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.