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Showing posts with label Alyssa kay. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Alyssa kay. Show all posts

Monday, January 20, 2014

Mondo Beacho update Monday Jan 20

Ahren Buhmann and Sarah Winsor on set of Mondo Beacho
Ahren Buhmann and Sarah Winsor on set
photo by Mel Cafe
I'm working on the movie theater scene and accompanying bookends, hoping to finish them up tonight.

We originally shot a different version of the theater scene inside the mighty Grand Illusion, but unfortunately that didn't work out. We reshot one scene another day back in the theater, but ended up doing the rest outside further down the Ave.

At the time, I was wondering if we'd run into trouble with the the Rat and Raven, whose establishment abutted the creepy stairwell we were commandeering for the shoot. I'd done a drive-by of the location a day earlier and it looked like they were painting outside. We were working fairly early in the day, but the local reprobates were already queuing up outside the bar across the street. A few potential problems here, and kinda/sorta no backup plan, nor desire to figure out how to do it the official way at this point.  But,  bon chance!  It turned out the painters had been painting over the signage; the Rat n' Raven had gone belly-up. (The actual rats and ravens, however, remained on site.)

Drunk on good luck, we also tried running across the street to ask the vegan restaurant next to the bar if we maybe set up our camera on their their roof, to get a production-values-friendly aerial shot. But they were in the middle of brunch and didn't want to talk to us. We ended up parking Kat's truck in the middle of the street and shooting from the back. Worked just as well.

I also spent a lot of time last week editing the band practice scene.

That was a complicated one, because the scene needs to do several things at once: show the relationships between a bunch of new characters, be cool as a band practice, and also fit in with the look/feel of the rest of the film.

For most of the previous scenes, (including the movie theater scenes) I've just been eyeballing all the footage at once and assembling it intuitively. But the band practice scene just had too much going on for that to work.

Kenna Kettrick, Amanda Keogh, Alyssa Kay, Zach Sanders, Brian Wolbert on set for Mondo Beacho
(L-R) Kenna Kettrick, Amanda Keogh, Alyssa Kay,
Zach Sanders,and Brian Wolbert on set.
photo by Mel Cafe
I ended up going back to look at how I'd diagrammed it in the screenplay for the actual shoot (go figure), and pretty much started over, but it went well after that.

It was sorta like when you're trying to figure out a technical problem and you finally decide to look at the manual.

And continuing my practice of doing everything the hard way.

But -- with the accumulated knowledge from doing it the hard way!

"Hard: my calling card"
     -- Chuck D

Monday, October 28, 2013

Mondo Beacho weekly update: audio edition

Mondo Beacho used this mic to record at one point, and will again in the future.
I finished naming and logging all the location sound files from Mondo Beacho over the weekend.

This was the first time I'd listened to a lot the production audio, and I was nervous about a couple of scenes.

The ambient sound on location in Georgetown was particularly difficult. Our biggest day there was on a nice, sunny Saturday,  and the area around the shoot (on the public street) was crowded with people. And motorcycles, and trucks. And freight trains.

And a crazy political performance artist with a portable sound system, who thought it'd be nice to be on film.

Oh yeah, and the Cessna jets, coming and going every ten minutes at 100 ft. overhead, from the nearby airport .

Did I mention that cast and crew had been on set since 5 am?

Anyway, with all that going on, audio from only one shot from that day was seriously affected, and that was a long master shot, which we covered heavily with a variety of nice, close shots. 

Beyond that, we have 100% lovely, usable audio. All taken with a portable recorder and shotgun mike on a boom pole. 

Thank you David Thomas!!

 

Also last week

I got together with a bunch of the actors to record clean versions of the three songs from the bonfire scene. The session was fun and went very well.

Singers included Sarah, Ahren, Riley, Kenna, Amanda, Alyssa, and Mel.

It was really great to see everyone again; I missed them.

In other news

2nd AD Kat Brede stopped by the other day to borrow my apple box for a different shoot.

I'm glad that the old box is getting a chance to go out in the field again.

Though it does make an awesome coffee table.