False start and rough cuts

The worst thing about editing sound? The wait. You've got to wait 'til the film has picture lock before you can do any mixing. Sure, you can take note of some of the sound effects you'll need and go out to record them, start working on ideas for music composition, and other little bits and pieces, but the meat of the work doesn't come until the end. Adam decided to take it upon himself to sync up the sound for Who's the Mother, which was all well and good, but I wish he'd let me know he was doing it, I would have given him the sound report sheets, and it would have significantly cut the time it took him. Too late now... I did get most of the sound for Isolation synced though, only to be informed that they had started working on a different sequence and didn't take any of my synced sound, so I'll have to do it all again. A bit frustrating and inefficient, but once again, nothing can be done now. They said they'll hand it over to me for sound sync and mixing once they've achieved picture lock, so I guess I'll wait it out and keep working on The Ghost Recordist.

We also showed off our rough cuts the other day. I'm really impressed with how all of the films are shaping up, Remembering Yesterday is my favourite so far, it's really quite moving, and very artistic, so I must congratulate Paddy, Colin and the crew when it's finished. I'm not so happy with how The Ghost Recordist was received. It's not even halfway finished yet, so we weren't expecting scares, but laughs were just about the worst reaction we could hope for. We were reassured that it was just because of James' hammy acting (which we had planned to fix with some ADR), but still, it was a little disheartening. We got some good feedback on other areas of the film, but the general response was that it's hard to judge without sound, as it's such an integral part of the plot. Listening to the class's feedback on Isolation and Who's the Mother helped too, I know what issues I'll have to fix when I get to the mix.

Calm before the storm...

Wthe the 7 Minutes with Beibhinn shoot done, I can now start freaking out about the next three weeks of shooting, starting with The Ghost Recordist (Or Echo, as Niall would like to call it, I don't know, we might have to have a vote on that)... This is going to be intense. I haven't mentioned yet that we've finally secured Rodrigo Ternevoy as our 'Mikael' after much deliberation. We've also decided that my house is the most viable place to shoot the final two scenes, we were offered another place in Longford, but it's way too far logistically. We need a sound studio, and my bedroom is halfway there, we also need a room that's a blank canvas to use as the oratory, so we're using my mam's room, with her permission, of course. For our exterior, Shane has agreed to let us use his granddad's house on the condition that we don't go filming inside. So, everyone has their scripts, call sheets, contact sheets, shooting schedule, lunch is being made, I just hope I haven't left anything out. We meet in Shane's place at 10am, wish us luck.

In other news, Who's the Mother is up the following week, and it seems they're having trouble procuring an actor too. I haven't seen the final script yet, but it's the least of my worries now, I'm sure they'll send it out soon. Lesley Ann has talked to me about the soundtrack for the film, I though some acoustic guitar music a la Juno would be nice, but we're going to talk more about it in post. James has also been giving me some examples for the Isolation soundtrack, he cited some of the score for Book of Eli, as well as this Dark Ambient stuff as examples. He also talked to me about the atmosphere they were going for. The script has changed a lot since the promo, and they've removed all horror elements of the film, so the sound design will have to change accordingly. It seems like it's actually going to be easier on me, so I'm not worried.

Crisis averted

I'd just like to take this opportunity to say that finishing that dissertation was one of the most stressful experiences of my life, no exaggeration. I should have stuck to what I knew, last year, I researched Propp's Theory and applied it to three films, this year I took it one step further and went for surveys. Compiling the data into graphs took a lot longer than I anticipated and I nearly missed the deadline. Having said all that though, handing in another finished dissertation was incredibly satisfying, the weight of the world off my shoulders.

In other news, I'm still working of the script for the Ghost Recordist. I'm not really sure what to change, so I'll just develop it further and hand it on to Niall soon. It's a bit loose but I hope he likes it. I've also got to start planning for the next shoot, it's a month away and we still have to find our lead actor, and a location. Speaking of which, I should have shown these off before; I took some recce photos in Shane (Davidson)'s granddad's old house, it's abandoned now and it would be absolutely perfect...

Spooky exterior...

 Dusty old interior...

It even has this! This is pretty much exactly what I had in mind when I thought of Mikael's house, I went in and my jaw dropped, it was perfect. Too perfect. It turns out Shane would rather we didn't use the place, out of respect for his granddad, and because it's not 100% safe in there, someone might get hurt. Well, at least I have something to work off, I'll send Steve the pictures of the place so he knows the look I'm going for. I don't think we'll be able to recreate it in all its glory, but we'll give it a shot.

Editiiiiing

Okay, so editing for The Ghost Recordist was, admittedly, pretty easy. We had like 12 clips on the timeline, hardly any intercutting, it was a doddle, I almost felt bad for the other groups. I guess this balances out with some of the difficulties we encountered on our shoot. Niall and James had a lot of trouble blocking out the shots in a way that flowed, that was difficult because the editing was so sparse. I think what we've got is a good representation of the style we're going for, even if it doesn't make perfect sense right now... We may need some amendments on the script for the main shoot. Anyway, major project presentations are pretty soon and I'm not quite sure what exactly they entail, I should go find out!... Okay, I'm still not sure, may need to ask in class.

Editing the sound for Who's the Mother, and Isolation, however, that was a different beast altogether. Who's the Mother was a lot of dialogue panning and fixing transitions between shots, it was time consuming if nothing else, I wish I had more time to work on it though. I had a lot of fun with Isolation. Besides the mixing of lots of wind atmos, I had bits and pieces of foley to do, which I have a particular fondness for. I could really get creative with this one too, they wanted lots of non-diegetic sounds to build up an atmosphere in the second to last scene. I won't reveal too much though, I'll leave it for the presentations.

But of course!

I never spoke of how shooting the promo for The Ghost Recordist went! I must say, the nerves hit me when we went out on the shoot, I had never produced anything like this before and I knew it was on my head if an actor didn't show up, or we forgot equipment, or the food sucked or anything at all, basically. A million things could have gone wrong, but they didn't, thankfully. I found that, once everything and everyone was on set, managing resources was much, much easier, and I felt much more at ease than the night before, and part of my job was to keep calm and be organised (or at least appear to be). I acted as a consultant to a stressed out Niall, a sort of stage hand for props and lights, a chef, a time-keeper, and comic relief. Oh, I also took lots of nice pictures.

Shane Showing Alan the art of boom swinging.

Actors between takes.

"The lonely light."

More actors between takes.

All in all, I'm happy with our two days of shooting. The last scene of the first day took far longer than anticipated, Niall and I should have thought about that one more, but other than that, everything went like clockwork, we had everything we needed, and everyone was satisfied.

Double barrel post-gun...

...or something, not a very good title this time around, but ya can't win 'em all. Okay so I didn't really try, but at least it's informative, this is indeed a double post, covering 2 whole weeks of class, and maybe more! So, here we go, in chronological order (the best order):

Last Tuesday, Conor Barry came in to tell us all about the wonders of producing! You could tell right off the bat he was good at what he does, he was organised in thought but conversational in tone, he used lots of analogies and stories to aid his presentation, and gave a great many useful tips. I'm glad I was taking notes. He gave us mostly practical information and didn't go on too much about his own films, although I could tell he was excited about them. Among his words of wisdom were some keywords for the producer: Resources, control (of resources) and responsibility (and trusting those in your employ). The other two were more concepts, subjectivity and objectivity, or proving your claims of talent with evidence of experience. Conor also instilled in us the importance of marketing and distribution as the most important thing for a producer to focus on; if the film isn't going to reach an audience, why make it?

Vanessa Gildea gave us a workshop the following Tuesday, dealing with her work as a director and producer. Her talk was less informative, but more motivational and engaging than Conor's, and she takes a more creative approach to production by the looks of it, though I wouldn't say either is more effective. She told us about her role as 'creative producer' and how it's slightly more involved, and allows you to offer your opinion on the film a lot more, which appealed to me quite a bit. She also showed us her 'look book', which was brilliant, I'd almost consider making one just for the fun of it, so I'm sure it'll be a useful thing to add to our arsenal in future, especially if we make feature length films. She gave us a really nice piece of advice about documentary filmmaking too: The subject should set the tone of the film, if the subject is a person, the camera, lighting, soundtrack and overall style should match their personality.

Besides that, Niall and I decided our production company's name should be N&N's productions, and that will steal the M&M's logo... Genius! We've also been working on the script, I've got some character biographies made to help me with this. We've procured some possible actors too, but we're still deciding on our location, it's looking like we'll be making a set somewhere practical for the interiors. Right now it feels like we're on top of things, which is always a good sign, hopefully I'll be in the same mindset for my next post!

Time to get Kraken

Sorry about that, bad pun, but cool picture... I just had to do it. Is it just me or is this blog becoming less formal with every post? Is that really such a bad thing? Save the formal writing skills for cover letters, I say, this feels much less like work.

So anyway, Niall and I gave our pitch on Tuesday (totally unprepared by the way, I'm pretty sure most of the class only realised the groups would be pitching together on the day), and I think it went okay. I've never been much good at selling my ideas. I know the trick is to make them seem much more exciting than they are at that point in time, with the hope that they'll live up to the pitch by the time they're fully developed, but I just can't grasp how to actually do that. Maybe I'll Google some pointers, isn't the internet great? My first idea, which we actually went with, came across well, partially because I'd had some practice the previous week. The second was just trying to shove the plot into 5 minutes, but I do think it's a good plot, but it needs more work. Maybe some time in the future.

Next on the agenda then, the full script and trailer for The Ghost Recordist. Not sure if that's actually a good title, it does the job as far as I'm concerned, but I may have to ask for some opinions. The script, I think I'll enjoy writing, but, well, I'm not a fan of trailers. I don't like revealing anything I'm doing until it's a finished product, all neatly polished and ready to be taken for what it is, but I know that's just not realistic. So I'm a little nervous about it, I have no idea how to go about making a marketing trailer, but I guess that's what the workshop on Tuesday is about. I'd better start gathering cast, crew and locations asap!

Oh, and I watched the aforementioned Berberian Sound Studio, which I really enjoyed, and took a look at a few horror shorts I hadn't seen before:
   8 Butterflies was creepy and atmospheric for the most part, some of the scenes were a bit cliché, the story was fairly convoluted, but on the whole it gave me the heebie jeebies.
   The French Doors had an absolutely brilliant premise, and good execution. The soundtrack was an odd choice though, like they got their "Horror Movie" and "Cheesy Spy Movie" tapes mixed up.
   There Are Monsters shows how some simple video editing and sound effects can make you jump out of your skin if you're not expecting it, the end could have been much better though.

So it begins...

The year is off to a flying start. We've been assigned our partners for the year and are all ready to get our projects moving forwards. Before we start driving though, we need a vehicle, so we spent yesterday's class discussing some ideas and getting feedback, sort of like a test pitch, except I was completely unprepared and had unwittingly volunteered to go first. Oh boy. It went well though, and when it comes to pitching next week I think I'll be prepared. I've got my ideas together and fairly well developed, ready to write up, and spent some time discussing Niall's ideas with him. He's not what you'd call an idea man, but we talked about some short stories we liked, stuff from classic writers such as Edgar Allen Poe, and websites like Creepy Pasta , we had agreed to go the horror route, as you may have guessed.

As far as my ideas go, well, I have many, but two that are particularly plausible, and well developed. One of which I pitched in class, and it was quite well received. It's about a quirky sound recordist who discovers a way to communicate directly with spirits via recording equipment, but it all goes to hell... Literally. It's to be shot in a documentary style, and I was referred to a film called Berberian Sound Studio, which I plan to view forthwith. My other idea came to me in the night a number of weeks ago: A 20-something college student sits alone in his room, when his friend starts sending him unusual messages over Facebook. This turns from slightly strange to terrifyingly bizarre when he realises he can trust nobody outside of his room. The plot of this one is kind of harder to fit into a tagline, so hopefully a good treatment and pitch will do it justice.

Needless to say, I'm really looking forward to getting started on our project, and I heard some great ideas yesterday that I'll be very excited to help out with and see finished.