Do You Hear What I Hear?

Well, 'tis the season!

Of course, aside from the music on the radio and some lights awkwardly strung up around a palm tree, you wouldn't know it out here in La-la Land.

Indeed, if you were to check the Mark-o-meter right now I would say "Chicago-longingness" is close to an all-time high. My favorite time of year and there's no snow, no cold, no CHRISTKINDLMARKET in Daley Plaza. I guess it's all for the best, since the past week and these next few days I am immersed in a tedious, time-consuming, (seemingly) never-ending world of sound editing.

Yeah, so as I mentioned a week or so ago, we picture locked on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. I'm very happy with the picture edit I locked, and since Dec 1st I have been adding a soundtrack to that picture.

Since we shot everything on old Arri S cameras that doesn't record sound we have to create all the sound that will be in the movie. That's EVERY SINGLE SOUND. The whirr of the computer, the typing on the keyboard, the car horns in the distance, the breathing through the nose...hence the tedious nature of the work.

And what gets really frustrating is that the more sounds you add, the more you feel like you need to add. At first, you see the actor walking down the hall and you think "okay, lets just put in some footsteps". Go out record the footsteps, sync them up, put the sound in. But then you watch it and you realize "well, we should hear his pants 'swooshing' as he walks. And his vest. And shouldn't the bottle he's holding in his hand make a noise? What kind of noise does a bottle even make?"

This is why it seems never ending, because life is so full of sounds, and you have to create all of them to enhance your movie. So even when you drop a bunch of sound in, someone watches it and says "You could add this sound here" and so on and so on.

However, it is really strangely satisfying when you get good sounds that truly improve the film. Plus, I have enjoyed working with a composer who is going to write a musical score that perfectly suits my film. This, I'm very excited about. Gone are the days when we'd have to edit the picture to fit a Beastie Boys song, now the music perfectly compliments the image.

My composer is from USC's special composer program, which is the only film composer program like its kind anywhere in the world. So you know these guys are good. As a friend of mine said just earlier tonight "These guys are much better and experienced composers than we are filmmakers", and I'd have to agree with him. And since I am an amazing filmmaker, you can only imagine how good these guys are.

So there's the good, the bad, and the ugly of this final stage of my film being made. Gone is the planned insanity of production and the story structuring (or restructuring) of editing. Now its just me, my movie, and a sleigh-load of sound.

We sound lock this Thursday and on Friday we have the sound mix (a fascinating process which I'll hopefully have time to write about. That is, if anyone's interested...?).

Only two weeks until I'm back in the CHI. Keep the cocoa warm, the brats hot, and your ears open.