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| photo by David Thomas |
Costume department - wrapped. Barbara came by and picked up all the costumes, most of we've donated to the mighty Seattle Public Theater. Our kids take classes there and they would move out and live there if they could. The SPT community also brought us Barbara, Steven, Ahren, Kenna, Alyssa, Amanda, Emily, Zach, our set dresser Jennifer, and a bunch of extras.
Music. I finally recorded a guide track for the vocals for our opening song. The current version is a rough track that we used to shoot, with the understanding that we'd go back and get it right later. I still need to record some more guide tracks for the bonfire scenes and get all those tracks to the actors, and schedule some recording time. I also still need to record the DJ's radio-voice tracks with Steven. I will try to wrap my head around this in the coming week.
I was debating for a while whether to use some of the live versions of the bonfire songs that we recorded on set, but I'm pretty sure we can't use all the songs, so the problem is that post-recorded songs would probably not mesh gracefully with live songs. I don't want it to sound like it used to on "Happy Days", when Joanie and Chachi would sing, and Erin Moran would sing the first line naturally but when Scott Baio came in for the second line, they processed his voice through about sixty pounds of anti-stink filter, and it sounded like he was being beamed down from a space ship.
That sort of thing might be fine for Chachi, but not on my watch, brother.
Pre-Editing organization continues. I'm in the early end of the long process of organizing all the footage that we shot and then scanned in telecine. This organization involves taking very large files that are several reels of film combined, and cutting those files into a zillion small files, each named for a scene/shot number to make standalone sub-clips, one for each take and/or angle of a shot. Many of these files are only 20 seconds long. Most are not more than a minute. After I've worked for a while, I back up these new files onto a second drive. Using my old computer, this is all a slow process.
A big part of it is disentangling the relationship between the shot names and numbers that we planned on in pre-production, versus what we ended up and slated during production, versus what makes sense in organizing the footage for editing in post production. Ultimately, I have to defer to the production slate for the purposes of audio sync later, but again, as scenes were added/moved/altered in production, some slates were not consistent. So I make notes on the script and try to name the final file in a way that makes sense across the board.
I am not fastidious by nature, and have had to go back and rename files a couple times even in this beginning phase -- I'm an artist, not a bookkeeper -- so I have to keep reminding myself that this kind of fastidiousness pays off later. Or rather, the lack of fastidiousness will burn me later. Slow and steady...
However! The process of slowly, slowly going through all the footage, and not even doing it in order, is good for my brain as an editor, and already I've thought of some things that wouldn't have occurred to me if the process were more linear. And that is exactly in line with my usual, comfortable process...
In other news...
It's been raining a lot this month, and every morning without fail, I look out the window and am grateful that we had such a warm and sunny summer. Often September/October are warm and summery, but not this time, and we really lucked out. It's nice to see a daily reminder of this when other things we weren't as lucky with.
Alpha Cine is processing their last batch of film this week. Strange to have our own lab going the way of telecine-only, but not surprising, with Vancouver having swept away the production boom of the 90's, then the rise of digital, and finally the fall of projected film prints. I am not looking forward to mailing out my film for processing, but on the upside, I worked with Spectra Film & Video down in Hollywood when we did The Last City in the East, and they did a great job.
