Wind

Tonight I came in and replaced the wind SFX that we had in the film. The previous wind sounded like the house was right next to the ocean, which is not the mood we are trying to set. I got some new wind SFX from Kasey and have layered them into the film. They sound a lot cleaner and appropriate. THey are more wispy and have a bit of a eeriness to them. I think it's a much better fit.

Festival Plan

Last week, Chris, John, and I finalized our festival plan. We had eight festivals that we found as good fits for The Basement. One of the festivals that I found with free submission is River Run in Winston Salem. They have no charge for NC students, which I thought was great because they are really helping support the students of the state, and if we got into that festival it would be an easy day drive up there. We also finished up our website with the cast and crew bios. It's looking pretty good. Basic, but clean and easy to navigate. We still need to burn a DVD copy and then just need to place our festival plan and completed budget in a binder with the link to our website, and we are good to go.

Whimpers, Wind, and Nearing the End

We've been working on refining the video and then adding sound effects to enhance the film. The video camera scene has not been cut down. Instead of seeing Phil walk away to turn off the light, which kind of broke up the tension, we cut straight from him setting up the camera and hitting record to him going to lay down with Jim in the bed. This not only helps cut down our overall time, but it adds to the scene in that it leaves more to the imagination for the audience. We also tweaked the scene in the woods when Phil goes to pick up Jim and carry him back. There are now a few more cuts with different angles worked into the sequence which helps give the scene momentum, rather than just standing back in the long shot the whole time. That's still something I wish we had more of throughout the whole film: close ups. Having some more punched in shots would be great for this film to really zero in on Jim's fear and uneasiness around Phil.

We've also enhanced the sound scape. In the opening shot in the basement, we hear Jim whimpering a bit which adds a nice touch. One of the whimpers sounds like a girl, so we have to mess with that still, but in all it sounds good. We also need to look for an alternative wind sound because it still sounds like ocean wind outside. Kasey says she has some wind sounds on her hard drive, so I'm going to check those out tomorrow.

Over all, it's looking good. It's still rather long (about 18min 30 sec, I believe) but I don't think there's a ton we can do about that. As long as the pace feels justified and we make it as concise as possible, I think we'll be okay.

I've also been working on the Festival Plan a bunch over the Eater weekend. The website is up and having last touches added to it. We already have our poster, and we're finishing up sifting through the festivals that we want as our top choices.

We submitted to Reel Teal, but they rejected our submission due to mature content. Lame.