We’re winding down the home stretch to the premiere of our first episode “The Travail of Sarah Pine” on June 26th.   The picture is now “locked,” meaning we have debated what to leave in, what to take out, and how it all flows together.    Along the way,  my daughter reminded me that “dip to black” transitions were dated.  “Too nineties,” she said.   I’m not sure I agree with her, but it looks like that advice might have found its way to the editor as the transitions are a little faster now.   (There are still a few dip to blacks, here and there, but it looks like we used them where a passage of time was implied.)   

The picture is now being mixed for 5.1 sound, since it will be shown in a theater, (unusual for what is really a television pilot).    During principal photography, we used a lot of Sony levolor microphones for the dialogue, along with a Sennheiser mic mounted on a boom for backup.   Sound is sometimes a step child among independent film makers, but we went out of our way to get good microphones and a good field mixer, and the post-production guy paid our young sound crew a high compliment.   He called it obscenely good sound, but he used the anglo-saxon version of the compliment.    We may have to do a little ADR (automated dialogue replacement), but hopefully not too much.    ADR, or looping, is where you have the actor watch a scene with muddy dialogue and repeat the words in a sound booth, over and over again, “looping” them until they get it lip-synch perfect.        

The picture will also now go simultaneously to the colorist and the composer, to keep the light and color even, and to match music with the emotion of the scene.  If you’ve ever set your family pictures, slide-show style, to music, say Kenny Loggin’s “Run River Run,” you know what music can do for a story, or even just an image.   When we were debating camera angles early on in the process, I emailed the producer, Jonathan Wilson, a youtube video, featuring a Canon 7D camera, mounted on a Cobra Crane, recording slow motion snow coming down along the trunk of a tree.   “Isn’t that incredible?” I asked.  “Yeah.  But that music,” he replied.  “You could set a slow motion garbage run to that music and people would weep.”

Which is true — sort of.   Music can lift a flat scene up and send it soaring.  But I’m proud to report that, among the people who have seen this story, and the way it has been performed, the piece has a music all its own.

Make sure you don’t miss it!