Extract from ‘Six Different Ways’

"I find it odd that his office resembles a living room yet his hallway resembles a young offender's institute and I tell him this. He asks me if I think she should be here and I tell him immediately that I absolutely do not deserve to be here, but that it was better than an anger management course – which was my mother's initial suggestion.

    I ask him what he is. Is he a therapist? A psychologist? A counsellor? A shrink? A psychoanalyst?

    He tells me he's somebody to talk to, somebody with which I can unleash with no consequences. He tells me to get angry, be rude, aggressive and that here and only here it's ok, that it's safe. He tells me to think of this room as a room without judgement and without repercussions and I tell him that if there're no repercussions then he certainly is wasting my time – even though I know this isn't what he meant. He sighs a little and I decide to loosen up on him. I tell him I've never needed anyone to talk to.

    He pauses for a second here. He leans forward and puts both his hands together, elbows to his knees and thumbs to his chin, leaning into himself. His two index fingers are stretched out together. He speaks more softly now.

    "Is it that you've never needed anyone to talk to, or that you've never had anyone to talk to?"

    I can feel the pressure against my temples. I can feel it boiling underneath my skin. But I don't disrespect him, so I keep it at bay."

"She's a good shell"

"If you shake a blown lightbulb close enough to your ear it sounds like sleighbells. Yesterday I saw a cat.

She's a good shell but that's all she is, nothing worth holding. I've had to build my reasoning from scratch -I had it all figured out but now I've lost it. I'm not cold anymore but I'm not sure where the warmth is coming from. I think it's the fact that the rejection came before the proclamation and that isn't what bothers me. I'm not even sure why I did it, I should have waited a few hours for it all to come down but I did it anyway and now the whole world's at a loss. I miss the days when I felt cold, calm - I felt metallic - but I'm on my way. I'm drinking fucking panda blood. I have no strings.

I'm breathing water still I reach for the surface, hoping that I'll like what's up there."

Canon EOS 550D

So I'm now the proud owner of a Canon 550D DSLR, and slightly out of my depth with it. I've just got to learn how to use the thing and practise with it. Hopefully put together some sort of filming. Our entire course seem to be converting to the use of DSLR for filming, as the colour and depth of field is far superior to anything the Media Centre offers.

Grant and I want to shoot a short film over the next four weeks entirely on green-screen. Something stylised and over-the-top so we can experiment with effects and backdrops. So we need to come up with an actual concept some time soon.

'Open Till Late' Hand-in

This Tuesday is the presentation and hand-in of our finished short film. I saw a rough cut two days ago and, honestly, I'm not sure how proud of it I am. I don't know how much of it is panic, but I know we could have done a better job between us.

Tomorrow we add the audio mix, which I'm also worried about the quality of and put it all together then burn it to DVD - finished.

I'm also in charge of compiling the production folder. All the pre-production research and planning, shot-lists and storyboards, schedules, contracts right through to promo material (which I've had a stab at, but my Photoshop skills aren't exactly great). So it's a mad rush now with everything needed to be complete by tomorrow afternoon, then we need to plan a ten minute presentation to be followed by a screening for our tutors.

In the evening there's been a party organised in a pub in Penryn to screen all the films along with the cast, the rest of the course, the tutors and some other guests. I'm a little bit nervous about that, and whether I want to share the finished film. Hopefully will make up my mind seeing it all in place tomorrow.

Rosemary Recording Sessions - Day 1

Last Thursday was our first day in the new recording studios recording Rosie and her band.

It did not go smoothly.

Firstly I was just not used to the set up, working with the patch bay and routing the paths of all the microphones and wires for a project this big. It was also my first time in Control Room 1 (without a proper induction). This control room has a large D-Command digital mixing desk that, in essence, works in the same way as the Control 24 desk from the Tremough Studio, but everything seems to be in nonsensical and overcomplicated places - but that's almost definitely just because I'm used to something different.

When I could only get half the microphones to come through to the desk I started to get quite frustrated. When seven people are waiting around for you to set-up and start getting on with the recording and there's nothing anyone else can do it can be very stressful and embarrassing if things go wrong. Even if it's a smooth set-up the process is still long and dull for anyone waiting.

It turned out that there was a problem with one of the 192 pre-amps and that half the microphones wouldn't come through. This meant sacrificing a couple of the drums microphones and the ability to record drums, bass and guitar at the same time.

So, after wasting nearly three hours, I had to record drums (not having the time to take the care to get as good a sound as I'd liked) with a guide guitar and guide vocal in the control room. Then begin laying down the bass and piano separately - a much longer process. And, because we hadn't pre-booked a decent guitar amp we have to wait until next week for that.

Despite all this, things went well once we did get started - and the songs started to sound pretty good. We got the rough tracks down for five songs and next Thursday (starting at 9am and finishing at 10pm) we have guitar, piano, more drums then more bass and piano and then vocals to lay down. Hopefully things will go a lot more smoothly then.

We're also taking more care as to which members of the band come in at what time to minimise the amount of waiting and boredom.

The filming went well though, although I felt especially guilty making Grant and Josh wait around more than anyone. Apparently they got some good footage and hopefully that will be worth it in the end.

Pro Tools 9

I was having issues running Pro Tools at home with the Original Mbox that I needed to run it through not working properly with my computer or monitors, so I decided to upgrade to Pro Tools 9, which runs straight through my PC – and far more stably. This makes me feel a lot better about having my ridiculously over-sized and expensive monitors functioning properly. Two of these pretty much dominate my room now.

I also decided to purchase a Faderport, making mixing in my bedroom easier. Although, despite the manufacturers promising me otherwise, it's not entirely compatible with Pro Tools 9 (yet), which is great. It was a nice idea though, emulating a larger mixer so I don't have to use a mouse (which doesn't work well at all when automating volume or effects in comparison to a fader).

'the Fall'

After re-reading Camus' 'the Outsider', which I often refer to as one of my favourite novels, I decided to read a few more of his books. I bought 'the Fall' and 'the First Man' (his unfinished last novel), but I'm still kind of hesitant to tackle any more of his essays after the density of 'the Myth of Sisyphus' - no matter how interesting it was.

I started reading 'the Fall' and, even though the language isn't as easily accessible as 'the Outsider', it's still pretty good. There's more on the surface of this story and just as much underneath. Essentially it's a 100 page monologue about guilt, hypocrisy and the loss of innocence - a series of one-way conversations between two strangers in an Amsterdam bar.

This passage stood out from the early pages:

"There was one man who gave twenty years of his life to a scatter-brained woman, sacrificing everything in his life for her - friends, work, even respectability - only to acknowledge one evening that he had never loved her. He was bored, that was all, bored, like most people; so he created from scratch a life of complications and drama for himself. Something's got to happen - that's the explanation for most human undertakings. Something's got to happen, even if it's slavery without love, or war, or death."

Rehearsal Extract

Here's an extract of the rehearsal Grant filmed last week in prep for the recording.

Recording Studio Documentary

Today I went to one of Rosemary's rehearsals. It was the first time I've heard her play with her band and I really liked the sound of what they've put together. They played the full version of Hieroglyphs (which I recorded an acoustic version of and shared in a previous post) as well as two other complete songs and a few that are still works in progress and I'm really excited to get started on producing them.

We booked the studio for a week today and I've started making notes on my microphone choices and how to structure the recordings. It's a big project, with drums, guitars, bass, piano and four vocal parts, and the band were keen to record live. However, I'm less keen on that, with bleeding between instruments making it difficult to control the mix of the recordings as well as being limited to 16-tracks/microphones with the analogue mixing desk, when I tend to use around 15 on just the drums.

So I'm trying to figure out a way to make the band perform as comfortably as they would in a live environment but with the same result of multi-track recordings. Ideally, I'll get the drums, guitar and bass to play together in the live room but route the guitar and bass through to the amps in the two isolation booths. I'll have Rosie in the control room singing a guide vocal at the same time. Then record the piano and vocal tracks separately afterwards.

Grant - the editor and assistant cameraman on our current project - asked me if he could take some photos or do some filming so I approached Rosie with the idea of making a mini documentary/making-of to edit together. She seemed enthusiastic so I asked my friend Alex - also on our course and good with his DSLR and interesting in music production - whether he'd be interested in helping out too, which he was.

The idea is to make it into something useful for Rosie as well as ourselves for our PDP work.

'The Lion in Winter'

(admittedly, discovered through references in 'the West Wing')

Geoffrey: 'You fool! As if it matters how a man falls down.'

Richard the Lionheart: 'When the fall's all that's left, it matters a great deal.'

Extracts from other things

“He sings about me in Latin. He writes about me in Greek. If you want to earn me, you have to do something.” And all of a sudden it knocks me to the floor. The culmination of her words and my flaws, and the weakness in my left ventricle, it’s hit me like a hard left-hook and I fall to the ground in front of her. She looks at me as if I’m mad, but I’m not female.

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“Girls, one day – if it hasn’t happened already, mind you – one day a man will tell you he loves you.

It will be a lie.

Especially if he’s Italian.”

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I wrote our history on a napkin and then I threw it at your face. It was one of those posh napkins, the reusable ones, not the disposable type. I guess that makes it better. You picked it up and read it and you laughed. Everything summed up in to four or five sentences - that’s the way you like it, and that’s the reason I hated you so much. I smiled and you grasped my knee under the table.

We speak quickly and honestly and simultaneously.

“I love you.”

“You wear me out.”

Looking Back

Just looking back on a few posts here and noticed the post where I declared my intention to write something more uplifting and less cynical... I guess that didn't happen.

The most recent thing I've been working on is a short story about a girl juggling a relationship with an abusive boyfriend and a heroin-addicted best friend, but isn't as dreary as that makes it sound, I hope. It links slightly to my last piece, and at the moment I've got about 6,000 words. I was aiming for around 10,000 but at the moment there's not really any plot or structure and I'm trying to figure out how to deal with it as a story.

“You’ll never understand the ways you’ve helped me.” He tells me. “You’ve released me. You’ll never believe the state I was in before I met you.”

The look in his eyes tells me he’s being a soft and sincere and affectionate romantic. The grip with which his hand takes my arm tells me I should be afraid of him, of what he could be capable of.

“Jay...” I begin the question before I’m even sure what I’m about to confront. I take a moment and he looks at me and smiles a smile that would have made my heart melt a month ago. He’s become this sweet and loving and genuine male out of nowhere, and he tells me that this is my influence – I’ve drawn the sweetness out of him and into the forefront of his character.

The silence has lasted too long now and I realise it’s no longer appropriate to ask him whether he did, in fact, murder his brother, so instead I place both of my hands, softly, on either side of his face and give him a delicate kiss, hoping he mistakes delicacy for affection.

'Open Till Late' Filming

This week we finished the bulk of our shoot for our short film. After finding our feet on the first day it was quite a smooth process and we managed to work productively as a group. The actors were great, very patient, enthusiastic and happy to help out. Because we had to wait for the shop to close, we couldn't start setting up until 8 and usually ended up finishing around 3am. We now have just one short scene in another location and some green-screen footage to film.

We suffered from two significant set-backs, however. One that was resolved before it had any actual impact on the project, another that's irreversible we're all very unhappy with and we'll have to continue to deal with.

Firstly, after a month of pre-planning and organisation, we arrived at the shop and unloaded our three cars worth of equipment when security turned up and announced our filming had been cancelled by health and safety, and that we'd have to leave. It turns out the shop's manager, who okayed the shoot and organised our supervision with her staff, didn't have the authority to allow us and our kit in the shop after closing. It turned out that everyone was informed of its cancellation four-days prior apart from us, who weren't informed of any issues at all.

Luckily, after a long conversation with security and phoning the shop manager and head of health and safety, we were given the clearance to go ahead and film again, despite issues with our risk assessment and preparation. Thankfully, this was resolved pretty quickly, before our actors arrived and we could quickly move past it.

The second issue was that the JVC's we used to film on (which are usually reserved just for third years) suffer from an defect that, after they've warmed up, causes them to produce "hot"/dead pixels. So the majority of our shots are now decorated with 4 or 5 red and green dots. We didn't notice this until we uploaded the footage in an edit suite, and there's not really any way we could have prevented it without prior warning.

From the tutors point of view (after being convinced it wasn't us being negligent) is that we can't be marked down for it, but no one is happy about it at all. Our tutors wanted us to re-shoot all the affected scenes, and so did we - with the knowledge that we'd benefit from doing a better production job a second time round, but it didn't seem feasible with the deadline/budget/actors availability. The other, significant issue, is that it will probably be difficult for any film festivals to take the finished work seriously - which is a requirement of the brief. The larger the image is shown, the more prominent the pixels will become.

My main worry now is the quality of the audio, as all sound is diegetic and dialogue-heavy, and all the atmos noise (such as the fridges and freezers) is very apparent, and the levels tend to peak and distort during the argument scene. I really want to avoid having to do ADR (dragging the actors into a recording studio to re-record and sync their lines.)

We aim to have a first rough-edit in place by Wednesday, and I'm looking forward to seeing how it comes together.