This week has been busy…and rough. On Sunday my composer that I’ve worked with on a few other projects resigned from the position. His schedule is just too crazy. It’s partly my fault for not keeping up with him on where we were with the movie, and also just unfortunate timing. He’s not only trying to finish school but also he’s working on planning his wedding which is in two months. So I’ve got to find a new composer to have the movie done by the time I’m done with school. Tom is going to help me find a new one cause he works with music student orgs and such. It’s on my list of things to do this week. Tom said that he thinks the movie would benefit from copywritten music like blink 183 or SR-71 so I’ll look into that avenue as well. The idea of copywritten material scares me because I have no money to pay for rights.
Grady and I did some testing last week in the ADR booths. There are two at the facility and we wanted to see which one was the best so we can schedule the right one. We had some technical difficulties but we figured out which one we’ll use. Now, tomorrow I have to go and book the space. I thought that we could only use it between 8-5 but I guess that’s changed to between 8-6 which is for the best anyway. It just frustrates me that I didn’t know that before I emailed my actors about scheduling. I got a hold of just about everybody so I’ll be locking everything in tomorrow and making lots of phone calls.
Me and Grady have still yet to finish our note taking on the movie. We’re about 26 minutes into the 85. We just couldn’t find the time to sit down for a substantial amount of time. And when I say substantial, I mean like 8 hours. We pretty much have to have it done by the beginning of this week so I can get all the lines in order for the actors. Also, we can’t do any sound effect and room tone gathering until we know exactly what we need.
Seeing as we’re not ready to do recording, and I had thought we were going to be by tomorrow, we’re still going to take the equipment I have reserved and do some tests tomorrow or Tuesday. I’ll re check out the equipment when we are ready.
I met with Johnny, my cartoonist, and he’s really excited, which makes me feel great. We had a little trouble with transferring some reference pictures from me to him but hopefully I resolved that today. We should have a poster by the end of two weeks.
I’m still working on the news sequence. We’re shooting Kate’s scene this Thursday and I get the equipment on Thursday and return it Friday. It took me longer than I thought to do this news sequence but so far I think it looks awesome. I tested what I’ve done so far with my HD TV at home and it looks great. I think I’ve got another 3 or 4 hours left of work to do on it. Tuesday I’m going to be prepping for the shoot, buying everything I need, like the posters, markers, and stuff.
2/17/08
2/10/08
Steady but Slower than I Wanted.
Things seem to be moving along nicely, but at a slower pace than I wanted.
Dan is in Korea for some Friend’s wedding so nothing is being done on the color correcting side of things.
I emailed the cast about specific dates for ADR and over half emailed me back. There are still a few I haven’t’ hear from and that makes me nervous. I’ll be making phone calls this afternoon to try and get a hold of those people. The cast that I did hear from seems enthusiastic to finish the project, which is great. I have a lot of control over the scheduling and can pretty much do the ADR anytime I want over the next few weeks but I gave the cast specific dates and times to choose from just so things can be more streamlined and strait forward. It would be a scheduling night mare to approach each individual member of the cast with “so when’s good for you?”.
Tom canceled on my twice this week for the spotting session. We’ve scheduled to do it today at 8pm cause our schedules don’t match up at all next week.
I met with the editor of the trailer and we went over the file I created for him. We also set goals for the next four weeks in terms of when we want to have a rough cut, fine cut, picture lock, etc. According to our timeline we should have a trailer by the end of spring break (mid march).
I can’t start work on the website till I have the poster.
I made a flyer for a Cartoonist Needed add and put it up in the art building on every bulletin board I could find. I also posted an add on Craig’s List and Facebook. I got almost 20 responses. So now I have a cartoonist. He’s a kid that I’ve worked with before but on Disks, and he was an actor. But in the last three years he’s been studying graphic design and he sent me some of his portfolio stuff. I’m excited to see some drafts. I’m in the process of setting up a meeting with him this week to show him what I have in mind and give him some reference files.
I scheduled the shooting date for the opening credits scene with Kate for the 21st of February. I’m excited to get this in the can as it’s been a long time coming. I’m going to try and finish the new sequence today so that I wont have to worry about it next week.
I scheduled some recording equipment with the school of the 18th and 19th and plan to do room tone and Sound Effects gathering with Grady. Should be fun.
I spent a good few hours creating the project files in soundtrack pro. One for each chapter. We have the tracks broken down into In Camera, ADR, Effects, Music, and Room Tones. Each section has a few tracks as well, for example there are 2 effects tracts and 4 ADR tracks. We’re using this setup as just a base. If we need to add more tracks we will. Once I had the project files all set up, Grady (my sound designer/technician/artist/whatever) and I had a hard time figuring out just where to start working on this project. He started to go through the chapters, just playing with different files and settings, trying to learn the program. A few months ago, sometime before Christmas, we sat down and watched what we thought was a close picture lock and wrote down all the sound that needed to be replaced, and what sound was good enough to keep. Well Grady was playing around with some of the files that we know we want to replace and he made it sound beautiful! So that threw a wrench in our approach. Where do we start? We don’t want to waste time recording things that we’re not going to need, and we don’t’ want to waste time fixing or trying to fix something that we’re just going to rerecord. So we decided to do a more thorough walk through if you will of the entire film. A sort of stop and play session of what’s good, what’s, not, what’s saveable, what’s not, what needs to be rerecorded, etc. sort of the same thing we did before xmas but much more involved. We started last Thursday and did it for an hour and only got 6 minutes into the movie. We’ll see how it goes. I emailed him today to try and lock down a specific schedule through out the week of when we work on the movie to make things more efficient.
So as you can see, moving along, just a little slower than I wanted.
Dan is in Korea for some Friend’s wedding so nothing is being done on the color correcting side of things.
I emailed the cast about specific dates for ADR and over half emailed me back. There are still a few I haven’t’ hear from and that makes me nervous. I’ll be making phone calls this afternoon to try and get a hold of those people. The cast that I did hear from seems enthusiastic to finish the project, which is great. I have a lot of control over the scheduling and can pretty much do the ADR anytime I want over the next few weeks but I gave the cast specific dates and times to choose from just so things can be more streamlined and strait forward. It would be a scheduling night mare to approach each individual member of the cast with “so when’s good for you?”.
Tom canceled on my twice this week for the spotting session. We’ve scheduled to do it today at 8pm cause our schedules don’t match up at all next week.
I met with the editor of the trailer and we went over the file I created for him. We also set goals for the next four weeks in terms of when we want to have a rough cut, fine cut, picture lock, etc. According to our timeline we should have a trailer by the end of spring break (mid march).
I can’t start work on the website till I have the poster.
I made a flyer for a Cartoonist Needed add and put it up in the art building on every bulletin board I could find. I also posted an add on Craig’s List and Facebook. I got almost 20 responses. So now I have a cartoonist. He’s a kid that I’ve worked with before but on Disks, and he was an actor. But in the last three years he’s been studying graphic design and he sent me some of his portfolio stuff. I’m excited to see some drafts. I’m in the process of setting up a meeting with him this week to show him what I have in mind and give him some reference files.
I scheduled the shooting date for the opening credits scene with Kate for the 21st of February. I’m excited to get this in the can as it’s been a long time coming. I’m going to try and finish the new sequence today so that I wont have to worry about it next week.
I scheduled some recording equipment with the school of the 18th and 19th and plan to do room tone and Sound Effects gathering with Grady. Should be fun.
I spent a good few hours creating the project files in soundtrack pro. One for each chapter. We have the tracks broken down into In Camera, ADR, Effects, Music, and Room Tones. Each section has a few tracks as well, for example there are 2 effects tracts and 4 ADR tracks. We’re using this setup as just a base. If we need to add more tracks we will. Once I had the project files all set up, Grady (my sound designer/technician/artist/whatever) and I had a hard time figuring out just where to start working on this project. He started to go through the chapters, just playing with different files and settings, trying to learn the program. A few months ago, sometime before Christmas, we sat down and watched what we thought was a close picture lock and wrote down all the sound that needed to be replaced, and what sound was good enough to keep. Well Grady was playing around with some of the files that we know we want to replace and he made it sound beautiful! So that threw a wrench in our approach. Where do we start? We don’t want to waste time recording things that we’re not going to need, and we don’t’ want to waste time fixing or trying to fix something that we’re just going to rerecord. So we decided to do a more thorough walk through if you will of the entire film. A sort of stop and play session of what’s good, what’s, not, what’s saveable, what’s not, what needs to be rerecorded, etc. sort of the same thing we did before xmas but much more involved. We started last Thursday and did it for an hour and only got 6 minutes into the movie. We’ll see how it goes. I emailed him today to try and lock down a specific schedule through out the week of when we work on the movie to make things more efficient.
So as you can see, moving along, just a little slower than I wanted.
2/4/08
A Week of Scheduling to Come
I watched our picture lock with the professor that has been overseeing the production, Switzer. Miguel has sort of stepped down on the project for a few reasons but mainly now I report to someone else. Miguel will help still if I ask something specific of him but I no longer report to him directly. Anyway, we watched the picture and he had a lot of praise for me and the other people involved in the project. We’ve got a good little movie here and I’m getting more and more anxious to finish it up. We actually made a few changes to the movie because we hadn’t specifically started working on sound. So now we really have a picture lock. 85 minutes, 2 seconds, and 17 frames , :) (with out the credits of course.)
Dan, the movie’s cinematographer, is going to be doing all the color correction as well as adjusting the framing. We shot in 3x4 and are putting 16x9 mattes on it so that we had the option of adjusting the framing. Dan’s going through the tutorial right now for color correction.
We met with the guy that’s in charge of the ADR facilities. This is going to work out beautifully. I’m a little concerned because I have to schedule all my ADR between 8-5 Monday through Friday. Like I said, I’m only a little concerned. I’m spending this week picking dates and emailing and calling cast members to start setting things up. One thing I also have to do for ADR is write some new dialog for some scenes that needed to change a bit. I’ll do that this week sometime.
I met with Tom, my composer on Friday. He’s a little concerned about getting things done in time in relation to what kind of music we use. He had talked about how if I want Anything of Orchestral genre it would take longer than the semester to write and record and mix. So we’re going to try to get the best out of the time and money that we have. One area we talked about was the Halloween mask scenes and he knew exactly what I was looking for. In short we both excited to get started. He’s got a copy of the picture lock and is watching it and we’re meeting Wednesday to start a full out spotting session (establishing and identifying musical ques.). We think it will take about three and a half hours so we’re going to try to do it all Wednesday but we might need to break it up into another session.
As for my afore mentioned marketing blitz in the previous post, I met with a web designer and the editor of the new trailer. Right now I’m setting up a project file for the editor and getting everything organized so that he can work efficiently with the 450 gigs of files that are associated with the movie. We’re meeting Tuesday night to go over the project file and also to establish dates for goals. The web designer and I went over a few options for the website. She’s not designing but more as acting for an adviser to me. We decided on a simple sleek design but I can’t move forward on it till I get the new one sheet for the movie. In that area I’m having a lot of trouble. I can’t seem to get a hold of a cartoonist to do the project for me. The school of art was very unhelpful. I had talked to a few people about it that were interested but they decided they didn’t have enough time to do a good job. Better in the long run I guess. So this week I’m also trying to figure out how to reach the art students better.
This week I’m also working on scheduling the last shooting we need to do with Kate with the news stuff in the background. I gave up on finding a graphic designer to help me with the news graphics so I’m doing it myself. I went to the journalism school to see if I could get some help but they said just to find an artist to do it. So I guess I’m doing it myself. So far it’s working pretty good and I’m pleased. Besides it supposed to be news produced by students and since I don’t know what I’m doing I figure I’ll get the look I’m going for right? :)
I also need to schedule times to go out and record room tones and some sound effects. I’ll do that this week.
Dan, the movie’s cinematographer, is going to be doing all the color correction as well as adjusting the framing. We shot in 3x4 and are putting 16x9 mattes on it so that we had the option of adjusting the framing. Dan’s going through the tutorial right now for color correction.
We met with the guy that’s in charge of the ADR facilities. This is going to work out beautifully. I’m a little concerned because I have to schedule all my ADR between 8-5 Monday through Friday. Like I said, I’m only a little concerned. I’m spending this week picking dates and emailing and calling cast members to start setting things up. One thing I also have to do for ADR is write some new dialog for some scenes that needed to change a bit. I’ll do that this week sometime.
I met with Tom, my composer on Friday. He’s a little concerned about getting things done in time in relation to what kind of music we use. He had talked about how if I want Anything of Orchestral genre it would take longer than the semester to write and record and mix. So we’re going to try to get the best out of the time and money that we have. One area we talked about was the Halloween mask scenes and he knew exactly what I was looking for. In short we both excited to get started. He’s got a copy of the picture lock and is watching it and we’re meeting Wednesday to start a full out spotting session (establishing and identifying musical ques.). We think it will take about three and a half hours so we’re going to try to do it all Wednesday but we might need to break it up into another session.
As for my afore mentioned marketing blitz in the previous post, I met with a web designer and the editor of the new trailer. Right now I’m setting up a project file for the editor and getting everything organized so that he can work efficiently with the 450 gigs of files that are associated with the movie. We’re meeting Tuesday night to go over the project file and also to establish dates for goals. The web designer and I went over a few options for the website. She’s not designing but more as acting for an adviser to me. We decided on a simple sleek design but I can’t move forward on it till I get the new one sheet for the movie. In that area I’m having a lot of trouble. I can’t seem to get a hold of a cartoonist to do the project for me. The school of art was very unhelpful. I had talked to a few people about it that were interested but they decided they didn’t have enough time to do a good job. Better in the long run I guess. So this week I’m also trying to figure out how to reach the art students better.
This week I’m also working on scheduling the last shooting we need to do with Kate with the news stuff in the background. I gave up on finding a graphic designer to help me with the news graphics so I’m doing it myself. I went to the journalism school to see if I could get some help but they said just to find an artist to do it. So I guess I’m doing it myself. So far it’s working pretty good and I’m pleased. Besides it supposed to be news produced by students and since I don’t know what I’m doing I figure I’ll get the look I’m going for right? :)
I also need to schedule times to go out and record room tones and some sound effects. I’ll do that this week.
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