It’s a plane! It’s a barking dog! It’s a lawn mower! It’s all the sounds we don’t want in our movie!
We are in the home stretch, folks! Picture’s been locked, music rights acquired, etc. etc. ETC. We’ve now turned our focus towards finishing sound mixing and color correcting in these last few weeks of post production.
Just recently we had our ADR sessions. What is ADR? It stands for “Automated/Automatic Dialog Replacement."
This is for actors’ lines that could not be salvaged from the original production track audio due to obtrusive and unavoidable sounds interfering with the recording. Take a moment and listen to where you are now. What do you hear? Air conditioning? Ambulance sirens? Planes flying overhead? People laughing? Production can try its best to lock the set and keep unwanted noise to a minimum, but sometimes it’s unavoidable. BTW, the vast majority of scenes in movies that are set outside end up replacing the dialogue for these reasons. That’s where our post production sound facility comes in -- to re-record actors’ dialogue.
All our actors had great recording sessions! They matched their own lips with perfect timing all the while keeping the same emotion they had while originally performing the scene. In some cases we even added previously unscripted lines of dialogue to the scenes if the actor’s back was turned on screen. Anything to make the movie even funnier and flow!
One of our cast, Javier Bolanos, replacing a line of dialogue for a scene.
As our actors wrap up their work on “I’ll Be Next Door for Christmas,” we have been dedicating more time to finalizing the opening and end credits to the movie. If you are an Affiliate or Co-Executive Producer, you should have been notified about the spelling of your name for our end credits. We’ve also added special little clips during the end credits, so we hope you get an extra laugh from them. Our talented cast entertained us not only during but before and after takes as well!
Some of you may be wondering when our premiere will be. We are scouting theatre locations in the Los Angeles area as well as getting in touch with film festivals. We would love to have the premiere in late October. For all those investors with that special premiere perk, details are still TBA, but you guys will be the first to know!
One more thing – THANK YOU guys so much for your title suggestions! Over 200 new title ideas were sent in. You may not realize it, but sometimes, if a movie’s title has a certain buzzword (like “Christmas”) or starts with the first few letters of the alphabet, then it will more likely be viewed on Video-On-Demand. This has to do with the habits of movie-watchers scrolling through movie titles.
You all voted overwhelmingly to keep "I'll Be Next Door for Christmas" as the title, so we are keeping it. It got 52% of your votes! The runner up was "Anything But Christmas" with 11%, so you can see there's quite a gap there. You guys sent in some VERY creative suggestions. Here are some of the standouts:
- The Teenager Who Stole Christmas
- Christmasquerade
- Love Act-Yule-ly (a pun on "Love Actually")
- At Christmas No One Can Hear You Scream
- I Cloned Christmas
- No, No, Noel!
- Christmas sHam
- All I Want Faux Christmas
- My Big Fat Fake Christmas
- Merry Kiss-Mah-Ass
Thanks for all your input. You guys are THE BEST!
-- David Willis
Here I am on the sound mixing stage. The movie is projected on a big screen while they mix it. BTW, it takes about 2 weeks to mix all the dialogue, sound effects, music, etc. (And in case you're wondering, my tee shirt says "Hyperbole is the best thing ever.")