Competed first complete rough cut - 26 minutes - including titles. Basically spend the day editing - maybe 5-7 hours (up at 7:30). End titles & images are in colour. Very happy - obviously things need to be tweaked - but basically happy.

Up at 8:30, watch the doco over a cup of coffee as I take notes of sounds I will need to record - camera clicks, car horns, demolition, etc.) Re-arrange two scenes - Dick talking about the North Geelong Meat Mart Cactus and the Six Months Later Minerva Bowser.

It is amazing by putting silence in the right spot, you can achieve much greater emotional impact. Have turned my attention to the beginning Charger montage. Am also reviewing all the footage one last time just in case I spot something I have overlooked.

I'm trying to find sound of demolition*.

Underground 5 (Underground 5 #006) 2002/9/11 09:18:46

As luck would have it, only a block's distance from the office, demolition has begun on the YMCA office.

So I brought the DV camera from home and this morning the foreman let me grab some some shots of demolished rubble.

And at lunchtime, I was able to film the Bulldozer in action - more importantly get the sound I needed.

I was shaking the camera to fake the "in progress" look of it and I hope to digitize it tonight. This weekend I will get the other noises.

*Literalism rarely works in the world of sound effects - fire noises being best made by crinkling cellophane, etc. So what you see will rarely sound the way you want... netherless the sound of a diesel engine turning over was one sound I wasn't expecting but which turned out to be the most useful.

File listing for the third montage of Dick's photos.
File listing for the Before & After photos.

Doing on-line high-res version of Lost Highway. My use of nested sequences and cut up clips from the same scene has caused some problems. I'm working my way through the solutions. Rendering clips with filters takes hours! Nice to see all that detail, though. Think I'll have to post my observations to the User Groups.

More work on LH. Almost all the sequences have been rendered, and some spots will definitely need tweaking. End titles need re-arranging due to being composed for a small screens - FCP's Offline Photo JPEG Settings.

Most of the scenes are now on-line at DV resolution, ready to be buffed & polished. Can't wait to run it through the camera and see what it looks like on a monitor.

Becoming quite a rush to complete the tweaking of LH before our Sydney Trip.

Bendigo. Review LH.mpg for score points with Steve Baker.

Tweaking the roughcut - mainly smoothing sound & laying in bg ambience tracks.

I have a problem. There is a noisy segment where Dick's voice is so loud it actually distorts. The problem is I really like what he is saying in this segment but in it's current form don't think it is acceptable. What to do?

Lost Print (Lost Print #001) 2002/9/30 12:06:36

Well, my old mate Steve Baker - he who has been doing sound for yonks - once advised me to, where possible, to take a method approach to treating sound. So if you want something that sounds like it is coming from a TV set, then play it back through a TV and re-record the sound - by putting a mic near the speaker..

This is an antidote to the Pro-Tools-give-me-a-plug-in approach.

Mmm, after some thought, I decide I'll hide the distortion by making it sound like it is coming from a walkie-talkie.

To explain this visually, I'll make the image look like is coming from a video viewfinder. (Final Cut Pro comes with such an effect built-in). I like this approach because I can get a cultish effect by re-filming off a TV screen. This should also provide a suitable treatment to the sound.

So I edit the footage of this segment. Then render the Viewfinder effect. Then print it to video. Then dub the video. Then play it off a TV and film it.

And it never really worked. The segment gets cut.

More LH sound tweaking in the morning.