I Ran Against Us [COMPLETED]

by **ntbullock** » December 23rd, 2008, 10:43 pm

Got all the footage backed up on-site and captured what we will need. It wasn't too much, just an exterior shot of a restaurant and three news segments. I'm working them into the timeline now.

by **ntbullock** » December 24th, 2008, 8:35 pm

I've got all four new elements on the line and worked in a little bit. I went and got the off-site harddrive and backed everything up there too. I'll take it back tomorrow.

Since we're done with shooting I also need to look into selling our Brevis unit and lenses. That'll help us recoup a little of the money we put into equipment that had nothing to do with the production budget.

by **ntbullock** » December 28th, 2008, 4:57 pm

Selling equipment and working on more graphics for the new elements on the line.

by **ntbullock** » December 29th, 2008, 4:13 am

Got the graphics done for now. Jared is working on actor reels and I'll be looking for some more music tomorrow. We've thought of another element to shoot here at the house to see if it works. We'll shoot that tomorrow night. We also are looking for some more voice acting for a couple sections.

by **ntbullock** » December 29th, 2008, 11:14 pm

Found some more stock music tonight and searched unsuccessfully for some more stock footage. Jared worked on actor reels. Spoke with Harry about music. Got some miscellaneous things done.

by **ntbullock** » December 31st, 2008, 1:53 am

We got the extra element shot this evening, and I've got it captured and on the line. We had been needing to get this element figured out for awhile but finally decided on something. Making a movie means you have 10,000 decisions to make and eventually you get to all of them.

Harry got us the news intro music and it's incorporated. We've definitely got some choices on stock music for the coffee shop scene. It's taken awhile to find something, but now we have two to choose from. We're awaiting the company to send us full clips to see how it plays with the scene. After that I think we may be pretty good as far as music that Harry isn't scoring for us.

As for having a locked picture before 2009 I think we're good. You never really get 100% because you sometimes have to shift cuts a little to match up to the score at times. Right now I feel we're at least 95% locked. No more major changes or reassembling of scenes. I say that now... ;]

We'll take New Year's off and when Jared gets back this weekend we're going to try and dig in on cleaning and mixing dialogue finally. It's a little dreaded. Then we'll quickly have to get it sent out to a couple more festivals.

by **ntbullock** » December 31st, 2008, 3:43 pm

Working in some new music. Harry redid newscast intro after suggestions.

by **ntbullock** » January 1st, 2009, 10:57 pm

Today I spent three hours setting up for the audio mix. We're pretty locked on picture so I went ahead and implemented the workflow I came up with a week of so ago. Basically it's making copies of all the FCP edit files, renaming them, duplicating our latest sequences and renaming those to identify dialogue and then another for sfx, and then stripping sequences of either sfx or dialogue so they can be mixed separately. After we mix the dialogue and do foley [in separate sequences] we'll have to bounce them out and remix them in another sequence. So, we should ultimately end up with a dialogue stereo track, a sfx/foley stereo track, and a music stereo track.

by **ntbullock** » January 4th, 2009, 5:39 am

We started cleaning and mixing dialogue tonight. Slow start because we're getting a rhythm and Jared hasn't cleaned audio like this before. It's quite a process and I'm having to relearn some of this myself. It's all about frequency and levels and compression, oh my...

by **ntbullock** » January 5th, 2009, 5:38 am

Parametric Equalizers, Compressor/Limiters, High and Low Pass Filters, and Expander Noise Gates are what we've been eating and breathing. Ah, the tools of amateur sound mixers! How glorious!

Alright, honestly, I want to blow my brains out - or at least some of them. We have a handful of scenes that have generators running in the background or we didn't have control of air conditioning and they are all different from each other. Tedious. Just leveling room noise by itself can be tedious, but then you add different mechanical noises and hums and you've got yourself a helluva good time on your hands.

I'm working on the toughest scenes while Jared cuts his teeth on the rest. We shot in a real coffee shop where they couldn't turn off the refrigerator and a fan came on here and there - plus outside traffic. What a nightmare when you mix performances from six or so different takes. Also add to that the fact that you have to wrangle sometimes six layers of source audio.

by **ntbullock** » January 6th, 2009, 7:02 am

Our lead, Grif, came through and stayed the night. He watched a rough cut while we worked on sound.

We're still on the same scenes but Jared's getting the hang of it, and I'm definitely making progress myself. I keep finding little tricks that will help with the next pass. Tomorrow I'll have my third pass at this coffee scene. It gets a little cleaner and consistent with each pass. It'll be awhile before we can incorporate this new audio into a rough cut because it'd throw the sfx and music out of whack at this point. It may be a minute before we completely hear the fruits of our labor.

by **ntbullock** » January 7th, 2009, 7:23 am

We're STILL on the same scenes. This coffee scene is about to wear me out. I've probably logged about 20 hours already into this one scene. It's cleaner for sure, but there are still snags and I still have to get all the voices back to sounding in the same vocal range. Absolute tedium.

by **ntbullock** » January 8th, 2009, 6:17 am

Half of today was spent building a new rough cut that includes the pick-up shots and more stock music - not to mention a few more tweaks here and there. We're sending out to another festival tomorrow. I got that on a new DVD this afternoon.

Then it was back to sound. Jared thinks he's done with his first sequence. I'll double check him tomorrow. He leaves tomorrow for the weekend, and I have a commercial Friday.

My scene is a constant push and pull. It's ridiculously difficult to get a two minute dialogue scene with barely any silence to be consistent after the amount of room noise tweaking that had to be done. It'll never sound "great" and that's unfortunate. We just need it acceptable.

by **ntbullock** » January 11th, 2009, 5:54 am

Shot my commercial and pretty much got it put together. I'll get it out of the way tomorrow hopefully. This evening I did some research into DNR [digital noise reduction]. I've tried it in the past and it made dialogue sound like it was underwater. I had Soundtrack Pro on a disc so I installed it. It took awhile to get audio in there [it wouldn't import a multitrack for some reason] but I finally played around with one of the worst clips. I think mixing in the DNR version with the already tweaked version might be the way to go. I'll try it out fully tomorrow.

by **ntbullock** » January 12th, 2009, 5:28 am

WTF. OMG. BLT. ... I'm pretty awesome. Everyone knows that. It's pretty "common knowledge." Even people that hate me still say, "I hate him, but he IS a bit awesome." That's why it pains me to say that this coffee scene audio is eating my lunch. I've spent an ungodly amount of hours on it. My first idea was to clean as much noise out of each individual clip. But the problem was then trying to make the voices sound similar from cut to cut. I also tried some of the DNR today with varying results. Some of them mixed in well and added some clarity and others played havoc with the expander/gate filters seemingly. So before I pulled my hair out I had the idea of removing ALL filters and starting over. I kept all the duplicated tracks and crossfades and such, so it wasn't exactly square one. Then I applied just two filters that seemed to do the most across the whole segment [the hum remover and a parametric equalizer set to tear out the 1000 kHz buzz]. From there I worked to get everything at the same volume again. On the clips that sounded terrible I started referencing my strict Nazi sequence. I copied over some small sections from the first pass and leveled them with the new sequence. I spit out a quick version and placed it back in the master sequence back with the ambient sound and music. I mixed it a little and it sounds better than my Nazi version. It's more consistent and the room noise isn't too noticeable. I'll make more tweaks tomorrow, but I feel I can move on after that to at least be able to step back and take a breather from this scene. What a nightmare. The lesson learned? Pay the locale to shut off the refrigerator and not continue to do business while you shoot an entire dialogue heavy scene.

I also spoke with Griff about doing a little dialogue replacement for this scene. There are just a few small lines that are almost impossible to clean to an acceptable level. He's going to try and come through soon. I wish we had the time and resources to completely ADR the whole scene, but we don't.

I think the upside is that I learned and remembered more tricks that will hopefully save time later in this process.

I'm done now... just had to vent.

by **ntbullock** » January 13th, 2009, 4:35 am

Jared's back and we worked a little this evening [just a few hours]. I made some more touches to the coffee scene and revisited the scene before it with some newfound knowledge. We listened to Jared's scene and I helped him fix it up. Tomorrow we'll move on to new scenes and consider our first true pass complete on these sets of scenes, which basically comprise the first 30 scenes of the film.

by **ntbullock** » January 13th, 2009, 11:14 pm

We finally got IMDb going: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1343094/

Today we were going to work on sound but so far it's been full of odd jobs. In my haste putting together the last rough cut for two festival submissions I left out fifteen minutes [thanks Duffy for the heads up]. It was the only version I put together and didn't have time to watch it first. Figures. I put another one together and we're going to watch it tonight before we send out because I doubt we put together too many more until sound is getting better across the whole film. We re-send tomorrow.

Jared has been finishing up a couple actor reels, and I've been looking at finalizing this stock footage. Hopefully we can be done with that aspect tomorrow. I've also been working on some graphics today. After we watch the movie we go back to working on sound tonight [aka the wee hours].

by **ntbullock** » January 14th, 2009, 7:20 am

We watched it tonight and felt better about it as a whole. All things considered we enjoyed it. We made about six small notes, fixed them, and went back to work on sound. We were both starting new sections. The whole movie is broken up into about 12 Final Cut Pro sequences.

Even though we didn't work all night on our new scenes we seemed to be going a tad faster so that's good. We also received some voice over work for the news sections from Ned [who also had a small role in the movie]. I gave him a little more direction and he's sending some more soon. I worked what he sent onto the timeline. We have someone else coming by maybe this weekend to record a little more.

by **ntbullock** » January 14th, 2009, 10:41 pm

Talked to someone today about filling in our last gap in stock footage and he's looking for us. We're close to ordering all that. Finally found some royalty free images that were usable and implemented them on the line too. Got some miscellaneous work done and we're working on sound in just a little bit here.

by **ntbullock** » January 15th, 2009, 5:57 am

Worked on sound and made decent progress. I hope we're going fast enough though.

by **ntbullock** » January 15th, 2009, 10:19 pm

Productive day so far. I'll get through our 140-162 scene block tonight. I chose the hardest three to start with, and I'll probably start the third one in not too long. They won't be DONE per se, but good first passes.

I may have found a guy for a small bit of CG work that we could use on the ending shot.

by **ntbullock** » January 16th, 2009, 1:50 am

I have good correspondence with the animator so far. Time will tell. If it works then great, if not then great.

I got done with the 140 block and I'm about to move on to sc165-226, which is the end of the movie. There's a fountain involved so audio may be troublesome in this section. Here's hoping.

I had a commercial pop up tomorrow, so I have to go to bed early. It kind of ruins the roll I've been on today, but I gotta pay dem bills, son.

Jared's been working on miscellaneous things [festivals, etc.] and is now working on audio, too.

by **ntbullock** » January 19th, 2009, 4:24 am

We've worked here and there in small patches over the weekend, but didn't have much time. Tomorrow we're back on it though. Jared is through with sc30-38 and I've got a good start on the last sequence. We're still trying to fig out these VOs.

by **ntbullock** » January 20th, 2009, 2:59 am

Jared is onto the next sequence and I'm done with my first pass on the last nine minutes of the movie. It's all over the place sound-wise, and I'm sure there will be multiple passes here. It's also unfortunate, but I think we're going to have to replace some dialogue in the studio [ADR].

We ordered the stock footage today and it should be ftp'd tomorrow for download. I'll implement that and get back to sound.

by **ntbullock** » January 21st, 2009, 4:15 am

I had a second pass on the last section and have moved on to the 053-072 block. Jared is making headway on his section too. I downloaded all the stock footage today and replaced the temps on the timeline. I also did some more graphic work on those sections. They're looking better. Back to work on sound...

by **ntbullock** » January 21st, 2009, 11:20 pm

I'll be done with my block tonight. It's eight and a half minutes and I've already cleared the first seven. This one has been relatively easy. Whew, I needed that!

We also scheduled with Griff and Leanne for some ADR. Griff's coming next week and Leanne the next. We also have some VOs this Sunday hopefully.

Coming up pretty soon I'm going to take an afternoon and go through the entire film shot by shot to adjust the highlights so they don't bleed. This'll probably be the only "correction" to the image we'll make at this point.

Hopefully we'll be done with the dialogue pass by Sunday. Then onto mixing it with the sfx.

by **ntbullock** » January 22nd, 2009, 4:00 am

Done with 053-072 and onto 074-095... uh, ... tomorrow.

by **ntbullock** » January 23rd, 2009, 6:37 am

Halfway through with mine. Jared is on 096-112 and is about halfway there too. We plan on finishing these up tomorrow and crunching to close the gap at scene 140. Then our first full pass on dialogue will be done. It'll be the good 85% version that we'll continue to tweak [and re-record where ABSOLUTELY necessary] throughout the rest of the process.

Saturday I'll create yet another sequence for each block that will serve as the mastering and final mixing arena. Maybe I'll try and get in the highlight pass in before we make another rough cut for Sunday. Sound effects and foley right around the corner...

by **ntbullock** » January 24th, 2009, 7:28 am

Jared and I picked some crew pictures, and I threw them up on the IRAU website.

Jared has a little bit more to go on his last block of audio and I've completed my first pass on my last one. Tomorrow while he's finishing I'll be making final mixing sequences, and I'll piecemeal it all together. We're trying to get a rough cut together on DVD this weekend to show a few people for feedback and to hear all the work that we've done.

by **ntbullock** » January 25th, 2009, 5:26 am

Bad news, good news, bad news. We barely got all the dialogue pass done today. The first pass is done. That's good, but when I started putting it all together the bake downs were having KHz conversion hiccups and a word mysteriously dropped out. With those small/huge issues I scrapped putting together the new audio version so a small group of us could watch it tonight. Disappointing but whatever. Now I have to fig out what the hell that issue is.

Regardless, we watched the movie with the old audio and as always Jared and I go back and forth on what we like and dislike and our mood can get in the way here and there and this and that and and and... blah blah blah.

We had positive feedback and some minor criticism too. We are at a point though that we don't have much time or resources to put into action many, if any, good suggestions past rearranging what's on our harddrive. We have festival deadlines and lives to get back to.

We all agreed that music and clean audio will definitely tie everything together and possibly alleviate some of the issues brought up tonight. I'm still excited about the finished product but I'm too exhausted at the moment to care about being excited. ;] Need sleep.

Tomorrow we record some small VO snippets.

I Ran Against Us [COMPLETED]

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