Discs not dead yet.

Well-reasoned editorial over at the New York Times about the (slowly) growing discs vs. downloads debate.

OmegaCon.

Looks like Crewless Productions will be present at Birmingham's inaugural OmegaCon, including a midnight screening of Hide and Creep and a special Interplanetary preview. More details later...

Just when I thought...

...I was getting caught up, this week kicked me in the arse. Filming on Sunday, Cutters recording on Monday, a nearly twelve-hour day job shift on Tuesday followed by an Exhibit(s) band gig Tuesday night... whew.

First part of Sunday's filming went well, after a hurried change of location (the quarry location we'd picked out had been blasted and, therefore, did not exist anymore). The afternoon was rough due to technical issues (we were trying to film an in-buggy conversation, but the actors couldn't hear each other--guess we should have built real working radios into the space helmets). All the same, it was good to have the camera on my shoulder again, and we had a great crew for the day, including Justin, who'd worked on Michael Clayton and, most recently, NBC's Heroes. Clayton to Interplanetary--how's that for contrast?

After wrapping for the day, Justin, Sanford, Hilleke, and I went down to Matthew's bar for beers and to cheer on Clayton via the Oscar broadcast (yay, Tilda Swinton!).

Things don't look to be slowing down anytime soon. Another Exhibit(s) show tonight, a little filming on Saturday, and a Wilco show in Nashville on Sunday. I'm going heading out of town for the day job on Tuesday, but at least maybe I'll be able to get some blogging done in the hotel room.

"Other Worlds Than These" episode 023.

023: "Start Dressing Like A Pro."

Today is "board day" at my day job, which means...

1. All the good parking spots are reserved for "visitors."


2. I have to wear a tie.

Here's some fashion advice for any other poor souls out there suffering the same fate as me, courtesy of AskMen.com.

"Start Dressing Like A Pro"

Spring winter cleaning.

Stacey and I might have house guests for the next few days, so we've been trying to get the condo cleaned up. That includes organizing and packing up a bunch of Interplanetary props. We've acquired quite a collection of... stuff while making this movie. After it's finished, be on the lookout for lots of space suits and shit on eBay.

Continuing the cleaning motif, I just moved about 18 GB of music off the trusty MacBook to a 500 GB USB drive. Man, I love cheap disk space. And the MacBook is actually usable again (before the music move, it was down to about 1 GB of free disk space).

Trap's been teaching himself how to rotoscope, and I just rendered out his first three test shots. Rotoscoping is, basically, using a program like Photoshop to touch up movie footage one frame at a time (removing an errant mic cable from a scene, for example). You can read a detailed explanation on Wikipedia's rotoscoping page. I wish I could post the video, but the three shots are all kind of spoiler-y. I can say Trap's already got a good handle on the process.

I'm watching Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer as I type this. The problem with the FF movies isn't so much that they're terrible--they're just terribly mediocre. Especially as they were produced after The Incredibles and Sky High, two excellent movies about superhero families. I actually think they perfectly cast the Thing (Michael Chiklis) and Human Torch (Chris Evans). But Jessica Alba as the Invisible Woman? Really? And then the screenplay paints the Woman as a total shrew. And they still haven't figured out how to make Mr. Fantastic's stretchy effects look good. And I don't like the word "rise" in movie titles. Oh, well. Maybe somebody will make a good Thing and Torch movie with Chiklis and Evans someday.

"Things..." episode 023.

023: DIY ADR.

I blogged a little about ADR a few weeks ago. I finally got around to the first rerecording session for Interplanetary last night, so I thought I'd post some details on the ADR setup (Mark I).



One of our closets is the "sound booth." The hanging clothes baffle one wall (to cut down on reverb), and blankets and sheets are hung to baffle the other walls. There is another blanket hanging in the doorway. The baffles also help insulate the closet from outside noise. Luckily, it's pretty quiet in our condo at night.

The trusty MacBook (perched atop a stepladder) serves as the actor's monitor. I'd pre-loaded the MacBook with QuickTime videos of the scenes the actor would be rerecording. The MacBook makes a good monitor because (1) the LCD screen looks so good and (2) it is virtually silent when playing QuickTime videos off the hard drive (as opposed to, say, a portable DVD player). Though it'd be on the small side, a video iPod would also make a good monitor for DIY ADR.



A headphone splitter attached to the Mac feeds audio to the actor's headphones so she can hear the dialogue she's trying to match. The same shotgun mic we use for production recording is attached to a small mic stand, and the mic's cable runs out of the closet to John's super-awesome Sound Devices 702 digital audio recorder. That headphone splitter connected to the Mac also feeds audio to the 702. My headphones are plugged into the 702, and I end up with the actor's new dialogue (from the mic) in my left ear and the old dialogue (from the QuickTime videos) in my right ear.

Both the Mac and 702 audio recorder can run on batteries, so no AC power is required.

After all that stuff's set up (which only takes 15 or 20 minutes), it's time to get the actor (Amanda Myers in this case) in the "booth" and start rolling. My first plan is to get Amanda to recite the lines in time with the original takes, so I can listen to the playback and get an immediate feel for how closely the new dialogue take matches the original. However, this is easier said than done, since it's tough for Amanda to figure out exactly where to begin the line.

On to plan B: Amanda hits "play" on the Mac, listens to a line of dialogue, hits "pause," then repeats the line. This seems to work pretty well, as Amanda is good at gauging the meter and tempo of the original dialogue.

The only downside of this method is I won't know for sure how well the new lines play with the original film footage until I get them all synced up. I'm not too worried about it, though. Past experience has shown that, as long as the looped lines are fairly close to the originals, timing-wise, there won't be any noticeable "drift" between the picture and dialogue.

I have an idea (Interplanetary ADR Mark II, maybe) for another setup that might allow immediate ADR plus picture playback, but I'll write about that if and when I have time to try it.

It was a year ago today...

Happy birthday, Interplanetary. Production on what is becoming our Apocalypse Now began exactly one year ago, on February 17, 2007. I originally figured that we'd be shopping the movie around to distributors by now, but...

Anyway, we're looking to get back to production soon, maybe next weekend. And Trap and I got some good location scouting done today.

Maybe we'll be talking to distributors in February of 2009.