Well, I recently found out that Zombie Fairy got accepted into the Northwest Animation Festival! It is one of 174 films selected for the festival out of 826 entries, so it feels pretty awesome to be a part of a selected project. To help promote the festival, our entry in particular, we decided to do a teaser trailer to post online. The teaser includes music and sound from the finished project, edited to fit the shorter format. At one point I tried to make a second version of the trailer, one that seemed like the trailer for an epic summer blockbuster. Unfortunately, when it was finished it sounded a little too much like the music from a particular epic hero movie, the main hook at least, so we decided to not post that one, just in case.
Tuesday, April 15, 2014
Sunday, February 9, 2014
Things that go squish, pt. 1
Woof! Well, fall of 2013 certainly got as busy as I thought it would, hence the lack of posting. It was the perfect storm of positive things happening all at once, so I'm definitely not complaining. My summer internship at a company that I've kind of had a nerdy technology crush on for the last few years turned into a full-time job in September, which feels so awesome that I can't even try to put it into words here...but I'll give it a shot anyways...
It's awesome!
I also started graduate school in September kind of impulsively. I was going to wait a year before going back to let the whole new career thing set in, but I saw that my adviser, whom I respect and admire greatly, was teaching a special topic course, so I just went for it. It ended up being a decent class, not quite as spectacular as I had hoped, but I definitely learned some things, the most important of which being that I now know I can handle my new-found full-time job while taking 4 credit hours of graduate level engineering courses. The last major thing I had on my plate, and the one I'm most excited to talk about here, is a project that I started 3 years ago that has been on the far back burner for much of that time.
During my first year back at school, I became friends with a fellow student named Matt, also returning to school as an older lad to pursue a new profession, mathematics in his case, and his wife Temris, an animator by trade. Matt and I became fast friends over our shared affinity for science, math, music, beer, food and cooking, beer, video games, childish and obscene humor, and beer. We had a calculus class together two evenings a week and would meet in the atrium outside our classroom hours before it started, sometimes to work on our understanding of how to test for the divergence of an infinite sum, but mostly just to bullshit.
It was one of these evenings spent bullshitting that Matt learned I had in the past dabbled in sound engineering. Live sound and recording musicians were things I had done with varying levels of enjoyment over the years, but what I really loved doing was composing/recording my own music and doing audio for video. This same evening I learned that Matt and Temris had been working on a short animated film as a pet project. The story, "Zombie Fairy", follows a flying zombie who visits people in the night while they sleep to retrieve their tired brains in return for spare change (imagine Lon Cheney as the tooth fairy and you're almost there). When by happenstance Zombie Fairy places one of these human brains into his own skull, he begins to see the world with a new perspective and experiences a reality full of terrible beauty. Temris and Matt eventually wanted to have original music composed and professional foley added to the animation once it was complete so they could submit it to film festivals. While being far from a professional in either the music composition or foley department, the project sounded right up my alley and I volunteered to do both just to be a part of the project.
At the point where I got involved in this film, Temris had put together an animatic that included all of the major physical events in the story. It included some very rough sound effects pulled from a stock library, as well as some music put in as a placeholder to capture the mood of each scene. It was just about the perfect place for me to start on the project, as everything I needed to start putting together sound effects and scoring was there. Over the next few months, I dabbled with different ideas for background music, some of which worked very well, and others not so much. In the summer of 2011, Matt and I spent the better part of a week in my kitchen surrounded by props and microphones, coming up with all sorts of ways to make convincing sounds effects for the things happening in the animatic. The following are a few of the noises we recorded:
Squishy-brain noise
Man struck on head/head hitting pavement
Disembodied arm crawling on pavement
2 zombies standing by water cooler, conversing
Zombie shoving child, curious zombie, scared zombie, aghast zombie, panicking zombie, shell shocked zombie, startled zombie, zombie in awe...you get the idea.
Our props included a large bowl of cooked oatmeal, seltzer tablets, a toilet brush, various pieces of cardboard, pillows, cinder blocks, beef soup bones, and large pieces of glass to hit with a hammer. After 3 full days of recording and some minor editing to the recorded sounds, we had nearly all of the sound effects that we thought we would need. All that was left to do was edit them together and sync them up with the animation, as well as finish composing the background music. I decided at this point to hold off on said editing/composing. Without finished animation, syncing up sound effects would be pointless, so even though we could get some idea of timing from the animatic, we only threw together a scene or two just to make sure that the sounds were as hilarious in practice as they were to make. They were. Holding of on the music was pure procrastination, however. Initially, I had tried to use mostly music that I had written years before and never used, and then just re-edit it for Zombie Fairy. It became apparent after the first couple of test listens with Temris that most of what I had put together at that point didn't fit the feel of the story, so it had to go. No problem, we both had other things going on and this was definitely a side project for all of us. All I had to do was work on things here and there and as long as I didn't fall too far behind the progress Temris was making with the animation, there was no big rush.
Fast forward 2 years. Amid the flurry of full time school, getting married, doing research, and finding ways to get paid to build things, not a lot got done on my end of the making of Zombie Fairy. And when I say not a lot got done, I mean I didn't doshit fuckall a-goddamn-thing squat in those 2 years. I knew Temris was making steady progress; I'd get updates every few months and new versions of the animatic combined with completed scenes. Each time I'd say to myself, "Wow, this is starting to look really good! I should probably start thinking about finishing the musiHEYLOOKAPENNY!!!" And so it went until the fall of 2013. That's when I got the email saying that the animation was complete, there was a deadline for a film festival a short 12 weeks away, and how was the music coming along? Now, 12 weeks seems like quite a bit of time, because it is, but this was the same 12 weeks mentioned at the beginning of this blog, so it was going to be tight. Thus, we began the mad dash of completing the sound for Zombie Fairy during the evenings and weekends.
It actually all went very smoothly, at least from my perspective (Temris and Matt may tell a different tale). Temris offered to start placing finished sound effects, which helped immensely. After a couple of weeks of fiddling around with my instruments, getting back into the habit of playing them regularly after so much time of neglect, I actually started to come up with ideas that I liked and thought might work and began recording some things. Every other week or so, I'd send Temris an updated version of the animation I had with newly recorded music, and within a day or two I'd get a reply with some detailed feedback. Likewise, when she had made progress on placing sound effects, she would send me what she had done, and I could either make suggestions or add things and send it back. It was an extremely productive dialogue that we had going. There were times when the music for a scene would get completely written, recorded, scrapped, re-written, and re-recorded all in on evening because of the rapid fire emails flying back and forth. What started as two interpretations of the same story eventually converged into a single narrative. By early December, the film was nearly complete. We had to do an additional day of sound effect recording to get some things we'd missed the first time around, which was great because we got to include the director in the mix for her cameo in true Hitchcock fashion. In the end, we had the final version done with a few days to spare.
"Cool story...where's the actual movie?" I hear the two people who will actually read this asking. Well, since Zombie Fairy is being submitted to various film festivals it's public release is still pending. By the that time I'm sure there will be news on whether it's been picked up for any of these festivals, so I'll be sure to add any updates along with the full film in a future post. Until then, feel free to check out Temris' teaser blog with some production stills.
It's awesome!
I also started graduate school in September kind of impulsively. I was going to wait a year before going back to let the whole new career thing set in, but I saw that my adviser, whom I respect and admire greatly, was teaching a special topic course, so I just went for it. It ended up being a decent class, not quite as spectacular as I had hoped, but I definitely learned some things, the most important of which being that I now know I can handle my new-found full-time job while taking 4 credit hours of graduate level engineering courses. The last major thing I had on my plate, and the one I'm most excited to talk about here, is a project that I started 3 years ago that has been on the far back burner for much of that time.
During my first year back at school, I became friends with a fellow student named Matt, also returning to school as an older lad to pursue a new profession, mathematics in his case, and his wife Temris, an animator by trade. Matt and I became fast friends over our shared affinity for science, math, music, beer, food and cooking, beer, video games, childish and obscene humor, and beer. We had a calculus class together two evenings a week and would meet in the atrium outside our classroom hours before it started, sometimes to work on our understanding of how to test for the divergence of an infinite sum, but mostly just to bullshit.
It was one of these evenings spent bullshitting that Matt learned I had in the past dabbled in sound engineering. Live sound and recording musicians were things I had done with varying levels of enjoyment over the years, but what I really loved doing was composing/recording my own music and doing audio for video. This same evening I learned that Matt and Temris had been working on a short animated film as a pet project. The story, "Zombie Fairy", follows a flying zombie who visits people in the night while they sleep to retrieve their tired brains in return for spare change (imagine Lon Cheney as the tooth fairy and you're almost there). When by happenstance Zombie Fairy places one of these human brains into his own skull, he begins to see the world with a new perspective and experiences a reality full of terrible beauty. Temris and Matt eventually wanted to have original music composed and professional foley added to the animation once it was complete so they could submit it to film festivals. While being far from a professional in either the music composition or foley department, the project sounded right up my alley and I volunteered to do both just to be a part of the project.
At the point where I got involved in this film, Temris had put together an animatic that included all of the major physical events in the story. It included some very rough sound effects pulled from a stock library, as well as some music put in as a placeholder to capture the mood of each scene. It was just about the perfect place for me to start on the project, as everything I needed to start putting together sound effects and scoring was there. Over the next few months, I dabbled with different ideas for background music, some of which worked very well, and others not so much. In the summer of 2011, Matt and I spent the better part of a week in my kitchen surrounded by props and microphones, coming up with all sorts of ways to make convincing sounds effects for the things happening in the animatic. The following are a few of the noises we recorded:
Squishy-brain noise
Man struck on head/head hitting pavement
Disembodied arm crawling on pavement
2 zombies standing by water cooler, conversing
Zombie shoving child, curious zombie, scared zombie, aghast zombie, panicking zombie, shell shocked zombie, startled zombie, zombie in awe...you get the idea.
Our props included a large bowl of cooked oatmeal, seltzer tablets, a toilet brush, various pieces of cardboard, pillows, cinder blocks, beef soup bones, and large pieces of glass to hit with a hammer. After 3 full days of recording and some minor editing to the recorded sounds, we had nearly all of the sound effects that we thought we would need. All that was left to do was edit them together and sync them up with the animation, as well as finish composing the background music. I decided at this point to hold off on said editing/composing. Without finished animation, syncing up sound effects would be pointless, so even though we could get some idea of timing from the animatic, we only threw together a scene or two just to make sure that the sounds were as hilarious in practice as they were to make. They were. Holding of on the music was pure procrastination, however. Initially, I had tried to use mostly music that I had written years before and never used, and then just re-edit it for Zombie Fairy. It became apparent after the first couple of test listens with Temris that most of what I had put together at that point didn't fit the feel of the story, so it had to go. No problem, we both had other things going on and this was definitely a side project for all of us. All I had to do was work on things here and there and as long as I didn't fall too far behind the progress Temris was making with the animation, there was no big rush.
Fast forward 2 years. Amid the flurry of full time school, getting married, doing research, and finding ways to get paid to build things, not a lot got done on my end of the making of Zombie Fairy. And when I say not a lot got done, I mean I didn't do
It actually all went very smoothly, at least from my perspective (Temris and Matt may tell a different tale). Temris offered to start placing finished sound effects, which helped immensely. After a couple of weeks of fiddling around with my instruments, getting back into the habit of playing them regularly after so much time of neglect, I actually started to come up with ideas that I liked and thought might work and began recording some things. Every other week or so, I'd send Temris an updated version of the animation I had with newly recorded music, and within a day or two I'd get a reply with some detailed feedback. Likewise, when she had made progress on placing sound effects, she would send me what she had done, and I could either make suggestions or add things and send it back. It was an extremely productive dialogue that we had going. There were times when the music for a scene would get completely written, recorded, scrapped, re-written, and re-recorded all in on evening because of the rapid fire emails flying back and forth. What started as two interpretations of the same story eventually converged into a single narrative. By early December, the film was nearly complete. We had to do an additional day of sound effect recording to get some things we'd missed the first time around, which was great because we got to include the director in the mix for her cameo in true Hitchcock fashion. In the end, we had the final version done with a few days to spare.
"Cool story...where's the actual movie?" I hear the two people who will actually read this asking. Well, since Zombie Fairy is being submitted to various film festivals it's public release is still pending. By the that time I'm sure there will be news on whether it's been picked up for any of these festivals, so I'll be sure to add any updates along with the full film in a future post. Until then, feel free to check out Temris' teaser blog with some production stills.
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