Brighten The Corner

I used to keep an informal list in my head of writers and artists whose hearts I’d eat to steal their talents.

I don’t keep the list anymore (somehow the way I think about that sort of desire has changed), and the actual phrasing was stolen from an Evan Dorkin strip, I believe where he pictures himself eating Jaime Hernandez’s heart. (For the record, Evan Dorkin was never on my list, nor was Jamie Hernandez, but the metaphor for talent-envy was spot on.)

Jules Feiffer was on that list.

Jesus, Jules Feiffer!

Talk about multi-talented. Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist who scripted “The Spirit” with Will Eisner and cartooned for the Village Voice for four decades, but also an Academy Award-winner for animation, playwright, novelist, artist…

Talk about a sharp mind, and an ability to crystallize the human condition into short, bite-sized pieces. Give me a six-panel Feiffer cartoon strip over any page of poetry to hit a note smartly, sharp and subtle at the same time. (Each such feat is a tiny miracle, and his work is full of them.)

He’s speaking in town on June 21st thanks to Cinefamily and Family bookstore. I’m probably not going to be able to go because of prior obligations, but you definitely should! You must. They’ll be screening the odd, ground-shifting (even by over-three-decades-later standards) film Little Murders.

I’d seen actor Joel Huggins’ “Fish Out of Water” web series and fictitious web journal a while back, but the fact is, I don’t talk to Joel a lot. (I do see him a lot, lately in an Intel commercial…) But so I had no idea that he and director Ben Barnes made another ‘Fish’ film and have now scored two years of back-to-back Fish at SXSW.

Fish Out of Water’s a puppet/live action comedy… If you check out this interview just up from Massify, they talk about the evolution of the idea and the puppet itself.

The new short, Fish Out of Water: The Nightmare, is excellent:

I’m perhaps foolishly doing everything myself on TEXAS 1960. Camera, editing, sound recording and final mix. Elana’s doing color correction. The idea is to learn now… and speak more competently to real editors, cameramen and soundmen on future projects.

But Christ! Final sound edit feels like a fog. The internet, usually so forward with advice, is nearly mum. It took me hours to find the following information, which could be described as opinion rather than fact:

1. Dialog voice should ride around -10 to -12 db, with peaks at -6db. (Overridden by a friend at a post house who says they put a hard limiter on all voice at -10db, no peaks above.)
2. Dialog voice should get a boost at 2500Hz (mid-range of human voice) and at 6000Hz (high end, for crispness). (But again, it’s just someone’s opinion.)

And then I talk to some friends who work as editors… None of them have opinions on this stuff. They send their big projects to audio post houses for final mix, professional black boxes where obsessive audio nerds do… Well, I don’t know what they do. No one I know seems to really know. It presumably involves chickens and black candles.

So then I talk to the directors I know who’ve sound-mixed their own successful independent films… Only to discover they’ve all gone by a method of “it sounds good to me”. To be frank, they have something. I’ve seen their films and had no complaints about sound… which is reassuring… But regardless, I’d like some freaking guidelines. How can I go by “it sounds good to me” when I have grave suspicions that rock and roll has permanently damaged my hearing?

Found by pure accident (while searching on a Soundtrack Pro issue) the Eazy Dolly post on Make Film Work.

Have tried building my own dolly using random things around the house. Worked, but only had a range of four feet. Severely limiting.

Don’t have much to say on the Eazy Dolly or their promo video that wasn’t said in that post, but liked the Make Film Work site and his video on shutter speed (see “screencasts” on his site)… which admittedly, is info I already knew but he explained it well… I was just daydreaming about the same stuff yesterday (exposure time in videography and still cameras, etc) and he summed up better than I would have. Liked everything enough to warrant a post.

Wanted to give a shout out here to the new site up at my buddies’ production company Population 1280 Films. I won’t be too shy to say I hooked them up with pal Jacob Winkelman’s design shop temp², who put the site together on a shoestring (though you’d never guess).

If you haven’t seen it, Population 1280’s film Pop Skull was an amazing piece of work also made on a shoestring. It’s a freaky movie that really sucks you in, and received a US premiere at AFI Fest last year. It’s now getting DVD distribution from Halo 8.