A heated argument... a hasty decision... a barren landscape.

Now all Val wants is to get home.

But she’s in for more than she bargained for.

Dark Highways

A motion picture by Christopher P. Jacobs

PRODUCTION BACKGROUND:

Dark Highways is a feature-length digital movie made entirely in North Dakota with local talent.

Dark Highways was written in the spring of 2003. Casting auditions and screen tests were held in June at the Empire Arts Center in Grand Forks. Three or four hours of auditions were taped, before about 23 hours of footage was shot for the 98-minute feature, plus an additional three or four hours for the 5½ -minute music video. Principal photography began the night of June 29^th with scenes 15 and 16. As with many productions, unexpected circumstances required a few sudden casting changes and scheduling readjustments. The final schedule ultimately stretched the 21 actual days of shooting over an eight-week period. Completion of scenes 7, 3, and 8 wrapped up principal photography the night of August 21^st.

Then additional scenes were shot Sunday, August 24^th, and Sunday, September 7^th, for a music video with “Sons of Poseidon,” the Fargo heavy-metal band whose music is featured prominently on the soundtrack. A minute-and-a-half excerpt from an early cut is available in low-resolution RealPlayer format here (554 Kb). Editing of about four and a half hours of footage down to the five and a half-minute video was completed September 13^th, and an abridged version of this cut appears under the closing credits of the feature. A revised “director’s cut” of the music video was prepared October 10^th. Then band members supervised editing of a separate “band’s cut” version of the video on October 13^th. Additional original music on the feature’s soundtrack is by Grand Forks rock band “Whisky Sam.”

The movie was shot with Sony digital 8 video cameras, a TRV-120 and a TRV-140, with all location sound recorded using the built-in camera microphones. The lighting design used a great deal of natural available light, augmented in many interior scenes with a Lowel location lighting kit of five lights. Some of the remote night scenes were lit by one to three lantern-style halogen flashlights with adjustable beams.

Except for the original songs, music was scored using Sonic Desktop Smartsound software and music library. Titles were created using Inscriber Title Express, which like Smartsound, is a plug-in for Adobe Premiere. Editing of both picture and sound was accomplished with Adobe Premiere 6.0 under the Windows 2000 Pro operating system, using a dual-processor 1.7 GHz Xeon Pentium 4 computer with a Matrox 2500 video card, one gigabyte of RAM, a 300-GB audio/video hard drive array, plus a Maxtor 250 GB external firewire drive for file backups. One of the IBM Deskstar hard disks in the four-drive RAID went bad and had to be replaced during editing, but the backups permitted editing to continue after a minor delay. Most of the editing was done on weekends from mid-September through early October, with the first roughcut completed October 6^th and a revised fourth cut by October 27^th.

The movie was shot up and down the Red River valley, from Fargo to Cavalier, but mainly in and around Grand Forks. Major locations included the Empire Arts Center office, Bonzer’s Sandwich Pub, the McKenzie farm, and the homes of several cast members doubling as their characters’ homes.

Most of the feature was edited during the last half of September and the first weekend of October. Editing of the first roughcut was completed Monday, October 6^th, the second Saturday, October 18^th. The running times are 101 minutes and 99 minutes, respectively, including the closing credits. Besides adding background music to many of the scenes and remixing the dialogue volume levels, the second cut shortened three scenes by about 30-40 seconds each, and eliminated the last one to three seconds of several other scenes to tighten the transitions to the following scenes. A few portions also underwent some minor re-editing using alternate takes.

The finished length is about ten to twelve minutes shorter than the 110 pages of the screenplay predicted. The fine-cutting process deleted brief sections in several scenes, shortened cues between lines in other scenes, used a few alternate takes (either audio, video, or both), remixed much of the audio, and made greater use of background mood-music.

Initial editing was sometimes sporadic due to frequent computer crashes. A defective hard drive in the Raid finally had to be replaced on Sept. 26^th for editing to continue (losing a good day of editing in order to reconfigure the Raid, reformat the drive, and copy the backed-up files back onto it). However, Adobe Premiere 6.0 still likes to freeze up (usually but not always during intensive work on individual parts of scenes) and Windows 2000 Pro still likes to interrupt everything for occasional bulk memory dumps and reboots (especially while timeline renders or video captures are in progress).

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