First edit’s done/Sound Design
I was going to come up with a cool way to say that with NASA terminology, but then I decided not to do that.
So the movie exists as a thing you can sit and watch now, with missing scenes replaced by text, just waiting to be kicked out and replaced by thousands of images creating the illusion of motion. It’s looking like the thing’s going to add up to be about 70 minutes in all, which I’m satisfied with. That’s the duration that my friend Connor Lloyd Crews (who plays the publicist) and I agreed marks the psychological threshold between “Feature Length Film” and “What is this, this isn’t a feature length film”. I think 80 minutes is probably about the cap on potential length.
So in the meantime between now and warm weather I’m going to be focusing on starting the process of sound design. Halfway through production it became apparent that we just didn’t have the time and manpower it was going to take to get really good audio, so we ditched it entirely and decided to go italian with the thing and overdub the whole movie. That’s how we did the kickstarter video, and ever since then I’ve become increasingly attached to doing things that way. It’s something like heaven to have complete meticulous control of that element contrasted with how ramshackle and chaotic it is to film a movie as independent as this. Since the kickstarter video, I’ve been practicing sound design in shorts. I’m steadily getting the hang of it. It’ll sound good okay? Just believe me. Just this once. Look me in the eyes and trust me. Know that I’ve got this, that you don’t have to worry about it. Okay, things are different now. You’re safe.
I think we can all agree that the sound of the gloves sliding against the metal pole as Alan readjusted his grip is what got the project funded in the first place.
Here’s an example of some recent sound design I’ve done. None of the audio in this was recorded when it was shot:
Progress Report on this thing we’re making
So, I understand that to those of you that don’t have this movie in concentrate form burning a hole through their brain everyday, it could seem as if it’s lost steam and potentially dwindling into non existent obscurity. This post is me assuring you, the person reading this that is aware of this film on some marginal level or maybe even a big ole fan, that that’s not what’s happening. I’m going to start training myself to remember to be more forthcoming about it’s production, as I have the tendency to sort of end of in like a private anxiety meditation about the whole thing. Not anxiety because it’s at all losing momentum or anything, just anxiety because it’s hard to make a movie because movie’s are complicated, and also because the anxiety is a good fuel and motivator I’m not trying to extricate from my daily head electricity.
Confessional introspection trudged through, I will now talk about the film.
It’s in a production limbo of sorts. 75% (exact mathematically derived figure) of it is post production, and the other rest of the % is in pre, which creates some potholes in the editing process. I’ve been steering around them in the meantime, piecing together everything we’ve got, which is everything that was going to be difficult to shoot. As soon as the frigid winter air skips town and I can step outside my front door without my nervous system going into shivering fantods of survival mechanisms, the rest of the film will be shot, which I am incredibly eager for. All we have left to commit to SD card are the scenes between the two main characters, Alan and Neil.
That’s all for now. I’ll keep typing things here sometimes. Thanks for caring about this movie. Any amount of interest warms me deeply, and like I said, it’s cold outside.
-Dustin
Virgil I. Grissom (April 3, 1926 – January 27, 1967), (Lt Col, USAF), better known as “Gus” Grissom, was one of the original NASA Project Mercury astronauts and a United States Air Force pilot. He was the second American to fly in space, and the first member of the NASA Astronaut Corps to fly in space twice.
Grissom was killed along with fellow astronauts Ed White and Roger Chaffee during a pre-launch test for the Apollo 1 mission at Cape Canaveral, Florida. He was the first of the Mercury Seven to die.
This is my all-time favorite photo of Gus. RIP, old buddy.
