Audio Person Needed

I need an audio assistant/intern/contractor. Willing to do sound recording for very low rates. Like $10/hour. Preferably with their own gear.
They would preferably have their own DAW (we prefer Samplitude because it's in-house but it isn't necessary). The job can be done remotely too. No need for someone local to NYC.

Audio person would be responsible for:

• Foley or cut effects for all footsteps and things that make sounds that look like they're happening to the characters onscreen.
• Also making cut-effects
• Backgrounds
• Music editing

If they could compose that would be awesome. But again, not required. And yeah, $10/hour isn't a living wage. This would be for a young person who wants some credits in features.

The birth of a space helmet

An "unfinished" helmet sits next to the silicon mold.

The "glass" part of the helmet needs to be cut out and replaced with the vacu-formed visors.

Although the helmets are intended to be weathered we are inclined to leave one of them white like this just because it looks nice.

The helmets have an almost organic look to them which I really like.

Dave Campfield's Caesar and Otto's Summer Camp Massacre is available on Amazon VOD.



And more pictures of the helmet. Anthony Jones cast it out of this nice, lightweight, resilient plastic stuff.

Glow and Helmet

Here's Anthony Jones' helmet being birthed from the silicone mold.

All about AfterEffects glow. Yup, I've violated all these rules. And will do so again.

Needs and Wants

I think I'm going to upgrade to this cooling system just to quiet my computer a bit:



I think we're just going to get some radios for this shoot. I think we need at least 4 of them.
Motorola seems to be the best-reviewed and are also reasonably priced.


I don't know which way to go though. Yellow kinda makes sense -- you'd want 'em to be bright for emergency purposes, no?


We're also going to need headsets. At least three.

Ha! And you wonder why I quit the Wooster Group. ;-)

In the virtual and real worlds

Work on Prometheus is being done.

Dolf Veenvliet is working on the smaller ship -- using Jason Birdsall's set for scale.

This model is waiting for UV wrapping. Dig the human figure for scale!

It's kind of awesome to have these great lights in Blender. I love the glow.

This is a preliminary lining-up of model to the actual set.

Anthony Jones sent me more pictures of making the mold for the helmets.

You can clearly see the silicone and the foam "structure" being built around it.

Here is the foam outer structure, held together with straps. Using foam is cost-effective and vastly lighter. Anthony did a pretty brilliant job!

Looking inside.

Looking inside and seeing detail. My dad pointed out there's no "0" on the keypad. I explained that the keypad won't have numbers but symbols -- it'll be in octal. ;-)

So This Happened

I don't know what to do about it. Other than watch. For much longer than you'd think. No. I mean even longer than that.

Bring on the Set

Adam Tweer and Jason Birdsall loading in the sets for The Prometheus Trap.

As it turns out we need Christmas lights. At least two more strings of Christmas lights.

The front of the set to the Prometheus. 

These groovy sets, designed and built by Jason, are incredibly easy to light.

Happy Robot Sings To Cat

This was the second funniest line from this week's 30 Rock:
“If you’re really gonna do this, you’d better get a move on. Right now, there are models waking up from their coke binges; multi-ethnic bartenders with daddy issues; former ballerinas who had to quit because their boobs got too big — they’re gonna hear about the horny billionaire, and Thad’s gonna forget all about his little crush. They’re coming, Liz. Click click. That’s their stilettos. Click click.”
The funniest line was:
"A gym teacher on a sex tour of Indonesia called, he wants his shirt back."

Via.
I feel like we need customized dog tags. Either for Tyrannosaurus Mouse or Pandora Machine. If not, we end up with Star Wars dog tags on our next movie.
Today is a big set move-in day.
Techno Info Slide. Only $15.

Imaginary Rehearsal

Today we had our first rehearsal without Lou. There was some sort of complicated mis-communication which involves his house not having electric and his cell phone not working.
So we had a rather expensive 3-piece rehearsal with Ethan, Arie, and me.

The band is very much not convinced that anything I'm suggesting is a good idea. In my experience that takes over 4 weeks. But eventually they'll come around. In the meantime we experimented with a number of notions. I think I've done a terrible job of explaining the vision of The Imaginary Opera.
Just using the word "Opera" with the two guys who do or had worked at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City is pretty loaded.

But we worked on some motifs (another couple motifs were rejected out-of-hand by the band). At one point I was playing piano and Arie was on guitar. Then there was a while where I was on piano and Arie was on keys (with Ethan playing standup). Then somehow I got back on guitar and was playing 6/8 against Ethan's 4/4 and nobody knows what happened. Luckily Ethan recorded it all on his sexy little Tascam portable recorder.
We did manage to play a couple of the little pieces of music from my dreams. And I think that those are going to work out very nicely.
I want to change the "tortoise" to something else. Something that has another word for it but that you also wouldn't flip on its back. I'm tempted to say "kitten" because none of them would know what a kitten was, now would they?
See? This is why nobody has any idea what I'm talking about. Sure, Chance Shirley would be right on board with the Blade Runner/Escape From New York/Apocalypse Now references, but he's in Birmingham (if you want to meet someone who really has no clue about these things, talk to my dad sometime.)
Ethan's engaged in a mighty struggle with GarageBand to try to get the recordings we made to us in a form we can actually listen to. We shoulda just played at my office today. ;-)

Arie asked if either of us knew The Decemberists. I said I couldn't think of their big song. As it turns out, this is it: The Decemberists "Why We Fight". It's a great tune.

Building the Helmet

Anthony Jones has made the mold for the helmet. Here are some pictures of the process. I won't go into any detail about the process 'cause I'll just say stuff that's wrong.
But he used a very cool foam for the outside, which saved money and weight. And he's already struck one helmet from the mold.
It's very cool looking. Almost an organic shape to it. I think we're going to leave one of the helmets white just because that looks so nice.

Bad Dates

This is an amazing documentary on making Indiana Jones. One thing I found very compelling is how Spielberg is so good at finding the little moments and making a story out of them -- like Marion drinking the shot which wins the drinking contest. It's what Blake Snyder would have probably called "mini 5-point finales". I'm generally terrible at those things.

Sniffing Around

I figure if we're going to spend as much as $40/hour on rehearsal we may as well just go into a recording studio. Note that of Tyrannosaurus Mouse I'm in a minority opinion on this issue.
SonicWave has an Amek/Neve mixer and they're $50/hour.
Grand Street has some very sexy microphones and is $80/hour.

I'll go ahead and say it: Everlong is a better song than Smells Like Teen Spirit.

Labor Law

So here's a thing -- don't have a Facebook policy at your shop. Just don't have one.
Thing is, calling someone a douche canoe is just something they could normally be fired for. BUT. And this is a giant "but". If someone writes on Facebook "My boss is a big jerk and we don't get paid well enough" and especially if someone else from your company chimes in with "Yeah" you can't fire them for that.
Why?

Because although your employees don't have 1st Amendment rights, they do have the National Labor Relations Act. And the NLRA does protect employee speech regarding wages and working conditions.
Clearly I have too much time on my hands dealing with renders today.

Last Night I Had The Strangest Dream

I actually had a dream about the upcoming Tyrannosaurus Mouse rehearsal. It turned out, of course, to be a recording session and I have a very detailed memory of discussing the track layout for the drums with the engineer.

The key is to reduce the sheer number of tracks. We agreed that there should be one kick, one snare, one right overhead for the "toms" side of the kit, and one overhead which would take care of the hi-hat because we didn't need a dedicated hi-hat track.
And yes, that was in my dream.
I was also disenchanted with the relatively small size of the guitar amp booth, but the studio we were in doesn't exist so that doesn't matter.
We recorded this:

Image via childhood friend Aaron Leone.

Various stuff on sound

I called the New York City-based rental house Dreamhire today and asked if he would match the rates of a rental house on the West Coast. He actually laughed at me. Problem is that Dreamhire's daily rate for a Cedar DNS 1000 is $185, while it's only $80/day at Audio Rents in California.

Although Audio Rents in CA has a 2-day minimum. Plus, of course, you have to pay for shipping.

The two words I have to say are "meh" and "feh".

There are a buncha audio post facilities in New York. Like:
http://www.buttonsny.com/index.cfm/id/home/lang/english/home

Stavrosound has a post on using multi-band expansion for dialog tracks. (In our shop we buss all the dialog to a subgroup with Samplitude's multiband expander strapped over it.)

I'm going over much more detail about mixing for film at blog.pleasurefortheempire.com because it's such an incredibly exciting topic.

Newe Machine

I've been looking at some AfterEffects projects. Just looking.


http://videohive.net/item/alien-encounter/1488423?WT.ac=category_item&WT.seg_1=category_item&WT.z_author=caeazar

It turns out there are some utilities for the MSI X79A-GD65 "Military Class" mainboard that I have which allow the temperature to be monitored and regulated without going directly into the BIOS. "Click Bios II" and "System Monitor" deals with overclocking.

I figure if the CPU temperature is less than 40 degrees Centigrade then I'm in relatively good shape as long as the mainboard doesn't go above 45 degrees. In any case, setting the fans to "auto" makes the machine a whole lot quieter. If it starts to heat up, the computer will up the fan speed. Still, I'm checking into a quieter top fan for the machine.

Marcus the robot says hello.

The Titanus machine is very nice. It's been thrown into production. I've already done heavy mixing and 3D animation. These frames are taking about 40 seconds to render and I'm not even being polite to the machine -- I'll be working on audio in another window in a minute.

Today's Exciting Notes

Make it clearer that the "bad" guys are from Earth. Make the decision to board the Prometheus a bigger deal.
How did Trent kill the other members of the crew?
How did Trent steer the ship off-course?
+++++
The new computer, Artemis, is fast. But it is loud as can be. It runs cool though. I suspect I can shut off the one fan which is so loud. I'll be finding out about that soon.

I'm dealing with notes on the mix of Day 2. A lot of these notes I remember from originally mixing it. And so many of the things I did were deliberate. This is a big lesson we've learned though. We're getting dinged on the English mix -- not the M&E's (which is where we expect to get flak). Right now I'm busy blaming Nat Cassidy. Because he sometimes opens his mouth like he's about to say something and the lab kicks that back as "there's no voice right there." Yeah.
I think one of the lessons here is that I need to mix at higher volumes. By that I mean my monitors have to be set louder. This can be confusing to them what don't do audio but the standard in motion pictures is that -20dB on your meters should be 85dB SPL in the room. It's a tad more complicated than that but what that means is that you're mixing to a standard level of loudness. Now, TV mixers sometimes use -20dB as 72dB SPL in the room. The effect of this is that the mix itself is usually made louder -- with louder dialog -- because your monitors have been turned down a bit.
And I'll go ahead and admit that sometimes (most of the time) I mix with an even lower calibration than that. And the effect of this tends to be that my dialog, effects, and music levels are slammed into the limiters. And (except for dialog) that's never a good thing.
+++++
It's funny how my dad, in a completely different business, has many of the same problems we do. The other day he said to me "Oh yeah, I know the feeling of having to go back and do work over again that we thought we'd finished." Yup. That's construction.
And honestly a lot of the way we do things is based on how my dad does things. We prefer punch lists in order to make notes (I suspect that elsewhere in the movie business it's called "spotting" even when it's a QC list of stuff the lab rejects.) We use job numbers. And we struggle with scheduling.
+++++
Today, just in order to irritate David Ian Lee, I whispered two lines of his dialog in the mix of Day 2. Because for whatever reason those lines were missing. And he will be irked! ;-)

Things For Today

This is the place where I talk about mixing movies, right? Yes. Yes it is. Not the Pandora Machine blog or the Tyrannosaurus Mouse blog.
Right?
Anyway:
I don't have a Cedar DNS 1000 because it costs six thousand bucks. But I have tried the Waves "Cedar-like" Waves WNS (Waves Noise Suppressor) and the Waves W43 (which is their Dolby Cat 43 - like plugin.)
Word on the street is that the WNS is about as effective as the DNS but it ain't as pretty sounding. It will remove the room yuk from normal dialog tracks, that I can confirm.

Right now I'm digging the built-in Samplitude "de-noiser" for tape-like hiss better than either of the Waves plugins.

"Zero DownTime" means over an our of starting and re-starting your computer, as it turns out.

I'm also feeling I may be prejudiced by reviews but the W43 sounds a bit better to me than the WNS. It's not as effective on dealing with noise on dialog tracks. On dialog I simply need something like the WNS. Sometimes there are some discounts out there on the wild web but the basic street price is $600 for the WNS. And that's considerably cheaper than the Cedar DNS-1000 (a Cedar was sold recently on eBay for $1900).

But I suspect that I should get the WNS plugin (I'm using the demo right now) before mixing the next picture.

Dig this post on cue-ing a Foley session. It's Pro-Tools-centric. I always thought the Foley people spotted their own tracks. Obviously they're used to someone sending them a session already spotted.

I'm working on new mixes for Day 2. And I'm mixing Android Insurrection. And I'm creating a new opening for Android Insurrection.

Here are some important notes for me:

"1002 from pre-render" is the version of 1002 with the multitrack audio.
"1002 2012" is the new version with the new mix.

Crash the Computer Day

Today is a computer-crashing day here in the Pandora Machine. FedEx says my new machine should get here today but I just don't believe them.
My groovy cousin Jaime-Jin is interviewed here.

Neil Benezra has a post-mixing house called the Brooklyn Sound Society. I chatted with him the other day regarding the Cedar DNS 1000 (he has one).
Alchemy Sound is a (primarily) ADR facility Upstate. I think it's funny that we all go to so much trouble to emulate the microphones used in production sound but nobody tries to emulate the preamps. Heck, I use Neve preamps and Apogee converters. In the field we just use Sound Devices 702 preamps/converters. Sure they sound good but not Neve/Apogee good.
Hmm... and I guess it's a tad odd that Foley artists tend to use shotguns when I think that most features will steer toward hypercardiods like the Schoeps. Actually, on our sets I've pretty much banned shotguns altogether. Even for exteriors. That's because the sound I find to be harder to edit from a shotgun. I'd rather just give up and go wireless. But anyway, that's just me.

Prometheus Trap Breakdown

I do a thing here on this blog which otherwise drives me nuts in real life. See, I put this amusing picture here and it has nothing to do with the rest of this post.

But the point of the amusing picture is simply that it amuses me. It doesn't in turn make the rest of the post a joke.
Likewise I have a "no jokes" rule in brainstorming. If you're just going to make a joke, you're wasting everyone's time. I'd rather you came up with a bad idea than an idea that's deliberately bad.
But being as this is my blog, I can deface it in any way my little brain sees fit. Or any way that I happen to have images sitting on my desktop which haven't been uploaded yet.
OK, now that I've got that off my chest, here is the basic breakdown for the 8-day shoot that will be The Prometheus Trap.

1. Venom bridge (small cockpit from Jason)/Venom corridor (this is a gratuitous set, it'll be scheduled on the same day as the Venom Bridge, maybe it'll be the tube?)
2. Venom Cyro-Compartment/Venom Locker Room (this is actually the same set and will be the locker room at SRS).
3. Cargo bay (the shop -- must be filled with haze and be dark outside)
4. Prometheus airlock (we have to build this set with a door openable by oxyaceteline torch)/Promethius corridors (built corridors)
5. Prometheus Cryo-Compartment (built set)
6. Observation Deck (built set)
7. Bridge (Jason's bridge)
8. Engineering (I have no idea)

HUD Comes Up Red

Jimmy put robots on this asteroid. As a rule when they use robots they really wanna keep it. Same is true with us -- flesh is cheaper than steel.
But your team doesn't have any robots. Damn things more likely to kill your own guys than to take on Jimmy anyway. That's why nobody wants to work with 'bots.
There's some kind of low gravity on this rock. Even in your full armor you weigh about as much as a baby. You learn that gets real clumsy real fast and you hug the ground crawling toward "Target X" which is supposed to be the entrance to their underground complex.
The first time you're hit you don't even know it. Your suit knows it though. HUD comes up red and decides that the shrapnel is too close to your spine to let you move anymore. So you feel yourself suddenly grow tired. More tired than you've ever been before. And you fall over like a statue, absolutely frozen.
This is what? The third, fourth time you've been hit. You don't remember and you don't care. Thing is, you're out in the open. And Jimmy wants you gone baby, not just taken out of commission for a while. Your rank insignia make you a senior NCO.
The stripes are just out there glowing. Any drone that comes by will punch depleted uranium into your medulla oblongata just as a sub-routine.

But your suit feels your stress go way up. It's almost like a gentle hiss in your brain when the miniature pumps change up your brain chemistry so you start feeling like lying here face down on this rock with enemy mechs all around you is the most comfortable place you could possibly be.

Artemus

Stavrosound has a post on using multi-band expansion for dialog tracks. (We buss all the dialog to a subgroup with Samplitude's multiband expander set on it.)

Did I already blog about that? I may very well have.

New computer is built. And on its way. As per Jeff Wills, the name of the new machine will be Artemis. By coincidence, one of the characters in The Prometheus Trap by Steven Niles is named Artemis. The classical references just keep on coming.

I need to get it up and running like the dickens. Does that even make any sense? It's coming from Titanus Computers. I've got mixing and rendering to do in order to keep my sales rep from killing me.

 Anthony Jones if finishing up the cast for our helmets. Those downward-pointing nozzles will be open so that the actors won't pass out as easily from lack of oxygen.

I'm kinda grooving to the semi-organic look of the helmets.

The Stars My Dispatches

So I'm reading two books right now. Dispatches by Michael Herr and The Stars My Destination  by Alfred Bester.

Vorga-T: 1339 Crew by InfinitudeTortoises
Shop for a different t-shirt design

Here's a friendly tip: don't read Dispatches unless you're heavily medicated. It's a fascinating book, but it'll royally piss you off. Herr's writing style became essentially the voice we think of in our heads of the American experience in the Vietnam War. He did, after all, co-write the screenplays of both Apocalypse Now as well as Full Metal Jacket.
His deconstruction of the sheer amount of bullshit shoveled on the American public by the Army, the Marines, General Westmoreland, and the whole gang of idiots running that show is just astounding.
Like science-fiction + madness levels of astounding. The book is bad for your blood pressure.
The writing style is somewhat trippy and in the "you are here" poetry of the "new journalism" of the time. But honestly, what he's saying is so crazy you can't write about it without talking about the metaphor of a snake which winds from Washington DC through Saigon to I Corps. The whole war was just nuts. Off the wall head banging screaming in the middle of the night nuts.
And if you want to read about it, read Dispatches.

There's a Marine named "Day Tripper". That's such an awesome name we have to use it somewhere.

Now, this The Stars, My Destination is a shockingly modern-seeming book. And it cooks along at quite a clip too. It's also about madness, but lucky for us it's just one dude's madness and it's a long time from now.

All Of My Friends Are Better Directors Than Me

Jill Sprecher has a new movie out this weekend. It's called Thin Ice.

The Last Thing You Need

You're flat on your back, staring up at some star you've never seen before. Your suit has you swimming in a bluelove haze of gentle flowers which can only mean you've been hit real bad and one of the little computer brains in your armor decided to give you the best stuff it had.
It turns out that it was a processor by your right knee. It talked to the chips in your brain, gave them a "handshake" and filled your nervous system with fun-time.
There's a gurgling sound far away. That's the suit filling your lungs with air or, if you don't have enough lungs to aerate your blood the suit will make sure your brain gets enough O2 directly. Hell, you don't even have that much organic brain to contend with anyway.
Jimmy's sloughing over this planet with tanks, he doesn't like the armor we wear he wants to stay inside where it's warm and cozy. You have rudimentary readouts on your HUD. You can see the Skinny's tanks roll over the barren and barely Terraformed plateau as little red triangles. They seem to be ignoring you.
Suddenly one of his tanks disappears. Then another.
You're stoned out of your gourd at this point wondering how much of your body you really have left. You certainly don't have any of your mind left.
And the triangles on your heads-up-display keep blinking out.
Fighter-bombers. Terran. They're picking off the tanks which had cut your unit in half within 30 seconds of landing on this Plateau.
A robotic landing craft rides right on top of you. You see the enormous blood-red crescent on the intake door as they open and a probe comes down and attaches itself to a port on your helmet that is, for whatever reason, still exporting data. More probes and robotic arms descend -- cracking open your helmet and you take your first breath of air from this planet and it tastes like latrine mixed with diesel fuel and rotting fish but without what we might call the "pleasant" part of those smells.

You're nodding out though and a foam is being sprayed on you -- flesh healant and blood clotter. Your last thought before you black out is that some idiot AI from Mission is going to give you a promotion again now that you're more robot than human. That's the last thing you need.

It's Great to be King

One of the great things about being the British Monarch (hadn't you heard? Yes, it's true. Don't listen to that crazy person who claims to be the "Crown", because I am the Queen) is that you get to knight people.
And the best part about that is the name of the Order of the British Empire. Right out of Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure the full name is:
The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire

Most Excellent.

It is great to be king.

Internet Tough Guy

So yesterday I got the rest of the armor delivered. Here I am wearing it. For whatever reason I have a Delicate Cutter's T-shirt on underneath. Somehow it makes me seem more macho.
That being said the new plastic smell here in the studio is overpowering.

The Hero of the Internet.

(18) 01:08:08  -     01:08:52………...lack of foot sounds

Added footsteps, breathing, and some whispering in the BG. I put in some rolling sound of the Whirleydoomer.

(20) 01:12:08  -     01:12:10…..…….lack of voice

I think it just looks like he's saying something. He doesn't actually say anything there. I put more background crumpling of papers in instead.

(22) 01:16:27  -     01:16:30………...lack of woman’s screaming

I... hmm... nobody screams here. Perhaps I'm confused.

(28) 01:33:54  -     01:33:56…………overlap and echo voice / lack of voice

Ooh. I found the overlap. Yukky.

(30) 01:34:29  -     01:34:33…………blur voice

(31) 01:35:03  -     01:35:05…………volume down of voice

(37) 01:48:04  -     01:48:07…………lack of sound

(47) 02:06:16  -     02:06:18…………lack of sound

(49) 02:09:38  -     02:09:40…………lack of screaming

(50) 02:12:29  -     02:12:31…………lack of voice

(59) 01:47:30  -     01:47:31…………lack of voice

Look up "engine" on freesound.org -- there's some awesome work on there.
Also, this is the holy grail of bullet casings hitting a concrete floor:

Robots and You -- Perfect Together

Advanced Robotic Dynamics "ARD" is the technology of the future. With inverse-feedback servo technology, the robot of the future can do anything a man can do and better.
There will be no need for wars over precious natural resources as Advanced robots maintain their own power supply and can regenerate new parts. And because Robots only exist at the behest of human beings, their only purpose is to serve Mankind making life better for billions around the globe and beyond.
Robots can be used in

• Construction. 
• Farming.
• Education. 
• Nuclear Technologies.
• Home improvement.
• International Peacekeeping.
• And much much more.

Keep in mind that although you may have a robot assigned to you, each robot is operated by an Artificial Intelligence, or "A.I." which communicates with the robot using subspace frequency-shifted communication. This communication is completely silent to the organic listener, but occurs constantly to ensure normal operations and codes of conduct.
These forms of communication cannot affect human targets. There have been no verified reports of increased psychic abilities, psychokinesis, telekinesis, or the ability to move objects or control others with organic minds. These aren't your grandmother's robots, no sir!
Should you or anyone you come in contact with exhibit signs of sub space radio frequency interference, contact a member of Joint Command immediately for physiological and psychological evaluation and cleanup.
Be advised that depending on the make and model number of any given robot there may be certain features in their makeup which predispose them to antisocial behavior. It is best to avoid these robots or to limit the time you are in contact with them.
Have caution around robots. Remember, they have a job to do and you don't! Robots are doing everything in their power to help humanity. Let's make their jobs easier!
Only trained professionals should try to give any instructions or orders to a robot.

Bring On The Noize

So, I got some masters kicked back from QC at me recently. My biggest fear is getting masters kicked back at me because the Music & Effects tracks don't sound exactly like the English Dialog Mix. So I go to a lot of trouble to make sure they sound identical (with the exception of the actual English dialog of course.)
But these masters weren't kicked back because the English and the M&E's sounded different. They just didn't like the way the mix sounded.

Pushkin was a very quiet cat. Never made any sound on set. Once he prevented the sound mixer from rolling because he was sitting in her lap. "I can't roll, cat is on my lap." At the time that seemed like a completely valid reason to not roll sound.

Let's go back a bit. The picture is a post-apocalypse picture. And we shot it in one of the noisiest cities in North America. That is, of course, New York. What this means is that something approaching 100% of the original dialog is unusable. There's just about nothing you can do about that. It doesn't matter how you mic the actors or how long you wait for the damned fire trucks five blocks away to turn off their sirens, the city is simply noisy. You're not going to get post-apocalypse silence in your tracks.
Let's back up for a minute. It's standard operating procedure on big-budget pictures for the composer to write score for the entire picture, the Foley artist to create sound effects for the entire picture, and the sound department to cut sound effects for the entire picture. From start to end, "spotting" the picture be damned! Everybody does 100% of the picture and on the mix stage they decide if/when they're going to use Foley, sound effects, and/or music.
Now at some point the idiot director decided that he just wanted to hear wind and music when we're outside. That director has been shot sedated. Oh wait. It was me. So yeah, "sedated".
So there are big swaths of the picture where the lead is walking around abandoned Gowanus and there's just music on the sound track. No footsteps.

Well that was a mistake.

I realize the visual effects look painted, but I kinda dug that about this shot. Heck, I still dig that about this shot. Daryl Boling at the spaceport in Millennium Crisis. 

"Oops", as it turns out, doesn't really cut it with distributors. "Fix it" is usually the response. That's what I'm doing now. Y'know, because I don't have anything better to be doing -- what with completing post-production on one movie and going into pre-pro on another and going into production on yet another. Sheesh.
Well. Lesson learned.
We don't have to do the movie 100%. But buyers will be annoyed if we don't do the standard job of Foley for most footsteps and suchly.

I felt the urge to add this picture to this extremely important blog post.

And seriously, I need a little Foley-stepping thing for our recording studio. You know -- a little box with different surfaces to walk on? Aw heck, that'll never happen -- we'll just go out into the hallway on weekends with our portable recorder.

This is a good time for me to plug Freesound.org again. They seriously have the most usable Foley effects of any library. The thing with Foley -- sometimes you don't want it to sound too good. It's gotta be a bit band-limited, with a bit of distance to it, just so it'll fit in with the dialog tracks.

I also need a Cedar DNS. Need. Not want.