Life, The Universe, And Everything

I originally wrote this on Facebook after some rather frustrating events, but I publish it here as well as it is, as part of my personal philosophy, also therefore somewhat part of my movie.

Hm...life is weird and repetitive...
I the beginning, we never were.
Then we gets ripped into existence, eating , screaming, pooping, having no clue who or where we are. And we need help eating, we're talking incomprehensive, and wear diapers.
Next, we're convinced we know everything, and do our best to tell everyone else how wrong they are.
In out 30's/40's most of us realize we really do not know anything in comparison to the shear fucking vastness of reality and truth, and just tries our best to do the best of the situation and our lives. Especially the career.
Next, we know for sure we knows best, and everyone else is full of shit. I mean, with a life of experiences, how could we be wrong?
Then, we have no clue who or where we are, just eating, ranting, pooping. Yet again we need help eating, we're talking incomprehensive, and wear diapers.
Finally, ripped from existence, we are no more.

/CvanC

Under The Stairs - The Cutting of A Broken Line

Yebo good people!
Piece by piece, cut by cut, everything is steadily falling into place. Over the past year this movie has seen several revisions, including some really heavy ones, with the most notable advance being between first and second version as I changed the format completely for both picture quality, ambition, and length altogether. Sound has always been intended to be top-notch though, no change there.
As a mainly improvised movie, any new idea, technical advancement or notable location gave new ways to proceed the story, sometimes pushing the entire movie to take a new direction even I couldn't had predicted before that. I was fully aware, even from the very beginning, what my choice in style would mean in technical terms, and that there would often be no way that I could predict exactly how the material would end up in the final movie. That meant that I, already from the very first shot, had to make sure everything was shot in a way that it could be assembled into a serious movie intended for an actual release without ever compromising with the scenes, and never letting it appear static or staged. The camera is always in motion and there isn't any (visible) cuts at all, yet, I'm proud to say that I never had to revise the original method as it never failed me in any way. It was indeed never revised, but it was eventually exchanged though as I found new and vastly improved ways of shooting this movie.
That also meant everything I had recorded for about two months ultimately had to be scrapped.

Not exactly health-food, but good for the morale.

The original methods wasn't discarded altogether though, many of the original tricks and techniques traded well to the new format, and gave me several new ways of splicing the movie together. But where the original photo, due to the limitations of my then equally limited recording-equipment, called for a pretty limited form of processing, the new photage did not. I not only managed to reach a dark, gritty, unforgiving photo I'm actually proud of, in the process I managed to untie the limitations something tremendously and opening up doors I though was practically welded shut! In a figure of speech, of course.

Happiness In Simplicity - The visual effects of A Broken Line

By returning to basics, you can actually make remarkable visual effects with virtually no means! Sure, you can't make a new Transformers using too much legacy stuff, there's a reason the technological advancements is called "progression" and not "recession", but letting old cafts fall into oblivion just because they're old is as stupid as rejecting new technology just because it scares you!

If anyone had told me a year ago "Soon you are going to make your debut movie as a director using no script, no CGI, using a cellphone as a camera...and by the way (and mind you, my normal work is sound designer and soundie, I spend my days preaching the importance of good location sound) - you will not have as much as a single sample of location sound in the entire final film." (a sample being 1/96000th of a 96KHz digital sound) I would say "You're nuts, noone is that stupid. Whatever you're smoking, kick it, you have lost enough braincells."

Yet, I will not write an actual script, I could never afford CGI of high enough quality to make it worthwhile even if I wanted to, my camera is my old iPhone (but using an app called Filmic Pro instead of the nauseating built-in ditto)...and I will not have a single sample of location audio in the final mix. And I'm very happy with it for this movie!
Still, over time, visual effects did become more and more important as the simple flick evolved into a real movie intended for international release.

What has occupied my thoughts the most last week is quite frankly the effects. I have edited a lot of material, and I now have a very clear view of what I have, what I need, and where it's going. Right now it's mostly different locations roamed by the protagonists, as well as the collection of monsters I have already made (still mostly using my crude but effective animatronics, mechanical effects, and found stuff, though now also with the first real actors, for example The Lisa Ghost (called Lumaphobe as it's invisible in light, topmost picture), meaning the most important pieces of this humongous jigsaw-puzzle is practically all there for me to get a very good overview indeed.

The first cut of the sprawling but dead district called Machineworld is more or less done already, as is the Hellish and decaying Inferno Halls. It was some of the first districts I ever made, meaning I have had a lot of time thinking about it. In the world of the dead, an area being dead itself shouldn't necessarily be confused with it being neither inactive nor unpopulated. On the contrary, the echoes of the past leaves remnants in the present that will never fade.

This is quite frankly not really an action-movie - The protagonist, as a carnal being, has no ways of defending himself against ethereal creatures, and the hostile environments leave little to no shelter against hazards. Even with the help of his companion, he must avoid confrontation at all cost and shun all light as far as possible. With that said, the beings is a very important part of the film, and must be treated accordingly.

Courtesy Of The Skinner

I'm back online again. Summer has come to its end, and I can finally shoot new scenes again. Living in the lower subarctic means there are no night at summer, dusk just changes into dawn without passing an actual night in between, leaving approximately one hour of at least enough darkness for me to be able to compensate with low exposure.
With that said, there has still been a lot made during these two months since I last updated this blog. Maybe not as much as I could have hoped for, I had an extreme allergic reaction to what I, after far too long, found out was due to mold from a silently leaky sink, making me very sick and wondering what the hell was wrong with me, but though I was far too tired to write any coherent blog-post , I've spent a lot of lime developing the soundscape and editing the footage. Which actually are becoming very impressive in both quantity and, considering it being recorded with a rather unimpressive cellphone, quality!
For a long time I had some difficulty finding a way to reconcile with the rather limited photage, but as I found a new program to replace the horrible built-in app, I learned to use its normally negative aspects as valuable tools for my new style, a style with absolutely no influence from other movies, but based all in what can be done here and now! I absolutely love working this way, you never know what you'll get!!!

We have such sights to show you

In Darkness We Trust

Holà good people!
Hm, I did chose Sunday/Monday for updating this blog as those where the days I am most likely to have the least to do. Hopefully that will turn true again in the near future...
Anyway, the last one and a half week has been good indeed! Other than my and Anette's usual balcony story- and scene-discussion-sessions, and the steady progress in the editing, I've now began recording the first real tests of my new Foley-locations and props! Armed with heavy boots ranging from everything between Doctor Martens, Gettagrip and Underground, to old sneakers and practically every kind of shoe I own, to creaky leather, heavy cloth and chains, I am now seriously putting my new locations to the test!
I'd like to say "Gee, whoever could have imagined that his movements would sound like this!"...but quite frankly, the bodily movement-sounds where actually the only things I actually had a fully developed concept of the very second I pushed "Record" the very first time, and unlike absolutely everything else it actually hasn't changed at all since then! Sure, the balance of things will change a lot as the movie calls for it, but the basic design for the sound of the protagonist is all based in my concept of the most interesting personal Foley I could imagine.
I seriously fucking love creaks and heavy textures!!!

Men Without Scripts (Unsafety Dance)

Davs good people!
Right now I'm sitting here waiting for the batteries to recharge, looking forward to tonight's recording sessions at some long since forgotten and heavily decayed bombshelters and stuff! During the week I and Anette has spent a lot of time sitting on the balcony in the summer heat, smoking like chimneys, and discussing scenes, monsters, and timeline frantically.
Not rarely it follows this pattern: I tell idea. She doesn't like. I disagree. She explains. I agree.
The longer version: Proudly I tell her the idea for a scene I just made up. She doesn't like something in it and suggest I ditch it, or certain aspects of it. I disagree and consider going along with the original plan, thinking it's just a matter of taste. She explains her reasons after giving it a little further thought. I agree fully and rebuilds the scene from scratch, but with the bad parts removed and solved by other means.
This thing is by no means new to me. Before Anette proved her tremendous talent in listening and understanding stories, I checked ideas I wasn't sure about by making temporal edits using existing footage and temp-recordings of dialogue I recorded myself in the livingroom to get a feel of the scene. Took hours, and I had to sleep on it to know for sure how I actually felt about it. With Anette it takes minutes: I get an idea, or tells her one I've been thinking of lately. She disses it. I find a new idea that really truly works. Much rejoice. All within 5-10 minutes.

Mother Of Invention - Darkworld Rises

Howdy people!
It has taken well over two months, and it was just a few days ago someone figured out it MIGHT be due to a system bug at my provider that could easily be remedied by a simple fucking restart of their software, but now I finally have Internet again!!!
Well, I'm pissed off, and this isn't the only thing they've completely dropped the ball on as the connection has been unreliable and tired for quite some time now.You get what you pay for I guess. First thing tomorrow now that I'm not bound to them anymore will be to cancel my internet subscription and order the same one my girlfriend has and loves. 100/100 fiber connection no less! Hopefully that will help me keeping my weekly Sunday nite/Monday morning-updates for now on.

Anyhoo, though I didn't have an online connection, surfing the web and updating the blog was more or less the only thing related to this movie I couldn't do, so we've been working every bit as hard as before. If not harder! The last week has seen the greatest revision and leap forward for the project since it first changed from a two minute short only intended to promote me as a sound designer to a full length feature film!
When I said "we", that includes my beloved girlfriend who now functions as my trusty sounding board!

Frankly, over the years I've had great difficulty finding good sounding boards when it comes to story for numerous reasons. Don't get me wrong, I do have a lot of people around me that I know for a fact I can trust and rely upon, highly creative and professional people indeed. I often get invaluable feedback and input from both actors, cinematographers, directors and producer to name but a few, input that has been of tremendous help for me, but those are mainly technical aspects. When it comes to story, Anette has a (for me) unique way of seeing things that I've never thought of before, resulting in among other things the ending getting heavily revised and improved!
I will not at this time say what her perspective was as it would hint too much at important plot-points, but it will probably be pretty apparent during the movie.

Living Jelly

Foley Ghost!

Yebo good people!

Last week teh internetz was a bad kitteh and had to go to bed without post. Had nothing to do with me being stressed off my ass over a difficult deadline combined with new wonderful girlfriend. Really!
This week teh internetz been good, so it deserves a treat. This post!

As a movie based mostly in sound, there are, not counting the obvious elements story and acting, mainly two techniques this will stand or fall by: The sound design, and the art of foley!
Most people understands the concept of sound design to some degree. They may not fully understand how it's done (which is the reason I will make a post like this for design later on), but most people knows for example that the sound of the humongous shapeless cloud being a poltergeist can't possibly be based in nature but being somehow fabricated.

Foley, on the other hand, has lots of misconceptions, which sometimes has changed the meaning to some extent.
The origin of the word "Foley" was, like Dave Foley or Axel Foley, a name. Jack Donovan Foley (1891-1967), known simply as Jack Foley, was an extremely dedicated and talented sound effects artist with a twist: he could do an awful lot of  effects in short time with tremendous quality by actually performing them in realtime in sync while watching the movie on the screen. Over time this impressed people, and producers began asking for sound "like Foley did it". As this caught on it simplified to "do foley".
The actual meaning of this is, hence; to make sound effects in realtime in sync with the movie. Normally in a studio, though many of us, me included, prefer to do it on location for acoustical reasons.

PUN & GAMES - Cheezus

I wonder I wonder...let's say someone really cheesy a person with braces (for example someone who likes bad puns) wanted to point out the gravity of a given situation, would he or she say "Oh my curd!" then?

This one actually got so old it got sentient. I found out when it bit me in the tongue when I tried to eat it. Now it lurks somewhere in the kitchen, snarling at me from the dark.

/CvanC

Let's Feed The Feline

Hiya people!

This post is a little over due, sorry 'bout that. You see, this weekend my friend and actor in this project, Andreas Rylander, came over from the sprawling megalopolis Kalmar, a city so vast it has its own county and even its own climate!

Not only did we cooperate in sending a 28" tubby-TV to kingdom kome [sic] using a very large sledgehammer (holy CRAP did that result in a great shockwave from the implosion!!!), together we met up with a few other people that hopefully will be part of this, discussed it all in civilized manner over a lager or two. Of course resulting in getting absolutely pissed and staggering home happy but dizzy in the early hours!

Though alcohol sometimes can lead to inspiration, it mostly leads to pure bollocks, and as such I simply will never write a post shitfaced.

 Hopefully you, my dear readers, will eventually find the results from this meeting as rewarding as I do as I now have quite a few new locations with an ass-kicking-factor surpassing the level Dr Martens and then some! The scaling of course being between 1 (fluffy kitteh in knitting-magazines) to 10 (14-hole black Dr Martens with steel-toe and a whole bottle of Laphroigh).

Run-down, decaying, rotting, vicious. In other words - amazing.

Kitteh. Unmolested from knitting-magazines though.

Metal Heads On Electronic Bodies

Oh, almost forgot! Happy International EBM-Day (24/2) y'all!!! :-D

Luminous Inferno

I, and very soon I can say "we", have much to look forward to now!
The project I'm sitting with right now, a nice little thug-flick drama/thriller called Jag Är Min Egen (I Am My Own) by Swedish director Johan Bergqvist, about a hoodlum finding himself knee-deep in shit in a very different way than they usually do, is nearing the end of post with just a few days left!
After that I'll have one day off with my friends Star Wars and Star Trek, with occasional S.T.A.L.K.E.R., and return to editing the day after.
Next week will see quite a few meetings, and if all goes well I have some cast and crew to announce! As I said, this is a mostly improvised movie, so more will be added upon over time, but it will be a good beginning!

I've began editing a fully 5.1 promotion short for supporters and sponsor using the footage from the new locations, and feel very satisfied with the photo! When I realized where this was beginning to lead I began looking for something new to keep both within budget and keep it hard and gritty as the iPhone camera and app just plainly couldn't deliver what I now wanted - a feature film for commercial distribution. On the silverscreen if possible, if so "only" on festivals.
After looking through everything from DSLR to GoPro I actually settled with my old iPhone 4, though with a new third-party app that gave me the settings I needed and 25mbps compression. Holy crap that made a difference! The original Camera-app have about 6mbps I think. Might be up to 10, but that's still very far from cigar.

Metal Auf Metal

Here I just got passed by a zombie looking for brains. Can't help but feeling a little insulted.

Life is good! This here shiny new and insignificantly used i7-based edit-station, with ditto complete Adobe-package including Premiere Pro CS6 and Photoshop, has made the entire process advance something ridiculously! Especially compared to the original idea of editing it directly in the iPhone (an idea I abandoned in rage the very same day I got it, just hours before getting frustrated with Lightworks and abandoning that one too in favor of my good old Premiere Pro 2...)!
But most important, I'm now in negotiations with a producer and his production company about joining the project, including helping getting it distributed no less!

From A World Less Bright

I haven't written here in well over two months, I simple didn't have the energy to make a new post at the time that would look anything but gibberish as I had to put all my energy into another project and nightly shootings.
With that said, this whole project has taken a quantum leap forward since last time!