Mommie Q and Memorial Weekend
I've spent most of the holiday weekend working on sound design for Mommie Queerest, as well as the slide show that will be used for all the scene transitions in the show. Who knew my computer skills would be so handy as a director. The show is completely blocked and the cast is already hilarious so I have no worries about them being ready for an audience.
Now I just have to finish the sound design and of course I want it to be as polished and perfect as the cast already is. So I have set myself a pretty high bar for this show. The writer Jamie Morris has included many sound notes in the script and I used those as a starting point. But naturally my own sound design background, old movie trivia expertise, musicology and generally campy sense of humor all went into overdrive, imagining twice as many cues and sound effects to enhance the production and hopefully add to the comic value. And a lot of what I 'heard' in my own head as the soundtrack to the action onstage required mixing multiple effects and music. So I have spent most of the weekend, starting on Friday evening just working on the laptop to perfect and finish the sound. I'm in the home stretch but still have a few tracks to mix before I have a working rehearsal CD with all the cues ready before our runthru tomorrow night (yes, we are having to rehearse on the evening of Memorial Day)
I did come up for air for a few hours midday on Saturday to have lunch with Lisa Haram and go visit Steve Lovett who is still in ICU recovering from his quadruple bypass. Lisa also helped me put up the last set of blinds I had left to install in the condo. Now I have finally replaced all the old vertical blinds that were left over from the previous owners. But that was only a brief vacation from sound design and then I had to get back to it.
I am such a perfectionist about it, I have actually spent several hours today getting just the right sequence, blend, and volume levels for the "farting" mix I built from scratch using 6 different fart sound effects - I bet I will never again create an FX file named "DeathFart.wav"
Now after this brief 'holiday' to blog, I must crack the whip again and finish the last FX tracks. Thankfully, I am done 'farting' for today. Happy Memorial Day!
Now I just have to finish the sound design and of course I want it to be as polished and perfect as the cast already is. So I have set myself a pretty high bar for this show. The writer Jamie Morris has included many sound notes in the script and I used those as a starting point. But naturally my own sound design background, old movie trivia expertise, musicology and generally campy sense of humor all went into overdrive, imagining twice as many cues and sound effects to enhance the production and hopefully add to the comic value. And a lot of what I 'heard' in my own head as the soundtrack to the action onstage required mixing multiple effects and music. So I have spent most of the weekend, starting on Friday evening just working on the laptop to perfect and finish the sound. I'm in the home stretch but still have a few tracks to mix before I have a working rehearsal CD with all the cues ready before our runthru tomorrow night (yes, we are having to rehearse on the evening of Memorial Day)
I did come up for air for a few hours midday on Saturday to have lunch with Lisa Haram and go visit Steve Lovett who is still in ICU recovering from his quadruple bypass. Lisa also helped me put up the last set of blinds I had left to install in the condo. Now I have finally replaced all the old vertical blinds that were left over from the previous owners. But that was only a brief vacation from sound design and then I had to get back to it.
I am such a perfectionist about it, I have actually spent several hours today getting just the right sequence, blend, and volume levels for the "farting" mix I built from scratch using 6 different fart sound effects - I bet I will never again create an FX file named "DeathFart.wav"
Now after this brief 'holiday' to blog, I must crack the whip again and finish the last FX tracks. Thankfully, I am done 'farting' for today. Happy Memorial Day!