Major Update

Ok, so I feel bad. I know that I said I would start posting on this blog on a regular basis and I want to. I really do. And I did…well, for a few weeks anyway. I talked to my brother in law who lives in texas at one point and we talked about it. He said something that kind of made me feel better about not posting very often. He said my blog reads like someone who's to busy to post on their blog. Well, that's how I feel. But, I think it's important for myself and for the people involved that I do make time and do keep up with it so I think I've come up with a plan. From now on I will try and post every other day. What I think is happening is that I'm doing so much through out the week that at the end of the week it seems like a daunting task to sit down for 20-40 minutes and type out all that's happened. Maybe if I post every other day they will be smaller posts and there for less daunting.

As you can see, I've also decided to create separate sections (which I was doing informally most of the time anyway) to help organize my blog better.

So let's go ahead and start shall we?

Picture:
Effects
I still have some Visual effects that i need to get done. I'm probably not sure when i'm going to do them but just so you know what they are here's a bit of a break down.

1. I need to create a camera interface for the shots that are the POV of Jeremy's camera. Like time code and cross hairs and the little recording led etc.
2. I need to zoom in 10%-20% in on the image to get a closer shot that i didn't get on set. So essentially i need to take a medium shot and make it a close up. this gets tricky because i have to find the right balance where i don't loose noticeable picture quality when i zoom in.
3. We need to add realistic gun muzzle flashes to the scene where Jason fires a gun. Not sure how I'm going to do that yet. I only need one or two so hopefully we can sell it well. Maybe i'll put a post on craigs list or something for someone familiar with After Effects.

I believe that is all the effects that i need to do for this movie.

Color
Dan and I have yet to go over the picture. We need to sit down and watch the entire movie and go over frame adjustments and color pallets and then start color correcting. I'll probably start to worry about this in 2 or so weeks when i've got the majority of my sound recording done and am working only on mixing.

Credits
Occasionally this goes through my mind but i quickly dismiss it as one of the last steps i'll do. I just don't have time right now.

As for the opening credits, I have to finish editing the opening scene before i can even think about how, what, who, etc.

Picture Misc
The only thing that falls under this category in terms of picture is the last scene i have to edit. It's actually the first. I've put together a rough cut of the scene. I'll talk about it more in the Misc in General Section further down.

Sound
Effects
I have taken the master list of ADR/RoomTones/Effects that Grady and I did and have put them into separate files. Yesterday when I went out to do Room Tone recording I brought the list with me to see if I could get any of those effect via Foley work while i'm out with Grady and the recording equipment. I got a few sound effects that i needed, like when i was doing room tone during the Jeremy arrest scene i was able to record the sounds of the elevator that Tyler was hiding in. the dings, and button mashing, etc. There are 4 pages, single spaced, of sound effects we need to find and or create so this will take a few days to compile.

Room Tones
As i stated above, last night, Grady and I went out on the town getting room tones. I was supper late in the lab creating an ADR DVD and didn't get out of there till about 10. We had planned on starting at more like 6pm and going to every location that we shot the movie at through out the valley with our sound equipment and just sit and shut up. we need to record about 1 minute of audio from each location. Well, since I got out of the lab so late we ended up just walking all over campus getting various outside campus room tones (as a lot of the movie takes place out side on campus) and various sound effects too. once we have all the room tones done we'll then take that minute at each location and lay it down over the scene that takes place at that location. if the scene is longer than a minute than we just loop it. This is done to create a consistent background/ambient noise for the location that the scene is taking place in. Normally (and ideally) this is done on set by the sound crew when the scene is being shot but we just didn't have time and frankly, i just didn't want to. When you're on set it's always easy to say, "eh, we'll just fix it in post" but then you've created an entire day's work for yourself. reap what you sew i guess.

ADR
I almost don't want to write about this section. Not that it's been going bad or anything, just more that so much has happened in the past month that it seems daunting to sit and write about it. Anyway, I had stated in the previous post that i found out the ADR facility was open not from 8-5 but 8-6 and then proceeded to rant about how i wish i knew that before. That doesn't make much sense that an hour would be so significant. It actually is not supposed too. It's a typo, the ADR facility is actually open from 8am-9pm, so actually that's 4 hours outside of business hours. Needless to say we took advantage of it today. as of right now we have 13 of our 25 actors done. So far the sound quality seems to be just fine. One of my initial concerns was that the movie is rated R and i didn't want to offend anyone with the actors yelling obscenities all the time at the facility. we only had one incident with Alicia. It was the scene where Alaska wont let Jason into her room. She's yelling at him through a door and while we were doing a take someone knocked on the door and asked if everyone was OK. Apparently there was a line of people outside the booth all concerned that something was going down inside. no harm no fowl. A nice little chuckle it gave us. oh well. I made a large mistake in terms of ADR scheduling though. For the first few days i didn't give enough time at all for the process. I figured we would have about 8 hours of audio when all was said and done of ADR takes for the movie. I seem to be about right as we have about 4 hours of audio right now and half the actors done. The mistake i made was telling the facility that we had about 8 hours of work. It has worked out to where we need about an hour to get fifteen minutes of audio recorded. So we spend about 16 hours in the facility, 8 of which on one day, getting ADR so far. Well, the facility closed for a week during spring break, (which was about a week ago) and i had sent a few emails requesting time to do ADR for actors that were coming in for the Easter weekend and such. Well, i didn't get a response for a few days until finally, my contact emailed me and said that he was sorry but that the management had decided that "The only firm option I can give you at this point is possibly some Saturday time, the lab is open from 10am-4pm". I was a little stressed by this. Actually, that was a horrible day when i got that email, a whole bunch of other stuff went wrong and i had to scramble and send emails like crazy to all the cast to see if they could change to Saturdays. I sent my contact an email with 2 major concerns. However i started the email on a positive note, letting him know that i was fine with this and that we film students call this "the cost of free" (which is true, if they're giving it to me for free i have no leverage but to grovel). My concerns were this: 1 being that I still have 16 hours of time i need in the facility for the other 12 actors and that takes up almost 3 of the 6 Saturdays left in the semester and other students need to use the facilities, other student that have more precedence then me because it's not my department. I also was concerned because he gave me a Firm option to Possibly work on Saturdays. How is that firm? so i asked for complete confirmation on that so that if it's loose, i can find alternatives. I also started looking for alternatives either way. I had heard a rumor that the film school bought (or made) a portable ADR booth so i went to the studio to check it out. It seems they made it cause it was a joke. and if they did buy it, man what a waste of money. Grady and I checked it out and basically it's some PVC pipe glued together in a rectangular form with bed lining egg crates glued in between the pipes. It was a sorry sight. well, i heard back from my contact at the facility we had been using and he gave me a concrete confirmation on using Saturdays and also laid to rest all of my concerns. so that's what we're doing. I have 6 actors today and we're filling up the entire 10-4 time slot in the booth we've been using. so that's where we are so far. now, here's a bit on the process.

Basically what I did was take the ADR break down sheet that i got from the original sound break down sheet and created an excel file. Then I separated all the actors dialogue ques in sequential order. Basically recording according to actor, then time code. Then Grady and I entered each time code into the timeline of the picture lock and manually typed out the line(s) that needed recording. so from there i also copied a portion of the scene with the line(s) it and significant head room and tail room and opened a new timeline and created a loop. Then i exported the loop as a separate movie file and then have been organizing and authoring ADR DVD's by date and actor. So for today I made a DVD yesterday with a main menu and links to 6 other menus for the 6 actors we have. In each menu are links to each Que loop that the actor needs to replace the dialog. as of right now i have about 6 ADR DVD's today's being one of the biggest. I try to recycle my loops as it takes a long time to create them. what i mean by recycle is if say Kent has a shot where he's in the background with Josh and we just need them mumbling, i'll use Kent's loop on Josh's DVD instead of creating the same loop again for josh. I think it saves time but who knows. So when the actors come in i set up my lap top and put the DVD in. Grady starts the equipment and I start the DVD and they just try to recreate the que while watching the loop and trying to match their performance and sync to the picture. The facility is small but it's free. Grady, me, and the actor are all in the same booth but that doesn't seem to affect sound quality. Grady listens to the soudn't being recorded and I have a head phone splitter on my laptop that i split the sound with so that the actor can listen to the original audio and i listen tot the original audio as well but keep one ear out of the headphones to listen to the new audio the actor is creating. It's always awkward at first but then the actors get used to it and move along smoothly. Thus far we have done the following

Steve Murphy
Amanda Melby
Kate Haas
Kent Walter
Alicia De La Vega
Kasim Aslam
Nate Klaer
Ryan Murphy
Brad Golden
Jen Ball
*Colin Redemer
Danial Kunz
Jon Baranick

Still Left:

Vic Martinez (Today)
*Josh McDermitt (Today)
*Lauren Monroe (Today)
Ben Folsom (Today)
Kristin Kelley (Today)
Mike Zduniak (Today)
*Ali Stelzer
*Jamie Isreal
Jamie McKeel
Jacob Detharidge
*Adam Roa
Jared Mercier (don't laugh)

6 of our 25 actors that need to do ADR don't live in AZ anymore so they're coming form out of town. I *'d them above so you can see who. Colin already came out and i was nervous about his ADR because i had scheduled only 2 hours before i had realized how long it was actually taking us. But it worked out and we breezed through it. Colin saw the movie as it is now while he was here and said he was impressed and that he can see it will be better than he thought it would be. that was motivating. :)

See i told you there was a lot in regards to ADR. Sheesh.

Mixing
Haven't really started this at all. We plan to start syncing the ADR we already have sometime this week.

Music
Tom is back on board. When Tom and I met last and he said he probably wasn't going to be able to do it (before he sent the email saying he wasn't) he asked what i would do if he couldn't. I told him 2 things. Send out emails and craigs list posts etc looking for a composer and also plead with administration to use the editing lab over summer to finish up the mixing of the project. Turns out that i'm considered a student by the university until the start of the Fall semester of 2008 even though i graduate in may. So i'm going to try as hard as i can to finish the mixing before the semester is over (depends on if tom can get it done in time) but if he can't it's fine. So that's why he's back on board. plus, like i told him, i couldn't imagine anyone else doing my first feature. Tom's music saved and/or tripled the effectiveness of the other 3 films that i did with him. I did send out emails and stuff looking for other composers, but everyone that emailed me was very very flaky and/or didn't know what they were doing. It was stressful until i found out about the student status thing.

There will be a campus screening of the movie on April 20th for a capstone presentation, not a premiere or anything, but the school is requesting that I show the film. Actually, i had approached them about it back when i thought it would be done in time, but now i know it wont and they still want to screen it, just with temp music. So i'm looking for temp music and i'll have to start mixing that soon if tom doesnt' have stuff by a week or so before the 20th. Also, Danielle is looking into copyrighted music that we need for the movie. Nothing on that yet.

Misc Sound
I think i've covered everything in terms of sound.

Marketing
Website
The website is moving along fine. I wanted to have my "marketing blitz" out by now, but that just wasn't realistic. I should have, depending on the art work, the new website launched by next sunday. it looks good so far. I'm toying with launching different parts of the website one day at a time to try and raise hits and get people excited about the site and the movie.

Trailer
From what i understand via emails and meetings in passing with the editor, the trailer is in a fine cut stage. I emailed him at the beginning of the week to see where it is but have yet to hear back from. I'll email him today about it. the new trailer wont be out by the time the website launches but that's ok if i do like i said in not launching the entire site at once.

Posters
My poster guy is AWESOME. He did a few drafts so far and they look great. I'm going to try to meet up with him sometime today to go over everything. The posters are going to be the main art for the site so I want to make sure they are done in time. he says it shouldn't be a problem. he's also doing 5 character portraits. I can't wait to get them out.

Misc Marketing
There's a girl i sit next to in one of my classes that is a writer for the state press magazine. I feel temped every tiem i have that class to be like, "hey, i got a story for you" and pitch my movie. I was in the state press once before for LOTD and it was great. I'm going to approach her at some point, but i think i'll wait till the website is up. (i know it's dick but it's an opportunity i don't think i can waste)

Misc in General
Ok, so, as of 3 weeks ago we finally had on official PICTURE WRAP on Madison Hall! YAY! we shot the last scene with the RA making posters with the news on the TV in the background. It took me a long time to get the news graphics set up but i think they look great. So I shot it all by myself, well, my wife Molly helped :) and the actor too. ok ok. Anyway, the way it will work is the scene sets up the idea of the college environment with the school news on in the background and the quiet hours posters being made. the opening credits will go over the quiet hours posters. i still have yet to finish fine editing the scene because i've been so busy with other stuff but i'll get to it.

Over spring break i did nothing. Well, nothing on the movie. I figure it's my last spring break of my college career. Super smash bros Brawl came out and i and some friends played it for 4.5 days strait. i lost 4 pounds cause i barely ate. it was awesome. incredibly awesome.

I'm buying a new hard drive today because I've completely run out of space on my laptop, 500gig hard drive, and 4 gig jump drive. WD Terabyte at costco for $250. can't beat it.