds or how low the budget, point to The Blair Witch Project as proof that some beat the odds.
The Technology of Blair Witch Major software: Media 100 XR Adobe After Effects Adobe Illustrator Adobe Photoshop Adobe Premiere Commotion Borris FX
For storage and retrieval we used: Four 18GB MegaDrives Retrospect
We use these Macs: 300MHz Power Mac 9600 Two 266MHz Power Macintosh G3s A new 333MHz iMac An old Performa 6115 (we did all our publicity materials on this baby!)
Hold the hype, there's a film here At danger of being lost in the hype and buzz is the film itself-essentially hand made, without a bankable star or even a music track. Producer Robin Calley, of Haxan Films, says, "the editing process is one of the least appreciated aspects of the film. We shot 20 hours of film, and spent the next nine months editing it on a Media 100."
"There's no other way we could have edited this film, given our lack of budget and our limited resources," claims director Dan Myrick, who insists, "this film came together in the editing process." Haxan used a Media 100 XR, powered by a Power Macintosh 9600 equipped with 132 megabytes of RAM and sporting a 72-gigabyte MegaDrive RAID array. "It's very fast," Myrick attests.
Haxan, which is Swedish for witchcraft, had two options for editing the movie, Myrick says. "We could pay for time on an Avid at $100 an hour or entertain a lease on the Media 100 at $1,200 a month. That kind of economy meant we could do a few jobs to keep afloat, and pay for the unhindered time we would need on our own box."
In addition to the impact on their bottom line, Myrick was swayed by the way the Media 100 facilitates the creative process. "It's perfect for long-form projects," Myrick notes. "There's a seamless process of editing on the Media 100 that's fluid and less interrupted. It's visually oriented, so you can drag and drop film clips into the edit tracks and see what you've got immediately. I think of the Media 100 as being designed by Mac code dudes. It's an intuitive way of working, much more user friendly than the Avid."
Finding the film in the footage Once the filmmakers wrapped the shoot, their first challenge was to take 20 hours of raw footage and find a film. Original footage was transferred from their RCA Hi8 handy cam and film school standard-issue 16-millimeter camera to BetaSP video tape. They made VHS video copies with SMPTE reference time codes burned into a window, allowing Myrick and his co-director, Eduardo Sanchez, to log the footage.
"Our job" Myrick says, "was to get rid of what wasn't working-cut out all the junk. Next we got rid off everything we considered marginal. We were looking for great moments, great acting, trying to use our editing cuts to form a reality and develop character arcs. That got us down to 8 hours of usable stuff."
Haxan booked time on an Avid, and digitized the remaining footage, which allowed them to create an edit decision list. They rebatched the digital file, output it to Beta and brought it into the Media 100 as QuickTime video files. And then the really intense work began. Haxan, which also includes Greg Hale and Michael Morello, defines itself as a creative collaborative. Which means everything is done by consensus. "We take more meetings than Disney," Calley jokes. "Only we do it playing foosball."
Of course, reaching a consensus can be a painful, time-consuming process. "I'd spend all night editing the film and add what I thought were the best five minutes from the three or four hours we shot on day two," Myrick remembers. "Then Eduardo would edit all night and next morning those five minutes would be gone. Whoever felt the most passionate about the edit decision usually won."
"We edited to the very last minute before sending our VHS tape to Sundance," Calley says. Once the VHS was accepted at Sundance, Haxan sent their final edit to 4MC, a Los Angeles-based film transfer production house, which struck a 35mm print from the digital master. As they say in Tinseltown, the rest is history.
Myrick credits the site with creating the huge amount of industry buzz going into Sundance. "The web site made it one of the movies to see at Sundance." Once film distributor Artisan Entertainment bought the film, they reconfigured the site, so newcomers to the site could "start from scratch." They added new material each week.
Before long, Myrick notes, "we were getting 50 million hits. The Web site fueled the word of mouth momentum, and that's been integral to the success of the movie. Almost by accident we created an interactive component to the movie."
Calley explains, "We had all this Phase II' footage we were going to use for the documentary. That ended up going straight to the website, time-released on a continual basis. Our goal was to create an experience without giving anything away about the film." Nourished with new footage and purported "documentary" evidence every few days, the site offers an intricate online encounter. Hidden links and multiple levels through the story deepen the activity and reward web surfers with material filmgoers won't find anywhere else. Says Calley, "The experience of going to the web site became entertaining in and of itself."
That sense of online engagement-deep, emotional, and compelling-proved so profound, Blair Witch companion sites began to spring up on their own, built by die-hard fans who bought into the fictional story line. At last count there were 63 independently-created Blair Witch web sites. Even Myrick is baffled by the depth of passion some fans feel for the film. "You have to think," Myrick says, "That's kind of weird-that guy doesn't have a life.'"
Roll the credits Without the web, Myrick acknowledges, "no one would have known about this film. But with the right idea, the right team, and the right technology, things like this can happen. It's like winning the lottery, only better." The difference is, according to Myrick, "You win the lottery, you get lucky." With a 100 million dollar-grossing film, "you get respect."
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