Long time no see!

Wow, so it’s been almost four months since I’ve last posted! I’d like to say it was a super busy, tearing-out-the-hair stress time, but honestly, I’ve just been hit with a really, really, super-bad case of un-inspiration.

Winter break was a time to recoup from the hectic shoot, but moving into February I suddenly found myself very tired of Melpomenos and ready to move onto something new. Perhaps this is just me used to working on semester-long projects, but man, it really sucked. Still does. I managed on working on the rough cut and figuring out the pacing (and again I’m thankful for such a wonderful group of teachers and peers here in the photo/digital film department–I’ve got some digital film friends who are going to save my life and sanity very soon with the special effects) and tackling the first of the experimentations on the soundtrack.

The music has been super fun to explore. I gathered up two or three glass bottles I’ve been hoarding for the occasion and tuned the bottles up along the chromatic scale, blowing across the bottles to produce different sounds for each note. Once I’d gathered my library, I went into this wonderful, wonderful program called Paul’s extreme time stretch and fiddled with the notes. The program stretches the sound without distorting it, and it’s probably the coolest thing ever–one of my teachers last semester told us about a piece he did, recording the sound of a bubble popping and stretching it to last nine years (or something ridiculously fascinating like that). It’s a bit tedious–I have to construct the music, then go in with each individual note and stretch them, then compile them and fiddle around in soundtrack pro to keep the speakers from blowing out–but fun nonetheless.

The challenge now is figuring out the line between the music soundtrack of the film and the natural sound of the monoliths in the world, and learning how to blend them and make them significant and all that fun stuff. Woo!

And so there’s the fun challenge. The less-fun challenge is ending this ridiculous fear I have of math and making a fool of myself screwing up attempting to reconstruct the interior of the shuttle. I’ve still got a few shots to shoot, and, yikes, my final show is only five weeks away! What the hell! But I’ve finally gotten up off my butt and bought the supplies, so hopefully by the time the weekend comes round, I’ll have a set to shoot on.

Last bit of news–exciting!–I’m sharing my show with a wonderful friend of mine, Jess Wayland. She’s an adventurous photographer who hand-stiches the most gorgeous panoramas I’ve laid eyes on, and our work works quite well together. 🙂

Um, yes. That’s what’s been up these past fourish months. Here are some update images/sounds!

Experimenting with coloring, attempting to make the Flint Hills -not- the Flint Hills:

Two screenshots of first draft special effects:

And part of the soundtrack: