my goodness.

we sure gave mums a mouthful of words to say in his radio station interview. It's a soliliqouy of shakespearean proportions, but he pulls it off. We have some amazing looking closeups of his mouth while he speaks, but i keep thinking about projecting the film in a theater; do you really want to see his mouth so big it fills a whole movie screen? If it's a 60 foot screen, that would make his teeth like 3 feet tall!

Anyway, that scene - the radio interview - is gonna be a place where we make or break this short.

music, music, music.

I'm only on the 4th scene and I need like 5 different music cues so far. The timeline is hungry. It's interesting to be able to create music for an imaginary character. I suppose that's why we end up with Gorillaz and various nom de plumes for writers as well.

Finally getting started.

It's been a while since I worked with film, and I kinda forgot how much detail work this is to do. Answer: There is A LOT.

First, every shot has to be sync'd by hand, which is pretty tedious. Then you have to enter all the keycode numbers into a database so that the retransfer can be done later on and accuarately reference the original film elements. Then, convert the footage back to film speed for editing. Another process. So now I know, in case anyone is wondering, that we have exactly 203 different shots that needed to be sync'd, coded, reverse telecined. On the other hand, 200 shots is pretty managable, compared with that doc I cut two summers ago with over 100 hours of footage.

The first scene of the film, the rap battle in the club, reminds me of this feature I tried to help out with a few years ago. The opening scene was a whole short film by itself; all the characters were introduced, it had like 8 locations, and they'd shot the hell out of it so there was a million feet of footage for that one scene. The director (and writer, and star) was kind of a freak, so I got out of it, but that first scene was a tough nut to crack. I think it was probably the most difficult scene of the whole film.

We're not drowning in footage for Rhyme Animal, but there is enough...and our first scene really does very nicely encapsulate the issues for the rest of the short. It's also got a couple of different locations to manage, but I think in this case it works. Our leads are pretty strong actors, and they're kind of leaping off the screen from the get-go, which is encouraging.

Ok, back at it!