The Big Think

Looking forward to seeing it.

“Inception” Sound for Film Profile from Michael Coleman

XtraNormal is a website that lets people do cheap animated “films” by just typing in a script. It’s really basic and the results are far, far from professional.

Still, sometimes you happen across something golden in spite of the primitive tools.

Witness Sound Mixer Hell. This little gem was put together by a professional sound mixer and features all of the tired reasons we hear when we’re pitched a film. If you’ve ever been on the receiving end of this sort of thing you’ll get why it’s so funny.

(Note: This kind of thing is the rule, but there are exceptions. About a year ago I worked on a low budget movie using the Red and just me as the sound dept. In this case, though, the producers did everything in their power to make sure that the technical crew- those of us with an investment in equipment and consumables- were paid. And they listened to what we needed in order to do our jobs and took advice. It ended up being a good experience. Ask me about the other times when I’ve been asked to volunteer my time and equipment on a set where everyone else had been paid, simply because the producer had “run out of money”. When told that I had bills to pay, the response was “well… can we borrow your gear?”. This came from a complete stranger.)

I just discovered SoundWorks- a cool website from the production teams behind the sound of many Summer blockbusters. Some really neat stuff there from the unsung half of the movies.

I just finished watching the final color corrected and audio mixed version of Paradise Recovered. We became the first two people to see the “final” film. It looked and sounded (ahem) great! Celebrated with a few fingers of 15 year old Glenn.

Congratulations to Storme on a job well done.

For the first time in over a month I have nothing to do. Ahhhhhh….

I’ve been mixing the movie for a couple weeks now, and have a few more to go. One of the interesting things I’m noticing is that the more I get into super picky mode on the scenes I’m working on, the easier it is for me to catch production mistakes when I watch a TV show.

Tonight I caught a radio hit on an actresses RF mic on Castle, then Erin and I decided to watch Firefly (what can I say? Nathan Fillion overdose) and I caught something I’d never expected. There’s a scene in the pilot episode where Wash drives a 4 wheel off road buggy off of the ship. He stops on the ramp to talk to a character, then after they’re done he slowly putts off screen. They would have had to have had the buggy turned off because the engine noise would have overwhelmed the dialog, but how did the buggy go when called for? If you look really carefully in the bottom right hand corner of the screen you can very clearly see a hand in a black glove come in and grab the front bumper of the 4 wheeler and PULL. Yup, it was grip powered. Hey! This didn’t take place in space at all!

Erin has now forbade me from pointing out any other problems I see (I always catch boom shadows, camera reflections, ADR mismatches). Argh! The perils of Production Brain.

If anything, it makes me feel better about my editing. I’m going for perfection, but it’s nice to know that the average audience member isn’t as picky as I am. Erin told me today that audio editing is NOT the best thing for a perfectionist. It just reinforces our bad tendencies.

I’m deep in the middle of the mix for Paradise Recovered and loving it. Lots of time at the desk, but it’s really starting to sound like a feature film. I hear that the color correction looks fantastic, and the picture editing is wonderful (Storme and Lee did an excellent job). It’s funny to watch the film over and over and get familiar with every facial tic of the actors, as well as puzzle out the “why’s” of all the different edit decisions. Why hold for a few extra frames here? Why show the reverse on an actor there? Why go to that reaction shot? It’s all part of the subconscious decision making process of the visual edit. I’m trying to do the same thing with the sound edit by including subtle background foley sounds, or actors breathing (or not breathing) off-camera, as well as getting the ambient/vocal ratio just right (where I have control- darn doves).

It’s a tremendously fun process that takes a lot of attention to detail, a bucket load of creative decision-making, and a ton of seat time, and if I do my job right, the rough production tracks will sound smooth and unnoticeable. That’s the downside to the mixers art. If you do it right nobody will notice. I think of the audience as the stereotypical demanding parent that only comments on the one B+ on the report card. They only notice the deficiencies.

The deeper I get into the film, and the more I see all the scenes come together, the more I forget what it was like to shoot the movie. It’s starting to “feel” like a real film to me. What fun!

Mmm… Jelly squishing on bread. Delicious, delicious Foley.

I came across an excellent short article series here. Among the key thoughts was this one:

Since much of the audio process doesn’t happen until after the cast and crew have gone home, the sound usually isn’t addressed seriously until that point – which can be a big mistake. If you prioritize your audio well and plan for it from early on, you’ll reap all of the rewards of a completed and marketable project. If you underestimate your audio needs you may find that your project never seems to end.

That’s so true. I’m embarking on the mix for Paradise Recovered, the film that took our small team three weeks to shoot last summer, and I’m so glad that the director and producer took audio seriously while on set (in spite of the grumbling from certain other parts of the production crew). There were a few unavoidable compromises made that will take costly and lengthy repair in my post production phase (among them, the necessity to recreate sound during several MOS scenes), but I’ve come across many, many scenes where the director and producer actually listened to the sound dept (a rare thing!) and made the right call. It means that the final film is going to sound that much better. I think the end result will be a film that comes across as being much more professional than it would have if there was a lot of room noise, uncontrolled ambient sounds (airplanes, air conditioners, cicadas), or bad dialog. There’s always a lot of post production work to do on any film – just listen to the audio from the “deleted scenes” from any of the DVD’s you may own- but the more consideration that’s given to production sound, the better the final product. You can always fix stuff in post if you have the budget (redo every bit of audio, loop all the dialog, send out a crew to recreate all the ambient sounds, etc), but just take five minutes on a rushed set to let the sound crew do its job and you’ll reap huge benefits in post, not to mention getting more natural sound because it was actually recorded in the environment that the audience sees.

I sat in the Starbucks just up the street for an hour this morning drinking free Tax Day coffee and creating a big spreadsheet of all the scenes in the film and everything that needs to be mixed in each (dialog edit, ambient edit, foley creation, music, etc). As I typed the scene descriptions I kept remembering how Storme and Andi (the director and producer/writer, respectively) kept balancing the needs of camera and sound on set. I’m sure glad that they listened to me at the time because, not only did it save them thousands of dollars in post production costs, but the final film is going to sound so much better for it. Thanks, Storme and Andi!

I’m excited to get going on the edit. It’s a long, sometimes tedious, painstaking process, but it’s something that I’ve gotten good at it (toots own horn).

So this is day three of production for Paradise Recovered, the independent feature I’m working on. My job is the head of the sound department (and the main mixer, and the boom operator… you get the idea). Today was another good day working with fun, talented, and creative people. One of those days where you work really hard and go home exhausted but happy. The house we’re shooting in this week is an old home in central Austin with a rickety air conditioner. Unfortunately, we have to turn off the A/C when we shoot (I’m not a popular guy when I call for it to be killed!). It was 104 outside today and we actually had to leave the house and go outside to cool off. It was ridiculous. Nobody had a thermometer, but I would guess it was at least 125 in the house with all the lights. Crazy!
We managed to get about 7-9 pages shot today, which is a pretty good pace for a small crew. The writer/producer’s blog is here and there are some flickr pics here. I encourage you to keep up with both locations for a blow-by-blow of the shoot. Andie (the producer/writer) is great. She’s doing an absolutely wonderful job of taking care of her cast and crew and I know it keeps me really motivated to do my best work. I’m having a (very hot!) blast. I’ll try and keep you posted how things are going, but right now most of my time is taken up by either being on set, or sitting at my computer for several hours every night transcribing my sound report notes for the editor, then reorganizing my gear and preparing for the next day. I usually take a freezing shower every night and sit under a blasting a/c until my nose turns a beautiful shade of blue.

Hey! I just found a super secret behind the scenes video of our location this week on YouTube. Thanks for the house loan, David!