And So It Ends...

Due to a mixture of late nights, rushed work, the onset of projects, papers and exams, and the sheer inability to log into my blogspot account, I have not updated in nearly a month. This does not mean I haven't been keeping track of my work, so in turn here is information and journals that I have either previously written or some after thoughts on the topic since the last of my updates. But one last thing before the journals; I know I have expressed feelings throughout this process of all sorts to my partner Devin, but in the end he did an excellent job and completed much more than was necessarily asked of him, and despite our differences in opinions we made it through this and hopefully completed what some may deem an ok film. Now onto the journals:

Today: Met Devin at the lab around 11:15 this morning. After all the work I did on the sound last night, I ended up running both hard drives together and pulling files from both of them, so I ended up keeping his harddrive over the night. I was able to eliminate much of the background noise and he approved of the changes I made. We printed two copies of the tape, one for class and one for the student screenings. We also spent a very long time converting the files so that we may store them as a self-contained movie that will transfer in the proper aspect ratio onto a DVD. We're finally done with this film...at least we hope so.

April 29th: I get to the lab around 10:30 am after Devin's honors defense. Not having seen the whole film together, I thought he did a pretty good job. Back at the lab I waited until about 2:30 for Devin to show up so I could work on the whole film's sound, but he never showed up. So after messing around with AfterEffects and Photoshop to see if I could somewhat improve our film anymore (I couldn't), I decided I would go take a break for a bit. I got back around 8:30 and Devin was there, so we were finally able to start working on David. He had been working on graphic animation, so he finished that and left me his hard drive so I could use my ProTools expertise (minimal) and fix all the sound problems. Val, our "sound person" was there to lend a second opinion on what she did and didn't like in the changes I made, etc. Of course when I made a change she liked it...I'm just that good. To fix the problems, I had to export my section of the party to ProTools, but we were only able to import the audio files as one long, stereo track. In turn, I had to separate every cut in audio and video, and I ended up using an equalizer and band pass filters to try and neutralize the humming of the pumpkin in the background. It worked pretty well, but for some reason it didn't affect Sara's scenes...oh well. The biggest problem is that Baylen's audio levels have dropped now due to the masking of the background noise, but it sounds better overall so Val and I decided to stick with it. Once I re-imported the audio and video, I realized that Devin and I had cut out more sections of my party scene on his hard drive, so I had to go back and try to find all the audio and match it to Baylen, which would have been easier had Final Cut been cooperative and not told us nearly every time we were going to change something that we couldn't do it for fear of losing all our render files. But after a while, we were happy with the result, and having modified the party sounds and bus sounds in Final Cut there seemed little left to do than to watch on its own. I decided to export a copy just to see if it would work. It did, but in the wrong aspect ratio. So I re-open the file and what should happen? All our media is offline, and nothing is working....I'm freaking out trying to figure out what happened, and it turns out Val was leaning on the power chord and had pulled it out from the hard drive. We fix it, it's good, we watch it, we watch it again with more people, we're satisfied, it's 2:30am, we leave.

April 23rd: So after watching everybody's projects today, I was pretty impressed to see how far everybody has come since the last viewings. Everybody's films seem more structured on the whole, and some are nearly complete. The documentaries have all greatly improved, and I was impressed with the changes Richard had made to Last Call to make it work better...though not perfect, it's not his fault either. That film has a few issues that seem hard to fix in editing. Anyways, this was the first time I've seen our film played in it's entirety with all the music and sound effects added...and I was horribly troubled by what I saw and heard. I can't believe this is the film that played at Reel Teal. Even though I heard people enjoyed it, I was horrified by the lack of sound and some of the cuts. And while I doubt much more editing will take place, I must change much of the sound. Most of the comments given back by the class were comments that I had already made myself during the viewing. While I'll probably just live with how the music is right now, it could probably be tweaked a bit, if only for the percussion in the beginning of the film. The blow-up pumpkin sounds absolutely atrocious, I need to see if I can somehow get rid of it completely, though that may be hard since it's making a wide range noise, and my abilities with pro tools are shoddy at best. The party sounds...well, there needs to be more, it sounds way too empty for a party, and it needs more of a build-up at the end. I also need to add bus sounds to the end, while also toning down the ambience that's already there. Devin has done more than his share of work on this project with some of the editing and titles, now I've gotta assert my "specialty" in this partnership....damned sound...

April 17th: Now that we're pretty close to final picture cut, we just need to work some more on the sound. The music Devin has isn't bad, even if it's a little too Little Miss Sunshine-ish. He wanted my part of the film finalized so he could put it all together and play it at Reel Teal. I'm looking forward to seeing it on the big screen myself, it should be a good time. I'm not exactly sure how I'm going to import the sound into ProTools since Final Cut only seems to support Soundtrack...but whatever, I'll figure something out. I have a few ideas to try anyways. I want Devin to either cut out some of the party entrance or use his effects know-how to get rid of the markers on the floor, it just looks awful. And I don't know how to use Photoshop or Aftereffects. I understand the concepts, I just have no clue how to use the software. Devin doesn't seem interested in changing it, hopefully I can change his mind though. Devin said he would add the party sounds of children and music for the film, since we're on separate decks having background sounds on mine would make it harder to mesh. I feel bad that I really can't do much more now until Devin is ready with his part, but I did as much as I was capable of. And while I feel like it may have been technically less than Devin, I think it was harder to work with, and I also had to keep checking back with him to make sure it was what he wanted....hahaha, I can tell he got tired of that.

April 8th: So close to final picture cut, we've got our total time down a bit but we're still looking to get it a bit shorter. I want to re-record some of our actors with ADR because they don't match spatially, and I'm not too happy with it. I wish Val would take on a more interested role to help me out with that, but she doesn't seem to have the time and Devin doesn't like the idea. Oh well, guess I'm gonna lose that battle...I would at least like to record some of the humming sounds from the ghostpumpkinthing so I can at least add a more steady room tone, but I don't know if Val has it or not anymore. Either way, we need to work on the sound some. I was using the audio from the actual party, but there's too many indescrepancies to use it in the final cut. And we need to find a song of some sort to play throughout the party, but I don't know if there will be one long enough and more importantly "Halloween"-y. Maybe Devin can scrounge something up like he did with our theme song...I just can't wait until we get a picture lock; working on sound is nothing compared to cutting down these images of mis-matched items...so sad, so sad.

Ok...

So I know I've said this before, but I'm finally done with color correction I think...I went back and re-worked some of the previous color correction so not as much of the grain pops out of the footage... I've been working on sound, mixing and matching both dialogue and some background sounds, party noises specifically. We're getting close to the finish...Devin's going through musical selections, and we've gotta trim about half a minute off the film. I'm tired of working on this project for specific reasons, but we are getting close...