Thursday, April 24, 2008

Canon Event at Birns & Sawyer


I have been invited to speak at Birns & Sawyer, the famous camera facility in downtown Hollywood, about our experiences using Canon's XL-H1 high-definition camera on "The Blackout". The event takes place on Wednesday, April 30th from 6:00pm - 9:00pm. I will be showing a few select scenes from the movie as well as discussing our digital HD workflow.

The event will most likely sell out. If you'd like to attend you must RSVP using the link below:

Canon Video – NAB Recap (4/30/08)

From its inception in 1954, Birns and Sawyer has been a premiere rental and sales firm of motion picture equipment in the United States. Birns and Sawyer has been a Hollywood standard for quality and dependability for the last fifty years and continues to assist the needs of filmmakers and progress with new technology.

Wednesday, April 9, 2008

We Have a Composer - Justin R. Durban

The ink has been applied and Team Blackout would like to welcome Justin R. Durban aboard as the film's official composer. Justin has a great resume and demo and his compositional style is perfectly mated to this project. You can view samples of his work at his website.



We just completed the "dry" spotting session tonight. By "dry" I mean no temp music track. Trying to describe, scene by scene, what we want for the score without the aid or use of actual music is actually pretty difficult. The English language is utterly inadequate in trying to describe a film score that does not currently exist. Several weeks ago we screened a rough-cut of the film for Justin, complete with temp music culled from various appropriate blockbuster movies, so he could get a sense of the movie we were going for - tonally. Tonight's session was the first time we would discuss the movie in detail, moment by moment.

Several things became immediately evident this last week as we prepped the movie for delivery to Justin. We switched off all temp music tracks and watched the movie "naked". And we discovered that the movie actually works exceptionally well in key places without the aid of music. When electrical power goes it there is a certain sense of quiet...certain exterior sounds start to seep into interior spaces - and that became a more powerful sound-design motif to use during those scenes. Places where we had placed originally music originally, but now removed, suddenly played more tense, more suspenseful, more "real". What a revelation!

We're all very excited about Justin's contribution to the movie.