Sending Out CDs

I spent Monday night putting together "Corporate Zombie". All of the renders finished, and I exported the finished mixes of the dialogue/sound fx. Put it all in a timeline and watched it; turned out to be 45 minutes long, which isn't too bad, although it'd be nice if I could cut out another 5 minutes. Someone else will have to look at it, though, because I can't find anything else to cut.

--

I also posted another "composer wanted" ad on the forums at garritan.com. Garritan makes GPO, which is a nice orchestral software synth. There are a lot of composers on that board, and I got a lot of good responses. Between those responses and the ones from the other ads I put out, I have about 12 candidates. I spent last night making up all of the quicktime disks to send out and writing everyone back. Listening to some of the demos that people have available on their websites, I'm sure I'll have plenty of quality material to choose from. Although, I'd definitely prefer someone local, since they would be able to attend the premiere and I wouldn't have to deal with FedEx. Hopefully the local candidates will send me amazing stuff!

--

I realized that I need to finish "Mother In-Law Zombie" ASAP, since I'll need to give a locked cut to the composer. So, that's next on my priority list, and I expect to get it done by the end of this weekend. However, tonight nothing will get done on the movie because Tracey and I will be spending time together for our 3rd anniversary!

--

I think I might have a solution for the premiere dilemma.... I'll have to run it by a few people first, though.

Ryan

Corporate Zombie Sound

I spent the weekend finishing up the sound for Corporate Zombie. I was able to get it all done, although there still might be some minor tweaks that need to be made, since I mixed a lot of it on my headphones, and things tend to sound different (and more like what it will sound like in a theater) on my monitors. But the headphones are necessary for picking up little details that you can't hear in the monitors. Things like clicks during a cut, differences in white noise between shots, and minor background noises are much easier to hear on the headphones. To hear these things on the monitors, they need to be turned up really loud, which hurts my ears.

Anyway, the sound work consisted of a few things:

1. Disguising cuts in the audio with crossfades, noise reduction, and ambient sound fx. A lot of the time, you can tell when the audio cuts because it either makes a little popping sound, or the background noise/ambiance changes. Crossfades get rid of the pops and make the transition between noise changes seem less abrupt. Noise reduction gets rid of enough of the white noise to make it not too noticeable when there is a cut. And background ambiance (like birds chirping, traffic going by, crickets, etc) covers up the cuts by being louder than the original ambient noise.
2. Adding sound fx/foley. This includes typical stuff like footsteps and door knocks, and also stuff peculiar to this segment, including a paper shredder, sword wooshes, head chop-off sounds, punches, body falls, and other stuff.
3. EQ, Compression, and Mixing. These are the final stages. The EQ mostly just cuts out low rumble, but I also use it sometimes to make voices or sound fx more distinct. Compression takes really loud sounds and makes them quieter for a more even track. After all of this I mix everything together, making sure that the levels of the dialogue are consistent throughout the scene (by watching the peaks on the meters), and making sure that the sound fx and ambient tracks are loud enough but don't overpower the dialogue.

So, that's all done for Corporate Zombie, which is cool. Now it only needs music. Luckily, I have received a few responses to my ads for a composer. I've decided to send out DVDs of Scene 10 (the one from the Hondance teaser) so that all of the applicants can take a stab at scoring it. Whoever does the best job will get to score the rest of the film, and the runner up will have the option of scoring "Mother In-Law Zombie". Everyone will also be allowed to keep their copy of the scene and to use it in their reel, regardless of whether they are chosen to score the entire film.

--

I've also decided to re-render the film in 24 frames per second, as opposed to converting it back to 60 interlaced fields per second via telecine, as I have been doing. The reasons for this are numerous:

1. I found out that DVD players do the telecine automatically when playing to a television.
2. When the telecined video is played on a computer, you can see the interlace lines unless the player is setup to deinterlace, which most aren't by default. This is pretty annoying to watch.
3. The mpeg2 files that make up DVDs can be encoded at 24 frames/second encoded video, meaning that there is about 20% less data to encode (24 frames/second vs. 60 fields (30 interlaced frames)). Having less data to encode means that I can encode that data at a higher quality, resulting in a clearer picture with less artifacts.
4. If somebody ever wants to transfer the movie to film, it will be a direct frame-to-frame transfer, with no inverse telecine necessary.

Since the color correction is already done, this isn't really a big deal. It just involves setting the renders up and letting them go. The rendering actually takes less time than it did before, because it's having to process less data (again, 24 frames vs. 60 fields).

In essence, this is just one more way to ensure that the movie will look good no matter where it is played, and that if I do use a DVD for the screening, it'll have less artifacts.

Ryan