June’s been pretty hectic. I got very sick at the beginning of the month. There’s been a fair bit of that going round Melbourne – swine flu and all that. Middle of the year always seems to be a busy time for me. Here’s what’s been happening:
David Franzke and I have been spending most of our time working away on darklovestory, a film directed by Jon Hewitt and written by Jon with his wife actress Belinda McClory. A version of the film has just been shown in Perth at the Revelation Film Festival. Another short film that I mixed earlier in the year, Carrot was also shown at Revelation.
Dave and I are taking care of the entire soundtrack on this movie, which means plenty of work and quite a few interesting challenges. I spent quite a bit of time early on cleaning up dialogue. The film was shot entirely on location in Kings Cross on Super 16 film. We only have dialogue from the shoot and it was all pretty noisy as you could imagine – lots of traffic noise and unwanted room noise across most of the film. ADR is not an option, and I’m not a huge fan of re-recorded dialogue anyhow. I had to go looking for a tool I could use for cleaning up some of this stuff. I ended up using the amazing Izotope RX thanks to an awesome recommendation from Cornell Wilczek (aka Qua). I’ve used a bunch of different noise reduction tools in the past, but not recently. What this software package was able to do for the dialogue in this film is nothing short of amazing. It’s really changed the sound of the film for the better!
We’re continuing to work on the film over the next couple of months most likely. It’s possible that the next stop for the film will be overseas festivals in Korea and Canada. We’re both pretty happy with where it’s all heading. I’ll keep you posted in future updates as things develop.
Also this month I’ve been busy working further on music for the Melbourne Planetarium show The Living Climate. Nat Bates (who’s doing the sound design) and I are getting pretty close to finishing and the show will be completed by the end of July.
Also, semester one finished at RMIT, so I was busy dishing out the grades. For all my students reading this – don’t worry, you probably passed!
