Oscar Bait

Bill Martell re-posted an old blog post arguing persuasively to eliminate indy films from Oscar contention.
As an indy filmmaker I think it's a terrible idea but it makes sense if you're trying to get studio movies to be better*.

*Yes, I'm aware that genre indy pics are never Oscar-bait.

And More on ADR

Okay, these videos on dialog editing are just awesome. Nobody does videos about dialog editing, so these things are just a relief to look at. I'm thinking "Here's somebody who's really doing it!"
There are a few "rules" John Purcell lays down which are actually just "ProTools" rules. Stuff about using time compression and expansion and some of the data management he does. But otherwise -- who'd have thunk about reversing room tone to make a longer loop? Oh man, that changes my life right there.

This looks more like I expect to EQ lav mics under clothing. Sometimes a shelf on that very high end is nice (although there really isn't very much signal up there.) EQ band number 3 there has a mightily wide "Q" but it really helps with making the recording sound more natural. Obviously there's a lot of clothing to poke the sound through as everything below 1000 Hz needs a world of reduction.

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Man, I just had the biggest technical problem recording some ADR. Kept getting a "pop pop pop" sound on playback. I tried everything. Reboots, switching FireWire audio devices, flipping from ASIO to WDM. Finally tried recording to a new track. That worked. Sheesh. Very weird.

Me and those wireless lavs

This is what I've been doing to hidden lavalier microphones. It seems kind of extreme but the sound of a mic up against someone's chest, underneath their clothes, is fairly obnoxious. There's a big whumpus typically in the 200Hz region. And the very low end has been getting a shelf -- just to make it seem more natural. A tiny bit of whumpus is added right in the middle right where the consonants are. And I don't know but that high end bugs me. Maybe if we were using more expensive mics like DPA's or even COS11's I wouldn't mind it.

This is the third time I'm mixing this movie. Each mix involved a new philosophy. The second mix was all about pulling the faders down so we didn't hit the limiters so hard. This mix is all about adding massive robot sounds and doing ADR. We're scheduled to be done with all of those things by around the 4th of July. Which, for a movie originally scheduled to be finished on February 1, is uh. Well it's what it is.

Sound and the Furry

I'm gonna get this book. Dialogue Editing for Motion Pictures.
Also cool are the video tutorials available online associated with the book. Look, I straight-up do not agree on putting tones on any digital format. But I'm allowed to not agree with parts of stuff I otherwise like. It's in the Constitution.

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Oh man. My nice Sennheiser 580 headphones are falling apart. A new pair of Sennheiser HD600's is more money than I want to think about right now.

What part of this design isn't awesome? No part, that's what.

Wot Next?

I'm going to hang a copy of John August's "How To Write A Scene" in the office tomorrow.

Our editors likely think this is how we shoot our movies.

We have, I think, a complete list of dialog which needs ADR. I am trying to get over myself in that I like to think I can oversee the recording of dialog which does not need to be replaced. It's just not true. Some dialog will have to go and get itself re-recorded. It's just the way it is. There. Am I over it? We'll see.
It certainly does mean we have to schedule our post-production differently. I wish I had a solid clue about how long it takes to edit picture on a feature. The amount of time seems to be really random.
In any case, now in addition to our normal picture-lock, then dialog edit, sound effects, and music, we really have to schedule in ADR and not be ashamed about it.

Louder Bot

We don't tend to "test" our movies in any normal sort of way. What we will do, however, is show them to people for notes. The writer, the producer, the editor, the composer(s), all get to give notes. But these are people who have been, how shall we say, emotionally intimate with the picture.
So the biggest notes come from the distributor.
His particular notes were that the robot wasn't mechanical enough. More heavy robo-cop-esque. I made the robot more a "stealth" 'bot. But he's got to feel some weight.

So we're going through and adding some more bigness to his footsteps. A bit of a whirr and a bit of a clank.
And yup, I had been blind to the movie needing that. It totally needed it. And now the movie is better for it.
There were also a couple scenes I thought we could get away without doing ADR on. Those scenes need ADR. I was really too close to the movie to tell on my own but those were some additional notes by our sales rep/distributor.
So we're organizing the ADR. I was really hoping to have whole acts done by the end of the weekend but that doesn't look like it's gonna go down. We'll see what we can get though.

Celtx vs You

John J. Bruno does not like Celtx.
I'll tell ya, Celtx does not revision the way normal-budget movies want to be revisioned.

But we've managed to use it to schedule a couple features now. Note that the scheduling it does only works for us. A real AD would be driven insane by the limitations. I'm just happy it'll make call sheets. It doesn't do an awesome job with call sheets but it does an okay one.

Vers l'infini

Mathieu Cesar - "Vers l'infini et au-delà" from iconoclast on Vimeo.
This is what's going on in the Pandora Machine today. I mean, watching videos is what's going on.

Cineform

There are days when one must praise customer support. This is one of those days.

Jake at Cineform fixed my Neoscene (which had mysteriously stopped working). He actually logged into my machine and remotely dealt with it. I told him to go ahead and look through all my personal stuff and to edit the three features on there but I don't think he did either of those things. ;-)

Dynamo

Oh man. Ian Hubert has done it again. The fifth episode of "Dynamo". It's not so much a movie as a tone-poem of the mind.

Finishing the Finish

I keep "finishing" the movie. Meaning, I do all the changes on the punch list and then upload it again hoping that the changes are enough. So far I've addressed everyone's issues except for our sales rep's issues. Because he hasn't sent me a list of his issues. Oh but believe me, he will. He will.

So I've finished partying with a new mix for the entire picture. Wait. Do we even know what movie I'm talking about? It's 1202. Oh right: "Dead Raid".
I like this movie. It amuses me. After this there are two other movies to get to. The dragon movie needs to be finished up, and we have post-production on the Masquerade movie to do. I feel like I've been in exactly this situation for a goodly number of months.
Which I have. But soon. Soon there will be a Finishing. Right now I need a cookie.

Your three things for today

The Letus Helix. It's one of those new camera stabilization systems. And you know it's going to be awesome. I can't even remotely afford one right now, but it's going to be very cool. I've loved everything Letus has made.

Natural Reader is a pretty cool text-to-voice thing.

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The Headzone Pro was a thing Beyerdynamic made a while back. It's the only surround-sound monitor for headphones system I know of. You can plug in six channels and it does some psycho-acoustic thingy to do surround out of the two speakers in headphones. Which if you have problems getting your room quiet or sound-isolated enough, might be your best option. Problem is they only make a vastly more expensive system anymore.
Oh, and it's made to follow your head around although that sounds like it would be terrifically annoying.

Mixing too quiet means mixing too loud

If you're not trying to be really obnoxious to your office-mates you might think that it would be better to mix with your monitors turned down to a reasonable level. It's not. Indeed it means you have to mix over again.

In film there is a standard for how "loud" you should mix. Specifically, your monitors should be at 85dB SPL (measured in noise bands) from each speaker at the mix position with the meters at -20dB Fs. Does that make sense?
This is actually pretty loud. Louder than what you should be doing with music actually (my rule with mixing music is that you should be able to talk over it comfortably. That's how you know you're at about the right level.) Now the other thing with film mixing is that you typically have to hard-limit each channel at -12dB Fs. This may be more of a broadcast issue actually. But considering that -12dB Fs is 93dB SPL from each speaker it's a good idea to not go above that level anyway.
As an aside (isn't this entire post an aside?) I've often wondered why they fellows at Dolby or whomever decided to lose 12db of headroom from mixes. My only guess is that if all six channels of a 5.1 mix are limited to -12dB it becomes very hard to actually go above 0dB Fs when you mix all those channels together, even if you do it clumsily. That's my guess.
Anyway, remember about how 85dB SPL should equal -20dB Fs? Well even when I'm mixing "correctly" I don't even go that loud. I set my system to 72dB SPL at -20dB Fs. This makes mixes "louder" than if I'd done them at 85dB because I'm pushing the faders up more to make up for the fact that my monitors are turned down.
But this whole complaint is that I'd mixed the first pass of the Dead Residents movie even quieter than 72dB (somewhere around 60? Maybe?) and all of those mixes just slammed into those -12dB limiters way too often and too hard, losing any sort of dynamics in the mix and actually making it a bit distorted.
So, mixing quieter means mixing louder. Right?
Somebody re-write this so it makes sense.

Angry Planet on DVD

Angry Planet, the Mac Rogers-penned sci-fi picture we shot a while back, is out on DVD in North America.

Fun fact, by searching for "Angry Planet movie" I found that the design was come up through 99Designs.
There were some nice designs submitted. Some were based on an older piece of art for the movie (the art used for the streaming version of the movie.)

Those different versions of Daryl Boling are pretty amusing.
Order yours on Amazon or what-have-you. Buy some for the kids! (You know how the kids are always wearing through DVD's -- buy plenty of extras for 'em.)