Star Wars Episode III [COMPLETED]

by **ntbullock** » January 16th, 2005, 10:49 pm

I finished the small list. Some things aren't worth nit-picking about visually [not at this point anyway]. I went through, cleaned up, and bounced out the clean audio tracks Eric, Michelle, and Scott recorded with me. I've used ProTools quite a bit and it didn't take long to tear through - a couple hours. I still have mine to record, but I'll do that when my throat isn't soar like today. There's plenty to work on anyway.

I pitched the Emperor's voice down a notch and Jar Jar's up a notch. I'm going to see how well this works. I also pulled a little more low-end out of Yoda's voice since Eric is a big burly manbeast.

Color correcting has been a hassle. When you view the picture on a television and on a lcd they look different. Which do you correct for? I went for something in between. I predict that 99.9% of all viewers will see this on the internet, so I try and show a little favoritism towards that.

Now I'm matching the VOs back up to the footage on the line. I'll probably be done with recording mine and getting everyone else squared away within the next couple of days. Then I move onto sound effects.

by **ntbullock** » January 17th, 2005, 7:37 pm

Last night I layed everyone's VO down on the line. Most of them work out fine. A few of the lines lost a little flavor in the redubbing. It might not be a problem. And then again the lines might just get redone if I don't eventually get over it. On the flip side, some lines are funnier now. It's definitely one of those things you have to step back from and take a fresh look at.

Today has been super busy with freelance work, so I'm just now taking a stab at this project. I doubt I get long to work on it tonight. Either way, I'm prepping to record my VO. Hopefully, I can keep my "flavor".

by **ntbullock** » January 17th, 2005, 11:56 pm

I've recorded my voice-over. It didn't come out bad at all. There may be one line that I might redo later. I also voiced a droid that has a small part. I had to take my Vader recording and roll off the bottom end with the EQ and pitch it down a bit. It may need more tweaking as we go along, but it's a good start. After you add the breath in there it might be fine. I'm going to try and get all my bits on the line and synched up tonight. One more thing down...

Eric's making some headway with the sabers. He gave me two shots tonight and they look great. I know how much he's been through getting this done. It's one thing to place lightsabers on unkeyed footage, and it's a different thing to do it after your keyed edges have been eaten into and no longer match your original footage. Good work, EK.

Scott's coming up this weekend and we are probably going to redo two of his lines. They lost a little "flavor" in the translation. That's sucks because one of the shots is actually kind of complicated. He's really good at doing this, so I don't think it'll be a big deal. If it were someone else I might pass on re-looping it.

by **ntbullock** » January 18th, 2005, 7:53 pm

Last night I got all my voice material down. Today I've been going over everything and touching up the audio. I've already started laying down some sound effects. I've got a decent library of sounds I've amassed over the years, but I still go on the net and get sounds. I recommend http://www.findsounds.com

Here's a snap of what Eric has been working on:

I've also made a list of elements that will require some foley. It's not too many, but some of them were lost upon looping the dialogue.

by **ntbullock** » January 19th, 2005, 2:30 am

I've been laying down sfx most of the night and I've made a lot of headway. I'll probably have most of the sounds down by the end of tomorrow. Mixing will be the next hurdle. I tend to mix as I go along, though.

Eric and I have to rearrange some of the shots from the way that we have it in the script. You move one scene because it's a problem, that affects another and you don't realize it, then you move something else and you've painted yourself into the damn corner. Well, we're at the turpentine stage. It's not that bad, but we do have to fig it out.

I'm going to try and do most of the foley tomorrow, as well. I believe we'll have a good rough cut/mix by the weekend. It's still running about 7:30 minutes and there's been minor trims here and there.

by **ntbullock** » January 19th, 2005, 11:00 pm

I got all 6 elements of foley recorded today and laid down. They worked great. Eric and I went ahead and worked through the scene order over the phone a bit ago. I've already made the changes. This way when we get together Thursday afternoon we can look a little more at music.

by **ntbullock** » January 20th, 2005, 6:25 pm

Eric's coming over this evening. I'm not completely through laying down all the sfx, but most of them are working out fine. I started going through the music last night. There's a ton of it. I've been laying pieces down and seeing how they interact. Most of my choices have been working well. It's always a challenge to tie numerous smaller scenes with different tones together with the music - especially when there's some not-so-small scenes in there, as well. Coming along...

by **ntbullock** » January 21st, 2005, 12:40 am

Eric and I worked for many hours tonight finishing out the music. There was one tough spot that made us have to rethink a whole section towards the end. We worked through it, though. We actually had to cut a couple of shots. There was one long shot that has been bugging me for awhile, so we cut it. The movie is now down to about 7 minutes with the credits added. I doubt too much else gets cut. It'll be small snips from here.

Now I've got to go back through and mix everything. I should have a decent rough mix by the end of tomorrow.

Eric brought over 2 more saber shots tonight. They look great. He informed me he has 365 more frames to do. He's such a number jockey. Well, I'm staying up to work yet another night. I think Eric and I are definitely ready to bring this project to a close.

Goodbye ice cream close-up. You ruined the pacing.

by **ntbullock** » January 22nd, 2005, 2:21 am

Tonight was productive. Eric, Scott, Anthony, and I watched the near completed trailer. Eric and I have been needing some outside perspective on it. Oh yeah, Eric Kohn finally finished his saber shots. He had himself a little marathon finishing. Kudos to the EK. The shots look great.

Anyway, we're at that nitpicky stage. We actually made, with Scott's help mainly, some nice improvements. We're excited about it. Lord only knows how this will be received. Here's hoping the net gets hip to it. We're ahead of schedule. We may have the bloopers and the trailer finished within the week. ... Thank goodness because damn.

by **ntbullock** » January 22nd, 2005, 6:57 pm

Today I've been mixing. I've watched it about 4 times - making subtle changes along the way. We still need to get Scott's re-dub. We'll get that tonight or tomorrow. We're getting very close to finishing.

by **ntbullock** » January 23rd, 2005, 6:51 pm

Scott and I recorded his re-dub this afternoon. It's better than the first time we did it. The first one looked fine, but the tone that made it funnier had been lost. I even added a little something that makes it a little sweeter. So, good things can happen when you redo something you've already redone.

After Scott left I also recorded some small sounds for some puppet reactions. God, that sounds crazy. What a silly sentence. I'm sure half of this journal sounds silly. Either way, that should do it for the looping. I got one small segment from Jeromy, which we did quickly at his studio, and placed it on the line the other day. So we're done.

Scott handed me the short version of the blooper reel that he and Clayton whittled. It'll be released with the movie on the site.

I'm almost through with mixing it, then I have to master it.

by **ntbullock** » January 24th, 2005, 11:17 pm

I've been swamped today with freelance work. Not a bad thing, though, as I still need to pay the bills.

Clayton mentioned something to Scott, then Scott mentioned something to Judy, then Judy said something to me, and so I mentioned to Eric and we decided to cut a scene. Simple.

I cut out 23 seconds today. It was one "scene" that was funny, but the supporting jokes had been cut, so it was kind of just "out there." It kind of slowed the pacing a bit. Here it is for your early viewing:

http://www.sequentialpictures.com/starwars3/SW3_-_BootyRooter.mov

by **ntbullock** » January 25th, 2005, 3:08 am

Tonight I've been cleaning up the audio. I compressed the number of tracks down from 16 to ten and got rid of all the audio from the line that was replaced with voice-overs. Sometimes when you have too much going on you'll get small little pops that you don't want in your final mix. Once I finish this then I'll export the audio for ProTools and sweeten it a little. Then I'll re-marry the audio to the picture and hopefully be done. I'd like to see this happen by tomorrow's end.

by **ntbullock** » January 25th, 2005, 6:26 pm

Mastering the audio...

by **ntbullock** » January 25th, 2005, 8:29 pm

Compressing the video...

by **ntbullock** » January 26th, 2005, 12:18 am

It's taken me ALL day to finish cleaning up the audio and getting three versions compressed. I've rendered out quite a few versions to try and get the compression working well. It's a crucial stage.

Also, the audio can tend to change a little when you compress it. I've already made a small mental note of levels to modify if I have to go back in and redo them for some reason. Nothing I can't live with, though.

Now I need to get my mirrors going. I've also got to compress the bloopers and get some html done. There's still much to do.

by **ntbullock** » January 26th, 2005, 5:14 pm

Today I've been trying to organize the mirrors. This'll take a lot of the load off my site. I've also put some minor touches on the blooper reel that Scott and Clayton worked on. I compressed it down and have uploaded it to the site.

I imagine the site will go live with the movie either tomorrow or the next day. Eric is coming over this evening and we are going to record a commentary for it. I'm getting sick, so it'd be nice to rap all of this up.

We've already gotten some splendid reviews from friends and family.

by **ntbullock** » January 26th, 2005, 10:36 pm

The commentary is recorded and I'm now waiting on mirrors. I've quite a few offers for hosting. Thanks guys. That's great.

by **ntbullock** » January 27th, 2005, 1:00 am

The movie just went live on the site.

We still have the Making Of to do.

by **ntbullock** » January 27th, 2005, 9:14 pm

Feedback thus far has been amazingly positive and my all time record for unique hits in a day has been broken - 1300 hits in one day. Here we go...

by **ntbullock** » January 30th, 2005, 4:36 pm

The hits have been going crazy.

Unique hits:
1st day roughly 1,800
2nd day roughly 12,000
3rd day roughly 6,000

The counter died early Sunday morning and I had to reset it up, but today is looking great, too. Tomorrow should be a big day. I'm readying 3 more mirrors to handle the load. Thank goodness for the mirrors. We're all getting slammed.

by **ntbullock** » February 1st, 2005, 9:14 pm

We got 20,000 hits yesterday. Today is turing out very well, too.

Eric and I have been quickly shooting the "Making Of". Hopefully, we can release that soon.

by **ntbullock** » February 2nd, 2005, 2:14 am

Eric and I recorded out portion tonight of the "Making Of". Apparently, we needed a "therapy session" because we talked for an hour and forty minutes about this project. What the hell is wrong with us? I feel better, though. We went through a lot on this project. Oh, we also got Jeromy's part tonight.

by **ntbullock** » February 3rd, 2005, 1:09 am

Unique hits:

Wed, February 02, 2005 14,452
Tue, February 01, 2005 17,092
Mon, January 31, 2005 20,736
Sun, January 30, 2005 5,351

We're having a good week. The counter keeps messing up a little, but these figures are representative of what's going on.

We recorded Michelle's interview tonight for the MO.

by **ntbullock** » February 3rd, 2005, 10:29 pm

Well, it's the third of February. Today we're going to get around 25,000 unique hits. We're barely able to keep this up and already half of the site's bandwidth is gone. I've got to figure something out. We broke 100,000 hits today. It took about a year to get that amount of hits with my first SW parody. Keeping the site afloat has become a part time job this week. One of our biggest mirrors went down today and I'm not sure if it'll go back up.

by **ntbullock** » February 5th, 2005, 1:14 am

We got about 20,000 unique hits Friday. We also shot a little bit for the "Making Of". Even if we had the MO done we wouldn't have any bandwidth to spare on SP to host it at the moment. Keeping the site up this week has been like owning the Tomagotchi from hell. I like that term, so I'm going to use it. Hopefully, the weekend will be a nice break.

by **ntbullock** » February 7th, 2005, 12:29 am

Even on weekends we're still getting over 10,000 hits a day. Amazing. Who knows how long it'll be this way. I've had to scale the entire site back due to bandwidth shortages. The site has never cost so much! Oh, and Kevin Rubio [TROOPS] complimented us today. That was nice of him.

by **ntbullock** » February 11th, 2005, 4:17 am

Tonight Eric and I worked on the Making Of for 6 hours. It should run under 20 minutes, hopefully. It's coming along. Hits have started to calm down a little. We're getting about 7-8 thousand a day now.

by **ntbullock** » February 13th, 2005, 10:34 am

Hits continue to calm, and I can't say that's a bad thing at this point. I'm finally regaining some control of the site. I await to see if there's a resurgence when the real trailer, and ultimately the movie, are released.

Eric and I are supposed to work on the MO today. It's looking like it might be 20-25 minutes now. But, it's turning out very well we think. I'm excited about it. I've been annoying Eric trying to work on it [we're editing out at his house]. Hell, I might have to plan a sleepover where we make s'mores and talk about boys and make paper dolls... just so I can get some editing done. What? He likes sleepovers. That's his bag.

Anyway, I'm still trying to update this prod. journal up through when the real movie hits theaters. Obviously, not as much, but enough so I can go back later and track the whole thing, for whatever reason, if I want.

by **ntbullock** » February 14th, 2005, 3:26 am

Eric and I spent another 6 1/2 hours on the MO tonight. We've got a really good rough cut. Still much tweaking to do, but we've got it under 20 minutes at least.

The SWE3 movie has brought in 200,000 hits in about 2 weeks.

Star Wars Episode III [COMPLETED]

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