And it's done!

I've been waiting a very long time to be able to say that. And it does feel a little surreal to say it,… but it really is finished.

Mike Dollar wrapped up mixing the sound this past Monday.  I put my final touches on the animation Thursday.  Now the final render with audio is in the hands of Ryan Burkholder of Grand Rapids based Organisum. Ryan will be overseeing the compression and formatting needed to prepare it for theater projection. 

A million thanks to Dollar for introducing me to Ryan after I had told him how difficult it was to navigate the complexities involved with compressing a 55Gb movie without losing the image quality (that's right,… I said 55 Gig! Not 55 megabytes, but 55 gigabytes)   

How Ryan keeps track of all the complex ins-and-outs of codecs, avi's, BetaSp, HDcam, H264's and a gagillion other terms that make my head spin, is beyond me! But I'm so glad that he can and even happier to have him helping us get these issues ironed out.  

While Ryan is working his magic on the movie, I'll be ironing out the details for something I hope to formally announce in a post later this week.  (stay tuned,..)

In the meantime, I can announce the official monster,me website is up and running. Many many thanks to Lisa Price for all her work in putting it together! 

You can find it here.

Let there be music!

Quite a bit has happened since I last posted.

The film is now edited into a roughcut with a 9 minute runtime. The sound tracks have been handed over to Mike Dollar who will be performing all the sound editing, remastering and audio wizardry. Mike's an interesting guy with a widely varied background that ranges from psychologist to musician to sound engineer to civil war buff. He came highly recommended from a voice actor friend of mine, John Guertin.

And lastly, but definitely not leastly is the arrival of a score composer to help bring this project to life!  

Last week, Mojave Bird (the stage name of Grace Peters, a Portland based singer/songwriter/musician) joined the small monster,me team. Grace was the keyboardist in the southern California bands "Fairview" and "Kiev" before moving to Portland and creating her solo project "Mojave Bird." Her music has an ethereal and, at times, hypnotic quality to it.  It also has the feel that I've been imagining all along, which I can only think to describe as "hopeful melancholy." Please follow the link above and check out the sample songs on her website. I think you'll see what I'm trying to describe.

( Grace Peters )

It was an odd and unexpected set of circumstances and synergy that brought Grace onboard.  I had approached the recording artist Petracovich, who I've been a longtime fan of, to see if she would be interested in composing a score for monster,me. She was interested, but she was also 8 months pregnant, which made our timing less than ideal. So when she decided she'd be unable to work on the film, she suggested that I talk to her sister who is also a "very talented" musician.  

I listened to the song samples that Jessica (Petracovich) directed me to. Turned out that Grace's music, like Jessica's, had all the qualities I was looking for in a soundtrack for the film. A few emails and phone calls later and Mojave Bird became the composer for monster,me.

Grace has already written/recorded the theme that opens with the first few scenes of the movie and I can't wait to hear where she is going to take this.  Beautiful work.

So, many thanks to Mike Dollar for taking on the role of sound-man for the movie. And many thanks to Petracovich (who I hope to have the opportunity to work with someday on another project) for suggesting Mojave Bird for this film, and many many thanks to Grace for lending her talents to the soundtrack!  I couldn't be happier to have her on board.

( In Grace's Portland studio )

Almost fullsize,...

 Since the full resolution version of the film is larger than can be displayed on my widescreen  monitor,  this is a screen grab of it at roughly 85%. (hoping that I can post an image this large,... I guess if you are reading this, the site at least allowed me to upload it. Not sure that it will display at the full 85% though. The actual film is over 2000 pixels wide.)

Rain, rain, rain,...

So, I thought I'd put up a little bit of the riveting exercise in monotony that I've been up to. 

Since the basic rain presets built into AfterEffects weren't going to fit the look of the film, I've been fine-tuning a system of making rain with particle generators.

Roughly 18 or so of the 40 shots in the film are in the rain.

Sound effects and trying to keep the mic dry:

So,... since the work I'm doing on the film right now still falls in the category of "Images Too Boring to Post," I thought I'd put up a few shots from when we were recording sound effects.

These are Markey and I capturing various noises for splashes, rain and for when the main character is moving thru the water.  Kait shot all these,...  even climbing onto the counter to get a vantage point above Markey (really getting into her job of being the documentary photographer).

For some of the sounds, we tried putting the mic in a ziploc so we could submerge it. And it worked surprisingly well!

And standing in the pond making waves. 

This was really cold.

 

 

Sketches vs. Finals

Well,... more like "Near Finals." 

This week I've been working with floating water particles creating underwater atmosphere, and since that would make for some seriously boring images to post,... I thought I'd put up "Before & After" shots of some finished and nearly-finished scenes. 

The "Before" images are from the original test reel which was a combination of scanned storyboard sketches and drawings done directly in Photoshop.  The "After" images are screen-grabs from the latest motion renders generated earlier this week. 

I hope you find these more interesting than the floaties drifting thru the water that I've been staring at all day.

Fish Breath

As production gets closer to wrapping up, I've been going back to add the "fine tuning" that I'd left for later: such as rain, water ripples, lighting effects,... etc.  The task this last week has been giving the "monster" her gills.   ... I mean,  she's gotta breathe, right?