I enjoyed creating the foley for this film as I got to experiment and find lots of creative solutions- I had to cover a giant walking octopus, a sentient tree, humanoid rabbits, assorted robots and all sorts of weird and wacky props and events varying from spaceship crashes to dream sequences. The clip below gives a sense of one of the worlds that the characters inhabit . The award nomination was the icing on the cake.
Flyways tells the story of migratory shorebirds that fly thousands of killometers every year. I shot the foley and edited dialogue for this documentary feature. The birds are naturally skittish so a lot of the actuality footage was shot at great distance and sound had to be replaced. The foley involved lots feathers being flapped, rustling straw/ pecking around in wet sand, mimicking Also I covered things like Chinese fishermen hauling sacks of shellfish, scientist wading around on mud flats. My studio looked like a bomb site afterwards!
TV versions will be released on ABC iview in Australia, ARTE in France, PBS America and in many other territories. More information is available at the film website https://flywaysfilm.com/ Trailer is below.
Excuse the press silence- I had a son! All well there- but haven’t as yet found the right keystrokes for sleep mode, there’s meant to be a firmware update somewhere around puberty. Here I am trying out a jazz lullaby on the double bass. He didn’t cry or scream which is an improvement on some gigs.
Vincent Watts- My usual partner in Crime at Sonic Mix-did the mix and sound design for this feature documentary. It was directed by Jerry Rothwell for whom we carried out audio work on previous prize winning films ‘Heavy Load’ and ‘Deep Water’.
The film has gone on to win prizes at the Washington Silverdocs and New York Tribeca film festivals and since had a decent theatrical run which is now coming to an end.
To celebrate the end of the theatrical run there is a special screening and Q+A with Jerry and the producers at the Curzon Soho on Wednesday 3rd August at 6:20pm.
Follow this link to the film website for more info about the film. Or just watch the trail embedded below:
DONOR TRAILER v4 WEBSITE from Docs & Pieces on Vimeo.
For online bookings of this screening at the Curzon Soho follow this link
Trailer for our previous collaboration with Jerry Below
Starsuckers-(click for link to the Film Website) is a feature doc which looks at the corrosive effect of celebrity culture and the working practices of the celebrity press on mainstream news and politics.
The audio post was carried out by yours truly and Vincent watts (Vincent also wrote the score).
The film is getting a timely re-run on More4 starting 31st July 2011 at 11:10pm. Check it out if you get a chance. Should be an interesting watch in terms of what is happening with News International.
If you miss the terrestrial screenings and are really ken you can use the following:
Red White and Blue continues to get prizes and great reviews on the festival circuit. It went out on VOD as of 25th September via IFC Films and will go on a limited US theatrical release starting in New York on 8th October. Fingers crossed from there. For more on the release go to the website or read my previous post on the film, my involvement and the approach taken to the audio post.
The French Pilot I co-wrote has got a decent chunk of funding. Enough to schedule the shoot for this winter. It will be shot in the Bourgogne region (Burgundy). We are still looking into potential co-producers to develop the series. Good to get off to such a positive start so early. Now the hard work starts.
I did the mix and sound restoration for this South American film, its LA Spanish title is: Musica para un film Perdido. It has recently received a special award for restoration at the 21st International Festival of Short Films in Sao Paulo. (Other prizes that films I have been working on have won can be seen under the ‘Prizes’ Tab on the top of this site.) The film will be released for distribution via the BFI on the first of November. The information below is from the director Luciano Zubillaga’s website.
El Huerco (which means death, abandonment and hell) was the first experimental film made in Venezuela*. The film has since been lost. All that remains is the original music, the film script, discarded footage, and the memories of those who saw the film over forty years ago.
Music For A Missing Film traces the spiritual and material remnants of the lost film, exploring the aesthetics of film restoration, reconstruction and montage in the context of fading collective cultural memory.
“Such greatness! can you believe it? it’s lost. The most glorious piece of Venezuelan filmmaking and it doesn’t exist. We’re inventing it, making it, reassembling it…based upon three things: a script, its music and some lost memories. Memories of an old world, that lost its memory.”
Rodolfo Izaguirre
Writer and Film Critic
I have formed the ‘STOHO’ group in the ‘Linked in’ Network– . The aim is for production professionals living in the Walthamstow area to get a bit of local knowledge and gain local contacts. If you want to join, feel free to check out the link.
The first gathering will be at the Nags head pub, wednesday 21st July from 7:30 pm. Drop me a line if you fancy dropping by.
Cheers
Steve
Following screenings at SXSW, CANNES, and winning the Best Film Prize at the Boston Underground IFF, Red White and Blue gets its UK premier at 6:30 Pm on 30th August at the main screen of The Empire in Leicester Square as part of the Film Four Fright Fest.
Be warned this film is very disturbing. It starts slowly, giving you time to engage with the characters before events spiral out of control. I think that one of the strengths of this film is that -Unlike standard Hollywood fare- there is no clear good or evil, just very flawed people living with the bloody repercussions of their own actions. If you want to categorise it, you could draw a lot of parallels with the Jacobean strand of the revenge play genre. (so not your run of the mill slasher film) The film maintains lot of grey areas- the music remains unempathetic for many of the most extreme scenes.
I did this job through the Sonic Mix Audio Collective . So I handled the foley and dialogue edit, working alongside Vincent Watts who handled the Sound design and mix. There are bits of extrovert sound design care of Vince, but my brief was to maintain a documentary feel. The foley was kept really understated and wheras you would usually expect to replace large chunks of sync sound with polished post production, I kept as much as possible of the sync sound when handling the dialogue/sync edit. We stuck entirely to dialogue recorded on location, used no post sync looping sessions + tended towards layering up extra surround sound ambiences on top of existing ambiences recorded on set. Certain set pieces aside, the aim throughout the audio post process was to keep things sounding natural and complement the documentary feel of the picture.
Use the link below for details on how to get tickets etc.
Feel free to check out the Trailer (caveat emptor, the film would most definitely get an ’18’ rating)