week after spring break

We are officially on the last page of the shooting script and it is such a relief!!  Spring Break was not as productive as we would have liked, but at the same time it was nice to have a little bit of a break from the project.  Once we were both back in town though, we met up frequently and had small work sessions.  We got through about two pages each day, and are currently in the last conversation.  Today we finished working on the scene where Emma auditions for her role with the company from New York.  There is a small piece missing from this scene that we will go back and finish this week before we present our cut on Thursday.  This piece will be a collection of images representing Emma's racing mind in her anxiety towards the performance.  Finally, the judges dismiss her and Nate is waiting to surprise her outside the theater.  So far, the cutting has gone pretty smoothly with the exception of certain sound barriers.  One argument between the couple, for example, had a lot of overlapping dialogue and sometimes the actors would improv a few lines here and there which changed up the order of the conversation.  We were able to work around all of these obstacles, however, and now have most of the ground work finished.  Tomorrow we will meet and hopefully finish laying out the timeline.  Next, we will go through with our notes and fine-tune according to class and producer suggestions.  Then we will add sound effects and music and adjust sound levels.  I can't believe how far it has come, this semester is flying by!

SPRING BREAK!!!

This week Taylor and I both were extremely busy and did not have as much time to meet as we would have liked.  Luckily, spring break is here and we will both be in town so we are hoping to make good use of that time.  I really would like to get as much cut as possible early on because we all know that the end of the semester is a nightmare.  Once we have an image-lock we will be able to work on the tedious fine tuning and finally sound.  To get ahead of the game, we have tried to look for sound effects on our own time this week.  I’m not sure what sounds will be usable, or even if we should go record a few sounds ourselves.  Once we get a folder of them all we will probably get together and try them out with the images, and then make that decision.  We still need to go back through our class and producer suggestions to make those changes.  We may take the spring break opportunity to do this as well.  I’m not sure if we will change the beginning or just keep plugging away towards the end and then refine, but I think the next time Taylor and I meet we will set our spring break goals.  We will keep you updated on those.

This week Taylor and I were preparing to present our second 4 minute rough cut.  For this cut we included the living room study argument, Emma’s run, Nate talking to Kathy on the phone, and the kidnap sequence.  Continuity gave us some issues, as with all narratives.  We tried to go through the footage with the script supervising notes and color highlight the good takes.  This way, we could easily locate the best performances, and try to find ways to continuously edit those.  When that was impossible, we looked in the non-highlighted footage.

Sound-wise, we haven’t really done too much yet.  We did put audio filters on Kathy’s telephone dialogue though, and we tried to make sure to use the pen tool at least on the ins and outs of the sound clips so that it wouldn’t be so jarring.  We still need to go back and adjust levels overall, I noticed in particular that the scene where Emma bangs on the front door of the apartment yelling for Nate is pretty loud.

I think that things are coming along very smoothly, we only have a few more scenes to add onto the end.  I really liked the suggestion that we had in class this week about moving the title sequence until after the first scene, I never even thought about doing that.  The plan is to keep getting the image and dialogue roughly laid out, and then go back and fine tune the entire movie as a whole using the in-class and producer critiques.  Then we will add foley and music.  I think that we are staying on track and we are trying to get as much done as possible in a timely manner so that we won’t have a lot to do at the end of the semester.