Zombie Appreciation

I cannot seem to find enough time in the day to get to this thing!  The last couple weeks have blasted by. 

I suppose first things first:  The first skit we filmed almost three weeks back was a Zombie skit in collaboration with Underpaid Heroes project with Troy Norcross.  The whole thing was improvised on location, not to mention slightly less than legal it turns out!

Troy led the skit idea,  It took us a while to get makeup done on 2 zombies.  A few hours longer than expected running the whole production on account of the Navigator battery dying because of improvised lighting with the cars and 1 mobile spotlight being run from a power inverter (yay for homebrew videography)!

We tried to race through a lot of the shots with a tight time-table.  Mok operated the Camera hand-held and I ran the Shotgun mic the same.  There was hardly any time to plan out camera angles and really understand what the group wanted to do action-wise.

We ran out of time to really make sure we got all the shots we wanted to make the scene complete on account of it being after 3 AM by the time we shot the last bits.  The next day we dubbed the tape to Premier and built a rough edit in just 30 minutes.

With only a mono audio source to play with there would be a limited pallete of real-world audio to play with and a lot of sound replacement.  I refined the rough edit Mok had done and proceeded to the visual FX for several shots that happen in the skit.

Getting to Picture lock was fairly easy with the minimal VFX shots we had to work on.  The final edit still needs bumpers and motion graphics for the titles.

While the picture was pretty much complete aside from those elements I headed to audio and proceeded to break apart the audio.

I quickly went through the audio from each of the takes to pull apart the vocals, and then find useful ambiance to overlay or if it included Foley for footfalls etc. I moved them into timing and copied the audio where necessary. I could only do so much with most of the audio, so I proceeded to then mark spots and add in sound effects for replacement, and then foley and sound effects for enhancement.

First, iZotope's Ozone 4 was used to analyze the entire audio track before any noise reduction was applied to capture the EQ profile of the Rode NTG-3 mic's on-location audio.  The next step was the most time consuming.

I had to go through one clip at a time for each cut I made in the timeline to analyze and apply noise reduction for each separate take that followed the take from the video.  Once the noise profile was captured for that take, I could simply copy the plugin to the next clip I cut.  The plugin is very processor intensive so I had to bounce each clip after the noise reduction was applied.

We also had to replace quite a bit of Voice work from the on-location audio as it was too compressed and the impact noises with the gravel and dirt muddy up the mix.  I setup my shotgun mic outside my room and had everyone record their parts to the video.  I then applied the Ozone EQ matching profiles to the new material.

I still have to head into surround mix, and compose the underscore to the skit and then apply the final film grading and review before it's done.

Not sure if zombie is zombie or clown...

fast zombie = fast...

Hit the deck!

Kaplow!

Who plow?

Homie don't play dat.

Horror scene, or eerie homo-erotic love scene?

Yup, eerie homo-erotic love scene..

So, I have to get back to my busy schedule.  I will definitely be adding more up very soon of the other projects I've been working on.  Now, off to gym!