Back in business

Well! Howdy. I am starting to get acclimated to having a life again, catching up on emails, phone calls and of course this blog.

The last few days I have been kind of decompressing after a kickass ending to the school year. Doing some household stuff, playing with Jack, helping him when he has gas and so on, hanging with Genevieve, cooking us dinners, all the stuff I haven't been able to do since, oh, last September.

Last Friday I screened my last cycle project, a 17-minute martial arts action picture entitled Tag. I was at first apprehensive about this project because a previous martial arts-based project at school came off as pretty unconvincing, but my teammates had secured the services of some genuine masters in the field. Our superstar lead was played by an amazing young guy named Steve Terada, who is capable of mind-boggling feats of midair legerdemain and is an up-and-coming superstar in the martial arts world. (Check out his website for some of the stunts he can pull.) Also featured were performers who have done stunt coordination work in Lethal Weapon and Rush Hour movies and countless others. My director, Eric Kmetz, had really meticulously planned his coverage, and the team had rehearsed and pre-shot the movie on Mini DV before shooting.

The result was that I was seeing really, really compelling and exciting footage every day in my dailies. Eye-popping, in truth. For the first time all year, I had exciting, perfectly-executed footage to cut, unlike anything I had ever seen in a "student film" and certainly several notches above anything I had worked on previously. Watching Steve do his thing, I really felt I had to bring my work to another level to do him justice.

And this I did, I think. I really feel like I did a great job on this piece. The material was planned so well that my job in editing picture was to present the material appropriately -- in this case, my mantra was "Steve never stops moving." In other words, I only wanted two very specific moments to have even a frame of Steve not in motion -- and then find the most seamless "joins" between setups so the action would be extremely fluid from take to take.

The biggest challenge, though, was sound. I haven't counted yet, but I believe I placed somewhere on the order of 150-200 individual sound effects -- punches, kicks, combinations of sounds,footsteps, door rattles, just soaked it with effects to boost the integrity of the world we are presenting to the audience. It was mind-bending. Until you have faced a long, four-person martial arts fight with no sound effects and had to cut in every single punch, kick, foot scuffle and environmental rattle and click, it's hard to explain the feeling of being overwhelmed for a while.
For example, when one character is hit by a car, I combined the sound of a body hitting wood, a sledgehammer striking a car hood, a body falling down an air-conditioning duct, a wood-slintering noise and a deep bone punch -- because I wanted the audience to feel the impact.

Well, they did. The movie opens with a kind of a warmup bout between Steve and another character and cuts abruptly to black -- and when it did, an absolute roar went up from the audience (in this case, my entire class). It was a great, great experience. People laughed exactly where we wanted them to laugh, heard all the lines we wanted them to hear (in other words, as an editor I gave them enough time to hear the lines after the laughs and my sound balance was right). When I structured a deep hit in terms of sound, to match the picture, the audience gasped and sitting there, I could really feel the impact in my bones. After Steve's final fight scene, the audience cheered again, even more loudly (and rightly so, he is amazing). When the last scene scrolled off the audience whooped and cheered as our team's names came whipping past in a fast-moving 3d animation I had designed -- I really had wanted the energy to keep flowing as we went out of the film.

My team for this movie was just awesome, really, in every way. I got such great stuff to cut and had such a good time doing it, and the whole team was so enthusiastic, we were all on the same page ("let's give the audience a thrill ride"). I got to use every editing and sound trick in my little bag of tricks to great effect. Our teachers pronounced the work "astonishing," and in my view it kind of stands apart from any other student film I've ever seen. So satisfying and such a great way to end the year, for us and for the audience -- we were the last movie to screen and a lot of people were actually thanking us!

So that was the last three weeks or so, basically -- from 8am to 11pm, editing at school, coming home by 11:30 to an exhausted wife and cranky little boy with gas pains and relieving the poor wife, who would be falling apart at the seams by that time. Then soothing little Jack until he would fall asleep for a while around 1:30 or 2, then working on 3D animations for the movie until 3 or 4 or whenever I would literally pass out sitting at my keyboard. Up again at 6 and back to work at 8.

Thank God, one of those weeks Genevieve's parents came to stay. I regret not being able to really spend any time with them, but they planned a visit just then specifically to help out in my absence. Genevieve, well I can't say enough about her really. She was coming a little unglued for a while there during that last week, when I would be gone the whole day and Jack was being really kind of cranky and colic-y. But she hung in there, God bless her, and I couldn't have done it without here.

So school is over; I have a couple of meetings this week for a committe I serve on and for thesis film fundraising and that is it. My new identity this summer is "Mr. Mom." It just makes economic sense for me to stay home with Jack this summer while G returns to work (next week, as it turns out, alas). I will pick up some kind of summer work, hopefully in the field, but as long as it pays a little green, it doesn't really matter that much. Then we can figure out what to do next year!

No doubt, both my page and Jack's will have some interesting updates in the weeks to come. Today, we are making a quick trip to Disneyland -- Jack's first visit and by no means his last!