We would like to give an extra big THANK YOU to all those who invested in and donated to the post-production of our feature film Shackled. Thank you for believing in our company and the film. Money is obviously a precious thing in the current economic climate and that makes your contributions even more special and heart warming to us. Thanks guys – we couldn’t have finished this film without you! 
Archive for the ‘Post-production’ Category
Thank You to our Investors & Donators
Monday, September 6th, 2010Bill Coleman
Monday, July 26th, 2010We are delighted to announce that we have aquired the talents of Irish singer/songwriter Bill Coleman for Shackled. He is providing the film with two songs, including an exclusive, never before released track, Close My Eyes.
Funding update
Wednesday, June 16th, 2010Hi Guys
We’re pleased to announce that we’ve raised enough money for the first half of the post-production sound cleanup for Shackled!
Thanks to everyone who helped so far
Shackled edit locked!
Tuesday, June 8th, 2010It’s four months to the day since Ambrose and I took over the editing of Shackled.
Shackled FX shot
Thursday, April 22nd, 2010Hi guys, just want to share with you a small FX (and grading) shot from Shackled:
(more…)
Portrait poster for Shackled
Friday, April 9th, 2010Hey folks, check out the Shackled Page to see a rough draft of the film’s portrait poster.
Landscape poster coming in a week or so!
In case you’ve not seen it, the teaser for the film in on that page also!
Shackled Teaser
Tuesday, March 30th, 2010Hi folks,
We’re pleased to be able to bring you the first teaser footage of Shackled!
This is primarily for cast and crew, so we’ve left the plot somewhat vague for now.
Music is ‘Until Tomorrow’ by Martin Brannigan; used with permission.
‘Shackled’ is on IMDB
Monday, March 8th, 2010We are delighted to announce that Shackled has been awarded its own IMDB page. View it here: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1603379/
Not everyone involved in making the film has been added as we were unsure of who had previous listings and who didn’t. You may want to correct individual credits if you already have an account or you can add yourself by using the ‘update data’ option. If you don’t have an account, you can easily create one which will allow you to add yourself.
If you have any questions about how to do any of this, or what exactly you should list yourself as, then let us know!
Also, once you have an account you can vote on the film (and The Hollow Girl if you’re feeling generous!) which may help it in the festival circuit! 
Thanks to Sara for helping out with the set up.
Project Updates
Thursday, January 14th, 2010Hi Everyone!
We hope you all had a nice holiday season and that 2010 has been good to you all so far. We’re very busy here at Squid Media, so we thought we’d update you all on our current projects.
(more…)
ADR tips
Monday, September 7th, 2009Hey guys, I’ve been cleaning up some of the dialogue in Hollow Girl, and I thought I’d share some tips for ADRing1. ADR is usually employed to clean up dialogue, but we were able to use it to rework the story, by modifiying Max’s lines. Whatever reason you are ADRing, here are some tips I’d recommend for the best end result:
- It is going to be one of the last things you do with the film and certainly if you do end up doing ADR make certain your edit is 100% locked. In our case we had a lipless character2, so we could change anything he said after the edit was locked. If you are in similar situation, then make sure their dialogue is locked too!
- Maybe ADR can be done cheaply, but cheap sounding dialogue is likely why you are ADRing in the first place. Dig into your pockets and go somewhere that has a proper sound booth to get clean audio. We used The Bright Room up at DKIT. It is a dry hire suite, so you’ll need to find an engineer who can work pro tools. They can usually provide a few leads.
- At the very least you’ll want a to take a copy of your film so the actor can hear the lines they are re-recording, as well as hear how they delivered them. It can help for them to see their performance too. An up to date script will be welcome too.
- During the re-record, break down your dialogue into managable section, and anytime there is a pause of anything more than, say, a second, try to record them seperatly. At this stage you want to get it sounding as similar as possible to the original delivery – same tone, inflection, etc. The closer you can get it to original in terms of tempo, the better too. But you may find that no matter how hard you try they won’t sync perfectly – fret not!
- For that is where the kind folks at Synchro Arts come in. They have created a program called VocAlign which will magically align up your ADR track to your guide track (the original dialogue). The below example isn’t so much for ADR, but for syncing the voice of the Hollow Girl to Max.
Check it out before being sync’d:Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Dialogue is clean, but out of sync. Well some VocAlign tweaking3 and:
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Pretty saucy eh?
- Drop your newly aligned ADR track into your audio editing software and get it into place. If you are using one of the plugin versions of VocAlign you won’t have to do this, but I was using the stand-alone version, so I did.
- Listen and watch back over it all to make sure it’s all in the right place!
- Crack open a beer and praise yourself for a job well done – you should now have wounderful sounding and perfectly in sync dialogue!
_______________________________________________________________________________
1 Automated Dialogue Replacement
2 Max. Obviously 
3 It is easy to use software, so I’m not going into it, but let me just say that you want to make sure any sizable gaps are removed from your audio. You won’t be able to sync up dialogue properly if you have any dead space before, during or after the recording on either your guide track or dubbing track.
