Tweaking

Yesterday was a day of final tweaks on the film.  I started with Peter Carlstedt at 10am, back at KRA Creative to adjust the mix slightly.  I noticed that when I watched the film at home on a TV set with crappy little speakers, certain things became inaudible.  Peter told me that most films will do two mixes; one for theaters and one for TV, as the sound quality is so different.  The other thing we discussed was Foley (which is recreating sounds that occurred on set but that are either not recorded properly because the boom operator is correctly concentrating on the dialogue, or the sounds are married to dialogue and cannot be separated and edited in).  At present, we don't have a Foley track and when we shot the film, in many of the scenes of Jeannette either writing a letter or hearing a voiceover you can hear off camera dialogue which ruins the sounds of what she is actually doing in the scene.  As an example, when Jeannette is cutting lemons and squeezing them during a scene, she is also hearing a reporter (who is seen in the window behind her) talking about Miss Rankin's demeanor in Congress.  In order for Jeanmarie to react properly to what was ultimately going to be heard by the audience coming from the window we had Cameron read his lines off stage.  And while this gave me the performance I needed in  order to cut Cameron in later, it ruined any hopes of using the sound of her cutting and squeezing the lemons... What to do?  Well, in the big budget world, we would create a "Foley track" where foley artists would recreate all the sounds that are being "seen" in the film:  footsteps, clothing rustle, body movement, lemon squeezing, etc etc.  This would be put on a completely separate track and mixed into the film.  The additional advantage of having this track is that later, when the film is being dubbed in a foreign language, there is still ambient sounds to fill out the experience.  Otherwise there will be music and sound f/x tracks but no other sound but the dubbed dialogue.  To make a long story longer-- that is what Peter had to contend with and he did a brilliant job salvaging little bits of lemon squeeze noises and sewing them together and editing them to the picture, matching her movements with the sounds and now, it sounds really good.  He did the same with the letter writing scene where it is obvious that we would be hearing pen scratches but we didn't have any.

After the adjustment to the mix, I went to Justin Shumaker's place to see the final notes of picture changes that he had executed and it really looked great!  We made a final last minute decision to replace a portion of a background shot with another one - kind of funny... Originally I had thought that we would use still images behind Jeannette during her speeches (to replace the greenscreen) but when we did that, it bothered me that nothing moved.  So a few months ago I went out and ran around with my camera shooting backgrounds.  I was looking for something pretty for the background of the Butte Country Club and, as it was winter, everything was kind of drab looking and dry except... the cemetary!  So I got a cool background of a grassy area with a lake and ducks and swans and blood red roses.  We put it in and then I realized that the "gazebo" in the background of the shot (which was actually a sepulcher) there was yellow police caution tape all around it  and a ladder- apparently there had been a homicide or something horrific had transpired there the night before.  Well that was hardly the scene for a Ladies Lunch!  So I had Christel Thompson, one of the compositors/artists paint the caution tape and ladder out of the frame!  Well, as you can imagine, this was a pain in the a**.  So a couple of nights ago, when I'm watching the final picture, I ask my husband, Joel, to be a second set of eyes and make sure I'm not missing anything (he hadn't seen the new version so he was fresh meat).  We get the the Butte Country Club scene and it starts on a static shot before moving onto Jeannette and Joel suddenly shouts "Hey!  that's a graveyard!".  Needless to say, I was disturbed.  I realized that all the nice grey stone bumps and crosses were not really blending into the foliage like I was convincing myself they were and it looked like Jeannette had decided to give a speech a the Dead Ladies Club.  So last night, despite all the the time and work that went into cleaning up that shot, I replaced the offending shot with ducks swimming around in the lake and then cut straight to Jeannette filling the frame!