Cornucopia of progress…

There are a multitude of projects that are all moving at a very fast pace at the moment so instead of talking about them separately, I will talk about them together

Elektromigration Debut CD in Mixing:

After my last evening spent talking with Steve Archer, he told me “It’s time to release something” and with that  advice, and a few recommendations, these songs shall sit on my studio server no longer.  I’ve begun the long task of bouncing out the tracks, re-recording the vocals, making all the last minute changes to the songs, and everything in between. I have contracted with Dan of the Dark Clan to mix and master this release, as he has come highly recommended.  There are definitely a few months ahead of me of work and collaboration with another on one of the songs, but finally, it will be complete.  Which reminds me, I need to start collecting artistic examples for Vlad who is going to be doing the art work for the release.

Collaboration work with AnIon on a possible future EP or CD release:

Me and AnIon have begun a collaboration music project with some hard hitting tracks.  The best way I can describe these are take Combichrist, mix in some Wumpscut then maybe sprinkle on some IAMX and that is where my mind is at.  Not sure of the direction, but something should definitely come from this later in the year.  We’ve got about four tracks already in process and might bring something out to a local club soon to give it a demo listen on the big guns.

Round Two; Making Music for Video Games:

Once again I have submitted two tracks to a video game development company for some new game they are working on.  I am very happy with the tracks and the initial feedback is good.  Unfortunately, the chain of decisions is long and clouded, and the parent company has huge existing resources so we’ll see if anything comes of this.  If not, I will roll them into one of my other projects where I am doing more big dance material (think Underworld).

Scoring Work:

I’ve got three scoring projects coming up, however, I don’t have all the names of the projects yet (final names I should say).  Two of these are from my good friend Mike Chrisco who I’ve been working with for years.  They both sound fun so I look forward to working on them.  The third project is from one of the unfinished films from Adam Ross who passed away recently.  This is a 3D film and I’ve seen the rough cut of it, which looks great.  This film is VERY heavily influenced by the Twilight Zone which almost has me giddy to work on it.  I have no clue when this work will start as I am sure Adam’s estate and projects will have to go through a bit of restructuring and deal with legal issues to make sure everything is okay.

Relativity; Filming to begin shortly:

For the past few months I have been gathering the props for some of the scenes of the movie.  We are about to start shooting the first few scenes and I am ecstatic about this.  We have the first few set locations picked out and I am putting in an order for the last few pieces we need to get this started.  I have also submitted the project to IMDB and as soon as that is updated, I will begin putting up all other relevant information since a lot of the initial pre-production is mostly done.  I’d like to also announce that Andrew Comstock has begun the fabrication of some of the more complex props and we should see some stuff soon.

For some of the other scenes we will be holding some casting calls soon to fill out those rolls.  In addition, we’ve got a photoshoot coming soon and Micah Moore will be preparing some new promotion material.  We are also going to get Ben Spicher to do some on set photography and such.  The last big hurdle is finishing the camera construction.

iPhone Apps; More in Work:

I have sold a few copies of my iXposure app, but given the niche market that it fits, this does not surprise me.  As soon as my camera is done, I will be using it more and placing some sample footage online showing how it is used and such.  

I also have 4 other apps in development (at random stages).  I think two of them I will finish, the other two are more for test.  In addition, I’ve been contacted by a few people about working with them on some game apps.  Sounds like that would be a lot of fun if I get a bit of free time (haha).

Random Notes:

I’ve begun using Drop Box (https://www.getdropbox.com/referrals/NTEzMjI4NDg5) for sharing data with the people I am working with.  It works AMAZINGLY well.  It is like Rsync in a way, but basically files in particular folders go out to everyone who is using your dropbox (or you theirs).  I cannot stress enough how awesome this is.

If you use the link above (which is a referral from me) you get 250MB more for free (and I get 500MB for free) up to 6 GB more.  The default free account is 2GB.  I am paying for the 50GB since I have SO MANY files in there now (working with so many different people).

In other news, the studio is fully functional in its new location.  We have not moved to surround capability yet, but that is planned for later this year.  I am very happy with the layout and it is very conducive to productivity (as you can tell).  There are some acoustic issues I want to solve soon and am working with a company that creates custom acoustic absorbers to deal with it.

That’s about it.

Our first iPhone app is live…

iXposure

I can say now that I have officially been through the entire process of releasing an app on the iPhone.  I have to say, it is quite a few steps, and if it wasn’t for early adopters taking good notes about what to do, it probably would have been a lot more painful.

The app we’ve released is called iXposure and the purpose of this app was to solve a problem we were having with our DIY 35mm cameras and still cameras that take video.  Most lower end video device do not allow you to adjust the exposure setting of the camera.  You can typically lock it and on some devices, like the HV30, you have the option to adjust it slightly from a locked value.  I can only imagine this limitation is in place to protect the CMOS sensor from damage in conditions like outside under the sun. Regardless, for shooting film projects, this became a problem.  If you accidentally unlock the exposure, you are stuck trying to recreate the exact conditions to fake the camera into the exposure setting you want.  You could try and fix in post, however, this is not always easy to do as details can be lost (or gained) that require tricky adjustments of the color curves.

The path to the App Store link is here:

http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/M…318175452&mt=8

Currently the functionality is limited to what I needed at the moment for what we are working on.  If you are one of those that have purchased this and have some other functionality that you’d like, let me know and I’ll evaluate that and if possible, or very useful, I will try and get it into the next update.  (Note that updates do take awhile because they require going through the evaluation process with apple.

I’d also like to thank whoever it is in France that was our first customer.  I can’t wait to get some feedback from others to see how they are using it.  Everyone does things a little different, and that can be a good thing.

Now to finish putting together the DIY35mm and take some test shots.

It is with great sadness…

that I have to pass on the news to everyone that the Executive Producer of Dogs of Chinatown has passed away today.  Although I really don’t know all the details, from what has come through to me was complications of meningitis and shingles, and was certainly unexpected.  My thoughts go out to his family and all they are going through.

Out of all the people I have met over the last few years, I can say no one has truly been as unique as Adam and I still remember the first time I met him.  It was on the set of z13 when I first started working with Micah Moore, Blake Faucette and Andy Coon.  This guy shows up with a MASSIVE amount of energy jumping around asking Micah if he could be a zombie.  He pulls his arm sleeve of his shirt over his head (he was quite skinny) and starts flailing his arm around.  After being in a few scenes, he decided he wanted to film some of the production and grabbed a camera and started running in place as if to simulate someone running towards the zombies.  I of course asked Micah, “What the hell is he doing?”  to which he replied, “That’s Adam Ross, and this is his film.”  He definitely saw the world through a different set of spectacles.

The second time I saw Adam was at the Castle Carnival in Greensboro, NC last year.  He was running around filming with two video cameras on a mount system he build.  He told me about his fascination with 3D movies.  He showed me some of the material he had filmed, which was neat, and how he wanted a very powerful score to go with his current projects.  Then, he was off, as he had more to film.

The third and last time I saw Adam was at the screening of Dogs of Chinatown at Solaris in Greensboro.  I talked with him again and connected the dots that I was the person who mixed the sound and did a lot of music (along with a few other bands and composers) for Dogs of Chinatown.  He was absolutely ecstatic about the quality of the audio and video in Micah’s production.  He asked me how much I was paid for the work I did.  I told him the project ended up costing me about $600 in new software and hardware.  He became incredibly concerned and asked me if I wanted him to give me some money for my work.  I said no, I used that project to learn a lot, and he could hook me up on the next project.  And still, I wouldn’t change a thing in that. And that was it.

While my interactions with Adam were pretty minimal, his impact on film making in the Triad in undeniable.  He’s given many many people the opportunity to chase dreams while he chased his own.  For that, I am truly grateful as I’ve been able to find new passions in audio that I didn’t know I’d enjoy so much, and work with people, all friends of Adam, that have amazed me with their dedication to not only their projects, but to each other, in chasing a bigger thing than themselves individually.

There are no details about a service yet, but I will post those details for those who’ve worked on his projects, or knew him and want to attend.

Thanks again man, and I hope you get to continue your wacky eccentric passions wherever you end up.

And the planning continues, Relatively speaking…

One thing is for sure, there is a lot of decisions that have to be made, items procured, locations found, people to work with, concepts to come up with, and no end to the glue that sits between all these tangents to a film.  While I may have been rather quiet lately about the progress, it wasn’t for a lack of progress being made!

I am a person who likes details.  I want immersive settings.  I don’t like a set when I watch something that could easily be replaced with a thousand other sets because it totally doesn’t play off the story or the scene.  Not to say there isn’t a need for scenes without this level of connection, for a short film, I think it goes without saying that it should be a requirement.  To me, this separates a lot of work that I’ve seen.  If you are going to take me on a thirty minute ride, I want you to blow me away.

That said, I’ve rearranged our production schedule to allow for more detailed analysis into the scenes, and less multitasking so that all the people involved can really hone in on one details at a time.  The big picture is obviously important, but that is my job, as the story writer, and I am fine with that.

The biggest hurdle I was trying to hop over was concept art.  I can see everything in my head that I want to use as a starting point, but drawing it on paper then scanning it in is archaic.  I just refuse to go down that path.  So, I finally broke down and bought a WACOM tablet.  To say the least, wow, amazing.  I am still getting used to it, but for doing sketches of ideas, and being able to modify them quickly, this has REALLY sped up my processing.  Granted, I still use clips of images that are influences, especially with all the ideas Micah sent me recently, but this allows me to take other images and really go to town on modifying them to see what we are going to come up with.

The first machine has been prototyped and tomorrow I go over it with my DP, Micah Moore before we submit the idea to our prop construction man, Andrew Comstock.  While I am sure there will be mods, I finally got the idea out of my head which is good!

In addition to this, I’ve begun drawing pictures of the sets.  Not to set them in stone, but to influence my set scouts and also to provide Micah, who is doing storyboards, at least an idea of what was in my head and what coloring I was seeing (albiet very crude sketches for the rooms).  We’ll see how this works.

Finally, using excel I’ve begun putting together the huge prop list for the film so items can be procured as they are found and we can get this thing rolling!  We plan on coming up with a productions schedule for the first 1/3rd of the film after the prop designer gives us some estimates.  Which, hopefully, will be enough time for me to finish the lens system I built for the Canon HV30 (not far from being done) and finishing the follow focus as well.  We also need time for experimentation and we DEFINITELY need to work with a steadycam that will work for both the HV30 and the HVX (with adjustment of course).

On top of that, we are going to start working on casting the people and voices we need for the first two sets.  I am VERY excited about the next steps…

Filtering Incoming Projects…

I can say without question that I have really had an amazing opportunity to work with lots of different SCAD students on a variety of scoring and sound productions projects.  All of this work, until recently, I’ve done for free as I am sure these experiences were just as much for me learning as it was for them.  That said, I’ve decided to bring that chapter of my involvement to a close in its current capacity in looking forward and starting to clamp down on which activities I am involved with so as not to dilute my efforts and so that I can invest more into the technologies and libraries I have available for me moving forward.

With my commitments to All Aces Media, ShadowFX Films, Bonesland Productions, my own film that is in pre-production, and a variety of other projects, it’s a lot to be involved with.  If you are interested in my score work, the best thing to do is get together the information about your project, including sample music types, time frames, length of film project, etc and send me an email.  When I take on the task to score your film, it becomes an ultimate priority in my work, and I will not sacrifice that as my name is on that project along with yours.  

As many say, if only I had more time!  This is such a true statement.  Looking forward, I have begun building the 5.1 mixing system for future projects and you can be guaranteed that each bit of income made from these composition contracts have gone into that.  I cannot imagine the new sonic freedoms with 5.1 mixing where I feel A LOT of projects could really have a lot more fun with immersion of the listener.

In any case, I look forward to announcing some of the projects I am slated to begin shortly.

Relativity Pre-Production…

The crew for Relativity had their first preproduction meeting last night and it was overwhelmingly successful.  We had a script reading followed by a brain storming session for planning out each of the scenes.  This included set locations, props, art direction, actors and every little detail in between.  In all honestly, seeing the creative process come together from so many people, I am really liking the direction things are going.  Everyone has really contributed.

We’ll have a list soon of the initial crew, and I want to certainly thank James Clark, Micah Moore, Anthony Robbins, Blake Faucette and Brian Lee for joining up with the program and working through so much last night.

Work has been done to move our productions discussions over to ncfilmconnection.com, although this forum is for crew only.  Once the project is done, I will open the forum up as it is always good to see how a project progresses from start to finish.

We will be planning some auditions in the near future for the first half of the movie.  I’ll certainly have more details about that when the time comes.

New Project Announcement - “RELATIVITY”…

It’s finally time to let the proverbial cat out of the bag and announce my newest project, RELATIVITY…

The concept for this film started literally 15 to 16 years ago and I’ve tucked the story away in my mind for a long time.  Up late one night playing around with some script ideas, I suddenly remembered most of this story and started excitedly typing away.  One night later I had finished my first draft.  I spent another night talking over some of the plot points with my good friend Brian Lee and then finished the second draft a day later after he helped me work out some of the finer details I was wrestling with now I had committed the ideas to paper.

This is a short film, topping out at maybe 30 minutes maximum, but dripping with hard core science fiction and deep psychological winding intricacies intended to provoke thought and imagination.  It should come as no surprise being influenced by the works of David Lynch, Guillermo del Toro, Alfonso Cuaron, Douglas Trimbull, David Bruckner, Dan Bush, Jacob Gentry, Alex Proyas, Ridley Scott, James Cameron, George Lucas, Joseph Kosinski, Bryan Singer, Thea Alexander (author), Wachowski Brothers, Paul Anderson, Terry Gilliam, Luc Besson, Lex Gigeroff and Isaac Asimov (author).  And these are just the main influences that have written/directed something with a particular element that heavily influenced part of my thinking over the years.

For this film I am taking on the roles of producer, writer, 2nd director, composer, and all things sound.  In addition Micah Moore is the Director of Photography and 1st director of the film.  Since we are still in the story-boarding and planning stages for the major details of the film, I can say that Blake Faucette, Andy Coon, James Clark and Christine Poindexter have signed on for the film as well at this time.  Their roles in the production will solidify as we get closer to auditions and such.

For me, this project is a both a culmination of applying all the things I have learned over the last few years with the absolute thrill of taking this story to visual representation.  I cannot express how excited I am to be working with the people I am on this project and to see this through to the end.  Everyone wants to give this 110% and show just what we are capable of doing with a film that is deep, relevant, and just intellectually stimulating and beautiful on many levels.  Don’t get me wrong, I love big dumb fun films and would work on those sorts of projects in a heart beat,  I just miss some of the deeper thought provoking story lines that when the film is done, you sit there and just think about it for a little bit.  Like the first time I saw ‘Pi’ or ‘Naked Lunch’ or even ‘Bladerunner’.  No, this film is not those films, it is a short, but I hope I can capture a glimmer of our imaginations and present it to you in a way that is interesting on some level in maybe ways that we didn’t even anticipate.  Anyways, there you have it!

ProTools 8 LE and “How I learned to translate to Logic 8″…

Anyone with experience in most of the major DAWs today knows that unfortunately, no one application seems to lend itself to working in every situation.  Sadly, I had real hope that ProTools 8 would maybe reduce the number of applications I needed, but instead, it’s really just added another DAW to the list of “Don’t do this in there”.

Where to begin.  First, I did not have a lot of experience with PT7 or any flavor of PT7.  The only observation I can make going backwards is, wow, if this is better MIDI in PT8, I cannot imagine the pain of doing MIDI and worse than what I experienced.  But, we’ll get to that in a second.  After three long days of working in ProTools and then just giving up and converting the project to Logic which went like a breeze, I can say with confidence that ProTools has a long way to go in the world of MIDI.  Don’t get me wrong, there are MANY aspects of ProTools 8 that I really like, especially how track parameters can be edited so easily right in the arrange window, almost making the mixer only necessary at the end when mixing.  This by far works better than any other DAW I use.  That said, here are the things that really made working with ProTools difficult:

MIDI: Zoom in the MIDI editor is broken, after working in a session for a few minutes, I lose the ability to zoom out.  Also, it continues to zoom in on me over time.  This means I have to exit PT and come back in very often.  This probably added the majority of time to the project.  In addition, after I edited say a note in the MIDI editor, the playhead would move all the MIDI notes but NOT redraw the MIDI window, so notes were not where they should have been.  Obviously this causes editing mistakes over and over since I am clicking on things that are not there.

RTAS Performance: Abysmal is the best word I can use here.  I created the same project in Logic and was able to add 4 TIMES the number of instruments.  Getting a play through the whole song was impossible without drop-outs.  It’s sad to say, but the plugin performance was WORSE than Digital Performer, and that was something I was very surprised with.

Memory Handling:  Again, horrible, and I blame this on RTAS or the developers of the RTAS plugins, I am not sure who.  Not only was the performance of the RTAS instruments a problem, they used WAY MORE memory than their AudioUnit versions.  This is a SERIOUS problem when you are using lots of sample libraries.

Plug-in Compatibility: This was just astonishing to me looking at the number of plugins not compatible with PT8 when Digidesign CREATED the RTAS interface.  Honestly, having been involved with LADSPA development on Linux many years ago, this is just POOR coding design for an API interface.  It clearly shows a lack of robustness in terms of keeping programmers writing good plugins for your software in a manner that is not only controllable, but stability predictable.  In fairness, AU and VST plugins do suffer from compatibility issues, NEVER have I seen this many problems.  Given that the majority of Native Instrument plugins I use and how many of them do not work right in PT8 (and may be causing a lot of these other bugs) this is a huge problem that prevents me from writing in PT.

Bounce to Disk Bug:  Because I was trying to use some plugins not fully qualified with PT8, I can only suspect this was causing this problem, but no matter what I did, I could not bounce out tracks.  I had to feed tracks into an Aux bus and then grab the files from disk and convert them with quicktime.  Obviously this is a huge problem.

Digidesign LE Crippling:  This is where I vent about the fact that Digidesign needs to get with the program and realize that pretty soon, their TDM system is going to be obsolete and they are going to get left behind while everyone else is light years down the road with multiprocessor systems once they get that right.  Don’t get me wrong, TDM has been good because with this method of processing, you aren’t fighting for processor, you know how much you have.  The fact that you can only bounce to disk in real-time for say an hour and a half movie with 4 stems means 6 hours of bouncing to disk.  LE is not limited by this problem IF they had included the functionality in the system.  They have not.  Both DP and Logic both have no problem with offline bounce which can be WAY faster.  Second is the fact there is no automatic delay compensation in LE.  This is just unacceptable to me.  Both DP and Logic have had this for a long time and for very complex projects, the hack available just add way too much work to me.  I don’t want to send pings down each of the tracks and a bus.  I don’t have to do this with Logic or DP.  Finally the fact they don’t allow Video Satellite linking with two LE systems is just dumb.  I’m tired of them protecting their antiquated TDM system.

So there you have it.  PT8 has some great potential, but performance, bugs and compatibility really put a damper on it’s usefulness.  Moving forward I will use it for what I intended, and that is final mixing for film (with surround).  Hopefully they’ll get with the program and I can use it for more things.  That said, I don’t see it happening soon.

Final pass at “Devil in the Details” done…

Tomorrow I mail off a DVD of all the tracks to the score of Devil in the Details.  I can honestly say, this is one of my favorite scores I have written.  Before this, I did not have the opportunity to really do traditional score as much because a lot of the projects I worked on just didn’t require that sort of input.

The worst part is now I have to wait and see what the final project sounds like with all the audio mixing, as the cut of the film I have is raw camera audio, which sounds NOTHING like the final product of a movie would sound like.

That said, starting soon I am going to put together a repository of sample work that I have done with regards to film.  I get a lot of requests to hear what my music sounds like.  Unfortunately, I am always a little hesitant to give too many examples because I truly adapt to what I have been working on.  I like to push my boundaries into different music and will take the time to get it exactly how it’s wanted.

So, with that said, here are some sample score pieces from Devil in the Details.  The first is a piece that is used both in the film and at the end in the credits, it’s called ‘Sensibility’.  The second piece is during a lot of action and it’s called ‘Tripped Up’.

Devil in the Details - Sensibility

Devil in the Details - Tripped Up

In a few days I am going to set up an additional page where there will be a master list of sample work that I’ve done.  In any case, enjoy!

Shadow Ops script revision 4 is finally done…

This took longer than I expected.  After getting through the first few revisions, the level of overall change to the script had lessened and a period of extremely deep writing began.  I say this because I would sit down to write, then look up and four or five hours would have passed and I had no clue that it happened.  I was so absolutely inside the characters and the story, I lost track of time.

Honestly, this is an amazing feeling.  This is NOT like writing a book, granted they have some similarities, the intensity of visuals I imagining for the scenes were different, because I knew works couldn’t describe what I was seeing, only dialog could support it, but not be wordy.  Nothing is worse than a movie that is too wordy.

Tonight I made my last pass over the words, cleaning up the interactions, the believability of the situations, and the dancing of combat scenes that are VERY hard to coordinate through words.  It’s now time for the director and producer to have another look and then off to the investors once again.

All I can say is if all the elements come together that are in play at the moment, this is going to be on fun and exciting project.  Don’t forget, this is an action film, it’s intended to be fun, nothing more, nothing less.

Blake Faucette has been working with Justin Reich on some new poster art for the film, which I will be posting soon.  Things are rolling…