The good news is that I have been working a lot recently. The bad news is that it’s been crazy busy and things like reading my favorite websites, writing for my own website and sleep has suffered for it. The show that I’m working on right now makes me wish I could give more details that I can about the movie. It is so goddamned funny I wish I could share with everyone. So I’ll say this: there’s a moving coming out next summer. It’s very clever and quite funny. You should go see it.
Does that help you? 😉
We are actually cleaning up tracks from the Avid, smoothing out dialog and adding FX. This weekend and early next week we will mix everything down to stems. It’s basically a mini-temp dub in the Pro Tools. This way the studio gets to see the director’s cut of the movie with a decent soundtrack. It’s a huge undertaking. When Cameron was given the task, it was just going to be him for 3 weeks. That’s nearly impossible so the second week, he was able to bring in another editor and this final week, I came on too. Even on a small movie we might have a crew of 5 working for 3 weeks to do a temp dub. That’s 15 weeks of editorial labor. On this show we’re getting 6. Plus we have to do the mix ourselves. I suspect we will be seeing more and more shows like this in the future.
When I left last night I had been working for several hours on a large crowd scene. Crowds are probably one of the toughest things to cut well. Trying to keep them dynamic and interesting and have them react naturally to the events around them isn’t easy. Of course there’s really not time with this to spend anything like that on the crowds. I’m doing the poor man’s crowd reactions. The editor already had a bed of babble and reactions in his tracks. To give the big swells when exciting things happen, I pulled a steady white-noise-like extremely large crowd cheer from the sound effect library and looped for the entire length of the scene. Then I changed the volume over time with big spiky movements to simulate large crowd cheers.
I was able to kill two birds with one stone: cut crowd reactions for a ten minute scene and mix it all in one step. Now I’m adding in small group cheers (5 to 10 people) on all the crowd close-ups to give it a little more definition and I’ll call it done. It’s certainly not the quality that you’d want to turn over for a final mix but for this early stage of the film, it give them a decent sounding crowd quickly.
And of course in the month that I’ve had my Tivo, I’ve managed to go a little Tivo-Crazy™. Four months ago, I could have missed an entire month of television and not cared. Now thanks to easy viewing and recording I have a hard drive full of crap I’m never going to watch and I’m already saying to myself, well maybe I should record these to DVD in case I want to watch them in the future. I’m actually up early making DVDs to free up space so that I can record the “Farscape” marathon that Sci Fi channel is running for the next couple of weeks. I could go to the store at lunch and pick up every episode of “Farscape” on DVD and not worry about this. But no. Has to be recorded on Tivo. I’m definitely going to have to sit myself down at some point and get a little more rational about the Tivo.
Well I have to jump in the shower and get off to work (after I put in one last DVD for recording). But I’ll leave you with one of the funnier comics I’ve seen in the last week, about another fun thing that I haven’t had the time to enjoy:
