Writing this post early in the week because Josh & I will have our hands full with editing audio all Thursday and then I'll be placing the score in the film.
When I think about this class I feel a lot of things: frustration, pride, anxiety, excitement. The time constraint is very unnerving and I just want to make the film the best it can be because we've put in so much work into it. There just isn't enough time in the day at this point to make everything perfect.
There are so many things out of my control. We wont get the edited ADR until Thursday, and I'm not getting music until Tuesday night. Then there's waiting for graphics editing/placing foley in. So I can't do anything on my end until at least tomorrow when we get all of that. (which is why I'm blogging now)
I know I'm the type of person who takes charge of things but I didn't expect to have to do so much of the actual work in post. I volunteered to do it because I know how to and it was easier to do in the time constraint than teach someone else how to log footage, etc. There are things I would change about the production, including my own work on it. I'm not perfect at all but I certainly tried. The film could not have been completed by the help of many of my group members and friends who are angels for stepping aside from their own productions to help in pre-production. This semester has given me so much stress and I am ready to be done.
Brb, crying over a bowl of cereal/pouring over all my other undone work/praying that I make it through this week in one piece. That was hella melodramatic and I know that everything will get done somehow. I'm trying to stay positive because I know the film will be great.
This past Saturday, I took out the intermediate audio production studio (Park 143) for a couple hours to just mess around and practice doing some foley work. I had it all planned out, my files were ready to go on my external hard drive, and I brought snacks (of course).
Things started out totally normal: I went to master and got them to unlock the room, put my stuff down, and then headed over to PPECs to pick up equipment that I reserved. I had reserved one ME-66 Rycote shotgun microphone, and the rest of my order would be non-reservables. Pretty soon I realized that the mic I reserved would not connect to the mic stand, nor would I be able to remove the dead cat. Fine, I'll take out a different one. Turns out, I'm not authorized to take out many microphones. I ended up with a ME-66 K-Tek shotgun mic, which also would not connect to a mic stand. Instead of the stand, I got a boom pole, mic boom cradle, attached that to a grip head and then attached the grip head to a C-stand. It was a very awkward setup and it looked like this.
Not as low to the ground as I wanted it to be.
The whole thing took about 25 minutes because for whatever reason, the computer I was being checked out on stopped working. Obviously, it wasn't anyone's fault at PPECs, but it was still frustrating since I lost all that time.
Once I got all my equipment set up and plugged in to the right inputs, I was ready to solve the next series of problems. For whatever reason, the computer in 143 would not recognized my external hard drive. This was an issue because the file of the video I wanted to use was on it, so I ran to master control to get help. We couldn't fix that problem, but the computer would read one of my thumb drives, so I transferred the file from the external to the thumb drive and then I was good to go.
Nope. Not yet. I thought I had everything set up and ready but whenever I would hit record on any track that wasn't the first one, no waveform would display in the recording, which meant it was not recording any sound at all. I asked for help again and figured out that there was a setting turned on in Pro Tools that makes it so that every time you add a track, it automatically chooses the next input for you. So the first track would record from input one--that's where the mic was plugged in; since I only had one mic, track two would automatically try to record from a second input that didn't exist. Once we identified the problem, it was easy to go in and switch the input to mic one for every track.
After working out all the kinks I could finally begin. And let me tell you, foley is 100% at least a two man (or woman) job. I probably looked like an idiot to all the families walking around Park peeking through the window to 143 as I hit record and ran from the control room into the studio to record a couple times and then ran back again. But I don't really care.
This is the video I attempted to foley. It's a short animation of a guy getting up to dance to Pharrell's song "Happy."
My foleyed edit is by no means perfect. I know that there are sounds I missed or left out and that's because I had a limited amount of time in the room and because I only sort of knew what I was doing. Here's my edit. You will definitely have to turn up the sound and put on headphones to hear what I foleyed. (If it looks like its lagging a tiny bit, it's because I've uploaded the video directly into Blogger).
Overall I'd say this foley experience was a positive one. Now I know what sort of problems I will probably and definitely run into when I do post sound for our project for class as well as foley for the senior thesis film Scout's Honor.
