I had my first day back at work today. It was exhausting. Not that a ton of stuff happened. The first day after a chunk of time off is always tough. Inevitably during my free time I slip in the habit of staying up as late as I want and sleeping until whenever I feel like getting out of bed. When I’m working I usually follow a strict regemin of getting up at 6am and going to bed somewhere between 10pm and 11pm. These two schedules clash hard those first few days back to work.
We spent a couple hours in a spotting session for the movie we’re working on. The picture editor wants us to punch up the sound a bit before he shows the cut to the director on Monday. So a lot of it was fast forward through sections. “This is fine. Our temp FX are working here.” That kind of thing. Then there’d be moments like, “This car chase is ok, but it’s not great. See if you can help it a bit.”
It’s a 7 reel show right now. Typically reels are no more than 20 minutes long. Most dramatic features are 6 reels at release and most comedies are 5. It’s not uncommon early on for a show to be a little long while they figure out what’s working and what’s not.
I got the videotapes and loaded the first 4 reels in the computer. And I converted the OMF exports of the editor’s audio tracks to Pro Tools sessions. (Tomorrow morning I’ll have to finish loading the other videos.)
We set up a Pro Tools system at Cameron’s house several months ago, and moved certain things from the office there because we weren’t working for awhile. We knew we had to bring some of that back to get this job done so we took off about 3pm to go back to his house and gather those drives and CDs up.
We also had to record some sound effects that the editor wanted after the spotting session. So we spent several hours in the afternoon rolling cans along the floor, making hinges squeak, and bumping luggage around on the sidewalk. Tomorrow I’ll load that DAT into the computer and master the sound effects we recorded.
It’s good to be back, and tomorrow will be fun. After getting all that new material into the computer, my job is to figure out all the backgrounds that are necessary and cut them into place.