Beta

I'm going to give the current version (sound10) the beta designation. I showed it to my niece tonight. She had pretty much the same reaction as everyone else... you can follow it up to the beginning of the research sequences. And then.... she thought it had something to do with "art." Also she couldn't tell that the video was coming from the little TV. Damn. That means I have to shoot something. The film is testing so consistently that I may just jump to the mastering stage.

Scoring/sound design

Here's what I've discovered about sound design/scoring so far--

1. It's not nearly as difficult as doing video.
2. It's tedious in places. 90% of the audio you hear in noise film was put there by hand. It's almost like animation--building a world from scratch. Probably the most tedious was putting in the typing noises for the typing scene. I found a recording of typing sentences and split it up to match the video. This gives the typing a more natural feel. I think that using the same sample over and over would sound repetitious.
3. The layer/track-based metaphor of the software makes basic layering and assembling operations easy. The hard parts involve sequences that morph or transform from one thing to another.
4. My sound design style is very 'modernist.' I find myself frequently changing the audio when there is a cut, or accentuating cuts. Normally in film, you're supposed to try to smooth out the cuts. I found I love it when there's a cut and you change the room tone. That was always part of my vision for the film.
5. Although I shot MOS, I should watch when I'm talking. I was able to use a lot of desert sound (walking, car stopping) because there was no dialog over it. There's nothing as real as reality. I even used some of the parts where the wind hits the mic creating wind noise. Technically that's considered bad craft, but I really liked the sound of it.

Contemporary perpetual motion machine

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Own a piece of movie history!

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Incomprehensibilityness

Last night I recorded Ben's narration. It came out well I thought. As usual, when I go through the stuff we recorded I have to listen to myself direct. Sample:

Remember, its' like those lines... it's like you're picking up lines, as they're flying flying by, they're just occurring, thinking, really quick, you're starting to realize something, it's important

Seriously, how does he understand what I'm talking about? But apparently it seems to work since I got what I want and there was a difference from the previous take.

Sarah Palin and 35mm adapters

If noise film were Sarah Palin, it would now be railing against the elitest use of 35mm adapters (see earlier post) promoting, instead, an aesthetic of chromatic aberrations and infinite depth of field. In this lenticular class struggle, standard lenses would be the province of Joe Video Production, a tool for those who exist outside a powerful cultural elite. Yes, 35mm lenses enable the use of high falutin' film grammar like rack focuses but this grammar is grounded in a culture of specialization. You can't be a rugged individualist and drag along a focus puller at the same time! But noise film isn't Palin because it accepts the viability of 35mm lenses. Rather than attacking lens adapters, it wonders aloud whether its own visual and textual qualities are sufficient to make it watchable believing, in the end, that the heart can ultimately prevail.

Noise music

On NPR this morning there was a special segment on "noise music" which, as you might expect, is music that sounds like noise. The music itself is very similar artistically to noise film. In fact, the other week I was thinking of the idea of creating an all-noise internet radio station which would broadcast noisy sounds and music both live and prerecorded. Certainly, in noise media we find a longing for an earlier, analog world.

The moving boundary of unacceptable quality

Yong dropped by today and was talking about the 35mm adapter he's getting. Apparently, while I haven't been watching, a slew of new, cheap static and vibrating adapters have been released (check out this site). This is significant because developments like these will continue to raise the lower bar for acceptable image quality. Already, once cutting-edge SD footage looks dated. The video that comes with the DV Rebel's Guide, for example, now looks brittle and gray. Shooting in HD does make a difference but shooting with a 35mm lens is a real game changer. The footage looks dramatically better.

Each day I sit on the noise film footage, it gets worse looking, not because the footage is changing, but because the world into which it will be released is changing. One way to address this problem is to move laterally, working with the footage in such a way that its musty quality is made irrelevant, or essential to its character. This is what David Lynch tried to do with Inland Empire, using the PD-150 for its quirky, homemade quality. But it's a tough trick because of the transparent way in which we accept technological advances. At a certain point, you don't see the spectacular image of a nice 35mm lens. It just looks normal. And everything else looks bad in comparison.

Knowing the score

I met with Dan last week to talk about the score... or I should I say lack of it. We decided to go another route with it, which right now, means me. I'm about a third done with it and I think it's turning out well. Dan reminded me about the film Hara Kiri that I had given to him as a reference. So I dug up some Asian and shamisen sampling CDs I had stashed away and started assembling a score along with various pads. I found some great resources in the process. I got a lot of sounds from soundsnap.com and the freesound project. Both sites are free and well worth checking out. I also got some effects and pads from Soundtrack Pro's library which is surprisingly extensive.

The hardest part of the whole thing was deciding what program to use. I like Pro Tools for its interface, but I hate it for its insistence on making me carry around an mBox dongle. I tried Soundtrack Pro but was bewildered by its interface. I did a lot of work in Final Cut, but it lacked sufficient audio processing capabilities. I finally settled on Logic Express which is working pretty well. What I would really like is a program that makes it easy to simultaneously edit video and audio. There was a program that did something like that, but it disappeared. I forget what it was called.

I think we're now looking realistically at an end of the year release date.