The long road of post production

Oi veh.

I went over to my editor's house this afternoon at 2pm for what we thought would be a simple looping session with our lead actor. For those of you trying to figure out what I'm talking about, a looping session is basically when you have sucky audio from your shoot (shoot being the production of the short film that I went through in early January) and you have to go back and loop the video clip and have the actor try to re-sync their dialogue w/their lips. It's a tremendous pain in the tookus. So what we thought would be a short 4 hour session turned into a full 10 hours. It's so painstakingly tedious and very difficult. The scary thing is how many movies actually use looping for their audio. It's also called ADR, which stands for automatic dialogue replacement, but there really is nothing automatic. It's just taxing.

It was a funny session, despite the frustrations. The funniest moment, which had us laughing for at least 15 minutes (yes, we were at that point when the giggles were kicking in hardcore) was when I commented on the following line to the actor, Dale. "Come morning, we'll get back in that car and we won't stop until we hit the ocean." I said, "No, you're hitting the 'come' too hard." That sent Dale, in his Beavis mindset, to a very scary place where he was picturing lines of shot glasses... need I say more. So after laughing hard about that for the first half of the 15 minutes, I managed to calm everyone down and said, "You know what I mean -- you're hitting the opening too hard." Which was the wrong thing to say to Dale at that point, and we laughed for the rest of that 15 minutes.

With all of that said, I will say that if you are going to make a short film, FIND A GOOD AUDIO PERSON -- SOMEONE WHO REALLY KNOWS HOW TO GET CLEAN AUDIO ON THE SET. Our audio guy was fairly new to the film world and we ended up with some awful audio. It's all there, but a lot of the shots have bad levels. So it makes our post-production process a real bear. I'm very frustrated, but at least I know that I'm working with a good editor. I also have a few audio contacts around town. I'm planning on calling them to see if they can take a look at the project and see if they can give me any advice to get the audio to a point where it's the best it can be. If there's anything that makes a film look unprofessional, it's bad audio. That's the last thing I want.

The other tough thing is working w/the composer. Primarily, that's because my composer is one of my best friends. That always creates awkward working situations. His music is great, but sometimes it doesn't fit. So I have to tell him, and we work everything out. Which is what I'm doing, but it is awkward, particularly because I know he's very busy and doesn't have a ton of time to redo any bits. But he did take the gig, so I don't feel too bad. ;)

So our deadline -- the date we're planning on premiering our short -- is March 9th. That gives us 3 weeks. I'm out for an entire week in that time on another job, so really, I only have 2 weeks to work on the film. And we still need to edit the looped dialogue back into the film, normalize all audio, add the rest of the sound effects, add the score when it's completed, do the final audio mix, add the special effects, prepare the closing credits, do final edit tweaks, do the final picture adjustments (the film is only in black/white/red), and burn it to DVD. It doesn't seem that bad, but considering we're all doing this for free and still have to find paying work, it makes it much more complicated.

Anyway, enough griping. I'm done.

I missed another Thursday Thirteen today -- since I generally do these late at night, I need to remember to do the TT late on Wednesday instead of planning them for Thursday night so people actually read them and respond. I'm slowly getting this blog thing down. I'm not around as much as my wonderful wife, Paisley Propaganda, so I haven't mastered the fine art that it is. Slowly but surely, I suppose. Slowly but surely.

Well, priorities, I suppose. Right now, my priority is my short film. And my baby.

I've gotten to a rambly point of my post so I'm outta here. nearly 2am so time for beddie bye.

Last note -- I finished watching The Shield Season 2 last night. If you love cop drama shows, you should check this show out. Intense, taught, exciting show w/great characters and writing.

The Movie Monkey