This crazy idea that I can make a go of this filmmaking life lurched further along the road to fulfilment this week when I ordered my splendid new Apple Mac based Editing System.

I’m hootling with excitement, but at the same time, not allowing myself to get too carried away – it’s a lot of commitment on my part so I really do have to put all the hours in to make it work. Greetings and Tolerance should be excellent testing grounds for me to work out some of the finer details of the new system.

I was a bit nervous about shifting over to Final Cut Pro, but reading through the manual has not only allayed my fears, but possibly inspired me to believe that FCP may well be better than Avid (***shock***).

I shall wait and see – the system should be here by the end of next week (with any luck), by which time I should have a reasonably fine cut of Alligator to pass over to Pete Brown who’s doing the music (though I’m still struggling with the cafe scene – but I shall prevail!).

And then it’s on with Greetings…

It’s all go on the Alligator front at the moment. A viewing of the first cut by cast and crew has really only drawn two minor points which have been easily rectified, so I’m working now on the sound edit. David Motta dropped round Julian Glover’s voice over which has taken me a lot longer than I expected to drop into place.

There were points where Martin, who played the character Julian has voiced over, said the dialogue in a similar rhythm and style to Julian, but while it looked fine for him, it completely didn’t work with Julian’s voice over it. Very strange. So I then had to go hunting for shots where his body language better reflected the dialogue we actually hear, which was quite tough as there wasn’t a huge amount of choice.

I’m off round Ken’s tomorrow evening to go through the cut with a fine tooth comb and better get my head round what he wants for the sound mix of Greetings. There’s every chance he may well be away for a while in the next few weeks, so I need to get as much out of him before he disappears.

Darren should be back from basking in the sun this week too, so hopefully some progress can be made on Tolerance as well. I’m fairly set on getting Final Cut Pro and a Mac, so it might be a chance to upgrade to the higher def material before Chris and I have get too stuck into it (though I guess that depends on budget!). My poor laptop is struggling a bit with the HDV for Alligator, transitions and effects make smooth payback nigh on impossible, so editing around some cuts is tricky. Grrr.

I’ve also been playing with Bryce, trying to do some previsualisation work on my own film. It’s slow progress – I used to do loads of 3D modeling in my youth on my old Amiga, but it’s taking time to get back into that mindset – and things have moved on a lot in the past 15 years.

Still, it’s paying dividends as I’m staring to understand what I can and can’t do on my own. The main reason I chose Bryce is that it’s primarily a landscape package (and it’s cheap!), so I’m trying to create a cityscape with it which I can then key against real life interiors. I’m not sure how far I can take it before I need to move up to Shake/Fusion and a bigger, better 3D package, but it’s an interesting learning curve.

The first edit of Alligator is now complete and in the hands of Ken, who has, in the meantime asked me if I’ll help out complete the sound work on his feature film, a sort of horror/thriller/sci-fi type affair called ‘Greetings’.

I’m still trying to ascertain how much has been done on the film so far. There’s a fairly tight edit and what seems to be half worked on sound. The whole project has rumbled on for a very long time, over 18 months, so it will be good to help put some closure on the project.

I’ve been thinking about getting a new editing system as the one I’m using is, well, a little on the shaky side to say the least. I did a bit of research and was surprised to find that a decent Apple Mac with Final Cut Pro Studio and Shake is significantly less than a decent spec PC and Avid and Fusion (I couldn’t even find a price for Fusion, but I guess it’s not cheap).

I’m a big Avid fan, but as it won’t run on the new Intel Macs until they release a universal Binary (hopefully soon), it’s still cheaper to cross over to Mac (and I get to run Vista as well with BootCamp).

And at the end of the day, I love Macs.

Problem is my car went on the blink last week – so funds for new editing systems kinda went out the window rather rapidly. Bah!

So, if anyone is feeling generous – I’ve reactivated my donation button. It’s shameless, yes, but if anyone does feel like tipping tuppence my way, they’d not only be helping me out, they’d be helping Admiral Piett too (in a roundabout kinda way). And they will get a credit in my feature which I’m going to make next year (hell, you can come and be an extra if you want).

Onwards and upwards…

I caught up with Ken to give him an update on how I’d been getting on with the edit (quite well, as it goes).

Ken had mooted the idea of trying to find someone to revoice one of the actors, the character Mr B, who was cast deliberately because of his physical presence rather than his acting ability. Ken deliberately shot him in such a way that we never see his face a) to add an air of mystery and b) for this reason.

He told me today that he had an actor friend of his who was up for doing the voiceover, a chap called Julian Glover.

General Veers and Admiral Piett in the same short film. Cool.

Chris came round to watch Voice of Silence, (new working title, Tolerance), and seemed muchly pleased with what I’d done. Daz has also watched it and given similar positive feedback, so I think we’re onto something good.

There’ll be a short break in proceedings while Daz disappears of on holiday and I edit Ken’s short film, but I think that’ll give it the breathing space it needs.

Strangely both Daz and I played the first track of Johann Johannsson’s new album, ‘IBM 1401, A Userís Manual‘ (the whole album is absolutely stunning) over the edit and it worked really well. So that’s given Daz some good cues where to head with the music.

I’ll also now sit down and watch the older 83 minute version which Chris says has some good things he’d like to keep. But the version I’ve done will be the working version we’ll move forward with.

I’d like to get the BetaCam tapes Chris has of Tolerance transferred to HDV. My machine seems quite happy with it. Might have problems with disk space there though – I’ll need at least 500GB (the Avid DNxHD files get quite big!).

I am enjoying editing HDV footage, the quality is immense. I love the way I can watch back the footage on my monitor at it doesn’t fit on the screen (and I’m running at 1600×1200!).

Chris is happy for Tolerance not to go back to 35mm unless absolutely necessary, I think he’d be happy just with a DVD release and HD version for festivals.

For now, though it’s onwards with Alligator…

Unfortunately, I’ve spent the last three days wandering round feeling like someone is skewering my intestines, so I didn’t really get to help Ken out with the filming as much as I’d liked. I soldiered on through Saturday morning as David Motta had to be elsewhere, so I stood in for him, but as soon as I could I headed home to feel sorry for myself and nurse my wife who had also got the bug.

Anyhow, Ken brought round the camera earlier this evening and I’ve captured the two hours of footage in all it’s fabulous HDV glory. Next step, transcoding down to something that won’t feel like I’m wading through glue while I try to edit it.

Here’s a couple of snapshots that I took before evil alien invaders raided my guts…

Ken and Denis discuss important things while I try not to throw up…

Ken in full director mode…

John watching the ducks go by…

Oh yes, just look at that beauty on the right hand side there, one bar at 100%!

I just finished the first edit of Voice of Silence, and it clocks in at 45 minutes and 32 seconds.

Now I just gotta get this baby onto DVD so I can show Chris tomorrow evening – as I write DV Film Maker is chunking away compressing the QuickTime Ref File into something a little more manageable for my DVD software.

Luckily my new 320GB hard disk drive turned up today so the first thing I did was format it to NTFS for those lovely big video files I need to produce (as soon as I got in tonight I exported House of Donn uncompressed and it weighed in at 50GB, but it looks gorgeous – I’ll do the same for SToA later.)

Now time to sleep, my poor little son was up to all hours with a bad belly last night…