Seems like every time I write a post here I’m saying it’s been a long time and I’ve been very busy. That just happens to be the truth – I’ve got a million projects going all the time and now is now exception. But with that said, I do have some updates.

So we are approaching the end of another year and I’m regrouping again and getting ready to buckle down anew. The coming year is going to be the year Overcoming Going Under comes to completion and gets submitted to festivals. We’re putting the plan together now. I’ll tell you about the plans for 2012 in a minute. Let me first quickly update you on the progress over 2011.

At the beginning of the year I was buckling down to plow through the second pass of the edit. That came together in a few months of very focused work (in addition to the day job of course) and it looks really good. I only shaved about 7 minutes off the first cut but I think it is much improved.

I also revisited the Voice in January’s head – it wasn’t working as I first recorded it (the idea I had for making it sound creepy wasn’t working at all and needed to be rethought) as well as how is fit with what was happening on screen. The actors did a great job, but every place that the performances varied from how I had envisioned it in the script stage moved the Voice further away from working. I needed to re-write the Voice taking the actual performances and editing into consideration. So I did that, and I re-recorded the voice using a new technique called reverse reverb. It turned out WAY better.

Next on the list of problems to tackle was how to visually cue that January was experiencing the world around him differently than everyone else. I had some ideas about color and light which brought me to some amazing plugins and filters for Final Cut Pro from Crumplepop and Cinegrain. Using these I was able to get the look I had in my head. It took a couple months to plow through the edit again and add these effects but it turned out great as well.

Then it was time to start handing reels off to the sound editor so he could dig into the monumental task of fixing all my stupid sound mistakes during production…and boy were there a bunch! Trouble is, as soon as we got through all the planning for how to work together (and even set-up the ftp to pass files back and forth) he realized that he wasn’t going to be able to devote the time needed to work on this project. He had to back out. I understood (there isn’t any money for post – remember the kickstarter campaign? yeah, so anyway…) but it was a major set back.

This derailed the post process for a couple months while I dealt with being very alone here in Santa Cruz and feeling disjointed from my life. Mostly sitting in the bar Castaways and lamenting my woes to Connie (who is awesome by the way) while drinking many gallons of Maker’s and Coke.

So that brings us almost up to date. Over the thanksgiving holiday I visited LA and met with the aforementioned sound editor and he gave me some tips and kinda pulled the curtain back and showed me there wasn’t really too much magic behind the sound editing. I could do it after all. So that is what I decided I’m going to do. Every step along this process I’ve had to stop and learn a new skill. When I decided to write a script I had to spend some time learning how. Then when that was done I had to figure out what they heck goes into pre-production preparation etc etc. I learned to direct actors, shoot a film, edit in Final Cut Pro…now it’s time to learn how to edit sound. While I’m plowing through this next pass I’ll be continuing to get the score together, and finishing up the remaining animated sequences. After that all that will be left is the opening and closing credits. The last phase of the process will be to dive into figuring out how to strategically submit the film to festivals. Then we’ll see how this decade long project fairs for itself. It’ll either sink or swim on it’s own merits. Either way it will be a massive achievement…and I’m eager to dive into the next one!