The Glove Box - Final Cut

Yesterday I finished the final audio mix on The Glove Box. Gabe came over last night to approve the mix and get a tape for the contest submission.

While mixing the audio, I was afraid the film wasn't going to come across as interesting and frieghtening as we would have liked. In the end, it all came together. I even get tense and jump at the right parts, even though I know they're coming.

The first pass was to clean up the audio from the shoot. I ended up not using much of the original audio at all, as it was rather noisy, didn't match levels from cut to cut, and often had chatter from the crew. I mostly used field recordings we did last Saturday on my DAT deck, mostly ambient soundtracks of starting the car, stopping the car, driving the car, driving on the freeway, slowing down, car stopped with the windows closed, with the windows open, car off with the windows open and closed, etc. At this point it was nice and clean, but not very interesting, and with very little mood.

The second pass was to add sound effects to give our antagonist a little personality. I won't divulge what we used to achieve this, maybe someone can guess after they see it. This added some interest and tension, but the raw sound effects on the cleaned up basic tracks weren't all that convincing.

The final pass was to add music. This was the icing on the cake, and brought it all together. I was able to use the intro to Fatigo's "Spicy Nova" for the first half of the film, just over a minute of instrumental jazzy, bossa nova that could easily be the theme song to a sixties sitcom. I see a young woman in a big city tossing her hat into the air. The light, playful air of this song is a good counterpoint to the building tension of the film. Quite by accident, there were a number of changes that matched up with visual cues.

Gabe got permission from The Casket Lottery to use one of their songs, and wisely chose "Getting By" a creepy, sinister little number. We cut this song up into some key parts and used them to punctuate the action.

The world premiere is Thursday, October 28 at 7:00pm at Valley Art Theatre in Tempe, AZ. It looks like this theatre seats only 150 people. I hope we don't have another 48-Hour Film Contest screening debacle where some people get shut out.

As we speak, my workstation is on its 14th hour of rendering out a 24fps filmic version of The Glove Box. It should be done by the time I get home. We'll see if looks any good and possibly use it for a DVD release. Thanks to Panasonic, the footage looks absolutely amazing, and should lend itself well to the further processing.

Thanks to Angie, Brock, and John for their input and hard work, and to the bands for contributing their music.