Well, a lot has gone on since I’ve posted last! I thought it would be a good time to check in and take stock of where things are at with CD-Trip and other projects.
CD-Trip:
Post production has been extremely slow. Put simply, I underestimated how much work the sound was going to be. With most of my previous projects I recorded a lot of sound during production, and that does a lot of the heavy lifting. Even if you want to replace a sound (say, a door closing), at least you’ll have a reference. But with CD-Trip, almost none of the footage has sound. I really only recorded sound when there was dialogue, and there are only a couple of lines in the whole thing. Most of the sound with dialogue that WAS recorded I can’t even use because the sound of the camera is too loud. (Luckily my sound recorder Geoff had the idea to record all of the dialogue while we rehearsed. I’ve been able to match up most of the dialogue with sound recorded during rehearsal. That was definitely a good idea!) Anyway, all of this is to say there was quite a bit of foley to record (95% of which is now done), which was particularly difficult because I didn’t have a soundproof room to record in, and my house/street is really noisy.
Recording foley tends to be more of a technical task than a creative task, so it’s kind of a chore to get through. But the real thing that’s gotten me stuck is the creative part. Creative use of sound can really shape a movie, and it’s going to be a really important part of CD-Trip in particular. So I’ve been working on creating more abstract soundscape kind of things – the thing that is hard is figuring out how I want it to be.
CONTENT (new short film):
I got pretty burned out on CD-Trip after a while, and came up with a comedy short that I could put together quickly to change gears for a little while:
It took me about 40 hours total, which felt extremely breezy. (So far I’ve logged 390 hours on CD-Trip…. which doesn’t include most of the preproduction.)
NEW MUSIC VIDEO:
I also made a new animated music video for Muzzle Tung (music video starts about 7 minutes in):
That took me about 80 hours, which was pretty fast for animation. I have some other ideas for animation, and thought it would be a good chance to try out Unity as a platform for video (I already have quite a bit of experience with it as a game engine).
If you’re interested in more details about that process I made this little BTS video:
So, those are some of the things I’ve been up to! Progress on CD-Trip is continuing, and I hope to share more details soon.