It’s two years since we wrapped. How could it take so long to finish a movie?

If you spend six months alone in a small room with a computer cutting sound it’s easy to see how you can miscalculate how long this piece of string might be. On completion of my task I delivered all my audio elements to Rich, the dialogue editor, and sat down with Jez who will mix the movie only to discover I had entered the Perfect Storm of vacation bookings. I went away for 3 weeks and got back at the same time that Rich went off for a month. When he gets back Jez will leave almost immediately for 3 weeks. Et voila! Another two months are added to the schedule just like that.

I promise it will be over by Christmas…but that’s what they said about the War isn’t it?

What has sailing got to do with making a movie?

In 1969 Donald Crowhurst took part in a round-the-world yacht race sponsored by the Sunday Times. Occasional radio messages filtered back to base with the good news of his fortuitous trip around the planet in his boat as he scurried south from Europe, round into the Indian Ocean, across the Pacific and then turned North again towards England with the other competitors. He was making good time and the welcoming commitee were putting the Champagne on ice when his boat was found empty and adrift in the middle of the Atlantic.

What had occurred?

It soon emerged that the poor man had perpetrated a hoax and had never ever left the Atlantic. He’d avoided the shipping lanes, had even stepped onto dry land, and then had simply floated around in circles for weeks while he was pretending to be speeding across the Southern Seas, and then waited for the other yachts to catch up with him. Realizing his ruse would be discovered his diaries revealed he’d slowly lost his mind. His body was never found and those bottles of bubbly were returned to the fridge unopened.

Sitting here in my cave cutting sound day after day, on my Jack Jones, I’ve started to wonder if people think I’m a kind of movie-making Crowhurst. Have I been Pro-tools-ing around in circles for weeks while sending out false radio-reports to keep the ajudicators foxed? There are moments where it certainly feels that way to me.

But the other day I glimpsed a view of the end of the tunnel. I didn’t see a line of well-wishers at the quay-side or bottles of celebratory booze but I did see land. Right now it’s disappeared again behind more storm-tossed waves but I’m hopeful that shortly I will stumble upon the shore. I will be dizzy as I get my land-legs back but the sound cutting solo-voyage will, at last, be done.

I’ll do anything to get this flick done right, I’ll suffer any kind of humiliation.

I’m cutting sound right now and (not to give too much away) there are scenes involving someone farting and pissing. Of course we were too busy recording dialogue on those days in production so, this week, I needed to slug in the appropriate sound effects. I dropped in to Amoeba to see what Sound Effects CD’s they have and, yes, they do have one concentrating on farting and other bathroom noises handily titled RUDE SOUNDS. But why would I want to blow six bucks on a farting & pissing CD when I could record my own bodily functions AND own the rights?

Cut to yours truly drinking vast quantities of water and then squirming in pain to wait till the last available moment before off-loading so I could record a suitably long pee that would work for the scene in the movie. As I was peeing AND monitoring and recording sound all at the same time I was unable to take a pic of myself for the MAKING OF Gallery which, let’s face it, would have been the ultimate humiliation.

Can you find pix on the web of Scorsese taking a leak whilst wearing head-phones, holding a mic in one hand and something else in the other? I think not.

OK. So far, so good. Now about those other noises I needed…

The older I get one thing that it would seem I’m getting spectacularly good at is flatulence. But can I get a good fart recording? When I’m ready to release I’m not ready to record…by the time the tape’s rolling and the levels are right the urge has passed. No question about it, my cat is very confused by my sudden interest in shoving a mic up my butt.

Personally I can’t wait to get past this problem and get to the next reel when all I have to worry about is some footsteps and a few drive bys.

 

Ian Wallace, the wonderful man who played drums on 8 of the tracks you will hear in Callback, died yesterday. After an incredibly long career that included spells with everyone from King Crimson to Dylan and Eric Clapton it appears that those recordings will be among his last.

I’d been thinking about putting a small dedication to Stinker the cat at the end of the movie whose demise I wrote about earlier. It will be an honor to say thanks to Ian in the same place. I hope he’s OK about having equal billing with a mischievous tabby cat.

God bless you Ian.

MUSN’T GRUMBLE
2nd February
Jury Duty is done at last and I can finally get back to the movie for a few hours…before I fly out of town to shoot a job.

Everything I have seen over the past days puts the impatience I feel at getting this movie completed in perspective. Suffice to say it was a murder trial and the pictures of the victim and the descriptions of the injuries involved will keep me in nightmares for many moons.

Back to work.
(P.S. The trailer is complete and Lennie should be posting it soon).

IN JURY
20th January
This week has seen yet more technical problems. Long story short: 44 of the music cues for the movie were loaded into the Avid using iTunes. I’ve now discovered that if you do this it speeds up the music by about 1 second every 90 seconds! It took me from Monday to Thursday night to discover how to speed up the music so, as I cut the audio for each reel, I can re-lay it.

When I finally arrived at a solution on Thursday night I thought: “At last! Now I can get some serious work done.” Two hours later I got the call and now I’m doing Jury Duty.

There is no moral to this story but I can pass on some handy advice for future low-budge film-makers: don’t use iTunes and MP3’s to upload your music. Use AIF files.

PRO TOOLS AT LAST
16th January
The whole movie, with quick-times and everything, has now changed rooms and computers and is now awaiting for me to check, tweak and approve every sound cut and music cue. Last night I did my first piece of foley work.

You could care less, I know, but I want to at least create an impression that work is taking place every day. It will be done soon. Honest.

HAPPY NEWS
2nd January

We’ve locked picture…at last.

Over the holidays Kenny Brant found us a location that would serve both as the exterior to Moe’s digs and also his view across Hollywood. The leaves on the trees look a bit brown and I’ll miss those shots of the Knickerbocker but suddenly Moe has a new home and I’d best get used to it.

Could it really be two years since I sat here and proudly predicted I’d get this venture done? 7 or 8 months I thought. Ha! Yes - two years ago and counting. Jez Colin who will get the movie mixed for us has been very patient while these last few weeks have dragged on - I was trying to get the movie mixed by Christmas and look what happened to that.

And now I’ve got jury-duty on the horizon!

LOCATION, LOCATION
6th December
After a long wait we finally heard from the Hollywood sign people. To include close-ups of the sign they want a sum of money that would be a significant percentage of our overall budget. For a movie this size we simply can’t afford it. As far as we can establish if the sign appears in the background of a shot that’s OK but close-ups are not acceptable.

Dang.

I’ll have to shoot alternative views that say “Hollywood” or at least say it from Moe’s damaged perspective.

Also the building I chose as an exterior for Moe’s lodgings can’t seem to decide if they want to appear in the movie or not. As the use of exteriors seems to be something of a greay area everyone is telling me to wing it but, having come this far, I feel we should do the right thing and get permission. So now my location scouting hero, Kenny, is on the look-out for a building that will accept my paltry financial offering and become the establishing shot for Moe’s digs.

Until these two issues are resolved we can’t lock picture.

Finished a new tune last week, complete with French lyrics, that will be heard as background music when Vivian meets Jack. Having spent a long night trying to find French words to rhyme with ‘rouge’ I have a new respect for Abba.

REPORT CARD
6th November
Only three tracks left to mix, and some small editorial things to sort out and then…

…and then it’s time to do some really hard work and start cutting sound. There’s a reason why most movies have a post-production supervisor and a whole bunch of people working on post. Me pulling 15 hours a week on the movie isn’t cutting it.

I’ve just read my report card for the Summer term from the Callback Headmaster and it goes like this: Could Try Harder.

In other news I bought a cello yesterday and I start French lessons (my next crazy project) tomorrow. A bientot.