Flavio

Friday I editing my Flavio dialog with Michael Petak who I hit it off with right a way. Great guy in my book. Apparently he’s an extremely talented musician as well but that’s another story for another day.

For those who by chance might not know the whole process (that’d be almost no one who reads this blog) I will tell you what we do when we “Edit Dialog”… Ready?

Here goes:

First of course we record the dialog and we ask the actors to do multiple “takes”, tweaking the performance etc. to what we want or how we think it should sound to match the storyboard.

When that’s all done we get a really big “session” CD , (in other words just a bunch of dialog recordings that will open in a specific program with all the correct settings).

From there the sound editor; in this case the illustrious Mr. Petak, takes the session from the recording and loads it into his computer and assembles a soundtrack of all the dialog using the Circle Takes as a guide. A Circle Take is basically a script with each take noted by numbers and the one that the “room” generally liked the most is circled. These are called our “Circle Takes”, (’cause they’re “circled”… but then you knew that huh?

Then the Sound Editor and the creator or director (in this case me) sit down and listen to it and if there are certain takes that I do not like then we search the Recording Session for the other alternate takes and find one that suits what we want instead. Once we get what we want and the dialog sounds right, we see how long it is.

A typical 7 minute cartoon should have about 5 minutes of dialog and the rest will be filled in with random actions. In my case the film came in at 5 minutes and 50 seconds, but with Flavio talking so much in the film I think we’re fine time-wise. We’ll know more at the next step, The Animatic is scheduled for Tuesday.

We also add in 4 frames of silence between each line of dialog which is called NormalPause referring of course what would be normal pausing between words in the cadence of someone’s typical speech pattern.

It was really cool because when I first walked in the dialog was at 8 minutes and we whittled it down to 5:50!

The best part is that we did not have to cut anything out of the dialog. We just took out multiple takes that were already there. We also sped up Flavio’s voice about 3% because he’s only 18 and about 135 lbs. or so…with me doing the voice and being a large chunk of mostly blubber and also being much older than 18 (how much older is my own biz), I can’t help but sound a bit bigger and older. Pitching the voice brought him down to a younger age. that gave us another 30 seconds or so and in the end I am glad I had wanted to pitch his voice anyway.

And so endeth yet another chapter in the making of my small film Flavio. We’re getting near the end and while I am closer to shipping the show and excited about seeing it as a finished film, I am also sad in that I am one step closer to saying goodbye to Flavio and will have to move on to something else.

No more adding “a”s to the end of every other word, no more inventions and no more Good Guy List.

Still I am having the time of my life while it lasts!