Update Monday, April 7. Mondo Beacho

Silent-era stars Dorothy Sebastian and Joan Crawford
on the beach

Yesssir, that's the life. Young and stylish and carefree. Lunching on the beach with a pal. Say, you brought your "uke" -- Let's have a song!

This picture reminds me of post-production music work in many ways. I too eat sandwiches!

Last week, I completed two new songs and sent them to David Thomas to begin mixing.

David and I also completed the mix-down of all the performance songs (ie: the bands). Now they sound great and are ready to go in the picture. I should mention that when I say "David and I" what I mean is David had already done the actual mixing and the brains part, and I came in and sat around and said stuff like "can we have a little more of that whatchacallit... that one."

I also roughed in three other songs, and I'm hoping to complete at least a couple of them during the next week. I tried out some alternate guitar tunings on one of them. (But not the Curtis Mayfield tuning... yet).

Beyond that, I also spent a lot of time trawling around and listening to local bands via various online resources to find like-minded individuals who might want to Collaborate with me.

There are a lot of good bands out there.  And of course, I want to Collaborate if at all possible.

But it never fails to amaze me how a song can seem like it'd work perfectly for a scene, but then when you actually go into the picture and put it over the scene, it's no good for reasons that aren't clear until you see it.

Nuance is the key thing.

Nuance is a nuisance.

But it's also the difference between good and "okay".

Roasted and burned.

Bleu cheese and rotten.

Mondo Beacho report March 31 - amassing songs

L-R: Erik Hammen, Sarah Winsor, Ahren Buhmann
(photo by David Thomas)

I got a lot done on Mondo Beacho this week.

It was kind of gloomy here in Seattle, but the sun finally came out yesterday and I went out for a run. On my new route, I passed right by the area you see in the photo on the left, where we shot a few scenes last summer.

I spent a lot of time talking over email with Greg Wharmby this week. Greg is one of the handful of great musicians around the country (including but not limited to Graig Markel, Punishment, Thomas Wold, Fermentation, and Thee Samedi) that I'm working with on the huge variety of tracks we need to complete the soundtrack for Mondo Beacho.

It's a lot of people, I'll tell ya what.

In fact, one might say that as usual, I'm doing a lot of "collaborating"!

Here's the tricky thing about movie music. It's more about feeling than melody. And, in Mondo Beacho, most of the music is presented as actual songs motivated by a specific source (usually the radio), as opposed to traditional omniscient soundtrack cues.

So in addition to being great tunes, these songs have to be specifically-atmospheric, the right tempo, and sound right with the rest of the film, and not get in the way of dialogue or suggest the wrong thing through lyrics.

In other words, the music has to serve the movie, not vise versa.

I have very high hopes for my musicians, because any gaps left over will have to be filled in by me. Unfortunately, I have to fill the gaps first, then backfill with new tunes as they come in.

I generally like to work on songs one at a time, but I've found with the amount of material and the sort of material I need to crank out, my burnout rate is a lot lower I actually have a bunch of pieces in progress at once. So I blast away on one song until I can't get any farther with it, and then switch over to a different one and keep working. Ultimately, it's headphone-fatigue that makes me stop for the day.

Arrangement is a big thing. And instrument choice. Sometimes the 20 dollar plastic, belt-clip preamp sounds more "right" than the real thing. Sometimes the cheezy software keyboard emulator that everyone in the world owns and is sick of sounds very right...  but only after I put it through a phalanx of top-secret studio-processing tricks of the damned. Many which I learned in making my previous film, Time of the Robots.

Speaking of studio tricks, I'm also working on getting together with David Thomas, to go over the mixes he's done of all the performance material, and today, I'm sending out release forms to all the musicians whose music is already baked into the rough cut!

Very exciting.

Mondo Beacho weekly update: audio edition

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.