Death and beyond

Faces Of An Undying Nightmare

Trespassing Into Hell

"When there's no more room in hell, the dead will not walk very much"

I'm just back from recording several new scenes, this time mostly from an abandoned and very run down-place that reeks of evil, pain and generally bad manners! With rusty nails and chunks of metal, rotten floorboards, broken glass, and a lot of other pretty unhealthy stuff just waiting to get stepped on or treating me to a rather unpleasant fall I wasn't very cocky. Of course safety is always my number one priority, I never record anything without knowing I will not get hurt seriously in the process, but you're very aware of what surrounds you when in places like this.
There's something special about really old and worn locations, something that hasn't seen repairs or maintenance for years! I have now already a pretty wide variety of locations ranging from both contemporary interiors to heavily unearthly and mechanical surroundings to cold and hostile exteriors (though the focus of the movie s on claustrophobia and insecurity), and the soundscape will be anything but friendly. I love playing with decay and disharmony, and here there will be a lot of that.

/CvanC

Beating The System

The transition to 64bit Windows 8 in the studio was bitter-sweet. In many ways it was a great leap forward, both due to a way better memory-management, but also to a so far much improved stability and performance.
I expected pretty heavy problems, but initially it all went well, actually! Though I had to replace my trusty old but long since discontinued Matrox Parhelia APVe-card with a passive XFX HD 6570 (the Matrox card was also passive after ripping out (literary) the fan and build the cooling-system myself) and a Black Magic Intensity, the Lynx-cards and other drivers played along nicely! The much better OpenGL-processing capabilities of the AMD-card has been pure joy when playing back HD Quicktime movies when working in the DAW even!
There where no problem installing and running Nuendo 5.5, the new interface on Win8 wasn't very hard to get into, and most of my old plugins transfered well.
Except Altiverb and Dolby Media Meter. My two absolutely most expensive plugins in respect to what they do. Even trying to install the Dolby plugin screwed up my entire system, which is a shame as it quite frankly has one of my absolutely favorite limiters though perhaps a little CPU-greedy. Not to mention I bought it for a reason...

Building the horror

By the way, did I mention this is a horror movie? Mystery victim! :-)
This is a regular Sennheiser MKH40 through a Fostex FR2.

 

The things one does for this job...

Aw, screw it! Here's the real deal :-)

[EDIT:]
When first beginning this blog I didn't really have any direction at all. After a surprise rejection from AdSense, probably due to this picture, I thought it was pretty funny to do a kind of flipping the bird to unsound squeamishness by taking the picture of my session with this turkey and beeping it out with a black box. But I realized this could easily be misinterpreted as trying to be extenuating. No way in hell would I ever do something like that, this movie will be as relentless as dark and unforgiving...but I still think it's funny though so rather than un-censor it I add another picture!

I do however have one moral aspect here, and this I will never EVER refrain from: This animal was never a sound effect, it was my dinner taking a detour as a sound effect. Though it makes no difference in the final movie, it makes a world of difference to me out of respect for the animal. For many people, especially vegans I guess, this might very well make no sense, but I firmly believe in never letting anything ever go to waste as that would mean the animal died in vain.

In the spur of the moment

The next day it was time for a first edit. Mind you, I intended to keep it simple and had no ambition with the picture (at the time). I figured a video-editor on the cellphone would suffice. After all, the camera did. Not a mistake I'll ever make again...

So I tried Lightworks. A pretty decent program as far as I could tell. Close but no cigar, I never got it to flow for me, and the fact that it didn't support H.264 meant conversion meant a limited photo quickly turned shitty photo. Humongous difference I'm afraid.
I haven't been working with editing for quite a while, at least not paid gigs, but to my great joy I actually found my old Premiere Pro 2, and work was finally up and running! Sure, It's downright bad at effects and processing (it's REALLY old!), but my ONLY intent with this is pretty straight edits with no processing whatsoever, and that it did great!

An Inception Of An Idea

Once upon a time...let's call it "About 3 Weeks Ago" for the sake of argument, I was having a midnight moment of solitude, casually reading Fritz The Cat and trying my best to ignore the horror that surrounded me, when suddenly the entire block went black.
Horrible timing, I can tell you.
After going through every curse-word I knew and inventing some new ones on the fly, I, with the help of my trusty iPhone-lamp, managed to prevent this little story from becoming really really disgusting to full satisfaction, and got an idea!
For a long time I've wanted to make something short and extremely audio-based, a more extremely designed and non-visual based project, both for the pure joy of it just because I absolutely *beep*ing love making movies, and as a part of my showreel.
I've been planning several projects of my own over the last few years, but though I do have a lot of really good and extremely talented people to work with, due to logistic and economical reasons, I've always been forced to shelf them for the time being while looking for ways to make it happen. Very frustrating with all these Ideas and no way to realize them.
Here, I had an iPhone 4, fully professional sound-stuff I use as a freelance audio-guy, and a dark ghostly stairway. Problem solved!

When I pressed RECord I knew only this:
 1 - I have an iPhone. The photo will be EXTREMELY limited. Must make sure I can edit it, and every single sound and line of dialogue will and must be added in post.
 2 - Time is a luxury and the power might get back any second. Act fast and think later. Make the main character look chased and confused, and film everything interresting I can find. Figure what to do with it later.
3 - I have absolutely no clue what I'm doing. A minute ago I had no idea I'd record a flick this night, so there's neither a story nor a script. I must make up a concept on the fly and let the story evolve itself until the power's back: I am not Christian van Caine, I am a man trapped in a strange world chased by something I cannot see. Live it.

And most importantly:
4 - It's just me here - Make it work. If it doesn't - Make it work.

Also, average or "okay" is not an option.



When the power got back I had enough takes for three absolutely ass-kicking complete sequences of me sneaking from the port up to the top floor with much evil in between, and I had a simple yet effective story! I ended it all with a quick improvised recording of a monster lurking in the shadows, moving ominously, including an extremely well working attack I'll never have to excuse myself for!
 All in all I got away with approximately 10 minutes of actual footage that night.
Happy happy joy joy!

/CvanC