Dialog Recording

So it is four in the morning and I am starting a 72 hour work-o-thon to finish my animatic, because I am a masochist. All film makers need to be.

I am going through the dialog from my recording session and picking takes. Some engineers stop recording in between each take, but I don't like that. I like to keep recording until the line is perfect and we move on to the next one. That way while listening to the takes you can hear yourself giving direction and rate how you did.

Between every take you'll be saying "slow down", or "put a pause here", or "try emphasizing this". It is a really incremental and intricate process of shaping the dialogue until it's perfect. If you are an animator, you are already meticulously shaping the backgrounds and the character movement, so why not the dialogue?

In live action film you have so much to shape. You need to watch the movements of the actors, their faces, props, lighting, everything happens simultaneously. With so many things going at once, the little nuances in the dialogue, the emphasis or the cadence, sometimes get's lost. Animation is great because you can do all that later (or earlier if you so prefer) and have time to separate the dialogue, shape it, then shape movement, then lighting, etc.

Well, I've got a good three hours of audio to go through. See you on the other side.

Twouble With Twitter

A clip from Current TV's SuperNews. Funny and painfully true.

"Twouble with Twitter" sous-titré
Uploaded by LePostfr

What's in the Box?

I just watched this awesome video. Kind of like the bastard of Cloverfield and Half-Life 2 (even takes the HL2 sound effects and chopper). Still awesome. Love the HUD.



Blogger's not digging the wide screen, so here's the youtube link.

Hello World

So a few weeks ago I began using Twitter (right here). I have always skirted the too-many-tweets line, but my followers didn't mind, as they remained entertained. I have recently stumbled face first over said line, attempting to convey long winded thought over multiple tweets (apparently a mortal sin of the Twittersphere).

It was recommended that I get a blog for those times when the myriad of abstract thoughts careening through my head cannot be constrained by the limits of 140 characters.

So let's begin shall we?

I posted this video to Twitter (and showed several of you in person), but if you haven't seen it (and even if you have), it's wonderful.


Bathtub IV from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.

You should check out his other stuff on the side. Mardi Gras is fun too. This is not stop motion, but in fact real people shot using tilt shift photography. This is when you shoot something from a high angle with a lens that has a shallow depth of field, and everything looks miniature.

You can see a really cool tilt shift gallery here.