Beach Town local report March 31 - amassing songs

L-R: Erik Hammen, Sarah Winsor, Ahren Buhmann
(photo by David Thomas)

I got a lot done on Beach Town this week.

It was kind of gloomy here in Seattle, but the sun finally came out yesterday and I went out for a run. On my new route, I passed right by the area you see in the photo on the left, where we shot a few scenes last summer.

I spent a lot of time talking over email with Greg Wharmby this week. Greg is one of the handful of great musicians around the country (including but not limited to Graig Markel, Punishment, Thomas Wold, Fermentation, and Thee Samedi) that I'm working with on the huge variety of tracks we need to complete the soundtrack for Beach Town.

It's a lot of people, I'll tell ya what.

In fact, one might say that as usual, I'm doing a lot of "collaborating"!

Here's the tricky thing about movie music. It's more about feeling than melody. And, in Beach Town, most of the music is presented as actual songs motivated by a specific source (usually the radio), as opposed to traditional omniscient soundtrack cues.

So in addition to being great tunes, these songs have to be specifically-atmospheric, the right tempo, and sound right with the rest of the film, and not get in the way of dialogue or suggest the wrong thing through lyrics.

In other words, the music has to serve the movie, not vise versa.

I have very high hopes for my musicians, because any gaps left over will have to be filled in by me. Unfortunately, I have to fill the gaps first, then backfill with new tunes as they come in.

I generally like to work on songs one at a time, but I've found with the amount of material and the sort of material I need to crank out, my burnout rate is a lot lower I actually have a bunch of pieces in progress at once. So I blast away on one song until I can't get any farther with it, and then switch over to a different one and keep working. Ultimately, it's headphone-fatigue that makes me stop for the day.

Arrangement is a big thing. And instrument choice. Sometimes the 20 dollar plastic, belt-clip preamp sounds more "right" than the real thing. Sometimes the cheezy software keyboard emulator that everyone in the world owns and is sick of sounds very right...  but only after I put it through a phalanx of top-secret studio-processing tricks of the damned. Many which I learned in making my previous film, Time of the Robots.

Speaking of studio tricks, I'm also working on getting together with David Thomas, to go over the mixes he's done of all the performance material, and today, I'm sending out release forms to all the musicians whose music is already baked into the rough cut!

Very exciting.

Beach Town rough cut complete. Cue music.

I finished the rough cut on Tuesday. Posting early this week, got stuff to do...

I've also gone through the film and noted all the cues that are currently filled by temp music.

(Keeping with that theme, the picture here is also a temp picture, albeit a cool one.)

Anyway, there are a lot of music cues to take care of.

But the sun is out, I'm really happy with the way the picture is looking, I'm already working with a couple people on music ideas, and the road ahead seems very rosy from where I sit.

Rough cut getting close

L-R:   Riley Neldam, Kenna Kettrick,
Ahren Buhmann, Sarah Winsor, and John the extra
(photo by Jennifer Dice)

Summer in the northwest -- it's later than it looks.

We're on the beach -- Golden Gardens -- for the bonfire scene. Shooting with a permit, in front of a slightly unpermitted fire-pit constructed of an old Smokey Joe with its legs yanked off, buried in the sand.

We had a fire captain -- Jennifer Dice-- whose job was to make the fire bigger.

Foom! Up it went.

Do people sing around bonfires anymore? They do where I come from. Last time I was back east visiting my brother Bret and his family, we had a bonfire in his backyard. My niece Freya lent me her plastic cowgirl guitar, and we were able to squeeze a few tunes out of it.

Group singing is good for the brain.

The world-famous St. Olaf Choir holds hands when they sing, the whole lot of them. It helps them function as a single unit. The vibrations and empathy are transmitted directly. They don't have to worry about holding a guitar, though.

Or a beer can.

In the editing room, the bonfire scene had some unusual challenges. Honestly, I was stumped for a couple of days over the best way to cut it. But I cracked the code yesterday afternoon.

Now that I've got a grip on the whole thing, I hope to finish the rough cut this coming week, and then start on the remaining music tracks immediately after.

I'm pretty excited to get going on the music.

Beach Town update, daylight-savings edition

I got a lot done this week. Worked on the rest of the record store scenes, then on to the Georgetown Trailer Park Mall, and beyond that to our little scene on 1st Ave. S. near Slim's Last Chance.

A lot of locations on this film.

A lot!

You wanna know what one of the primary rules of indie filmmaking is? It's "limit your locations".

The process of packing up, moving, unpacking, and shooting over and over and over is costly, time-consuming, randomizing, and exhausting.

Limit your locations! It totally makes sense.

In a bean-counter sort of way.

But dammit, I love locations and I'm doing it the same way on my next film.

Locations are key to your mise-en-scène!  It's not "adding stress" to bring your cast and crew to places that inspire everyone and gives you beautiful images as well, it should be part of the expectation. That's Cinema, baby.

I do wonder sometimes, in the dark of the night, whether the I-know-better "punk rock" approach to filmmaking that I love so much maybe won't come out so charmingly rough-edged one day...

But this week? Once again, everything fell gloriously into place like I hoped it would.

Ha! Vindicated!

A bit 'o editing magic, it is. A little shell game, made possible by tons of pre-production planning, and then --- crucially -- by working with excellent actors and excellent crew.

I'm sure I'll have to eat my words some day in this regard, but what's the point of being in the arts if you have no conviction?

Anyway... Moving right along...

Now that we're getting close to the end of the rough cut, I've started getting distracted by the upcoming music phase of post production.

I need to reel back that distraction until the rough cut is done.

Last night, for example, I got a bee in my bonnet that I needed to figure out a particular piece of music right now, so I switched gears and tried to crank out a new brand new song -- with no real ideas per se and using kindergarten-level tools (re: apple Garageband) --  right there on the spot.

That was a big fat waste of time. But it did remind me that I'm gonna need to invest in one more (ahem) piece of software not too long from now....

In other news:  

The Criminal Element, written by Jennifer Dice and directed by Steven Sterne, at Seattle Public Theater this Saturday, March 15th, at noon. These Dice/Sterne plays are a blast, I highly recommend them. I'll be there, I hope to see you too.

And don't forget to Spring Ahead today.

Beach Town report for the first Monday in March, 2014

Emily Purington, on set of Beach Town
(photo by Mel Cafe)

It's been another busy week for Beach Town!

'Getting toward the home stretch now, at least for the rough cut.

This week's photo comes from the makeup test, I think, for one of the scenes I was cutting this week. Emily Purington is dressed for the Georgetown confab by Barbara Blunt, makeup by Juel Bergholm.

Beyond that Georgetown bit, I also put together the rest of the water scenes and another Shilshole Ave sequence, and ended up on the roof of Surf Ballard, a place where the cast and crew spent more time than we ever thought we would...

... Actually that's true about Shilshole Avenue as well.

... The great thing about working with talented actors, in this case Sarah Winsor and Maya Briller, is that they are able to reproduce their performances again and again, each time as if they were brand new. Despite (or "in spite of" -- is there a difference?) some unexpected technical challenges.

Hooray for acting --  wotta fine profession!

Here's something funny: I got derailed about halfway through editing the Shilshole Avenue bit when I realized that I'd forgotten we had music for that scene that was baked into the script. See, I'd already edited the whole thing to a temp track instead. Hilarious!

I think I've just had this particular tune in mind for so long that I took it for granted.

Upon recutting, it was amazing once again how powerful all that stuff is...  Music.... Editing.

Anyway, special thanks to the patient Thomas Wold for the use of his lovely, summery hippy folkadelic tune.  Recorded on machines so old they don't even exist anymore, from what I'm told....

Speaking of music, once the rough cut is done, the plan is to set the picture aside to cool off, and re-commence work on acquiring and/or composing the remaining music for the film. Because for expediency's sake, a handful of scenes are currently scored with temporary tracks, which have copyrights owned by giant, reeking corporations, the kind that charge licensing fees that exceed  the entire budget of the film x2 for each tiny, forgotten song.

(What percentage of that fee goes to the artist? My guess = 0)

After the music is finalized, I can go back to the rough cut, put in the final tracks, cut to the new music and tighten the whole thing up for public consumption. (note the metaphor follow-through here....)

In other news:

Sarah was in another play this weekend which I missed, but will also be in Macha Monkey's Lollyville, playing at Hugo House in May!

Steven Sterne seems to be working non-stop -- beyond his directing duties at SPT he's now working with the Young Playwrights on a read-through series...

Alyssa Kay is in Charlotte's Web, opening March 21 at the Second Story Rep.