http://music.bcoleman.com/

http://bcoleman.lightholderproductions.com/

http://www.facebook.com/billcolemanmusic

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

We’re not out of the woods yet though! We still need to get €5,500 for the final payment. Please check out this funding link and help us in any way you can!

And spread the word!

It’s been a long journey, but the film edit is now officially locked at a comfortable 77 minutes sans credits!
Special effects are currently underway, grading will begin next week, as will composing the score with the sound cleanup starting not long after that!
All going to plan, the film should be ready for your hungry eyes in August!

Actually, this is an opportune time to remind you all that we need your help to complete the film! For information on how to invest or donate to the film, please contact either Ambrose or myself!
(Preferably Ambrose )

Thanks to everyone who has been onto us to help so far!

Hope you like it!

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!

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.

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.

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.

Shackled: Our first feature film which we shot a few months ago is currently being edited externally. It is coming together very nicely and we’re looking forward to showing you all some footage soon. Due to the way we shot the film – all improvised dialogue, two cameras, etc – the edit has been a fairly big task to undertake and we appreciate everyone’s patience. I really feel that we have crafted a particularly fine film however, so I think it will be well worth the wait. We’ll have a lot more updates on Shackled very soon.

Unwritten Ireland: We’ve had a very interesting response to our documentary project over the last two months. Dave and myself were interviewed by Harry Lee on Dundalk FM in December which led to a number of fresh potential interviewees. The project has much bigger potential than we originally thought, so we’re working on ways to expand and improve on our original ideas. Once again, we’ll have updates on this site about it, so stay tuned!

New Short Scripts: Our writing team are currently finishing a number of short film scripts which we hope to enter into various funding competitions. Regular Squid Media film viewers will be pleasantly surprised by the tone of some of the new scripts. Don’t be worried though – we’re just as likely to film a dread inducing horror than a happy go lucky rom-com. 2010 is looking like the year of versatility for us! More information in good time.

New Feature Ideas: Our writers are also developing outlines for new feature films. As with the shorts, you’ll hopefully all be pleasantly surprised at our possible new directions. More news about these soon.

The Hollow Girl: Our short film is currently entered into a number of international film festivals and we’ll keep you updated on its progress throughout the year.

As always, we’re always looking for people interested in helping out on shoots, scripts and anything else we may be doing. Drop me a message on ambrose@squidmedia.ie if you’re interested in any part of our future projects. Thanks everyone. Talk to you soon again!

1. 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!
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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!
5. 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:

   Dialogue is clean, but out of sync. Well some VocAlign tweaking³ and:

   Pretty saucy eh?

6. 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.
7. Listen and watch back over it all to make sure it’s all in the right place!
8. Crack open a beer and praise yourself for a job well done – you should now have wounderful sounding and perfectly in sync dialogue!

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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.