Images from "The Betty"

Images from "The Betty"

I've been meaning to post frame grabs of pictures from "The Betty" for a while now. Well, shooting more of the opening scenes the other day got me playing around editing a rough cut, which of course led me to experimenting with the overall look of the film.

These grabs are just ones that caught my eye as visually nice, or, in some cases, challenging in a way that made me want to test the look and color correction on. Looking at these images, I'm really happy with the way this film is turning out. These aren't final by any stretch - just me playing with settings in After Effects trying to develop a style.

I hope you like what you see.

Greg Mansur as The Caesar

Eric Rhoades as Oatmeal - playing it tough

Qelsi Qualls as Thumper & Greg Mansur

Yours Truly as Archie, with Eric in the background

The Caesar's evil eye

Eric is the most facially expressive actor I know.

This isn't part of the scene; This is Qelsi holding a casual conversation with Marty Ezelle - a good friend and member of the crew.

Thumper and the Caesar

Me again. A fun trick for me in acting - and as the director I have this latitude - is to throw something out there in the first take that wasn't in rehearsals or wasn't expected by the other actors. Just kicking my legs up on the desk in the middle of the scene got reactions from all the others - two of which I now don't think the scene could do without.

A little money.

Oatmeal and Archie at Reno's Chop Shop in Deep Ellum. This is one of those scenes that, because of the lighting and the speed with which we had to get our shots, is going to be challenging to get right; but at least this test shows I can get a serviceable image out of it.

Rene Garcia as Hector the Bookie

There will be more of these soon. I'm having fun with them. Postproduction is one of my favorite things in filmmaking. I may be getting a bit ahead of myself with this work since the movies only about half shot, but seeing these images is fueling my drive to get this thing in the can.