Final cut begins!

Old Rocky Point amusement park dining hall.
Home of the Shore Dinner (Best in the World).

This week I sent David the last few music tracks to mix, and started on the final cut of the film.

It's worth noting that the rough cut is not actually rough -- the idea is to get as close as you can to perfect.

Then, you take a break (for music, in our case) and when you come back for the Final, you can concentrate on the performances without having to worry about structural issues inherent in the process of assembling a film from a million different parts.

It's all about going from good to great. 

So it's pretty fun, and exciting to see things working out so well.

Working all the way through the bike scenes over the weekend, I have to say that I am feeling a lot of love for the actors.

I also spent a lot of time on the ever-important opening title sequence. Moved a few things around , and laid in the newly-mixed opening song, which sounds great (thanks David!!).

I also badgered my (Emmy Award-winning) friend Eric S. Anderson with questions about font choice, size, opacity, kerning, leading, etc. My own know-how in that area is limited to what occurs to me randomly, but nuance and subtlety are the order of the day.

Eric is a trained professional and a cool cat, and ... he offered to do the work on them. What? Yes! Thank you Eric!

Also over the weekend, I walked downtown and grabbed a half-dozen more ambient audio tracks, and spent some time organizing and cleaning up my files, including removing some remaining AfterEffects artifacts, and adding that AE stuff to my list of things to do with Ahren Buhmann when the cut is finalized (in addition to color correction-- thank you Ahren!)  I don't want to spend time farting around with AE and failing at it when Buhmann can figure it out in a few minutes.

In other news:

Time of the Robots, one of my previous films, got a few screenings in Chicago. There's still some life in that old, strange warhorse!

Jennifer Dice and Steven Stern have another play over at Seattle Public Theater next Saturday (May 3) at 12:00 noon. It's called "Maria Morova", and has got something to do with BabaYaga.  It's going to be great -- I'll be there.

This week's photo comes from the (now gone) awesomely hand-built Rocky Point amusement park that my family used to go to when I was a kid. Apparently there's a place now that serves the old timey Rocky Point food. I wonder if it's any good?