Music of Sound

via Moving Content – thanks for tip Allan!

I’m pretty sure it hasn’t been seven years since my last holiday but it does feel like a long time ago. And I seem to remember making a rule for myself a few years back about never doing films back to back ie finish the mix of a film, and take at least a week off before starting into a new project. But these last two have been back to back – if I hadn’t leapt from the completion of one straight into the next one then it simply wouldn’t have been possible to do it. And after I saw a rough cut of the second film I just knew I had to do it – it spoke to me.
So now its payback time, delayed gratification of the minimal sort. We had a double head screening this morning which played brilliantly – no major conceptual shifts required, just a collection of details worth revisiting. Tomorrow we address them, double head screen with the graded pix and make any final, final adjustments and its then ready to leave home & have a life of its own….. And so am I!

Wednesday I load up & hit the road, driving six hours to that glorious geothermal oasis known as Rotorua. Thursday me & a couple of Auckland based friends have rented a beachside house in Onemana, Coromandel which looks a little like this in Google Earth:

When I lived in Auckland I made many trips to Coromandel (as its only 2.5 hours to drive there) but weirdly when researching this trip I discovered a whole bunch of new things to do there eg we plan to catch the Driving Creek train through some serious prehistoric bush! And after my trip to Ngawi recording seals I was totally reminded how awe inspiring the night sky is when you are out of cities with their interminable light pollution, so we also plan to visit this house which happens to have a research grade astronomy telescope! Add a boat charter (I’ll take my own wasabi!) along with some beautiful hot pools and I fully intend to return a completely different person!

But of course I am taking plenty of technology; apart from recording some doors I have three specific record missions planned, along with shooting any number of timelapse sequences & testing out my new GoProHD camera… And after a week in Coromandel I am planning at least a few days on the way back in Rotorua, exploring geothermal sounds…

So this is the long way of saying don’t expect much activity here for a week or two – I bought a USB vodem so I can get email anywhere along the way but other than uploading a few photos my mind will be there and not here… My next film doesn’t start until mid August and I plan to make the most of this mini-sabbatical. And one of the best things about going away is arriving home at some later date with a whole new perspective on ones place in the larger scheme of things, and total objectivity on all the work in progress. And Jah knows I have a lot of work in progress, all of which will benefit from my absence!

I shall savour the peace & quiet

I just saw MicMacs – the latest film by Jean Pierre Jeunet and wow its great – such a visually inventive filmmaker but also so great to see a film where sound plays such a crucial role in story telling. In fact I’d say it is the best soundtrack I’ve heard this year – definitely go see & hear it in the cinema!

Heres the trailer (and I had to hunt to find one without a dreadful american voice over)

Fantastique! Grand travail!

Sound Department
Vincent Arnardi – sound re-recording mixer
Julien Perez – sound re-recording mixer
Selim Azzazi – sound effects editor
Gérard Hardy – sound editor
Alain Lévy – post-synchronisation
Nicolas Becker – fx foley artist
Josselin Panchout – sound re-recording boom operator, second sound assistant
Sophie Chiabaut – boom operator
Jean Umansky – sound engineer

I’ve hit up a couple of people I know who have developed iPhone apps and received the equivalent of a blank stare so I am going to outline the specifications for the iPhone/iPad app that I want & hope someone from who knows how to code & appreciates the need picks this up & runs with it… because I’d pay $X.99 for it (where X is definitely less than 5) – the functionality I want is kind of included in the Movie*Slate iPad app I read about on Philip Blooms site, although its $20 and doesn’t quite do what I need…

If you work on film soundtracks (I’ll elaborate on other possible uses later) then you will know the most important feedback is provided from doublehead screenings. By the time you reach that point in the process (hopefully) all of the details have been taken care of and you have a soundtrack that basically works, and the next few iterations of screening & tweaking/remixing are all about final context.

Having spent 3+ weeks in a dark room carefully predubbing and then final mixing the multitude of sounds that makeup a contemporary soundtrack, the one thing I want to achieve from a doublehead screening is capture my instincts. After all this time (many months) sweating the details, now all I want to know is how did I feel about a particular scene/moment, and if I didn’t feel like that scene/moment was fully realised or it had issues, exactly what were those issues at that point in time.

And there you have it, the spec for the app:

> To generate notes, automatically cued to a timeline

There is only one sync reference in a double head screening: the 2 pop from reel 1. All the other head & tail pops have been removed when stitching the reels together so that we (the director, producer(s), editor, mixers, composer and all of the sound editorial crew) can watch the film as though it is a finished film; in effect we are all pretending to be the audience. So its unlikely there is time to write anything down. I just want to tap the screen & drop a note at that point.

Now for film, those notes probably only fall into one of a few categories:

> Overall mix note
> Dialogue/ADR
> Music
> FX/Ambiences/Foley

So heres how I would use it:

The lights go out, picture rolls & the 2 pop goes by at which point I touch my iPad screen & the apps timer starts running. Now I’m in a dark room so there can’t be any bright glowing ui – this has to be a cleverly stealthy app. So say 3 minutes into the first reel I notice some foley thats too loud – I touch the bottom quarter of the iPad screen and a note is created:
00.03.00.00 FX/Ambience/Foley
Then at ten minutes I notice some ADR that still bugs me, I touch the top quarter of the screen and a new note is created:
00.10.00.00 Dialogue/ADR
etc etc…

The screening ends and I stop the timer. I then export the cuelist via email or whatever….

Usually after a double head screening we sit down & talk through the directors & producers notes, with others adding their thoughts as/when is appropriate. So this is when the timecode cuelist is most valuable – I usually boot up the quicktimes of film and skip through them as we discuss what changes need to be made, as sometimes people forget what the exact note was until they see the relevant scene again, but as soon as you go to the specific point they always remember. So it would be incredibly valuable to have a reliable record of those cue points.

A caveat: the only note I make may be at the end of the film, so the app would need to happily run for 3+ hours without missing a beat.

When I suggested this app on twitter someone suggested it would also be useful for keeping timed notes in any real-time performance situation eg rehearsals, a presentation etc… So the categories for notes would need to be custom fields that the user defines….

That Movie*Slate app has a couple of nice features, eg when you drop a marker it can optionally take a photo or record a burst of audio – the latter could be very useful for prompting memory afterwards… Here’s a link to the specific section describing Movie*Slates shot marker/notes functions

Another nice feature it has is the ability to sync timecode between multiple iPhones & iPads – I trust dialogue editors sync the best of anyone, so maybe they could trigger timecode start for everyone in the screening.

The only other really clever thing it could do would be to retime the timeline based on the reel breaks, so if reel 1 starts at 01.00.00.00 and reel 2 at 02.00.00.00 etc and the reel lengths were entered, the cue list could be output with the continuous timeline in one field and the reel timecode in a second field.

So any other features you need from this app? Maybe the PureBlend software people will read this & make it! Especially since it would involve repurposing existing features into a new app… (Let me know if you need a beta tester!)