Fred Wilharm
September 17th, 2018, 12:20 PM
OK, I'll admit it. I'm shamelessly posting here to hopefully get views on our film releasing tomorrow. I don't feel too bad about it because I've been here since the beginning of the HVX200 era!
Now that that's out of the way, on to the film: Summer of '67 is a Vietnam War era drama that follows the lives of 3 sailors and their significant others as they are about to be shipped off to war. Their ship is the USS Forrestal, which caught fire in on July 29th and burned for 3 days straight. My father in law was on the ship and the movie is loosely based on his story. Of course, not being able to re create the deck of an aircraft carrier, our story is primarily based on life on the homefront. The fire was on the TV news, but it was over 3 days before relatives knew what had happened to their loved ones. 134 men died in the fire.
We shot it with the FS7 in 4K, no external recorder, using a Movi gimbal for many moving shots. Instead of renting the gimbal, I bought it used and resold it afterwards. I think my investment in the Movi was about $300. We shot in Slog 3 and color corrected in Resolve. Our films are ULB, so we usually go straight into the camera with boom or lav mics and have a film student hold the mic. This time we hired a sound crew and recorded externally, upping the sound quality substantially.
We put a lot of time and attention into making the film look authentic to the 60's. We spent over a year accumulating household props and furniture. I already owned a '66 Thunderbird which became one of the sailor's cars, and bought a VW minibus for the hippie boyfriend character. I spent 3 months getting the bus running and useable for the film, along with "grunging it up" for the right look.
We released theatrically in Nashville and a couple of other cities, and for an indie release, had a successful two week run. Here we are on Box Office Mojo:
https://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=summerof67.htm
Viewing it on a 40 foot screen was a satisfying experience in some ways and terrifying in others. The shots that turned out well looked incredible, while the less than perfect shots were magnified 40 times. All in all though, I was happy with how it turned out.
A few weeks ago we signed with a distributor and they wasted no time releasing it (it will be released on various platforms like Vudu,Itunes, etc. one at a time). If you have Amazon Prime, you can watch it for free starting today. Watch as much as you can (or just leave the room and let it run!) as Amazon counts that, and consider giving it a review or rating when you're done. As you can imagine, it's nearly impossible for an indie film to get noticed in a world of huge marketing budgets, but if enough people watch, it could start trending and go on from there. Thanks for your help, and here's the Amazon Prime link: https://www.amazon.com/Summer-67-Rachel-Schrey/dp/B07GWS1CV3/din02c-20
Now that that's out of the way, on to the film: Summer of '67 is a Vietnam War era drama that follows the lives of 3 sailors and their significant others as they are about to be shipped off to war. Their ship is the USS Forrestal, which caught fire in on July 29th and burned for 3 days straight. My father in law was on the ship and the movie is loosely based on his story. Of course, not being able to re create the deck of an aircraft carrier, our story is primarily based on life on the homefront. The fire was on the TV news, but it was over 3 days before relatives knew what had happened to their loved ones. 134 men died in the fire.
We shot it with the FS7 in 4K, no external recorder, using a Movi gimbal for many moving shots. Instead of renting the gimbal, I bought it used and resold it afterwards. I think my investment in the Movi was about $300. We shot in Slog 3 and color corrected in Resolve. Our films are ULB, so we usually go straight into the camera with boom or lav mics and have a film student hold the mic. This time we hired a sound crew and recorded externally, upping the sound quality substantially.
We put a lot of time and attention into making the film look authentic to the 60's. We spent over a year accumulating household props and furniture. I already owned a '66 Thunderbird which became one of the sailor's cars, and bought a VW minibus for the hippie boyfriend character. I spent 3 months getting the bus running and useable for the film, along with "grunging it up" for the right look.
We released theatrically in Nashville and a couple of other cities, and for an indie release, had a successful two week run. Here we are on Box Office Mojo:
https://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=summerof67.htm
Viewing it on a 40 foot screen was a satisfying experience in some ways and terrifying in others. The shots that turned out well looked incredible, while the less than perfect shots were magnified 40 times. All in all though, I was happy with how it turned out.
A few weeks ago we signed with a distributor and they wasted no time releasing it (it will be released on various platforms like Vudu,Itunes, etc. one at a time). If you have Amazon Prime, you can watch it for free starting today. Watch as much as you can (or just leave the room and let it run!) as Amazon counts that, and consider giving it a review or rating when you're done. As you can imagine, it's nearly impossible for an indie film to get noticed in a world of huge marketing budgets, but if enough people watch, it could start trending and go on from there. Thanks for your help, and here's the Amazon Prime link: https://www.amazon.com/Summer-67-Rachel-Schrey/dp/B07GWS1CV3/din02c-20