Friday, April 15, 2011

Blow in her face and she'll follow you anywhere.


Hard to believe this was ever a successful campaign.

Monday, April 11, 2011

Dangerous Writing - Steady Progress

Work was scheduled for this weekend for DW. I received a progress report tonight. Good news - almost all of the music has been mixed and synced. My immediate reaction: good thing we waited almost a year to do two days worth of work! Oh well. It's moving forward; that's the important thing. We'll do another review this weekend and then after a few tweaks it will be ready to be color corrected. That should take another week or two. The deadline for the Bend Film Fest is May 15th. We're aiming for that. Seems more than likely. Which is very exciting.

Sunday, April 03, 2011

DW Spotting Session #3,247

We did it! Finally sat down and opened the Dangerous Writing music edit today after almost a year.

Wait.
Pause.
Earworm:
 
You shut your mouth
How can you say
I go about things the wrong way?
I am human and I need to be loved
Just like everybody else does

Oh, yes. Always good to remember that I'm human.Thanks, Morrisey.
It felt good to get back to DW. I still like the film a lot. And I'm really trying not to get into feeling badly about letting it sit and all that should have stuff. I will admit that there are very easy solutions to some of the problems that have kept me from being very eager about getting back to it. For instance, there's this scene that I wanted to put some romantic, sentimental saxophone in the background. My musician friends worked on it for me but didn't come up with anything that worked. One of them told me I was asking for too much and why didn't I just buy some cheesy needle drop if that was all I wanted. Good point. I found something on audiovillage.com for about sixty bucks. Problem solved.  Moving on.  Sheesh.
As inefficient as this process has been - I can't count how many times I've gone through our songs and cues and the scenes that need music - the film has benefited from the protraction. I'm both more relaxed about the outcome and more capable of solving some of the problems we were experiencing. Choices made in haste or to follow convention are easily recognized and improved.
One of the skills I've been trying to polish is keeping things simple. With big projects like Dangerous Writing I often get overwhelmed by trying to take it all on at once. Like today, it's tempting to start thinking about the website again. Yes, it would be efficient to work on that while Jordan does some mixing. My fingers just paused as I wrestled with why that doesn't actually turn out to be true. Perhaps because I already have a lot going on and if I get overwhelmed I'm more likely to drop the whole thing for several more months. To be truly efficient in this case it would be best to keep it slow and steady. Support Jordan's efforts until the current task is crossed off and then move on to the next item on the shortlist of finishing the film. A finished film always speeds up the creation of a press kit and publicity materials. An old mantra brought back to serve:


Social Media Engagement/Canibalism