AudioMedia magazine this month features a 2-page article all about the making of the film. Based on an interview with Sean..they also saw a preview DVD.
The link to the article in the digital version of the mag is here: AudioMedia – February 2010 – Page – http://tinyurl.com/yasrb3l
Or click on the image of it below for a big jpeg of the article we scanned from the mag.
March 2010 AudioMedia
We’re putting the finishing touches to the retail version of the DVD at the moment. Building the menus and the extra features etc. It’s looking slick…
We’re also submitting to some film festivals… not many, just the ones that look like we might go down well at.
We’ve had lots of interesting feedback from the screening and from some people that received review copies of the DVD. Nearly all of the feedback was very positive… the only common comment was that some of the music-only sections were a bit long..so we’ve re-edited the master for the final release version. It’s about 3 minutes shorter.
More news soon..
S
Last night was huge… we played the film for the first time to a packed-out REMIX club in Hitchin. The cast, crew and friends and family turned up to see our film for the first time on the big screen.
Normski hosted the evening for us and got on the decks afterwards to get the party started. What a star.
We’re were nervous, but it got such a great reaction that we needn’t have worried. I think we all felt an incredible buzz when the whole place erupted as the credits began to roll at the end… amazing.
Massive thanks to all those that came and sorry to those we couldn’t squeeze in this time…there’s more to come.
More news soon..
S
I’m sure you’ve noticed…but there’s some wicked STDJ T-shirts in our shop which you get to from the main website’s homepage.
But… if there’s nothing there you fancy… head over to:
WormSign do lots of really cool DJ orientated T-Shirts… there’s bound to be something on there you like. …and no, we’re not on a kickback, they’re just a nice bunch with a cool site.
S
Check out our new Vimeo channel.
http://vimeo.com/channels/71900
There’s both the trailers on there and we might upload a scene from the film at some point soon…
S
Well it’s been a very tough week…the final stage of compressing the 20GB master DV file into a tiny 4GB file to fit on a DVD has proved really tough. It starts to show up the limitations of the orginal DV footage and all kinds of compression artifacts creep in. It’s pretty depressing when the original looks so nice. Still, we’ve got it to the point where we’re happy that it can’t get any better..(well, not without spending £5k on a Hollywood quality encoding).
So, it’s done…i can finally stop spending every waking hour at the studio. Phew…
We’ve just got to get them stuffed into jiffy bags and in the post now.
S
Oh how i’ve loved living at the studio for the last week…(not). It’s been a full-on task getting the film finished…but when i set the final Mpeg2 render going last night, i thought that was that. I assumed i’d pop in today, burn a DVD and i’d be done..
But oh no… fate had other ideas.
I burned the Mpeg2 video and AC3 audio to a video DVD and stuck it in my DVD player…and what did i see? Not a lot… it was so dark i could barely make out what was going on in some of the scenes…pants.
So, after much googling, it turns out there’s 2 issues here. Firstly, Apple gamma isn’t the same as everyone else’s…. and secondly, compressing video to Mpeg2 causes additional darkening… great.
So, i’ve added a gamma correction filter to the render this time and set it going again… it won’t finish until later tonight, so i’m not going to have the master DVD until the morning now.
I also forgot about the quality loss going from DV footage to DVD… Hollywood studios use very very expensive Mpeg2 encoders that work in an adaptive manner…ie, they work harder on the shots with more movement and complicated things going on. Unfortunately, us mortals are stuck with Apple Compressor or one of the other similar packages. Still, it looks pretty good, so it’s not all bad.
One thing i am really chuffed about is the audio master. I encoded it using Dolby Digital into an AC3 file… it’s amazing, but the audio now sounds just like a film should. The dialogue is clear and crisp and the foley sounds great.. there’s some clever compression going on there. I was pleased with the audio master anyway, but this has made a big difference.
So… we wait another day.. What’s one more when you’ve come this far?
S
What a mad week it’s been. I’ve been at the studio all day and most of the night all week. I didn’t finish until 4am last night… then got up at 9am and was back in here for 10am today. I even got a curry and beer in last night to keep me going..
Curry & Beer at Psyco-Central...
… But, it’s all been worth it…because….’Shoot The DJ’… is finished!
Yep, we’re done…dusted… as we speak i’m preparing the DVD master which is going to be duplicated tomorrow….so they hit the post on monday.
S
We’ve got all but one of the ADR sessions done and we’ve moved onto the dialogue mixing. This is where we get to see the whole package in its entirety for the first time. It’s great to see it all coming together…we’re really pleased with most of it. There’s a couple of little bits which are going to get the chop, but only because we can see now that they are both unnecessary and don’t quite work as we thought they might…. it’s all part of the process (as Morcheeba once said..)
The whole thing should be ready for duplicating on friday next week…then they’re going out to the press…and to the people that managed to pre-order from the website. It turns out all of you who pre-ordered have got a rather special deal… not only will you receive a very rare press-review copy of the DVD, but you will also receive the production run DVD as well… Not bad huh?
Anyone wanting to know when they can order a DVD will have to hang on…we’ll be announcing the new official launch date soon.
Back to work for me…
S x
ADR is the process of replacing the dialogue recorded on set… it gives you a nice, clear and controlled recording of the speech in the film so that you can deal with it better in the final mix. It’s a really arduous process but it’s worth the effort.
This coming week we’re doing the final ADR sessions with the last of the actors. Then it’s just the big final mix to go…(not that it’s going to be easy…with over 80 tracks of foley and 40 tracks of dialogue…all running for an hour and a half)
As some of you may have heard, we’ve booked the premiere for the cast, crew and friends. No press at this one i’m afraid..there will be a press screening after New Year sometime…(press review copies of the film will be available on watermarked DVD soon)
So, that’s where we’re at…
S x
