Friday, October 21, 2005

Music, Sound, and Digital Magic

I'm happy to announce that Zach Abramson has signed on as composer for "The Changeling." Zach is a graduate student at the Manhattan School of Music with an impressive body of work behind him. You can read more about him on the "cast and crew" page.

Zach is hard at work writing the score now and we plan to record the music in November.

Greg Sextro, the sound designer, and I have been recording additional dialogue with the actors (replacing lines where you can hear cars in the background, etc.) and plan to have all the dialogue in place in a matter of weeks. Greg has been putting in hours cleaning up all the dialogue, and so far, it sounds great. Although I'm sure Greg is becoming as sick of the movie as I am!

We'll spend November dealing with sound effects, music, and mixing.

Meanwhile, Ken Feinstein has been hard at work doing digital cleanup on several of the shots. There are some shots in the film where a person crosses in the background, there's a strange reflection in a window, or you can see a light switch on the wall during a candlelit scene, etc. Because we shot the film so quickly we had to let a lot of these things pass. So now Ken is working some digital wonders, going in and removing all of these problems, above and beyond what I expected was possible. I've seen some of the shots so far and am really impressed with just how much he has been able to do, and totally seamlessly.

Also, Jonathan Cousins is working on graphic design for the titles, DVD cover, etc.

So it looks like we're on track to be finished by the end of the year. But as you can imagine, something can always come up to slow us down. But I'm keeping my fingers crossed. Just one big push (or rather, series of pushes) left and we'll be done.

Saturday, October 01, 2005

FINAL CUT COMPLETED

It's official - I finished the edit on Thursday evening. I'm sure there will be small changes here and there as we work on the audio and music, but the editing process is officially over. The film runs 78 minutes without credits, so the total running time will be around 82 minutes.

Now on the the sound design and mix!