Friday, March 20, 2009

Dave Foley is that guy from The Kids in the Hall

It’s been a while. And there’s a reason for that. If, of course, you’re willing to accept my idiosyncratic neuroses as a reason.

See, the short is almost done. Done done. Not almost, kinda, but just needs one more thing done—it’s almost freaking COMPLETE and ready to be tossed out to the big bad world. Jeffrey is working his people-skills magic trying to secure us a location for the screening. And I’m working up the financial courage necessary to pay for entrant fees for the festival circuit. That kind of done.

So, I wanted my next post to be all Pomp and Circumstance, all fanfare and heraldry. But alas, the blessed day of completion has not yet arrived and the continuing blog silence is too much to bear (for me and two, possibly three, other people).

While we wait, let me impart here a lesson we learned the hard way. Always get sound. Even when the director says, It’s fine, we don’t need sound on this one. Tell him No. Refuse. Jump up and down. Mutiny if you must. He will thank you later. Also. On those takes when you think you’re getting sound, go ahead and give a little double check to the "microphone on" switch.

We failed both lessons a few times. Which means we had to foley some of the sound. In the video below, you'll see how we went about getting sound for a scene. Brandon and I went back to the office and, while watching a DVD of the movie on my laptop, recreated Jonathan’s movements. Movie magic!

PS: To anyone who got to this page looking for information on Dave Foley, I appologize. To make up for it, here's a fact about Dave Foley: He's the youngest member of The Kids in the Hall. That's a fact you'd learn if you looked at his trivia section on IMDb. So you should probably go there. And not here. But thanks for stopping by!

1 comment:

Jeffrey T. Baker said...

I think our next short should just be made up of footage showing the Director recreating sounds for Fine Arts— we could split the screen so that Fine Arts would be playing silently at the top, and Mr. BS watching the laptop while in a perpetual state of mimicry would take up residence at the bottom. This would do away with any need for a script and, as sound would be such an integral part of the concept, we'd never have to enter into debates about whether or not it was necessary to have it recording.