right on bro!

Feeling pretty good this morning, and very, very relieved. Yesterday, we did technical screenings of the two films for which I’ve been editing and mixing sound. It was a pretty solid bust.

Going into the movie theater at the LA Film School in Hollywood, I was nervous and tired as hell. This was my first time working on a film project, and I’ve never mixed for playback in a theater before, much less tried to mix two films in four days.

So I’ve been holed up in my apartment since Friday, trying to meet an end-of-week deadline for both projects. Around 4 A.M. yesterday morning I had totally burned out, with only the first half of the second film finished. I tossed everything in in the second half into the “Serious Noise Reduction” section of my mix and started rendering, preparing to get worked by the producer.

So later that afternoon, the four of us - me, the editor, the producer, and the producer’s wife - sat in the theater by ourselves to watch and take notes. I was starting to get paranoid, imagining that the producer would stop the movie five minutes in and say, “Hey, Mike, this sucks.” Or, even worse, the school’s projectionist would do it.

Two minutes into the first film, and I realized things were going to be okay. I’m not going to win any awards with the job I did, but shit was generally clear, crisp, and punchy (with the exception of the aforementioned second half of the second film, which was an unintelligible mess). I took a deep breath, relaxed in my seat, and thought, “Okay, I can do this.”

So now I’ve got two more days to refine things. I’ve got to finish the second half of the film, and I’ve got seven pages of notes on the rest of the material. But, I didn’t blow up the theater’s sound system. It was a good start.