Film competition starts today. I think we’re pretty prepared. Our team of about 12-14 will be getting the genre tonight. We start filming and post-production I assume right away. Director handles that part, I’m on music, sound effects and helping where I can with Final Cut Pro.

We had a ton of good, developed and organic ideas in our practice sessions. I think the production company I’m with has a good “art filter”. This is very useful imho. For example filtering out rogue and premature ideas:

“Wouldn’t a game where you’re the owner of a toy factory be cool?”
“How about a movie where something drastic happens to that person and now they’re all like, damn!”

We don’t have a lot of that going on in our group. Usually when someone pitches an unpolished idea the person is very excited about their idea, think it’s unique but fails to put enough effort into it to include ideas to cut out. Think about baking an apple pie. There are many things that don’t make it into the apple pie. So the sum of what you bring to the baking table needs to be much bigger than the pie itself. I definitely don’t claim to be a writer but I think I have a pretty good “art filter” on all the time. The thing that I fail at is prejudging everything way too quickly. A few ideas seemed very lame at the pitch but then reading the script later changed my mind.

It doesn’t have to even be something I’m working on. A story about a guy stuck on an island sounds pretty lame (“What is that survivor again?”) but I loved Cast Away. Someday maybe my art filter will mature into something more subtle so I don’t sound like a pretentious asshole all the time.

All of this effort is done to have fun. But also to get a demo reel polished. Get something in a portfolio and generally to learn something. GameDev and video (this is not film) post-production to me is the same process. They differ in more ways than they are the same but essentially where I come in on the video end for sound effects is the same process where I come in for event sounds in interactive media.

To that end, here’s something pretty frightening. A horror track.

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