VFX and the Art of Indie Filmmaking with Director Tom Putnam
Fasten your seatbelts, film enthusiasts! This episode is a rare treat as we sit down with the brilliant director Tom Putnam for a thrilling behind-the-scenes look at his latest feature film, 'The Dark Divide.' He reveals the highs and lows of shooting in remote wilderness locations, managing a star-studded cast, and the essential role that visual effects played in bringing the story to life. It's a fascinating peek into indie filmmaking and an exploration into the intriguing real-life story of nature writer Robert Pyle.
Buckle up for an enlightening discussion on managing a feature film production on a shoestring budget. Tom provides an in-depth look at how he creatively wove hundreds of visual effects shots into the film, whilst maintaining a tight budget. Get ready to learn about the critical importance of relationships in the film industry, and how they played a significant role in the creation of 'The Dark Divide.' The amusing Bigfoot scenes, the dramatic performances from comedic actors David Cross and Debra Messing, and the challenges of releasing a film during the COVID-19 pandemic: there's a lot to unpack!
Prepare to be amazed at the power of visual effects in indie filmmaking. Tom talks about how VFX can enhance the narrative, even when you're working with limited resources. You'll get a unique insight into how filmmakers can use VFX to combine takes, fix technical glitches, and create a more dynamic and realistic production. Hear how Tom used VFX to add depth and progress to the film, and how creative solutions were used to navigate the challenges that arose during the making of 'The Dark Divide.' By the time we wrap up, you'll have a newfound appreciation for the magic of indie filmmaking and the creative minds that make it happen.
The Dark Divide: VFX and the Art of Indie Filmmaking with Director Tom Putnam
[Paul DeNigris]: 0:00
Comedian David Cross plays real life nature writer, Robert Pyle, as he embarks on a perilous and sometimes comic journey across Washington's Gifford Pinchot National Forest. In Tom Putnam's feature, The Dark Divide. This week on VFX for Indies. Hello and welcome to this episode of VFX for Indies, a podcast about the intersection of visual effects and independent filmmaking. I'm your host, Paul DeNegris, visual effects, artist, filmmaker, and CEO of a boutique VFX shop called Foxtrot X-Ray. Joining me today on this episode is director Tom Putnam, who directed a film called The Dark Divide, kind of an indie drama sort of comedy that we worked on a couple of years ago. We did about 60 or 65 VFX shots for and had some fun challenges. Welcome to the podcast, Tom.
[Tom Putnam]: 1:07
Thanks for having me and man, you're showing me up with your nice video background. So you can see my laundry, but
[Paul DeNigris]: 1:15
Ha ha
[Tom Putnam]: 1:17
Paul is definitely the creative one.
[Paul DeNigris]: 1:19
Well, I am the host and it, and I am obviously portraying myself as a visual artist and expert. And it would, uh, it would, you know, when I first was given the idea by a couple of business gurus that I follow to do a content based marketing strategy with a podcast and everything, they said, well, just get going and then get good. And I was like, guys, I’m in the movie business. I can't just get going. I have to actually like put in the work, set up a nice backdrop.
[Tom Putnam]: 1:48
Looks good!
[Paul DeNigris]: 1:48
get a good mic, you know, I have to do all of this stuff. It's gonna take me a little longer to get ramped up, but once I do, we should be able to hit the ground running. And it's been, so far, it's been a really nice process. It's been great catching up with filmmakers like yourself, who very often I haven't talked to since we wrapped your project. And you and I haven't really had a chance to chat in a couple of years. It was, I think, 2020 that we worked on Dark Divide. It might even have even started in 2019.
[Tom Putnam]: 2:18
Yeah, and then it came out in 2021. So, you know, that's like that pandemic period where who knows how long things took. It's so nebulous.
[Paul DeNigris]: 2:26
Yeah, so it's been nice. I've had a number of great filmmakers on and sharing their experiences. And I know you've got a lot of experience with VFX, particularly on Dark Divide, some before, some after. And I think the audience is going to really enjoy what you have to share. So why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself, who you are, kind of what you've done, maybe sort of like career encapsulation. leading up to Dark Divide. And then we'll talk more about that film in particular.
[Tom Putnam]: 3:00
Sure, thanks for having me on. Hello, I am Tom Putnam. I am a director and producer. I'm based in Los Angeles, although everything I seem to film doesn't take place in Los Angeles. I'm a little bit unusual because I do about half fiction films, not even, probably a third fiction films and two thirds documentary features and television. I grew up in Portland, Oregon, which is near where The Dark Divide takes place. I went to film school and journalism school at USC, and I have an MBA because I was very slow during the pandemic from St. Mary's University. So I started off after film school as a post-production executive at the company that was doing the Power Rangers, Saban Entertainment. So I kind of come to directing with... a knowledge that maybe not every director has about the importance of post-production. And you sort of hear a joke on set all the time like, oh, save it for post. We'll fix it in post. And that normally is a huge red flag, but that's the thing I do say a lot. And Dark Divide was kind of a unique opportunity because usually when I mean that, it's in editing or sound design and Dark Divide was really the first time I got a chance to use VFX to... a little bit add to the film, but a lot of it fixed problems that happened from a very tough like 20 day shoot out in the middle of nowhere in Oregon with David Cross and Debra Messing and a whole bunch of fun people.
[Paul DeNigris]: 4:36
both of whom are among my favorite actors, been big fans of both of them for a long time. And so when the project landed on our desk, I went, yes, we're in Like to do anything for a David Cross, Debra Messing project was an absolute dream.
[Tom Putnam]: 4:55
Ah, thank you,
[Paul DeNigris]: 4:57
And they're both wonderful in the film. It was a lot of fun to have them up on our screens and to be looking at them It was like, oh, this is a real legit movie.
[Tom Putnam]: 5:10
Well, that's great to hear. And this is kind of a great lead into the VFX conversation because, you know, whatever you think Dark Divide cost, I would say divide that by about 10. And, you know, we made this movie that's 90% of it outdoors shot in really rugged wilderness locations, many of which people have never filmed in before in Oregon and Washington. It's a period piece, takes place in 1995, has huge storm sequences, tons of stunts. It's about a shy butterfly epert so there was this whole butterfly component. We went into production not knowing how we would film. And in fact, most of the VFX companies we talked to said that's going to be impossible unless you have like $20 million to spend on it. So it was a huge challenge to figure out how to get the movie that I wanted because I'd spent 10 years trying to get it made. I had a certain vision in mind. But to be able to do that in new and creative ways, which is I think where like a lot of the VFX came in.
[Paul DeNigris]: 6:14
Well, this is a good segue. Why don't you give us just a quick synopsis, sort of the back of the Blu-ray cover synopsis of the film, and then I'll run a clip of the trailer.
[Tom Putnam]: 6:24
So The Dark Divide is based on a true story. It's a non-fiction book written by a guy named Robert Michael Pyle. He's America's foremost expert in butterflies and moths. He wrote The Audubon Field Guide to North American Butterflies. It's the true story about what happened in 1995. He got a Guggenheim grant to spend six weeks... traveling through America's largest undeveloped wilderness, which is in Southern Washington, to catalog new species of butterflies. But at the same time, he had all of these encounters with a certain seven foot tall kind of famous resident of that part of the world. So we decided somehow to make like this crazy comedy, drama, horror, science fiction movie starring David Cross as a shy butterfly expert and poet who doesn't even he has no dialogue for like 40 minutes of the movie And shooting it in all the real locations where the movie took place. So with the least commercial premise ever, we somehow, after dozens of failed pitches, that's the movie that somehow found investors. And like most movies, I had a budget in mind and the budget I went into production with was about, just about a third of that. So we didn't have a whole lot of infrastructure. I mean, this wasn't a movie with a bunch of trailers and long shoot days. We shot in 20 days and in some cases we would have like eight, 10 locations that we would film. Huge stunt days. And when I budgeted the film, I had budgeted it thinking, planning to somehow digitally create the butterflies. There was one day where we had practical butterflies. We had an expert with us where he actually has to handle the butterfly, but for everything else, I just acted as the VFX supervisor, which I don't recommend, because I don't know what I'm doing, but I lucked out. And basically we're just shooting a ton of plates with the crew asking like, do you know what you're doing? Like, I see you put a tennis ball there, so maybe you know something. And just kind of winged it, figuring we would figure that out in post. So budgeted for about 30 VFX shots for these butterfly shots. Ended up with about 400 VFX shots because we had a lot of problems in production. And I just kind of started saying, Okay, I hope I'm going to be able to fix this digitally, um, and got into post and then that's, I kind of did it the opposite of how you should normally do it. Uh, in post, I started having these conversations with, with people like yourself about Hey, here's my problem. What are some creative ways to fix it? So visual effects in the movie, when you see the butterflies, except for three shots, they're all real butterflies. but rather than shoot them practically, I would shoot plates and then we went and shot them all on a green screen, which was a bit of a challenge because they were going to escape. And you can only have butterflies...you can only release them by law in their natural habitat. So we had to go back up to Oregon where we filmed and shoot green screens with these butterflies so when they inevitably escaped, I wasn't like introducing an invasive species in Southern California, which sounds crazy, but it worked. And then just started like kind of trying to figure out how much I could push the envelope with VFX. For example, there's a scene in the film where they're in a... Robert Pyle's wife died of cancer in real life and that's in the film Debra Messing plays his wife. So they're in a treatment center and we just didn't have...we had to shoot it in just a few minutes, didn't have time to like do any production design really. It's actually shot in one of the bedrooms that the crew was staying in, in like a basketball camp in the middle of nowhere in Oregon. So like added posters to the wall for that. Or there's a scene where David Cross's character is in his long johns and they didn't look dirty enough. So we dirtied those up and basically changed his wardrobe. You'll see all of these signs throughout the film because he's hiking to the Columbia Gorge, which is between Oregon and Washington. Almost every one of those signs was added digitally. So like in my driveway, I would film like a blank piece of wood from whatever angle it's supposed to be in. And then you guys would add that sign. at Columbia Gorge and the mile markers. So there was a lot of basically what I would call like wardrobe and production design sweetening. There were a lot of things, you know, when you're making a low budget movie, especially in the wilderness, there's not, we didn't have a Greensman. There's not much you can do. So it was like removing houses, removing power lines, removing cars. But also in a lot of cases just adding little bits of things that you might not normally notice. There's a scene where he almost drowns, and it was a very scary shoot. David actually couldn't talk for a couple hours afterwards because it was so cold. Basically, I had one take to do it. It was all shot up in the mountains in snow runoff. So for that, we added some splashing and... turbulent water in the foreground. So many little things that I was actually pleasantly surprised by because we were able to add all, I mean, add 370 shots and still stay within our very small budget, which I mean, our VFX budget was like not on the high side of five figures. So it was a really, eye-opening experience for me and something that I've taken into my subsequent... I've made a couple documentaries since then, but it's really taught me what a great tool VFX is in order to go far beyond what I think we all think of, which is like the spaceships or The Avengers movie and things as simple as if I have a two-shot and one performer's great in this take and another performer's great in another take. using you guys to put them together, which we did a lot of. So it's like, it's a million little shots in addition to the like few sort of big like storm cloud shots that maybe are more clearly effects.
[Paul DeNigris]: 14:03
Yeah, and this is a this is actually pretty typical of the types of VFX that we like to do at Foxtrot X-Ray. we you know, we... I love invisible effects. It's it seems weird, right? You would think that that, you know, us VFX guys would love the opportunity to do The Avengers or Star Wars or whatever. And of course, love that stuff. That's those are the kinds of movies that inspired me to get into VFX. But there's a there's a perverse thrill of being able to go into a shot, do a bunch of stuff, leave and leave no trace, right? And have the audience go, where were the VFX? Right, because then I've really done my job...and that to me is a lot of fun. It's like a magician being able to pull off a trick and you don't see the sleight of hand, you don't see the strings, you don't, you know, you can't see through the smoke and mirrors and that's really fun and we got to do a lot of work like that on your film. Um, we didn't do any of the butterfly stuff. Um, we didn't do any of the butterfly stuff. Obviously you had multiple vendors on this show, so we didn't do any of the butterfly stuff. I don't think we did any of that water stuff, but we did a lot of those signs... and we did, a lot of the, what you What you would call, you know, greens sweetening, if you will. There were a couple of places where, uh, and you obliquely referred to Big Foot as a some, something that he, that Pyle, you know, sort of encounters kind of brushes up against. and there's a lot of funny shots where, you know, Bigfoot's in one part of the frame and Pyle’s in another part of the frame and he doesn't see it, which is really cool. And there's also times when he finds these giant footprints and we did some like subtle cleanup of those, made them more visible, just little things that you would never even know that we had been in the shot at all, which is great. I find it funny, I'm gonna segue into the next thing here. I find it funny that you cast David Cross, who is a great comedian and known for his verbal wit. And then you took dialogue away from him for like a third of the movie. And then you cast Debra Messing, who's known for her beautiful red locks and you took those away and made her bald for most of her shots.
[Tom Putnam]: 16:18
Yeah, I'm not the smartest. No, that was actually intentional because part of the way we got actors who were, I mean, much bigger than what our budget should have warranted was because we, I intentionally, and really I gotta give credit to Jory Weitz who's the casting director, was really the first producer to come on board the project and was really the engine behind getting it made. You know, he kept saying, don't go to people who get offered these things normally, go to people who never get offered this and so Debra said yes, and when I asked her like, stupidly, I guess, asked her, why would you do this movie? She said two reasons. Number one, her mom died of cancer. And number two, she only gets asked to play Grace Adler characters. So here to be asked to be played like this older graying, woman dying of cancer she jumped at the chance. Same thing with David. He gets basically asked to play certain characters, so to be able to be asked to play a college professor, but also really get to leverage all of the tools in his like pretty substantial bag of tricks in terms of physical comedy and just how expressive his face is, you know, I can't imagine. I don't think the movie actually would have gotten made or finished with anybody but him because he also coming from like Mr. Show and the other things he's done. He was really, he fought really hard to do almost all of his own stunts too. So, you know, it's when you see him dangling off the edge of a cliff or in a like rushing icy stream, that's, that's David. So, um, that was great for me because it allowed me to get very close and be handheld and have it very clearly feel like super real in some of those scary moments.
[Paul DeNigris]: 18:07
And he is a brilliant physical comedian as well as a witty verbal comedian.
[Tom Putnam]: 18:13
And a really good dramatic actor. I don't think anybody had really asked him to do that much. So that was awesome to be able to see that. And especially, I mean, he's in almost every frame of the movie. So he got to really chew the scenery. I don't think he's ever going in the woods again but it was hopefully a rewarding experience. Going back to what you were saying, like with Bigfoot. Like all the Bigfoot shots in the film are practical. There's so much that people think are the VFX shots that aren't, and I kept thinking when we were shooting about that great Orson Welles movie, F for Fake, and you talked about magic. That's what got me thinking about it, which is a lot of those shots, you're looking at Bigfoot over here, but all the VFX stuff is happening over there. And it was, that was really rewarding to see how that paid off.
[Paul DeNigris]: 19:04
Yeah. To just tag off of the idea of, you know, David Cross being a brilliant dramatic actor as well as a brilliant comedian. Then this is not... this is just a complete VFX. It's an aside from VFX, obviously. So I have found in my own filmmaking before I hung up my director's cap, to just focus on VFX, that comedians actually are really adept at switching gears and giving these wonderful dramatic performances. So really briefly, my best buddy, Steve Briscoe, stand-up comic came up through Star Search and Carolyn's Comedy Hour and all of that sort of stuff. And when we first were collaborating, I wrote this film noir thriller called The Falls and I gave him this dramatic role with this, you know, a five page monologue in the middle of the movie and he looked at it and he said, you really want me to do this? And I was like, yeah, you can totally do it. He's like, I've never done anything this dramatic before. Are you sure? I said, Briscoe, you got this. Anyway, so he nailed it. The reason I bring up Briscoe is because I always on this show talk about how this is a business of relationships and so it's actually really funny. Tom and I were destined to cross paths at some point. Okay. So my buddy Briscoe is good friends with a filmmaker and musician named Peter Foldy and one time, its got to be 10 years ago, maybe more. I'm in LA with Briscoe for a weekend and we, we hang out with Peter Foldy and Peter proceeds to tell me the story about his brilliant friend, Tom, who made a brilliant movie called Tom Hits His Head. Okay. Stored it in the back of my head. Years later, The Dark Divide is in post. My friend, Mark Stolaroff, who's been on this show, he refers Tom Putnam to me. Tom and I begin our, our professional relationship. I look up Tom on IMDB. I see Tom directed, wrote and directed Tom Hits His Head. I went, what the hell? Six degrees of separation. That's how this business works. Everyone, you know, knows everyone else, you know, whether you introduce them or not.
[Tom Putnam]: 21:22
And you better be nice to them because they will tell other people if you're difficult. I feel like that's a problem neither one of us have, but yeah, I've known Peter for, holy cow, probably almost 30 years now. And Mark I've known for probably 20 years.
[Paul DeNigris]: 21:39
Yeah....
[Tom Putnam]: 21:41
Yeah, that's, I think such an important thing that people don't realize is everybody you meet, especially in this era with social media and LinkedIn and... and things. It's so much of the work I get is from referrals or the people I hire from referrals. And it's, you know, every time I'm home, like working on a script or something, I'm always thinking like, would I be better off if I just took somebody to coffee? And usually, yeah. Yeah. So thanks, Peter. And thanks, Mark, for introducing us.
[Paul DeNigris]: 22:19
Absolutely.
[Tom Putnam]: 22:21
Yeah, small business.
[Paul DeNigris]: 22:22
Yeah, it is a small business. It is a small business. You know, the old saying was, it's not what you know, it's who you know, and it's really who knows you. That is the important part of that equation, right? It's who knows that you're a good writer director. Who knows that I'm a good visual effects artist that can connect the two of us? And so it's, yeah, it's a... It is an often overlooked, I think it's, it's sort of understood like this is how the business works, but it's not something that people really address or teach in film school, right? They teach you all the, this is how and why to put the camera here. And this is how and why to edit and all of that sort of stuff. But it's, it all comes down to networking.
[Tom Putnam]: 23:03
I actually, having gone to USC, which is sort of regarded as, I think still, one of the better film schools, I tell people all the time to skip film school. I mean, I got a great education, made some great friends that I'm still friends with, but got six figures in debt, graduated, ended up having to get a job as a... career for the Power Rangers when all of my friends who skipped that process were like, PA on movies and working on cheap movies and making the connections. And I saw their careers moved so much faster than mine did. Cause the thing I didn't realize is for the kinds of movies I tend to make, which are like lower budget movies, it's just about like crewing on film after film, after film, until you sort of build up that network of people that bring you work and who can help you make your own films. I'm doing a movie right now that I'm directing and producing called Into the Unknown. It's about paramedics around the country. And I got that job because the publicist for a documentary I did a couple years ago is the publicist for a film festival that one of the producers of Into the Unknown runs and they were looking for a director and he said, oh, I think Tom works with firefighters and connected us. So it's really... It's always so weird how these things happen. I kind of think of it as like, you gotta put a lot of lines in the water,
[Paul DeNigris]: 24:31
Mm-hmm.
[Tom Putnam]: 24:31
you know? Because it's so hard to like, spin enough plates to actually get something... going.
[Paul DeNigris]: 24:42
All right. Why don't we steer back to Dark Divide's VFX. So again, on the subject of Debra Messing, she is she's losing her hair in a big chunk of the movie.
[Tom Putnam]: 24:52
Yeah.
[Paul DeNigris]: 24:52
And we I think probably the most shots that my team touched had to do with that bald cap.
[Tom Putnam]: 25:00
Oh my god, the bald.... So we had an amazing hair and makeup person on the film. And that's a bald cap. And we, there's varying degrees of her hair loss in the film. And we actually, one of the big line items in the budget was hiring like one of the best wig makers in the country because nothing to me wrecks a movie faster than a bad bald cap. And I wanted to be very close with her. There's scenes like it with her in the bathroom with her husband, a lot of scenes of them in bed together and in the kitchen and things. I wanted to be really close on her. And we had a great person, but we only had one person for the whole movie. And inevitably, you've seen Debra Messing. She has a lot of hair to shove under a bald cap. And we would get the dailies back. And I mean, every shot there's a wrinkle somewhere or a seam somewhere. And that's a great example of where you guys did an amazing job. And not just with the bald cap, but like making her face look a little more sallow and doing the things that we just didn't have the infrastructure to do on set. And I mean, I would say, I think every single shot she's in, there's VFX work on her seams and things.
[Paul DeNigris]: 26:19
Yeah. And I talk about this a lot because we do a lot of digital makeup repair, if you will, in our business. And the one thing I want to stress is anytime we're talking about this, it's never it's never a slight to the practical makeup people, right? They do amazing work. It's us coming in to help them is we're partnered with them. And there's been plenty of times where I've been on set side by side with a makeup person, a practical makeup person for more creature effects and stuff like that. Where we're, it’s understood, we're in this together. Like my work is gonna live and die on how good their work is and vice versa. And so it is, even though I never met your makeup and hair people, it definitely was a partnership. It was not, you know, we're not taking anything away from the work that they did. It's the limitations of time and money that work against you.
[Tom Putnam]: 27:17
Oh, a hundred percent. I mean, we had one person doing hair and makeup. She's like in the middle of the woods with no support. And you know, you'd have days where it's like, okay, the first part of the day, David's been out in the wilderness for a month and he's completely tanned and scratched up and this and that. But then in like 30 minutes after we wrap, I need you to turn them around for a completely different part of the journey. And having that ability is... huge. There’s a sequence where we shot in real lava tunnels, which I don't recommend because huge rocks were falling out of the ceiling. But deep underground, David escapes from the lava tunnel and he comes out. And she had like, I was worried it looked cartoony. She had put scratches and bruises all over him because he goes through quite an experience under there. And then when I saw the dailies, I was like, oh, it's not enough. Totally my fault. So, you know. the ability with VFX to just like darken those and add some bruising and things was huge. One of the things that is so exciting for me was the fact that we're finally in an era also where those things can happen on handheld shots and the camera doesn't have to be completely locked off. I mean, it was phenomenal to me as a mid-career filmmaker who started off cutting, you know, film on a movieola to see how far VFX have come. I think you guys do your job so well that you see these articles like with the last Guardians of the Galaxy where the actors are like, or where Kurt Russell's like, oh yeah, it was all the hair and makeup on set that de-aged me. And it's like, dude, come on. The actors get fooled, I think, sometimes.
[Paul DeNigris]: 29:00
Yeah. That's again, that's part of that magician's trick, right? If you don't know, I was there. Um, yeah. And you did, you shot all of, all of those bald cap shots were handheld and Debra is emoting and yeah, she's in the, she's in the bathroom. She's nauseous from chemo and all that stuff. And she's, she's worked up and, uh, and so her head's moving and the camera's moving and yeah, it's,
[Tom Putnam]: 29:25
all over.
[Paul DeNigris]: 29:25
yeah, yeah. All over.
[Tom Putnam]: 29:25
Camera blur. Yeah. One of the things I think people forget about is when you think of VFX, you think of certain kinds of movies. But for me, the power of VFX really shines when you're doing something dramatic. So Debra comes from a very, she has a very deep background in terms of Broadway, she was in the original Angels in America. She’s a very highly trained actor. So one of the things I wanted to do was take my documentary background and shoot really long takes with her and David. And they learned really quickly, I will try to just do one take of things. And if there's like a major camera problem, I'll do a second take, but otherwise we'll move on and shoot coverage. And they loved that because they knew it was gonna feel real for them every time they did it. I shoot minimal coverage, didn't have time. And I also work as an editor, so I had a really good idea about how I wanted to cover things. But you do a five minute long take where it's, she's in the bathroom and she's going through chemo and she's throwing up and she's arguing with her husband. You can't, it's not right to do a lot of takes for that with the actor, but then, you know, I'm behind the camera and then you can see that the back of the bald cap is bunching up on the back of her neck. I mean strategically and creatively, the worst thing in the world you can do is be like, oh, you did amazing, you've totally brought your A game, but we're gonna do it again because of the bald cap. Like the actors will lose confidence in you, they'll start saving their performances, assuming there's gonna be a problem. So having you guys in my back pocket and knowing that you'd be able to clean that up was huge for me. And I think where the VFX came into play the most oddly is in all of those dramatic scenes. because it allowed me to still do one or two takes and know I could fix the technical stuff.
[Paul DeNigris]: 31:26
Tha’s what this show is all about. Right. It's the, that's why it's VFX for Indies because we're not creating digital creatures. But I'm, sometimes we do. We're not, we're not creating, you know, spaceships. Sometimes we do, but the most, the majority of the work that we do is this. It's, let's help a filmmaker. wring the most production value and the most out of every frame that they decided to use. And it's this performance is great. This performance is great in a different take. Let's combine them. This performance is great, but this technical thing failed. There's a cable in the shot. The boom pole came into shot. The makeup didn't work for that angle. Right. All of those sorts of things. And that's what I love. That's what I love about working with Indies, because it's like we're making a real difference in terms of your ability to tell your story without the we're kind of mitigating the limitations of, of indie filmmaking, right? The limitations of coverage, the limitations of how long you can shoot, how many retakes you can do, um, you know, on a, on a studio picture, something like that might've happened. And after your first cut, they might've gone, we need to reshoot these scenes. Right. And you do a reshoot. There's no reshoots in the indie film world.
[Tom Putnam]: 32:46
No, and when you have days where you have a 10 page day, I mean, you're sprinting to just get one take of everything and get just the most minimal coverage possible. Yeah, I think as indie filmmakers, a lot of times we look at those sorts of VFX shots as damage control, when in reality, having gone through like The Dark Divide. On the next one, I'm really excited because I now in my mind have a better sense of in the moment, oh, that's going to be fine because I have the confidence that we can fix certain things and fix them pretty inexpensively in post. I think that's the other thing that was a surprise to me is VFX right now is in a weird place where there's everyone from guys on Fiverr who claim that they can do it for $10 to like... the same shot, you can go to somebody doing a Marvel movie and they'll quote you with a thousand dollars. And it's, I think we pretty much exclusively worked with like shops the same size as yours because you guys were affordable and you did work that is on par with anything else I've seen. So it's, that's the thing I have to educate people about a lot in the producing side of things that I do which is that. There are shops out there that can give you what you want and do a great job. I think people have just seen so many bad VFX in this sort of like Sharknado aisle of the video store that they assume that when they notice a VFX, those are the only VFX. Like you're doing, we were talking about holiday movies earlier before the podcast. I mean, I see, I have friends that do those and like they shoot them in the summer. And then the VFX crews add all the snow and nobody notices and it's, that's the part to me that I think is so fun because that's kind of the movie magic part of all this, right?
[Paul DeNigris]: 34:53
Yeah, yeah, we do a lot of that, that sort of stuff. You know, the Canadian Christmas movies where they shoot, they shoot in the spring in Vancouver and we have to make it look like winter in Boston or something. And if we've done our jobs right, the audience doesn't know we were there, right? They totally buy it as winter in Boston and they go on that journey.
[Tom Putnam]: 35:16
Had I only known, because we drug David up into an actual snowstorm on Mount Hood above the treeline, it would have been so much easier to just have done it that way.
[Paul DeNigris]: 35:25
Yeah. You know, mountains, the, the view of the mountain was something we, we touched a couple of times too. There were, there were spots where we were, and I'm terrible with geography and knowing what mountains are called and all of that stuff. I just, you know, you just showed me a picture. It said, this is the mountain, stick it back there. So I can't even tell you what mountain it was or why we were putting it there. You want to talk about that a little bit?
[Tom Putnam]: 35:50
Sure. So he's hiking through an area called the Gifford Pinchot National Forest. And I mean, I watched a lot of like forest movies and I noticed they all just felt like this guy's just in trees again. So we established Mount Adams at the beginning and as he's hiking we're constantly seeing it grow larger. He goes over it and then it kind of recedes behind him, which was a way for us to get a visual sense of his progress. But we filmed all over the place because since 1995, a lot of things had changed. So, most shots where you're seeing Mount Adams, it's being added digitally. So, we would shoot the locations and then I went back with just a DSLR and like matched angles and like spent three days just driving around Mount Adams, shooting the plates for that. And that became a huge part of the movie where Once I realized how good you guys made it look, I started adding it all over the place, much to the other producer's dismay. So there's shots where, I mean, I've had calls from people that hike that area regularly, like, I don't know where that trail is, but it looks great. I'm like, oh, that trail's like 50 miles away, but they think it's right there because, you know, it wasn't just about adding the mountain, right? You guys would add some texture with clouds or mist or... All those other layers that I think gave the film that like yummy sort of depth that it had. And that's a shot, nobody's mentioned those shots. So until probably this podcast, now they'll all realize it. But yeah, that's a great example because with maybe two exceptions, every time we see see Mount Adams, it's been added digitally.
[Paul DeNigris]: 37:39
Yeah. And we added it to a number of different shots to a couple of drone shots, a bunch of handheld stuff. The one that kept me up at night was the there was like a like a 360 degree or like 270 degree pan from the mountain across the valley picking up David Cross in the trail behind the camera and pan and yeah, you and I went back and forth on that one a bunch of times because just trying to get it to blend right and then there was... you kept telling me I'm
[Tom Putnam]: 38:10
There's tree branches, pine trees, which are the worst, like in front of it.
[Paul DeNigris]: 38:13
Yep. And you kept telling me, I just watched it on the biggest screen possible. And it's, it's slipping over here. It's it's locked down here, but it's slipping over there. And so, you know, we, we had to like fight lens distortion, you know, the, without, without going super technical on this, but lenses distort the image at the edges of the frame, depending on, you know, the glass manufacturer, how wide the lens is, whether it's anamorphic or spherical, you know, all of that sort of stuff. And so as the camera pans, particularly on pans and tilts, the edges of the frame will get, will warp. And so something that's tracking perfectly dead center will start to spread apart. And you know, the, the added pixels will now not follow the distortion of the, and so you have to match all of that. And it's, um, uh, you know, it's the kind of thing that a VFX supervisor on set would say. Okay, I need to make a note of what that lens is. We need to shoot what's called lens grid later so we can extract the distortion and then put the distortion back on. Coming at it after the fact, that information is lost. We don't, you know, very often a filmmaker doesn't write down what lens they used. There's no time. There's nobody on set to take those notes. And so it's a lot of guesswork in post.
[Tom Putnam]: 39:29
And I am a terrible VFX supervisor. Yeah, I mean that was part of the, that was one of the challenges, right? Which was, because there were so many shots where I didn't even think we would do VFX. Yeah, I remember that one. That was definitely one of the tougher ones. And the great news is nobody notices, you know? They just wanna know where that trail is. Yeah, so I do a lot of documentaries, and normally in a documentary, what you get is what you get. I don't think I had done any VFX shots in a doc prior to Dark Divide. And after that, I really have started to leverage what I've learned in a way that allows me to... get the most out of those moments. Sometimes it's light stands and the boom pole and the classic stuff that you think of, but other times it's, I'll give you an example. I did a movie with Insane Clown Posse, and those guys, if you know the band, they're inseparable. So they're always interviewed at the same time, but, so we would have two shots, but sometimes one of them will like, get distracted or be drinking a Red Bull or something while the other guy's talking, you have this great moment and no other coverage. So we would just like do a matte down the middle and replace the side that wasn't important with him listening versus drinking a Red Bull, which I don't think compromises the integrity. That's not who we're listening to. Or for example, right now I'm doing this movie about paramedics around the country and HIPAA laws are everywhere and there's all sorts of things you can and can't film and you can't plan anything because you don't know what calls they're going to get. So I'll have moments now where rather than just blurring somebody's face, I'll place an object in the foreground so that we don't see their face or that, or use VFX to maybe build in some camera blur or something so it feels more organic rather than like watching an episode of cops. That’s been amazing for me and also just a lot of cleanup. It's amazing now the technology is at the point where the camera loses focus a little bit. There's a little bit too much jitter and Premiere Pro or Avid can't handle it. You can go to VFX and they can clean it up or even a shot we're doing right now on that film where we're delivering in 4K but I have to punch in like 400%. So using VFX, using a VFX person to go in and like... realistically up convert it and build in a camera move so that we can use that shot. That's been exciting and also in a way that VFX now can also sort of blur, you can blur the line between VFX and graphic design. So you can include graphic design elements, maybe on the side of the ambulance or something that, you know, you can have a graphic artist create the text and then work with a VFX person in order to like, put it into the image in a way that's just a little bit more fun.
[Paul DeNigris]: 42:38
Yeah, that's great. I love seeing that. I love hearing about how the experience on one film then informs the next, right? It is a process, right? We're always trying to get better. Every movie should teach us something. It’s one of the reasons that I do this show. This business is really about lifelong learning. You have to continuously get better. Even if technology wasn't advancing, which it is, at a breakneck speed. We're constantly being introduced to new technologies, new software, new techniques, new everything. Even if technology stood still from this point forward, we still have to learn every day because it's this iceberg. We know our little part of the tip of the iceberg and there's all this other stuff down below.
[Tom Putnam]: 43:29
Well, and I think doing a movie at the size I do them at, whether it's a documentary or a fiction film, a huge part of my job is, I mean, honestly damage control. You know, every day something huge happens. We were shooting Dark Divide. There was a day where Portland, Oregon got its first ever tornado. It touched down, went one block, and dropped a tree on one car. Only thing ever damaged in Portland from a tornado. That car was our production van. So it's like, and that was a day where that was only like the third worst thing that happened that day. So you just sort of every day is like, okay, how do I get what I need given all of these like unexpected things that are happening and the ability to use VFX all of a sudden gives you so many more options, right? Rather than just where to point the camera or just how to direct people. So. That's, I think, you're always, I'm always learning. Every movie I'm like, well there's 50 mistakes I won't make again.
[Paul DeNigris]: 44:34
So once you wrapped post on Dark Divide, what was the release trajectory? Did you guys play festivals? Did you go directly to distribution?
[Tom Putnam]: 44:43
Great question. We had all these festivals lined up and then COVID hit and the festivals all shut down. So we were faced with a situation where we didn't have the normal route that you would go through to release a film. and that, in some ways worked out to our advantage because I'm also with theatrical distributor. And one of the reasons we cast who we cast in the movie was I wanted the best actors I could get. And I feel like I got them. But a bonus was that They're both people that have strong followings. David's a standup comic. There's a number of other standup comics in the movie, like David Koechner and Cameron Esposito. Patterson Hood from Drive-By Truckers is in the movie. and then The Avett brothers and Chris Novselic from Nirvana did the music for it. So we had all these people with strong followings and that was intentional because I, just going through a traditional route, I felt like, well, if we don't get any offers on the film, we'll release it ourselves. By the time the movie was finished we brought in REI Co-op Studios as a brand partner. They put some money into the movie and then the National Wildlife Federation, which is America's largest environmental nonprofit, a portion of our proceeds went to them So when the pandemic hit, most other people I knew were like, well, I can't play film festivals. This is gonna like go in a drawer for what ended up being two years. Whereas because we had a marketing plan in place, we were able to go ahead and release the movie and do a really robust national campaign for it. The movie ended up playing over 100 theaters in the US. Almost every theater held it over from one week to between four and five weeks. And did it make a fortune? Well, no, nothing did, but it definitely did, I think better than any other film that wasn't released by like a major distributor. So we were really happy with it. And you think making the movie is the hard part and then people discover like they have to distribute it. I mean, even as hard as that was, we had booked all these theaters. We were gonna start it in Oregon and Washington. And about four days before that release was supposed to start, Oregon had its largest forest fires in history to displace something like a third of the population. All the movie theaters shut down. So we like... could not play movie theaters in our core district. So we like played everywhere else and sort of circled back as much as we could to do special events screenings. So it's just, it's a real like, I mean, as you guys know, making movies is a real grad graduate school PhD and just learning how to be flexible and coming up with creative solutions.
[Paul DeNigris]: 47:30
Yeah, for sure. It's all the hard part, right? It's
[Tom Putnam]: 47:33
Yeah.
[Paul DeNigris]: 47:34
the writing. It's the hard part. Casting. It's the hard part. Shooting. It's the hard part, right? It's it. It never gets easy.
[Tom Putnam]: 47:40
Yeah, but and so I got my MBA at the top of the pandemic and the thing I realized was like everything's hard. Starting a bakery is hard, you know. It's every, you're basically, every time you make a movie, you're starting a small business and most of the time you're making a product and you don't know who the buyers are. Nobody else does that. General Motors doesn't make a car without some idea that people, what kind of person's going to want it, you know, but we live in this weird space where we're making hope on the good days we're making art, but we're making it with a lot of somebody's money, even if you're making a movie that's, I mean, I've made features as low as five grand, but that's $5,000. That's a chunk of a car. And so it's such a weird sort of art form in business. And for somebody like me, who doesn't have a trust fund, I have to work to pay my bills every month. And it's... it's always a challenge to figure out like, how can I keep making movies? And so to keep making movies, they need to make money for people and you have to make them like fairly regularly and that's the hard part with documentaries are, like the last three movies I finished took 12 years, seven years and 10 years to get made and that's not a good business model. That's a long time between projects.
[Paul DeNigris]: 49:09
Yeah, sure is. So thinking back to the filmmaker you were before Dark Divide, what advice would you give that filmmaker, or if a filmmaker came to you today and said, I've got this movie and I think I'm going to need visual effects, how do I prepare for it? What's one piece of advice you would share with that filmmaker?
[Tom Putnam]: 49:29
Due diligence, talk to people, talk to real VFX people that are in your budget range. Have them look at the script, really go into it with an understanding, Maybe not necessarily even of your specific shots, but of what you can do and what you can't do. And have some sort of dollar sign associated with that. Because we had a couple of huge sequences we shot for the movie that we just ran out of money and they're not in the movie. So it's, and that's because I didn't do my due diligence. And I think something I wish I had been able to do more that I will definitely do the next time is like, not just for us to talk in advance, but to have an open dialogue when I'm in production to be able to say like, here's the challenge I have, here's how I'm gonna shoot it, does that. is that gonna work for you? Because really my job is to give you what you need to give me back what I need. So without having the you part of it, you're kind of flying blind. So I think as filmmakers, a lot of times we're afraid to say we don't know or afraid to ask for help or afraid to say, oh, I did that wrong, let's do it again. And I think turning off that part of your brain will really like open up a lot of opportunities.
[Paul DeNigris]: 50:50
Yeah, that's great. You know, a lot of times when I was directing movies, I always had that feeling of that onus of I'm the director. I have to know. I have to have the answers. And I realized as I did more of it that being a director is as much about having the answers as it is about asking the right questions of your team.
[Tom Putnam]: 51:10
Yeah, for me, because I'm such a people pleaser, it's like, I have to remind myself to not be afraid to ask for what I want, but also to not be afraid to say, I'm not sure how to get what I want. Because everybody's there to make you happy. I mean, you know, David Cross and Debra Messing, they're well-known actors, and I think I can remember the first day thinking like, oh my God, when I give them direction, are they going to yell at me? Or like, what are they going to, they know so much more than I do. And it's like, no, everybody's there to make. Everybody wants you to be happy. So that's like the part you have to constantly remind yourself about. But also at the same time, too. You know, on a low budget movie, people are like. What they're making a buck fifty a day or something, you know, they're just they're just they all have probably better options. And it's also about sort of being strategic about those asks, too, so you don't burn people out. I think we've all been on shoots where by day two. the directors have worn everybody out too. So yeah, it's like kind of like a fine line to ride.
[Paul DeNigris]: 52:13
Yeah, it happens in post too. It's, you know, yes. Okay. We agreed to do X number of VFX shots with X number of iterations within your budget and your timetable. And, uh, and then we have this thing called scope creep where it becomes, Hey, can we just do one more thing? Can we just do one more thing? How about one more thing? One more. And it's, and before, you know, at that shot that had one VFX ask is now this monstrous shot that has, has eaten up a ton of time. Uh, and it is, it's always a balance. It's always trying to figure out like, how can we best serve the director's vision, best serve the movie and not, not get burned out and also not focus all of our effort, all of our energy on that one hero shot that the director is in love with, and then all of the other shots in the movie suffer.
[Tom Putnam]: 53:02
I feel like that's the VFX equivalent of what we all do when we're doing our first couple of movies, which is you spend half the day on the master shot that you're going to see for three seconds and then you're running through all the coverage because you didn't budget your time and resources wisely.
[Paul DeNigris]: 53:16
Yeah, I have that conversation a lot of times with directors who are new to the VFX process where they want to keep noodling with a shot. And it's like, let's put a pin in this one because we have the 50 other shots for your movie that need to get addressed. Let's work through those and we'll come back around to this one. And I promise when you look at it with fresh eyes, and when I look at it with fresh eyes, we're going to see this a lot more clearly. And nine times out of 10, they're like, when they come back, they're like, yeah, okay, that shot's fine.
[Tom Putnam]: 53:46
It's something that I've, I, a piece of advice I got early on that seems obvious, but a lot of people don't do it is when you see the VFX shot, cut it into the scene and view it in context because when you just look at the shot, you're going to pick it apart. But in context you look at it a whole different way. I kind of look at it like you can go to Best Buy to buy a TV and you can fixate on how all the TVs look different. But then when you take your TV home and put it in your living room, it always looks great. And, um, It's so easy to noodle those things out of context. And that's something I try to always take the time to do now is not even comment on the VFX shot until I've downloaded it and put it in the cut, even if it's like a rough comp.
[Paul DeNigris]: 54:30
Yeah, that's great advice. And that's something I'm going to share with clients going forward.
[Tom Putnam]: 54:33
Yay.
[Paul DeNigris]: 54:37
Don't make the knee-jerk comment when you see the shot. Download the shot, drop it in your timeline, look at it a few times, forget about it for eight hours, come back to it, then tell me what you see.
[Tom Putnam]: 54:48
Yeah,
[Paul DeNigris]: 54:49
That's great advice
[Tom Putnam]: 54:49
because if you want to watch it in con- there's so many times, I think we dealt with this where I would be like, I don't know. And then you watch it in context to the film and the film, the movie's over and you're like, oh, that was great. It didn't, it didn't bump for me or anything.
[Paul DeNigris]: 55:01
Yeah, yeah. Solid advice. So you've talked a little bit about what's next for you as far as documentaries and stuff. If people wanted to follow you on social media or see other projects that you've worked on, what's the best way that they can find you?
[Tom Putnam]: 55:16
Go to my website, TomPutnam.net, and you can see clips from my past work and links to fun stuff and I'm on all the usual suspects for social media. Yeah, I love feedback. So, you know, if you see something, you like it or you hate it just let me know. I'm always curious.
[Paul DeNigris]: 55:41
Great. All right, well that wraps up this episode of the VFX for Indies podcast. I want to thank my guest, Tom Putnam, for sharing his wisdom, both on The Dark Divide and on other projects. And if you are watching this on YouTube and you liked what you saw, please like and comment and subscribe. Definitely please comment if there's stuff you wanna hear about, things you want me to cover in future episodes, or maybe you have a question for Tom. Please share it in the comments. If you're listening on iTunes or Spotify or one of the multitude of podcast aggregators out there, a follow, a star rating, and a review goes a long way towards helping us reach new audience members. And for the independent filmmaker in your life who needs to hear this, please share this episode with them before they go shoot their film. They don't have to talk to me, but it's great if they talk to a VFX professional before they film. For the VFX for Indies show and for everyone at Foxtrot X-Ray. I'm Paul DeNigris. Thanks so much for watching.
