Today was the delivery date for the DVD. I didn’t quite make it. Friday and Saturday were supposed to be the last days at Neil Douek’s, finishing the surround mix, leaving me with Sunday to make a few last little changes and check everything over.

Unfortunately, the mix overran on Saturday. On Sunday morning, after just three hours of sleep, although we had all our premixes complete and everything was balanced up, it still wasn’t sounding as good as we both knew it could. Unable to keep my eyes (and more importantly, my ears) open any longer, I retired to Neil’s spare room for a couple of hours’ kip. I drifted off to sleep – interrupted only by Neil’s two-year-old daughter bursting in and trying to tell me something about her t-shirt – hoping that I would awaken to find that Neil had waved a magic wand and the mix was sorted. After dreaming of an audio waveform with peaks which kept distorting no matter what I did, I awakened to find that Neil had indeed waved his magic wand. He had applied some light compression to the entire mix, bringing up the quiet passages and generally giving the whole thing more punch.

Fantastic as the mix now sounded, it still needed work, and once again we found ourselves seated at the computer as the wee small hours graced the clock face. After another deficient night’s sleep, we finally got it licked at about eleven this morning (Monday). Having not planned on staying over for three nights, I was glad to get home this afternoon and change my clothes.

Wysiwyg don’t mind that I haven’t been able to deliver the DVD today. I need to spend tomorrow and probably Wednesday testing and checking before I hand it all over.

Neil Douek has broken lighting gaffer Colin Smith’s record as Longest Serving Crew Member as he enters his fourteenth month of work on Soul Searcher since he first recorded ADR for us back in November 2004. An emotional Douek remarked, “In your face, Colin…. whoever you are.” In your face, the lot of you; I’ve been doing this for four years.

We’re still on reel five and we’ve only got ten days left till the delivery date. On the plus side, Going To Hell is finished and I just have a list of tweaks and changes to make to some of the other extras and the menus.

Neil and I finished the vats sequence yesterday. It sounds amazing. If you don’t have a surround sound set-up at home, you’ve got about three months to buy one before the DVD’s out. Damn it, I’d better buy one myself…

The bulk of the work on the DVD is now done. I burnt a prototype yesterday for testing. There’s more tweaking and clean-up to do on Going To Hell and one more featurette to edit, plus of course the surround sound mix. Neil and I are still on the vats scene, with our friend Rick O’Shay, due to us having to break off to mix the new trailer the other day. We’re starting to feel the pinch; we’ve only got three weeks left to finish it, but saying that, three weeks before the premiere we were only just starting the original mix.

Happy New Year.

Going to Hell has reached its target length of 90 minutes. The few people who have seen it, including Tom from Wysiwyg, say it’s thoroughly entertaining -“great viewing,” were Tom’s words – but have suggested that I should put some more stuff going right into the film, as it’s pretty much all things going wrong. Problem is, I don’t have any footage of stuff going right….

Apologies if any of you haven’t been able to access the site for the last few days. You’ve got the muppets at Telewest to thank for that.

Just a quick one to say that Neil and I have reached reel five of the surround mix, which is the fun bit with all the rumbling vats and Rick O’Shay sounds, Tom and I have recut a leaner, meaner Soul Searcher trailer, and Going to Hell is going just fine.

After peaking at a ridiculous three hours, Going to Hell is down to an almost-reasonable 102 minutes. I think it’s turning out pretty well. Tom Swanston and I caught up the other day to discuss progress on the DVD, which I have to have finished by January 23rd.

Neil and I spent Thursday and Friday on the 5.1 mix. We finally finished the stampede sequence after recording and laying some more Kurt Russells, stomping feet and breathing. Then we moved onto reel four, which we’re now about a third of the way through – that’s the end of the rain fight.

Neil and I spent all of yesterday working on the nightclub crowd surfer/stampede sequence – about two minutes of the film. It seemed very empty, so we layered up a lot more sounds. I wound up voicing a bunch more extras, including the (female) crowd surfer. The first attempting at pitch-shifting my voice sounded like TV funny-man Joe Pasquale.

Right, so Wysiwyg. Soon after completing Soul Searcher, I advertised it as a film seeking distribution on Mandy.com. Wysiwyg’s Tom Swanston got in touch a few months ago and, after seeing a screener, saw the film’s potential. We met up a month ago for a chat and I found Tom to be very open and straightforward. (Unlike the used car salesmen of the Cannes Film Market.) The company is relatively small and new at present, but that’s a good thing because it means they’ve got something to prove by getting the film out there. Coincidentally, Diary of a Bad Lad – of Cannes Director’s Journal Crossover and recent Finchely Shooting People screening fame – is also being released by Wysiwyg next year.

I have just signed on the dotted line. It really is a dotted line too. Not dashed or continuous. Properly dotted. Like ellipsis gone made. Like that bikini from the Timmy Mallet song. I saw him once, at a church fete in Worcester. Days like that won’t come again. Wackadays, as they were known.

So this dotted line was at the bottom of a distribution deal. A distribution deal with Wysiwyg Films. A distribution deal for the world excluding the USA and Canada. Those are the salient facts. As to who Wysiwgy Films are and how the deal came about, that’s a story for the next journal entry – one that will be written once I’ve got the images of a man in novelty glasses beating children with a rubber mallet out of my head.

Neil and I did some more work on reel three today. Things seemed to go very slowly. Guess we’d better get a shift on now.