Voice-over Redo: a comedy with photographs
So, as many of you know, I am in the final stages with Dear Stranger. Till now, the rough cuts have had to pass with a scratch voice-over. The sound quality of those recordings were simply horrible, I had to paste music over it just to hide the machine hums. Recording at a professional sound studio was out of the question because of the cost. As Kelly felt more comfortable doing the voice-over while the movie played rather than from across the house in a bathroom, we had to record the voice-over in my editing space. My editing "suite" is filled with noisy buggers including my G5, a couple of external hard drives and the fridge in the adjacent kitchen.
For the new recordings, I upgraded from a RadioShack mic to a Samson mic. The sound was better but you could hear the hum of the machines in the background. It was driving me insane. We blanketed the computer, the hard drives, cut off the sounds from the kitchen but it still wasn't enough. I could easily see how this could drive Sound Engineer's nuts.
To tackle the problem, I decided to build a sound-booth made of cardboard packing boxes with foam on the insides to deaden the noise. After a couple of trips around the neighborhood shops, the biggest size boxes ($22) I could find was 25x25x25. I was able to buy some bed foam ($20) at our local evil Walmart.
I figured it would take me about half an hour to assemble it. Wrong! An hour and half later I was still working on it. Here I am deep in it:
I decided to go with glue over Kelly's more sensible idea of using a staple gun. Anyway, the glue thing was a mess, it spilled all over the bloody place, and I kept getting stuck in it. Any second then, I expected a Spider to come and finish me off.
When the box was finally assembled, we had to wait to use it because the fumes were so strong. Half an hour later, the sound box/booth was deemed safe and thus ready for a grand opening. Unfortunately, I had not figured out how to get Kelly into the actual booth. The ceiling was too low to simply lift and place it over her. The construction was not very good and any excessive tilting could cause it to crumble. So pretty much I had to lift and tilt the booth as much as I could and then have Kelly crawled inside. Once inside the booth, Kelly marveled at the craftmanship. Not!
The sound was not perfect. There was still some hum but I figured I could get rid of that with a couple of high pass filters. Anyways, after an hour of recording, Kelly was losing her patience with the "bloody" booth. She had no ways of getting out by herself without tearing it all up, she could not move, was getting high, trying to please my demanding director-self, and could barely read her lines because most of the lights were turned off (so it would eliminate any extra sounds and also for my entertainment!).
Afraid I might lose my talent for good, we took little breaks in between the various scenes. Now for those who don't know me, it might useful to know that Kelly also happens to be my wife. These sort of responsibilites fall on her shoulders all the time. In an effort to help and support me, she never says no and I love her for it.
Anyways, the breaks seemed to get longer with each successive one. Everytime I suggested we get back to work, I would hear violent scratches the inside of the box. It was time to investigate.
Bad idea. Hell broke loose. The voice-over session was over before I could find time (between the laughs) to apologize. So those who plan to attend the rough-cut screening at Green Bean -- be warned that the voice-over in the second half is incomplete.
In the aftermath, I was able to find this on Kelly's notepad:
- AAP
[Filmmaker]
For the new recordings, I upgraded from a RadioShack mic to a Samson mic. The sound was better but you could hear the hum of the machines in the background. It was driving me insane. We blanketed the computer, the hard drives, cut off the sounds from the kitchen but it still wasn't enough. I could easily see how this could drive Sound Engineer's nuts.
To tackle the problem, I decided to build a sound-booth made of cardboard packing boxes with foam on the insides to deaden the noise. After a couple of trips around the neighborhood shops, the biggest size boxes ($22) I could find was 25x25x25. I was able to buy some bed foam ($20) at our local evil Walmart.
I figured it would take me about half an hour to assemble it. Wrong! An hour and half later I was still working on it. Here I am deep in it:
I decided to go with glue over Kelly's more sensible idea of using a staple gun. Anyway, the glue thing was a mess, it spilled all over the bloody place, and I kept getting stuck in it. Any second then, I expected a Spider to come and finish me off.
When the box was finally assembled, we had to wait to use it because the fumes were so strong. Half an hour later, the sound box/booth was deemed safe and thus ready for a grand opening. Unfortunately, I had not figured out how to get Kelly into the actual booth. The ceiling was too low to simply lift and place it over her. The construction was not very good and any excessive tilting could cause it to crumble. So pretty much I had to lift and tilt the booth as much as I could and then have Kelly crawled inside. Once inside the booth, Kelly marveled at the craftmanship. Not!
The sound was not perfect. There was still some hum but I figured I could get rid of that with a couple of high pass filters. Anyways, after an hour of recording, Kelly was losing her patience with the "bloody" booth. She had no ways of getting out by herself without tearing it all up, she could not move, was getting high, trying to please my demanding director-self, and could barely read her lines because most of the lights were turned off (so it would eliminate any extra sounds and also for my entertainment!).
Afraid I might lose my talent for good, we took little breaks in between the various scenes. Now for those who don't know me, it might useful to know that Kelly also happens to be my wife. These sort of responsibilites fall on her shoulders all the time. In an effort to help and support me, she never says no and I love her for it.
Anyways, the breaks seemed to get longer with each successive one. Everytime I suggested we get back to work, I would hear violent scratches the inside of the box. It was time to investigate.
Bad idea. Hell broke loose. The voice-over session was over before I could find time (between the laughs) to apologize. So those who plan to attend the rough-cut screening at Green Bean -- be warned that the voice-over in the second half is incomplete.In the aftermath, I was able to find this on Kelly's notepad:
- AAP
[Filmmaker]
1 Comments:
what exactly did Kelly write?
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