Gone to America

I finally did it. I got drunk. It was bound to happen sooner or later – indeed, why did it take so long? I’ve been here for three weeks – was I never going to sample the Manhattan night life?
I went with Liza, Neil and Liza’s freshly arrived sister Christina …

I finally did it. I got drunk. It was bound to happen sooner or later – indeed, why did it take so long? I’ve been here for three weeks – was I never going to sample the Manhattan night life?
I went with Liza, Neil and Liza’s freshly arrived sister Christina to a place called Joe’s Pub. We went late – apparently people in New York don’t go out until 10 or 11pm, and still expect to get seats, even at the weekend. Culture shock! It was a hip and trendy place, although it can’t be that exclusive – they let me in even though I was wearing a bright orange fleece. Drinks were expensive – about $7 for a beer – and it wasn’t really that exciting.
We left after a few drinks and headed around the corner to Mannhatta, which seems to have no web presence whatsoever (either that, or I’ve gotten the name wrong). This was more like it. We went downstairs, drank, and danced. There may have been some tequila. In fact, now that I think about it, I remember being punched painfully in the upper arm by a waitress after I reprimanded her for not bringing the salt. Mmm, feisty!
Anyway, a good night. A lot less cramped than a Dublin night. It was possible to move around, get served in a reasonable time, find a seat, but still busy enough to have some atmosphere. And the women are gorgeous. And friendly. Who’s coming to visit?
I’ve put up some pictures here, in defiance of vanity. and yesterday, I went to see Mystic River, which I have reviewed.

The meeting at C5 went well. I just have to wait and see where it leads, now, if anywhere. It was kind of fun to stand beside Al as he handed a CD to an intern to “run it over to the Coens”. >sigh< . Will I ever stop being …

The meeting at C5 went well. I just have to wait and see where it leads, now, if anywhere. It was kind of fun to stand beside Al as he handed a CD to an intern to “run it over to the Coens”. >sigh< . Will I ever stop being star struck?
I went to a gig last night, here in Greenpoint. Roomie Liza’s brother Neil is staying with her for a couple of days. (Not that Liza is roomy – far from it. I mean that she’s my roommate). We went to a club called Galapagos, which was pretty cool, with a big reflecting pool and a bar. What more do you need?
There was also a band – a strange, dancy, Norweigan band called the Xploding PlastiX. They were the last act in something called the CMJ Music Marathon. It was a fun gig, although nobody was dancing. I don’t think there were enough people present, or enough alcohol. I single handedly caused an encore by yelling out “more!” when they were leaving the stage, which was picked up by a couple of other people. They really weren’t ready, and seemed a bit bemused. Don’t they do encores in Norway? Here’s a picture, of sorts.

When that was over, we went another club nearby, called the Laila Lounge. Here I learned something interesting. There are no licensing laws in New York! All right, there are laws, but they don’t involve a specific closing time. Now, both the places we were at did close around two, but the possibilities…
And it is odd to see people shivering outside pubs smoking, but you’ll all be getting used to that soon enough. I have to say, being able to go to a pub and then wear the same clothes the next day is kind of nice.

The poll. I shall continue to write reviews, not because of the nine who wish me to, or for the two who are indifferent, but for the one wants me to stop.

There’s a new poll now. This is the laptop I’m looking at. I want it so baaaad…

I know, I know…

and just because, here’s a picture of the Empire State I took from the roof of C5 the other evening. They’ve got great views there.

Last night, I went to a cocktail party at C5. I had a two pronged invitation – roomie Marilyn was going, and Al Zaleski, who works there, was one of the guys I was supposed to ring when I got here. So I did, and he invited me. So …

Last night, I went to a cocktail party at C5. I had a two pronged invitation – roomie Marilyn was going, and Al Zaleski, who works there, was one of the guys I was supposed to ring when I got here. So I did, and he invited me. So I went. C5 do all the sound for Martin Scorsese and the Coen Brothers, two (or three) of my biggest filmmaking heroes, so to work there would be the absoulute pinnacle of all I could hope for here in New York. They seem nice, although like everybody else they kept pointing out to me that it’s very quiet at the moment.
Al suggested that I intern for a while. This depressed the hell out of me. Interns make coffee and carry stuff, and while I appreciate that this would be a good way for me to meet people, I… I… I just supervised a feature, for Christ’s sake! Seeing my reaction (I didn’t yell or anything) he suggested I might be able to do a short for them. That’s more like it. I’d get to meet mixers, foley artists, other editors in a work situation, and hopefully impress them with actual work that I do. And they actually pay quite well for shorts. I’m going to go in there tomorrow, hang out, see the place, and see if he remembers saying that.
The Coen’s next movie, The Ladykillers, is coming in there in November. There’s no way I’ll get on it – it’s pretty much crewed, and nobody knows me yet – but working in the same place would be exciting for me, and that’s something I haven’t felt for a while.
Speaking of the Coens, I went to see Intolerable Cruelty, and I’ve written a review. Please feel free to agree, or disagree, or argue, or ridicule. Some of you must have seen Kill Bill by now. What did you think? Come on, Comment! (Not here, obviously. In the review section).

It was cold today, for the first time since I got here. I ran out and bought some heavy clothes, including a really big coat. I just thought I’d throw that in.

I’ve been holding off writing about this until I had heard some results. I’ve just been speaking to Anne Touchette, the production manager, so now I feel I can carry on. I’ve had a lot of communication from curious people. Prepare to have it satisfied to some degree. I should …

I’ve been holding off writing about this until I had heard some results. I’ve just been speaking to Anne Touchette, the production manager, so now I feel I can carry on. I’ve had a lot of communication from curious people. Prepare to have it satisfied to some degree. I should point out that much of my recollection is vague.
I showed up at the Circle in the Square acting school at 7pm, as instructed. Steve Chappelle, the producer and probable lead actor, was a student here, and works in the bar when there’s a show on, so he had no problem wangling access. The entire place is ours for the weekend – offices, classrooms, dressing rooms, auditorium – a real coup.
I meet James Monahan, the editor and one of the writers. He introduces me to Mark Reynolds, another Pro-Tools guy. He’ll be working mainly with the music crew, we think. Roles seem somewhat haphazardly assigned, but I suppose we’ll work it out as the night wears on. The core crew – Steve, James, Anne, Alan (the director) and Simon (the writer) – appear to have decided on a scattergun approach to crewing. There’s a lot of people here – I think the crew exceeded thirty in the end.
That’s reasonable, because nobody here knows what this is going to be like – they had two weeks to make the movie that won them their heat. They had to pick a production model and run with it, and they’ve gone with “better safe than sorry”. Whatever happens, there’s somebody here who can deal with it.
I’m put in a room way down at the end of a long corridor, with Steve’s fancy Titanium Powerbook and an MBox. Steve tells me it was Chris Rock’s dressing room. I can’t verify this. The music guys (there are three of them, four including Mark) are in the room across the hall, with their keyboards, guitars, ebows, trumpets and Logic system.
We hash out a plan with James. He’ll cut, export an OMF and a Quicktime movie to a small 25Gb Firewire drive, I’ll put it on the laptop, cut the dialogue, FX, Mark will cut the music, I’ll mix(!), bounce it out, back to the Firewire drive, back into the Final Cut Pro, where all the sequences will be assembled. At least, I think that’s what we planned. It’s more or less what we ended up doing, anyway. It’s all a bit hazy now.
And now we wait. With Pizza. I meet few other crew members. Both of the DoPs are students at the New York Film Academy (I’m sure you’ve seen the ads), and so is the sound recordist, Will. He’s a nice guy, but I’m a little concerned when he casually wanders in to my room and asks if I know how to operate the mixer he’s been given. I show him which cable to use, get him to turn off the limiter, ask him to just worry about the voices, and tell him to record two tracks into the camera, one 6dB lower than the other. Margin for error. In the end he does a decent enough job, although he’s hampered by the extremely loud, broad band and non-negotiable airconditioning found in every single room.

Midnight. Anne gets the assignment and calls in. The Genre: Mystery. The Topic: An Unwanted Gift. It’s pretty broad. The writing team sequesters themselves and the rest of us get taken on a tour of the theater. It’s big and labyrinthine – good location for a mystery, anyway.
After the tour, the music team springs into action, composing and recording suitably moody and mysterious music, even though we don’t have a story yet. I spring in to action too, and fall asleep on the couch outside my room. I have a sleeping bag with me, and boy am I glad. A few of the other crew have been jealously eyeing it. More than one of them tell me that they had considered bringing some kind of blanket, but decided against it. There’s been a lot of Red Bull laid in, and I guess they didn’t want to appear lazy. Those of you that know me will be aware that this has never been a concern of mine. I hear the music guys improvising away as I drift off. Don’t they know that most of their energy will be needed late tomorrow, and if they don’t sleep now they’ll be completely wrecked when it matters? Zzzz….

3.30am, or thereabouts. There’s a story meeting. We’re all called into the auditorium, and the tale is spun. It’s a story about an understudy, who is given the unwanted gift of the lead role when the unpleasant lead actress vanishes mysteriously, and finds herself oddly victimized. Will she be vanishing too?
Instantly a number of crew members leap into disbelief. There’s too much story. You’ll never fit that into a ten minute film (the rules state that the film must be no longer than ten minutes). That’s a feature, for Christ’s sake. The loudest objections are coming from some students, who are trying to mask their inexperience with brash overconfidence. Ah, I remember it well. I speak up in the story’s defense – I think it’s perfectly doable in a ten minute film, and it’s not a feature at all. They resequester themselves, and I go back to sleep. The composing continues apace. It’s actually sounding pretty good.

4.30am or so. A new story – much paired back, without an ending and disagreement amongst the writers about several key points – but they really have to start shooting now, so they do. Back to bed for me.

9am. I wake up. I actually hadn’t intended to sleep this long. Have I missed anything? Well, no. I meet Anne in the corridor. She’s looking for a sound guy to record an actor for a PA announcement for the movie. Work! I set up my mic and record him doing his line – “Could Anne please come to my office?” and variations thereof. I put it on the firwire drive and deliver it to James. He tells me the line has actually been dropped. Oh well. He also tells Oliver, the 3D animation guy, that they’re not going to need the CG cockroach he’s been working on for four hours. He take this stoically.
I go back to my room and sort through the FX library they’ve provided me with. It’s OK, and I’m familiar with a lot of it, so all is well. I drop in on the music guys, and have a listen to what they’ve come up with. They’ve been working all night, and they’re pretty tired. It sounds amazingly good, but will it work with what’s been shot?
The next few hours are pretty hazy – I’m not sure how I filled them, exactly. I know I didn’t go back to sleep. James asks me if I have anything to give to him. Well, like what? He doesn’t know. He mentions that there’s a scene where somebody bangs on some glass. The story has changed a lot since I last heard it, and I’m not sure anybody really knows where it’s going now. I dutifully take my recording gear and record some glass bangs and squeaks with Mark. I load them into the ProTools and master them, but really it’s just busywork. I don’t even know what the shot looks like.
Oliver has been working on an opening title. Myself and the music guys have a look at it. A minor, friendly power struggle takes place as we discuss our ideas for it. I think it’ll work with sound FX, they think it’ll work with music. We both go off and do our thing. He’s still working on it, anyway. I put some sounds together blind, but it’s not really working, so I go back to have another look. He’s changed it completely – it’s much faster now. I tell the music guys that it’s changed, and they go to look, but they can’t find Oliver. I have the advantage! I make something I think will work, only a sketch, and bounce it out. I give it to Oliver, and he likes it. Steve likes it too, and Oliver starts to change his animation to fit. I was going to change the sound to fit the animation, but hey, if that’s the way he wants to go…
I’m getting a little bit nervous now. Nothing is cut, and I think James is starting to factor the sound post out of his calculations (I could be wrong). I decide to hover around the cutting room, making it obvious that I’m not doing anything. Eventually, I get a scene. It’s a fairly simple dialogue scene, just a couple of cuts. The only wrinkle is the final shot, a very wide master, with a radically different sound to the earlier shots. And the sound prelaps the cut by quite a ways. There’s no possibility of finding alts or recording ADR, so I spend longer than I should messing with EQ, compression, and reverb. My shortcomings as a mixer are painfully apparent. Mark tries to help me out. He mixes music, which is very different, but he knows the tools better than I do. In the end I just kludge it by laying fill all the way to the head and faking a volume change on the picture cut to the wide. I try to add some kind of a bg, but I’m just adding noise, and there’s enough of that as there is. It’s fine.

And so we’ve begun. Mark burns all the music cues to a CD and brings it in. We try to cut the music they composed for this sequence without seeing it, but they’ve given us two minutes of music for a thirty second scene. And, as Mark points out, it’s tonally wrong. We end up using some of the music they did for the following scene. It fits perfectly. We call Steve and James down to watch. They approve, and we bounce it back to them.
I finally realise the method in the music guys’ madness. There’s no way they would have had time to compose anything and lay it down if they had waited until they’d seen the scenes. They just composed a variety of pieces around a theme, knowing roughly the story, and hoped that some of it would stick. It was the only way to do it, and it seems to be working.
We go back and forth like this for a while. About 10.30pm (the film is due in at midnight) we get sent down a real dog of a scene. It’s an atmospheric chase through the labyrinth, up and down stairs, in and out of doors… and there’s no production sound. I still don’t know why. I’m tired now, but I launch myself at it. I cut the doors, cut squeaks, slams. I add an escalating bassy atmospheric thing to try and make the lack of noise seem deliberate. It’s a cliche, but there’s no time for subtlety. A female reporter and photographer from Wired magazine wander in, and I grab them to record some panicky breathing. They’re very helpful. They kind of interview me, but I’m a little frantic. My photograph is taken. I cut the breathing. At the end of the chase, a ghost appears. No! Sound Design! I throw something together and add some heavy delay on the ghost’s voice to a) make it sound ghostly and b) try and hide the fact that it’s grotesquely out of sync. I’m glad I got some sleep when I did.
Mark takes over. He cuts the music quickly and well. We get approval, but the director (they finished shooting a while ago) is disturbed that the editor has cut out his ending. We try to bounce, but the computer keeps crashing. Bloody Macs. We restart. It’s 11pm. We send it back up to them. There are two scenes to go, but they’re not going to have the luxury of a sound edit. I gather my stuff together and wander up to the cutting room. They’re assembling the movie. It’s four minutes long. I knew they could have done that other story. I notice that the last sequence is entirely out of sync. I yell out “Eight frames later! Move it eight frames later!”. They do, but they don’t play it, so I’ll never know if I was right. It’s 11.30pm as I make to leave. Everybody’s pretty frazzled. They still have to render it and play it out, and traffic in Manhattan is bad on Saturday nights. They decide to change the ending. I leave.
I get a taxi home. The driver doesn’t know the way, and wants to palm me off on somebody else, but I refuse. Once he’s accepted this he puts a positive spin on it – he’ll be learning something new. He calls his brother, another taxi driver, and speaks, oh, I don’t know, let’s say Turkish, for a while, getting directions. He didn’t want to drive to Brooklyn, because he’ll probably come back empty. He seems like a nice guy. I go home and sleep. I spend the next day and a half wondering how the movie did. I don’t even know if they made it in on time, and I’m suspicious that it doesn’t actually make any sense. Still, it looked nice, and had some pretty creepy moments. Who knows how well anybody else did? They all had the same problems. Eventually I check the website.
< !more>
I just did that so you couldn’t skip ahead to the end easily.

There’s no information on the website. I check the discussion pages. Apparently the screening was a disaster – the projector didn’t work properly, and the organisers wouldn’t refund the money they charged to get in – $18. The winner, which was supposed to be announced at 8pm the evening after the competition, won’t now be announced for another ten days. At least that’s the rumour.
I ring Anne, to see if she knows anything more definite. She hasn’t heard any of this. It turns out they were late, and disqualified. Twelve minutes. Only one other team didn’t make it on time. A team from Massachusetts finished their film at noon, got in a car and drove to New York, and they were on time. Oh well. Steve is going to recut the film and we’ll all get copies. I’ll see then if it makes more sense than I remember.
Anne seems philosphical. They’ve learned that 24 hour movies aren’t their thing, they need a script. She’s just finished cleaning up the theater, and hasn’t called anybody. I’m the first to get in touch and ask.
Well, it was interesting, and I met some people. The music guys were great, and I’m sure I’ll see them again. I think they were impressed with my ProTools virtuousity. Heck, I even impressed myself. I’m damn fast. Of course, it’s not going to count amongst my best work when shorn of it’s 24 hour context. Even less so, when shorn of it’s sync! Who knows if it’ll lead anywhere? At least I feel like I’ve done something in NYC. Week three, here I come.
And could more of you please comment? This is all feeling very one way. Let me know you’re out there, people! Let me feel the love!

I’m on board for the NYC Midnight competition, as part of the “Aunt Agony” team. It should be fun, if it doesn’t kill me. We meet tonight in the Circle in the Square acting school, which will be our base, at 7pm. We’ll spend some time making sure …

I’m on board for the NYC Midnight competition, as part of the “Aunt Agony” team. It should be fun, if it doesn’t kill me. We meet tonight in the Circle in the Square acting school, which will be our base, at 7pm. We’ll spend some time making sure all the equipment works. At midnight, Anne, the producer, will receive the assignment, and then it begins. Twenty four hours to make the movie.
I’m going to spend a lot of today in bed, I think, and I’ll be bringing my sleeping bag with me. It’s just like being back in college. I’ll get to meet some people, that’s for sure. After this kind of thing if you’re still speaking you’re friends for life. I hope we win, because if we don’t we don’t get paid! It’s a pretty big crew, so even if we do we don’t get paid much, but hey, I’m actually not in it for the money.
It should be… Interesting. And thanks to Patrick Cutliffe who pointed out the ad to me on Mandy.com.

And the poll. Eight people think I should be hopeful, and two want to know what kind of job I have in mind. An excellent question. I’ve put up a new one.

I’ve added a movie review section to the site. I’ve reviewed Kill Bill, and I don’t know if I’ll ever review anything else, but there you go.
The guys from the advert got back to me. I’ll find out in a couple of hours if they want me on …

I’ve added a movie review section to the site. I’ve reviewed Kill Bill, and I don’t know if I’ll ever review anything else, but there you go.
The guys from the advert got back to me. I’ll find out in a couple of hours if they want me on board, and if so I’ll meet them this evening. Should be interesting, if it transpires. Here’s what it’s all about.