2001-2002 – Student of Sound
Picture was finished save for our creature shots. Meanwhile our sound issues were in ugly condition. I would have hired someone to help, but I was still living paycheck to paycheck. Steve became heavily involved with other projects so I spent a lot of time polishing and re-polishing the edit.
Fortunately, I was able to borrow a sizable library of sound effects, and I began applying final sound to all the scenes. It sounds easy saying it in one short sentence, but the sound was excruciatingly laborious and I was so new to the idea of sound and its place in film, I found myself on a steep learning curve.
I would spend hours watching each scene, applying sound where it was needed. The opening scene had us following Eden’s legs as she navigated downtown at night. I huddled close to the computer monitor, stop the footage and advanced frame by frame until her foot touched the cement, then apply cd6024_43_Steps Female high heels on cement to each step. Layered underneath this would be cd6040_05_City Ambience, light distant traffic. Eventually the sidewalk turned to cobblestone (cd6024_49_Steps Female high heels on cement w/l9oose rock) and she stopped (cd6002_12_Volkswagen Drive-by fast, Exterior). Across some tram tracks, by the Skidmore Fountain (cd6077_23_Fountain, medium) was her Lesbian lover. After a brief hesitation while a tram goes by (cd6011_67_city street car, exterior), she crosses over to her and they enveloped in a deep and passionate kiss (me making out with my arm).
We were able to borrow large slabs of foam from a local audio studio. We made a little fort with them, a primitive sound booth. Over a period of months, we asked the actors to come over and play, and shoved them into our play fort to have them replace their original audio. We would feed them their original line three times through the headphones, and they would attempt to repeat the line at the same pace and inflection into the mic. This allowed us to get nice clean lines for a lot of our exterior scenes whose production sound was polluted with external noises.
Here is part of a scene with original audio: Eden_Mom_Orig_Audio
Here is the same dialogue re-performed in our phone booth fort: Eden_Mom_New_Audio
I signed up for a fiction writing class at a community college in September. I tried to write other stories, but my creative energy seemed to either have been drained or stifled by this incomplete project. So I revisited the story of the movie, wrote parts of it out in literary form and read it to my class. Their feedback reinforced some of the better parts of the story and shed light on weak areas that I hadn’t seen before. Its one thing to receive criticism about my written work, but to have it done to my efforts of the previous five years, painstakingly shot to video… it was devastating.
But the more I watched the semi-complete movie, the more I agreed with their criticism. I had forced together two unrelated short stories in what I had hoped would be an interesting experiment, and it turned out to be an experiment without the interesting part. Perhaps it would have worked had it not involved two extremely unrelated genres, a detective thriller and a lesbian drama. The story of sad eyed Eden coming out of the closet and faced with breaking up with her unlikable boyfriend didn’t engage very well, especially being weakly linked with a more interesting story about a vicious serial killer. It was like – damn it’s her again, all sad and stuff.
I suffered a brain explosion. How the hell could I even think such thoughts? Seven years ago I was embarking on a single year odyssey along a golden path leading to Sundance! Why, why, why now this?! How come my ideas for story, for scenes, weren’t measuring up?!
It began to dawn on me that the largest of the awesome forces that stood in the way of my successful film was me. Seven years ago, I was like a 19th century peasant picking up a paint brush and expecting to be the next Picasso. Malcolm Gladwell mentions in “Outliers” that research shows on average, at least 10,000 hours is needed to master a skill or craft. I hadn’t spent that much time filmmaking, but I was getting better at distinguishing bad dialogue from bad acting and the foul smelling combination of both. And the current Eden story was exhibiting all the above.
It also occurred to me that retiring that story would in effect be the last of our original film. The thieves tale and the Eden lesbian story were our training wheels, our laboratory where we experimented and made glorious and horrendous mistakes. So perhaps it made sense to replace both and see how well and far we can ride.
So thinking in this manner, I convinced myself to swallow my pride and trash half of the movie once again. Perhaps I could take advantage of my small step up on the learning curve and fashion a better story, one more complimentary to the detective/serial killer story…
