BOHICA
16/08/24 10:18 Filed in: Post Production | Distribution
If you’re wondering where the hell the movie has been since we finished I can tell you there’s a good reason for its absence: It wasn’t finished. And it almost sank like a stone into the murky deepwater graveyard of 'Whatever Happened To That Film?'…
We actually signed our distro deal with Indie Rights back in October of 2019. We had four weeks to hand off our deliverables, all the digital elements like picture and sound, as well as posters and thumbnails and documentation, and blah, blah, blah that you need to actually license your film for foreign territories. One of the things you have to deliver are closed captions, so I jumped on creating those.
And that’s when everything blew up in my face. Charred face, hair whipped back, like Elmer Fudd's shotgun bent backwards and both barrels emptied.
Because I exported a dialog only track so I could transcribe easier and that’s when I realized dialog was missing. Well, not gone but bussed to the wrong tracks. So while you might hear a line or sigh while watching the film, that line wasn’t actually on the dialog track and instead might be on the effects or music tracks. This is a problem since that’s not a legal deliverable. See, the reason you have separate tracks is so, for example, you sell it to Italy, they can strip out the dialog track and replace it with Italian actors for presentation there. So you can’t really have dialog bouncing all over your tracks. That meant I had to go back to the sound house and have them make another pass on the film.
Wait...
What do I mean by another pass?
*sigh*
Okay, one of the things I haven’t blogged about is the cursed re-recording this film has endured to get to its final mix. We have, in fact, gone back six times over the years, always trying to deliver for whatever festival or distributor we’ve had to deliver for at the time. I don’t know how to describe how excruciatingly painful the entire post-production process has been for audio on the movie. I’ve supervised mixing trailers and features since the mid-eighties and I have never seen a film fucked up like this one was. Hell, the entire reason we went to a professional sound house was to avoid exactly this hell. But the problem with being a low budget nobody is, well, you’re a low budget nobody. And while they’ll be glad to take your money and fill the hole in their schedule with your project, they’re not gonna take it seriously. Or maybe they’ve never worked on a feature with three hundred plus tracks. I dunno.
All I know is that I really had no complaints with the mix or the re-recording engineer or the house or the management. I’d sit in their bay and sign off on each reel and I was pretty happy. But each and every Goddamn time I’d load up the final tracks in the timeline it would have problems. Problems like missing dialog or effects or holes where music should be playing. Worse than that, it would sound different.
And so I went back.
And back.
And back.
And baaaaaaaaaaack.
And each time they’d make the changes. And each time they’d slowly get more annoyed with me. And each time I’d get the tracks and they’d be wrong again.
It’s inexplicable.
After the second remix the re-recordist got a job at another shop. Then it was a couple different mixers, none of who knew the project, every one of ‘em seemingly changing the loudness target--one day we’re aiming for 24 LUFS, the next it’s 20 LUFS. Every mix was different.
The last time I was there The Vibe was clearly You’re Not Welcome Here Anymore. It didn’t matter that they were Dropping The Ball over and over, it mattered that they wanted my show off the books. When I listened to the last remix they’d exported it sounded nothing like it had in the mix theater, with huge differences in dialog volume between actors in the same scene. Like, 6dB swings between lines. That's a lot. Like 'The Battery In Grandpa's Hearing Aid Needs Replacing Because He's Yelling Again' a lot.
At this point we were Out Of Money. There’s no place we can afford to go Get It Fixed. And I truly believed that we were never gonna get it fixed by the original mixing house. Worse, we couldn’t afford to buy Pro-Tools, the software used to mix the show, and we sure as hell didn’t have the bread to buy the thousands of dollars in plugins used to modify and export the sound media. So instead I threw the discrete stems into Logic Pro X on my iMac and decided to make the fixes myself. I counted up the obvious problems and came up with a list of about 48 issues. Easy. Of course, we hit a wall as I soon as I brought up the dialog channel on the 8th surround mix. It was all over the place by a bucketful of decibels and sounded nothing like it had in the mix theater, with huge differences in dialog volume between actors in the same scene. Like, 6dB swings between lines. So two characters talking in a room were quiet LOUD quiet LOUD quiet LOUD quiet LOUD, etc., etc. I think the last mixer forgot to engage a compressor on one of the busses. Maybe. Who the fuck knows anymore.
After a day of going through all the mixes I ended up rolling back three mixes, to the fourth version, the one we actually heard in a theater at our festival plays, and made all the changes from there. This doubled the list of fixes required but, you know, onward and upward and whatever else proactive rah-rah applies here. I rolled up my sleeves and started making all the changes we’d incorporated into the 5th through 8th mixes and then started actually fixing the most current issues.
And that’s when I found out it wasn’t within loudness specs.
I thought our target was -24 LUFS, standard for broadcast, but the mix was scoring at the bottom of the -27 LUFS specs, closer to -29 LUFS. When I looked through pictures I’d taken at the mix I realized that some seseions had been mixed at -20 LUFS!
J.F.C.
How in hell do you aim for -20 and end up exporting at almost -29 LUFS?
Basically, if I delivered in this state they’d just normalize it or process it through loudness plugin like Adobe Audition or iZotope and it’d sound worse. I know because I ran a test and it sounded freakin’ terrible--all the lows went up loud and all the highs sounded muffled. The whole thing needed to be rebalanced so that the dialog was within range and everything else around it, music and effects, gloved around it smoothly and sounded right. I’d actually gotten in touch with a re-recording mixer in Nashville and he’d opened the project and immediately backed out of rebalancing the show, waving us off with a succinct, “It’s a shitty mix.”
Tell me something I don’t know.
So now I was stuck. Fixing this fucking thing was going to require more moola than the initial mix itself, because no legitimate mixer wanted to crack open someone else's mess and forensically re-engineer it. Not for what we were able to pay. Once again I rolled up my sleeves and started working the dialog tracks. I ran them through Vocal Rider to tame the volume overall and then a pass through Nectar 3 with a very light punchiness to bring them upfront. Then I went through the show and started moving all the stray dialog back from the music and effects tracks. Each time I’d have to go back into the original edit, export the sound and music so as to fill the hole created by chopping out the line or sigh or weird friggin’ crackling or whatever and basically rebuild that section. It was laborious. And when I finally felt I’d reached the end of these repairs, I exported the tracks and a screening copy to check and... it sounded like shit.
Here’s the thing: I’d cleaned up the dialog tracks They sounded good. Present. They were finally in loudness range. The problem was that now none of the music or backgrounds ambiences or effects sounded like they were in the same place. By fixing one I was now forced to basically rebalance the mix from beginning to end.
And that took awhile.
Because I’m not a re-recording engineer. That’s not My Thing. It’s like you’re a builder and suddenly decide you have to be an architect, too. It’s a completely different skillset. And now I was forced by my empty wallet to learn how to mix. And so I did. It was tough. Learning about loudness standards and best practices and balancing the speakers in my room was *painful* beyond belief. And slow. And as days turned to weeks I realized more and more there were a lot of problems. The more I fixed the more I found. Weird noises that weren’t in the original tracks. Drops from punch in's. Clicks and crackles and missing words and... Jesus, it never ended. Look at this:
That’s a line of dialog in stereo that’s out of sync with itself. It started as a mono dialog, so it should be an exact duplicate of itself. But it’s shifted on the left channel a hair late making it sound like the speaker is in a closet. In another scene with two characters, one on screen left, the other on screen right, had their pan bounced back and forth in the middle of the line. Or in another scene where a single music cue disappeared in the middle and then re-appeared a couple seconds later. Except it didn’t disappear, it jumped to the effects track! Or where one dialog line jumped to the surrounds behind you (the original Canary In The Coal Mine that started me down this remixing road). And on and on and on and on with problems. *Hundreds* of specific issues.
It’s insane, right?
And I went insane.
Twice I grabbed a hammer and stopped myself from destroying the hard drives. I just wanted this all to end. I wanted to give up. You ever seen that Sylvester and Tweety cartoon where the cat gets caught going after the bird so he pretends to knit, unknowingly darning with his own fur until he’s naked?
It was a *lot* like that.
It felt like every time I’d pulled another thread another gaping hole would appear in my sweater. By the end of a year there wasn’t a sweater anymore, just a big ball of yarn at my feet. At a certain point I reached full Fuck It Mode and decided to stop putting my finger in all the celluloid dikes and just fix the damned thing. Did I have a distribution deal anymore? Who the fuck knows. In the end we went from six mixed discrete surround tracks to over four hundred and eighty. Over the last year and four months I’ve watched this film well over seventy-five times. It was literally painful for me to watch and every new problem was a blade in my heart. And along the way, Good Things happened too: First and foremost, the post house where I’d originally mixed the Goddamn thing went tits up and out of business. Second, the pandemic came and while everyone I knew slowly got cabin fever, I was busy remixing “Clocking The T” while my wife learned to make croissants. COVID took the pressure off because what else am I gonna do?
But the whole thing was embarrassing too. I stopped Tweeting or blogging because I got tired of people asking me about the movie. I was underwater, spiritually hurting, and decided I wasn't going to make a peep until It Was Done. Friends and family members knew not to ask The Question. But now, on the other side, it looks good. It sounds good. I’m quite proud of it. Looking back, I would’ve spent far less time fixing the damn mix by just doing it myself in the first place. Or selling my car and paying for a new mix. Like many choices I made during the production, I thought I was saving time and only wasted more. Somewhere about a year into this debacle I realzied I should have just thrown away the mix we’d paid thousands for and started over. It would’ve been easier. But I thought I could make a quick hundred changes and that would be that. Instead, I got inexorably pulled into learning how to mix and my perfectionism kicked in, fueled by incredible gains in audio technology. I was able to clean up tracks with clarity that was impossible to achieve only two years before. And once I hit my stride, I started to dig mixing and got creative. Hell, if my wife wasn’t giving me the Stink Eye I’d probably still be remixing this thing.
Flash forward a couple of years--time flies during a lockdown--and we’re exporting deliverables. And even though I’ve watched this movie two hundred times by now it’s astonishing how you keep missing shit. Did I not replace that license plate? There’s dirt on the sensor in that shot! Why is that guy in the background looking into the lens?!!? And each time I’d put the brakes on, crack open After Effects and Fix The Problem. In all there are over 1,144 effects shots in the movie, more than “Return Of The Jedi.” Everything from onscreen text graphics to sensor dirt clean ups, from dead pixels to spaceships, fake websites to face replacement. As someone who cut his share of direct to VHS films in the nineties, it’s downright remarkable what’s possible now on an iMac in your home.
But that took time, too.
Lots of time.
When we finally came around to actually delivering the movie, Indie Rights had cancelled already our distro after we’d laughably failed to deliver in thirty days. So we signed a termination agreement, officially, and ended up going with Filmhub (Honestly, it’s probably a better fit for our film). But since we shot the picture lots has changed in the streaming landscape. Streamers push commercials now, so there are tons of requirements now that weren’t a concern years ago. That includes shit like not being able to have URLs in the credits, or the film itself (sometimes a problem when our movie features an internet troll), because they consider any other internet company their competition. In a fingersnap I had to suddenly revise another 48 shots, removing social media logos that were visible, and the Apple logo from Dave’s MacBook because they’re a streamer now and direct competition. Honestly, the future is exhausting. When the final “You Passed QC” email came it meant... nothing. I was numb. It was as if the finish line I was racing toward had been passed while I blinked. It was behind me now. Without cheers or champagne. It took a long ass time to get here. But I don’t regret it. We’d met some filmmakers at the Orlando Film Festival and they’d taken nine years to get their film onto the screen. At the time we’d wiped our foreheads and went, “Whew! At least that’s not us!” Of course, toss on our pile of setbacks a worldwide lockdown, visiting Paris, New York, Denmark, the Faroe Islands, and Vietnam (hardily recommend!), two bouts of COVID, the occasional freelance job that eats every living minute of your life, moving twice, a detached retina, and our work simply took the long road to delivery. In the end we matched those filmmakers, neck and neck. Nine years from when we started filming. Eleven from when we started writing. That’s okay. These things are handmade. It takes time.
So now what? Amazon Prime licensed the movie in the first twenty-four hours. That’s good. I’m sure there will be more streamers picking it up but I got Shit To Do right now, so I haven’t checked in the last couple of days. There is no *Opening Weekend* like in the Big Leagues. Films at this level trickle out, build steam, find their audience over time.
Perhaps it will find you.
___
© Michael Thibault 2024, All Rights Reserved. May Not Be Printed, Published, Posted, Transferred, Or Duplicated Without Permission.
Banner picture © vintagefantasyart
And that’s when everything blew up in my face. Charred face, hair whipped back, like Elmer Fudd's shotgun bent backwards and both barrels emptied.
Because I exported a dialog only track so I could transcribe easier and that’s when I realized dialog was missing. Well, not gone but bussed to the wrong tracks. So while you might hear a line or sigh while watching the film, that line wasn’t actually on the dialog track and instead might be on the effects or music tracks. This is a problem since that’s not a legal deliverable. See, the reason you have separate tracks is so, for example, you sell it to Italy, they can strip out the dialog track and replace it with Italian actors for presentation there. So you can’t really have dialog bouncing all over your tracks. That meant I had to go back to the sound house and have them make another pass on the film.
Wait...
What do I mean by another pass?
*sigh*
Okay, one of the things I haven’t blogged about is the cursed re-recording this film has endured to get to its final mix. We have, in fact, gone back six times over the years, always trying to deliver for whatever festival or distributor we’ve had to deliver for at the time. I don’t know how to describe how excruciatingly painful the entire post-production process has been for audio on the movie. I’ve supervised mixing trailers and features since the mid-eighties and I have never seen a film fucked up like this one was. Hell, the entire reason we went to a professional sound house was to avoid exactly this hell. But the problem with being a low budget nobody is, well, you’re a low budget nobody. And while they’ll be glad to take your money and fill the hole in their schedule with your project, they’re not gonna take it seriously. Or maybe they’ve never worked on a feature with three hundred plus tracks. I dunno.
All I know is that I really had no complaints with the mix or the re-recording engineer or the house or the management. I’d sit in their bay and sign off on each reel and I was pretty happy. But each and every Goddamn time I’d load up the final tracks in the timeline it would have problems. Problems like missing dialog or effects or holes where music should be playing. Worse than that, it would sound different.
And so I went back.
And back.
And back.
And baaaaaaaaaaack.
And each time they’d make the changes. And each time they’d slowly get more annoyed with me. And each time I’d get the tracks and they’d be wrong again.
It’s inexplicable.
After the second remix the re-recordist got a job at another shop. Then it was a couple different mixers, none of who knew the project, every one of ‘em seemingly changing the loudness target--one day we’re aiming for 24 LUFS, the next it’s 20 LUFS. Every mix was different.
The last time I was there The Vibe was clearly You’re Not Welcome Here Anymore. It didn’t matter that they were Dropping The Ball over and over, it mattered that they wanted my show off the books. When I listened to the last remix they’d exported it sounded nothing like it had in the mix theater, with huge differences in dialog volume between actors in the same scene. Like, 6dB swings between lines. That's a lot. Like 'The Battery In Grandpa's Hearing Aid Needs Replacing Because He's Yelling Again' a lot.
At this point we were Out Of Money. There’s no place we can afford to go Get It Fixed. And I truly believed that we were never gonna get it fixed by the original mixing house. Worse, we couldn’t afford to buy Pro-Tools, the software used to mix the show, and we sure as hell didn’t have the bread to buy the thousands of dollars in plugins used to modify and export the sound media. So instead I threw the discrete stems into Logic Pro X on my iMac and decided to make the fixes myself. I counted up the obvious problems and came up with a list of about 48 issues. Easy. Of course, we hit a wall as I soon as I brought up the dialog channel on the 8th surround mix. It was all over the place by a bucketful of decibels and sounded nothing like it had in the mix theater, with huge differences in dialog volume between actors in the same scene. Like, 6dB swings between lines. So two characters talking in a room were quiet LOUD quiet LOUD quiet LOUD quiet LOUD, etc., etc. I think the last mixer forgot to engage a compressor on one of the busses. Maybe. Who the fuck knows anymore.
After a day of going through all the mixes I ended up rolling back three mixes, to the fourth version, the one we actually heard in a theater at our festival plays, and made all the changes from there. This doubled the list of fixes required but, you know, onward and upward and whatever else proactive rah-rah applies here. I rolled up my sleeves and started making all the changes we’d incorporated into the 5th through 8th mixes and then started actually fixing the most current issues.
And that’s when I found out it wasn’t within loudness specs.
I thought our target was -24 LUFS, standard for broadcast, but the mix was scoring at the bottom of the -27 LUFS specs, closer to -29 LUFS. When I looked through pictures I’d taken at the mix I realized that some seseions had been mixed at -20 LUFS!
J.F.C.
How in hell do you aim for -20 and end up exporting at almost -29 LUFS?
Basically, if I delivered in this state they’d just normalize it or process it through loudness plugin like Adobe Audition or iZotope and it’d sound worse. I know because I ran a test and it sounded freakin’ terrible--all the lows went up loud and all the highs sounded muffled. The whole thing needed to be rebalanced so that the dialog was within range and everything else around it, music and effects, gloved around it smoothly and sounded right. I’d actually gotten in touch with a re-recording mixer in Nashville and he’d opened the project and immediately backed out of rebalancing the show, waving us off with a succinct, “It’s a shitty mix.”
Tell me something I don’t know.
So now I was stuck. Fixing this fucking thing was going to require more moola than the initial mix itself, because no legitimate mixer wanted to crack open someone else's mess and forensically re-engineer it. Not for what we were able to pay. Once again I rolled up my sleeves and started working the dialog tracks. I ran them through Vocal Rider to tame the volume overall and then a pass through Nectar 3 with a very light punchiness to bring them upfront. Then I went through the show and started moving all the stray dialog back from the music and effects tracks. Each time I’d have to go back into the original edit, export the sound and music so as to fill the hole created by chopping out the line or sigh or weird friggin’ crackling or whatever and basically rebuild that section. It was laborious. And when I finally felt I’d reached the end of these repairs, I exported the tracks and a screening copy to check and... it sounded like shit.
Here’s the thing: I’d cleaned up the dialog tracks They sounded good. Present. They were finally in loudness range. The problem was that now none of the music or backgrounds ambiences or effects sounded like they were in the same place. By fixing one I was now forced to basically rebalance the mix from beginning to end.
And that took awhile.
Because I’m not a re-recording engineer. That’s not My Thing. It’s like you’re a builder and suddenly decide you have to be an architect, too. It’s a completely different skillset. And now I was forced by my empty wallet to learn how to mix. And so I did. It was tough. Learning about loudness standards and best practices and balancing the speakers in my room was *painful* beyond belief. And slow. And as days turned to weeks I realized more and more there were a lot of problems. The more I fixed the more I found. Weird noises that weren’t in the original tracks. Drops from punch in's. Clicks and crackles and missing words and... Jesus, it never ended. Look at this:
That’s a line of dialog in stereo that’s out of sync with itself. It started as a mono dialog, so it should be an exact duplicate of itself. But it’s shifted on the left channel a hair late making it sound like the speaker is in a closet. In another scene with two characters, one on screen left, the other on screen right, had their pan bounced back and forth in the middle of the line. Or in another scene where a single music cue disappeared in the middle and then re-appeared a couple seconds later. Except it didn’t disappear, it jumped to the effects track! Or where one dialog line jumped to the surrounds behind you (the original Canary In The Coal Mine that started me down this remixing road). And on and on and on and on with problems. *Hundreds* of specific issues.
It’s insane, right?
And I went insane.
Twice I grabbed a hammer and stopped myself from destroying the hard drives. I just wanted this all to end. I wanted to give up. You ever seen that Sylvester and Tweety cartoon where the cat gets caught going after the bird so he pretends to knit, unknowingly darning with his own fur until he’s naked?
It was a *lot* like that.
It felt like every time I’d pulled another thread another gaping hole would appear in my sweater. By the end of a year there wasn’t a sweater anymore, just a big ball of yarn at my feet. At a certain point I reached full Fuck It Mode and decided to stop putting my finger in all the celluloid dikes and just fix the damned thing. Did I have a distribution deal anymore? Who the fuck knows. In the end we went from six mixed discrete surround tracks to over four hundred and eighty. Over the last year and four months I’ve watched this film well over seventy-five times. It was literally painful for me to watch and every new problem was a blade in my heart. And along the way, Good Things happened too: First and foremost, the post house where I’d originally mixed the Goddamn thing went tits up and out of business. Second, the pandemic came and while everyone I knew slowly got cabin fever, I was busy remixing “Clocking The T” while my wife learned to make croissants. COVID took the pressure off because what else am I gonna do?
But the whole thing was embarrassing too. I stopped Tweeting or blogging because I got tired of people asking me about the movie. I was underwater, spiritually hurting, and decided I wasn't going to make a peep until It Was Done. Friends and family members knew not to ask The Question. But now, on the other side, it looks good. It sounds good. I’m quite proud of it. Looking back, I would’ve spent far less time fixing the damn mix by just doing it myself in the first place. Or selling my car and paying for a new mix. Like many choices I made during the production, I thought I was saving time and only wasted more. Somewhere about a year into this debacle I realzied I should have just thrown away the mix we’d paid thousands for and started over. It would’ve been easier. But I thought I could make a quick hundred changes and that would be that. Instead, I got inexorably pulled into learning how to mix and my perfectionism kicked in, fueled by incredible gains in audio technology. I was able to clean up tracks with clarity that was impossible to achieve only two years before. And once I hit my stride, I started to dig mixing and got creative. Hell, if my wife wasn’t giving me the Stink Eye I’d probably still be remixing this thing.
Flash forward a couple of years--time flies during a lockdown--and we’re exporting deliverables. And even though I’ve watched this movie two hundred times by now it’s astonishing how you keep missing shit. Did I not replace that license plate? There’s dirt on the sensor in that shot! Why is that guy in the background looking into the lens?!!? And each time I’d put the brakes on, crack open After Effects and Fix The Problem. In all there are over 1,144 effects shots in the movie, more than “Return Of The Jedi.” Everything from onscreen text graphics to sensor dirt clean ups, from dead pixels to spaceships, fake websites to face replacement. As someone who cut his share of direct to VHS films in the nineties, it’s downright remarkable what’s possible now on an iMac in your home.
But that took time, too.
Lots of time.
When we finally came around to actually delivering the movie, Indie Rights had cancelled already our distro after we’d laughably failed to deliver in thirty days. So we signed a termination agreement, officially, and ended up going with Filmhub (Honestly, it’s probably a better fit for our film). But since we shot the picture lots has changed in the streaming landscape. Streamers push commercials now, so there are tons of requirements now that weren’t a concern years ago. That includes shit like not being able to have URLs in the credits, or the film itself (sometimes a problem when our movie features an internet troll), because they consider any other internet company their competition. In a fingersnap I had to suddenly revise another 48 shots, removing social media logos that were visible, and the Apple logo from Dave’s MacBook because they’re a streamer now and direct competition. Honestly, the future is exhausting. When the final “You Passed QC” email came it meant... nothing. I was numb. It was as if the finish line I was racing toward had been passed while I blinked. It was behind me now. Without cheers or champagne. It took a long ass time to get here. But I don’t regret it. We’d met some filmmakers at the Orlando Film Festival and they’d taken nine years to get their film onto the screen. At the time we’d wiped our foreheads and went, “Whew! At least that’s not us!” Of course, toss on our pile of setbacks a worldwide lockdown, visiting Paris, New York, Denmark, the Faroe Islands, and Vietnam (hardily recommend!), two bouts of COVID, the occasional freelance job that eats every living minute of your life, moving twice, a detached retina, and our work simply took the long road to delivery. In the end we matched those filmmakers, neck and neck. Nine years from when we started filming. Eleven from when we started writing. That’s okay. These things are handmade. It takes time.
So now what? Amazon Prime licensed the movie in the first twenty-four hours. That’s good. I’m sure there will be more streamers picking it up but I got Shit To Do right now, so I haven’t checked in the last couple of days. There is no *Opening Weekend* like in the Big Leagues. Films at this level trickle out, build steam, find their audience over time.
Perhaps it will find you.
___
© Michael Thibault 2024, All Rights Reserved. May Not Be Printed, Published, Posted, Transferred, Or Duplicated Without Permission.
Banner picture © vintagefantasyart