Wowza, get a loada this guy, am I right folks?

I don't know what I'm gonna do with this little blog. I've kind of put all my filmmaking aspirations on the back burner for the time being, a topic for another time. I'd still like to keep this little guy up, because I still want something creative in my life. I'm not sure what that's gonna look like. Maybe I'll make it one project a week instead of 3-5 projects. Maybe I'll make it two a month. I don't know. I'm doing a lot of thinking, and very little brainstorming. I'm also partially waiting to see what my dad blog is gonna do (dad blog here). But I shouldn't have what I do dependent on what Victor does, so. *Jared voice* Soooo yeah. That's the update. I'll be going now.

Week 12: Bite Nite Time Lapse

Hey all, this post is late, obviously. I was meaning to post it on Friday or so, but then I was out of town with just my laptop, where I didn't have the video file. So I couldn't upload it until today. But here it is!

This is the latest of my sound time lapses, a semi tradition I started in Sophomore/Junior year. This time I stepped it up by including a time lapse of the actual Pro Tools windows, which pretty much took me until day two to figure out how to perfect. It's actually pretty fun to watch that little corner screen, and I'm thinking I should make another version of this where Pro Tools is the main screen and I'm in the bottom corner. Maybe I will. Enjoy

This is likely my last content of 2016. I leave tomorrow for Alaska, and I ain't luggin' my PC up there - which is my main means of content production. I may do a write up on how this project will go for 2017,  and while I have semi vaild excuses I'm not super pleased with how I've been doing lately. In the meantime I will continue to suggest you check out my close friend Victor's blog. He makes more and often better stuff than me, but don't tell him that. Also check out *borat voice* my wife's blog. The good news is, she probably makes the best content out of all of us, the bad news is her website literally doesn't work so no one can view it but her.

So yeah. Bye.

Week 11: Bite Nite Write Up

This post won't make a lot of sense cause this film hasn't been posted to the web, so you won't have anything to reference. But maybe you can still enjoy this.

I was asked by some good friends who are still at Fox to do the production and post sound on their Intermediate Directing final. This is my write up on my work over the course of three nights.

Night one

Today I got started at 7pm, and spent about an hour and a half trying to make Pro Tools cooperate. Not only was Pro Tools crashing while I wasn’t doing anything, it wouldn’t connect to my controller. So I spent time figuring all that out, but eventually I was victorious. First things first, I set to organizing the project, color coding, grouping etc. I only had like twenty minutes once I fixed everything before I had other obligations that kept me busy until 2am.

At 2am I returned to my desk and started Pro Tools back up, and everything worked miraculously (knock on wood). I started back to work on my organization. I wanted my track colors to signify which character/mic it was, which meant I had to organize all the dialogue files. Some had been renamed and changed positions in the timeline. I also went through and added in some additional dialogue tracks that I needed. This all took some finagling but I eventually got to a layout I like, color coordinated and all. After this, I decided I would do “some” dialogue smoothing. I went through and made sure everything flowed together, sometimes changing which take I used so it sounded good. I did some preliminary mixing, mostly just turning everything up to a good level and making sure the dialogue volume was relatively even throughout the film. Before I knew it, it was 5:30am. I had most of the dialogue smoothed out, and will go back and polish it as needed. That’s all for tonight.


Night Two

This night started with another healthy dose of trying to make Pro Tools work with my controller. After this I decided I wasn’t going to turn my computer off until I was done with this project. I received the music, so I decided since that was a key element I would focus on that. I received some guidance on what to do, but given mostly free reign. I assembled all the music, hitting the cues I wanted to. This cut took a while to perfect, I spent a lot of time making sure the cuts between songs were invisible.I sent a preview of this off to one of the directors to get some notes, she had a couple changes she wanted, so I set to making those. And that took a long time. A really long time. I tried to make these changes fit with what I had already done, but it was just not happening, so I went back to the drawing board. I changed bits and pieces of my original edit one at a time until eventually it was entirely different. There were four, maybe even five, cues that I really wanted the music to hit perfectly, but for the life of me I could never get all of them to work. If I synced one up, another one would be off. I did a lot of wrestling and finagling and bashing different parts of the music together. It’s a lot like working with a puzzle, except none of the puzzle pieces are cut out, so you have to figure out how to cut it up and then put it together. The song has three or four distinct parts, and I wanted to use them not in the order they are presented. So in addition to the puzzle pieces not being cut out, the puzzle has four different designs that I need to make mesh together. I eventually got SUPER close to having the cues right, I was only missing the one big one that I really wanted, but I had kind of written it off. At this point there were a lot of cuts that were close but not good enough for me, and I still didn’t like how my cues were landing. And I didn’t want to compromise on either the cuts or the cues, so I really buckled down and started working small. Moving things around, to see if they fit, copying in some drums to make sure I can hit cues etc. Eventually everything shook out and sounded as near to perfect as I think I could’ve done. There was a lot of work put into making the music work, and hopefully no one will notice. At this point it was like 5am, and I hit a wall, I’m not as young as when I was in college. But I also realized that my deadline was fast approaching (basically a day and half at this point) and I decided to try to “worldize” the music. This means making the music seem like it’s in the world, makes sense right? I also tried doing some wacky effects for one part and I didn’t really like it so I decided to go to bed.

Day Three

The big day. This was was my last day to work on the film.

Now that I only had one day left to work on this, I started earlier in the day to have as much time as possible. I received feedback from the other director who didn’t like one of the cuts - which is fine, it was the cut that I thought of as the weakest. I also received some isolated vocals so that I could try some crazy things without touching the music. But first things first, it was a quiet day - thanks to the city basically being shut down for snow - so I set up an on the fly isolation booth. It may have done nothing, it may have kinda helped, who knows. So with my boothy thing assembled I brought in Lauren to do some ADR for a couple lines. Once I was done with that I grabbed some clothes and did the foley for each of the main characters. Then I kinda tried to do footsteps and I wasn’t really feeling it. So I stopped.

With all the foley in place I moved into placing all the cut FX (sound effects pulled from sound effects libraries). A big part of this was picking the ambient noises for both exterior scenes and also getting a good party crowd noise. I found some good ones and put those in and gave them a quick mix and cut them to the scenes. At this point I decided to tackle a scene where one character gets scratched and another gets bitten on the neck. Both of these took a bit of finessing, the scratch more than the bite actually. For the bite, I grabbed a couple different effects that I liked together (an apple being bitten and celery being snapped), but it wasn’t enough I still didn’t like it. On set, the actors didn’t really make any sounds when biting/being bitten, so I pulled Lauren back in and had her give me a few pained screams. I then recorded me acting like a dog and biting my hand, which I pitched down just a touch. Everything together sounded a lot more convincing, but it still wasn’t enough. I once again grabbed Lauren and recorded a few takes of us reacting as the crowd. Some gasps and “oh my god”s went a long way to making everything sound more convincing.

Throughout my work on this, a thorn in my side was this one part where the music needed to get weird and I couldn’t get it right, I was never really happy with it, and neither was the director. I kept trying different things and just didn’t like it. Eventually I got some pretty good direction on where I should take the sound and I think I got something that was at the very least presentable. Next for the music, I had to figure out how to end this thing. There were a few parts that I could sync the music up to, but none of the music really fit. I figured out something that worked alright, but it’s not my favorite musical cue in this thing.

Sidebar, keep in mind a lot of this happened out of order, I bounced around between different tasks on this projects, more so than in the past. I would be editing music and then want to to move on for a bit, or I would remember something I needed to add.

I polished dialogue, and then I polished it more. I put some EQs on a few clips, made sure there were no obvious cuts, made sure the background noise matched for every track.

At some part, maybe around 6 or 7am, I ran out of things I needed to add. I put all the parts together and I just kept rewatching the film, every time finding one or two things I wanted to tweak. Maybe it was a transition that didn’t work, maybe it was mixing something higher or lower. And I kind of did this until I finally turned the film in at 9am.

Most of the work on this film was done in this night. I set the foundation for everything by spending two solid nights dedicated to assembling the dialogue and the music, but the film came together all in this night. And while I didn’t have a lot of time, I think this is one of my more polished films. There’s still a lot of issues in it I think, my mixing is still not very good, but overall I’m pretty happy with it.

Week 9 - Wrap Up(?)

Hey folks.

As you can see I did nothing for now two weeks in a row. Some family stuff came up last week, and while I did record one thing with Victor it didn't go well (as outlined here). It was actually really fun and lifted my spirits quite a bit. A personal, rather than creative success.

I have some good news. The great content drought of November/December 2016 is nearing it's end. A short film I did sound on has achieved that mythical status "Picture Lock". This means I am in the clear to start working on it. And unlike the usual content for this blog, other people are depending on me for this - which means I will actually do it and do it well. So that's great! But it probably won't be posted online till the spring (maybe who knows). Which isn't great. But fear not, I've developed a plan.

I'm gonna do an in depth post on my work on the film. Either in the form of multiple posts over the course of post production, or one giant post at the end of it all. In addition I'm gonna go ham on a bit of a tradition I started some years back, the post sound timelapse. I have a few uploaded to the web, here are the good ones if you're interested. Now that I'm no longer at Fox, I won't have to reserve time in the studio, which means I won't need to pull all nighters like when I was in college. This might not make for as compelling timelapses though. If I only work in like 3 hour sections every day, it might not be as cool, but I'm gonna try regardless.

So that's the plan. No rolls for this week, and maybe next week too depending on how long this thing takes. But stay tuned, things are coming, I promise.

Week 8: Wrap Up(?)

I did nothing, I'm bad, rolls:

9, 14, 15, 6, 1

Which are "Take notes on a film as I watch it", "Write/Record a radio play", "Shoot something, anything and edit it", "Write about a filmmaker I love", "Write a short story/script".

No promises.

Week 7: Wrap Up

Hey everyone, long time no see.

This week was probably my most successful, although it might not look like it. I only did two things, but both were fairly involved practice activities.  This was all in addition to running sound on a shoot on Tuesday and Wednesday for some friends who are still at Fox.

The shoots on Tuesday and Wednesday went pretty well, Wednesday went until 5am, but I actually miss those kinds of shoots. I did a good job on sound and from what I saw it's gonna look great (thanks to the eyes of friend-of-the-show David Ridder).

(These are the only pictures I have from set.)

I'm really looking forward to doing post sound on this film. Updates on that whenever it happens.

But onto things pertaining to this blog. For "Record a Podcast", Thursday I recorded an hour and a half conversation with my friend Victor (who incidentally runs my father blog). I have a couple episodes worth of Podcast probably, but for this week I settled on us discussing both of our D20 blogs. This was an easy yet time consuming project, I had a pretty good grasp on how to edit a podcast from my work on "Everyone is John" a couple weeks ago. I'm reasonably pleased with this. There isn't much creativity involved, but content is content.

Next up though is the time stealer, "Shoot Anything and Edit It" and while I cheated because I didn't film this footage, I did edit it and I did shoot something. I'm really really happy with this, it's probably tied with "Everyone is John" for my favorite thing I've made for this blog. I went into detail on what I did for this video, and I'm pretty happy with that portion of the post. I, at least, think it's fairly interesting. So check it out and see if you do too (you won't).

Overall I'm really happy with this week. I only did 2/3 of my intended projects, but if you count shooting for two days and the fact that the two projects I did were practice activities, it adds up to me being fine with it. But what does this new week hold?

17, 14, 9, 18, 13. Wow, that's a lot of Practice Activities, let's take a closer look:

Music Video Without Music (good lord, again?); Write/Record a Radio Play; Take Notes on a Film as I Watch It; Work on Jonesy and the Big Chap; Video Essay.

Well. It looks like a busy week. But keep in mind Thanksgiving is this week, and I don't know when I'll need to start working on post for that short film. With all that said, I'm once again hopeful for this week.

Wish me luck.

Week 7: Shoot Anything and Edit It - "Will I Know Peace?"

I spent a deceitfully long time on this to get it perfect. And it worked. This is perfect.

This was filmed a couple weeks ago for a shoot (nice) I was doing sound on, we had the opportunity to do this, and we took it. Huge shoutout to Andrew Koehler for inviting me on the shoot, and filming this video; also shouts out to David Ridder who was also there and sent me the footage and is just a good dude always. Let's go into a break down of the work I did on this.

First I brought the clips into Premiere. Looking over the shots, I came up with the idea pretty easily. I knew it was gonna take some After Effects work. I also knew that with what I wanted to do with the sound I would need to use Pro Tools. The footage had no sound, which is fine - I would've probably dumped it anyway. I dropped in the music to make sure everything was synced up how I wanted. To get the song right I had to chop it up in a couple places, but Ave Maria is pretty forgiving when it comes to editing, as it turns out. As soon as I had the edit how I wanted I exported the video and an OMF and moved to Pro Tools - my sweet, sweet Pro Tools.

I started out by making markers at each gunshot, to save me time in the future - which was a good idea. Next I went about finding my gunshots, which was made really easy thanks to Still North Media's Firearm SFX Library, a library I backed on Kickstarter years ago and is still paying dividends. It's free so check it out if you like sounds. I grabbed a couple handfuls of clips that had the tone I was looking for, chopped 'em up and spaced them out about where they needed to be. Fun fact, most of the gunshots are shotguns with a couple rifles. I wanted the shots to have more "boom" than "crack". After putting the gunshots in their general place, I looked for some gun foley sounds. Loading mags, racking the slide, and miscellaneous handling noise all found they're way onto the timeline. Once I had the gun handling at the beginning done, I focused on the gunshots. For every shot I also wanted to include the sound of the slide, just for some added texture. I synced the shots up to the video easily enough and moved on to phase two.

I bussed(sent) all the gunshot tracks into an aux input track, added reverb and made it juuuuust right. I did the same for the foley sounds which included all the slide clips. After all the reverb was good, I set to mixing the sound effects with music. I made sure every shot/foley was as loud as it seemed it would be on screen, depending on how far away the camera was and where the gun was. Once that was done, I bussed the "reverb" aux faders into two second aux faders to have easy control over the total volume of the tracks. And since the shots and the foley was on separate faders it was easy to lower the shots for the "flashback" part of the video. With everything mixed I watched the video through a billion times and almost cried with joy. Lastly, I added in some bird sounds just to give the beginning and end some ambience. I bounced the tracks and sent them to Premiere. Once there, I grabbed the video clip that needed VFX and sent it to (dun dun dun) After Effects.

This was a really simple idea that I made really complicated. I actually started, though, by making things easier for myself. I hit "Track Camera" within AE and it actually made a perfect 3D camera that matched what Andrew did on set, I was shocked. This made placing the thought bubble and text really easy. But of course nothing can be easy, and I put the bubble slightly behind me so that it had a bit of foreground interaction. I started by rotoscoping my hat by hand, but then I had the thought "Hey maybe the Roto Brush will work well for this shot" - a thought my VFX professor told us to never have. And while the Roto Brush was very precise, it was slow going. Probably faster than what I could do by hand, but who knows? Things were looking good, but I decided that this wasn't enough. I wanted the thought bubble to have a more unique and interesting look. So I spent about an hour trying to find the perfect look, and while I'm not completely happy with it, I think it looks fine. And after that things were looking even better than before, and then I thought "Hey wouldn't it be funny if I never blinked my eyes in this shot?" Another bad thought. I spent about an hour doing each blink - and you'll notice in the finished video, I blink. It looked okay. Not good enough for me to let it go through though. There were some finishing touches on my roto-work and then I rendered and sent the clip back to Premiere. After a quick color grade I exported the final product.

And that's that. I hope you at least somewhat enjoyed that write up on my WORKFLOW. I had a really good time doing the sound and a good time editing the video and an alright time doing the VFX.

I really stepped it up on the content this week. In my opinion.

Peace.