IT’S FINISHED.

Just over 24 hours to go until the premiere, and of course the film is not yet finished. The last two or three days have passed in a blur of pixels and sound waves uninterrupted by such trifling concerns as sleep. That’s not entirely true, actually. I did get two and a half hours’ kip last night. I’m unable to drink caffeine (my heart is once again feeling the strain as zero hour approaches) and I’m spending a lot of my time slumped on the sofa at the back of Neil’s studio, occasionally issuing commands along the lines of “a little bit more” and “the Kurt Russell’s not loud enough”..

We just finished premixing the final reel and are now rendering off the files needed for the final mix, which will be done live with a real mixer. Then, if you can believe it, the film will be finished. Except for all the tweaks I’ll make at a later date.

So the question is: can we do the final mix, master it onto DVD and sort out the problems we’ve been having with the sub-bass in time for the screening? (We burnt a test DVD and went round to Lara’s yesterday to try it on her surround sound system and the bass was sorely lacking.) It’s going to be tight, but we’ll make it.

And if we don’t, it’ll probably be because we took five minutes off this afternoon to search the internet for the answer to that perennial question: “What were the first three words of the intro voiceover for Knight Rider?” The answer, for the record is: “A shadowy flight… into the dangerous world of a man who does not exist.”

Four days to go. Neil and I reached the end of the film yesterday lunchtime and immediately went back to the beginning to start tidying things up. By the end of the evening we had reel one done and dusted. Today Neil will work on it alone for most of the day. I’m at home waiting for the post to arrive, which should include David’s completed smoke effects. I’ll then composite these in, thus finally completing the picture side of the film, and set off to Neil’s for what I’m sure will be a pretty intense 72 hours of mixing.

I feel like crap, having worked nights on the mix all week. At a certain point in the wee hours of Wednesday morning I realized that of the preceding 44 hours I had only slept for three. That explained why my head kept nodding as I sat at the keyboard, and why I could barely see or remember what I was doing five seconds previously. I was in serious danger of accidentally erasing an entire hard drive or something similarly catastrophic.

The good news is that we’re now firmly back on track. We have only twelve minutes of the film left to go through, which leaves us two days to go back over everything and tidy it up, and a day for the final mix.

David Markwick is hard at work doing all the train smoke effects as CGI, after the cell animator I brought on board utterly failed to deliver the goods. Hopefully I will be incorporating those into the film on Tuesday, which will finally put the picture side of things to bed. I’m very disappointed that I won’t get the quaint, shaky look of hand animation that I wanted.

Neil Douek and I are now doing relay mixiing. Things were still going too slowly so we decided that I would work on the mix during the night and Neil would work on it during the day, with a cross-over period in the evenings where we can review each other’s work. So yesterday I was in the studio for 24 hours straight, fighting to stay awake at the computer screen. At 9am I headed home for some clean clothes, some files off my computer and three hours’ lkip. Now it’s 3:30pm and I’m about to leave for Croxley again.

On the plus side, MAN does this film sound huge. They better have a good sound system at the Charlotte Street Hotel.

Yesterday disaster struck in the special effects department. But these days I laugh in the face of Disaster, tweak the nipples of Calamity and tickle the lower back of Chaos. I won’t go into details now, except to say that David Markwick, who had just finished work on all the umbilical cord shots and was enjoying his first Soul Searcher-free weekend in months has been drafted in to sort it out.

Neil and I have speeded up the mix a little, but we’re still only 33 minutes into the film, and once we get to the end we still have to spend a day revisiting all our work and tweaking stuff, and another day doing the final master mix. Neil’s taught me the basics of the software, so I can do the easier stuff myself. Tomorrow, for example, I’m going to be working on it in his studio while he’s out. I’m already beginning to suffer from lack of sleep. I was fighting to keep my eyes open all day and today, and tonight I’ll be lucky to get five hours’ kip.

The good news is that most of what we’ve done sounds fantastic. Even some dialogue scenes that had pretty ropy location audio now sound like a million dollars. And the music increases the budget tenfold and papers beautifully over all the compromises in the production. Finally I feel like my vision is nearly there on the screen (and in the speakers).

Having said all that, it’s quite likely we will need to do another few days after Borderlines to really get it sounding its best, not to mention doing a surround mix at some point in the future for the DVD. Will it ever end? Nope.

16 days to go… Stress levels rising… Heart palpitations returning… Time to sleep shortening… Grip of doom tightening on inner core of being…

I finished grading at the weekend. There was one scene that I just couldn’t get to look quite right, but other than that I’m pretty pleased. I’ve also done some more work on the structure of the film’s 40-odd tracks of sound in an effort to save time during the mix.

And – aaargh! – there are still 30 effects shots outstanding.

Neil Douek and I spent all of Tuesday and a large part of Wednesday editing the ADR from November. It was incredibly painstaking. Once I’d chosen a take for performance, it had to be synchronized precisely to the picture, which involved shifting it back and forth by tiny fractions of a frame and watching it over and over again until it looked right. Often a few words had to be chopped up and placed individually, or stretched to fit, or taken from another take. We spent what seemed like an hour trying to find a suitable “a” sound for part of one of Chris’ lines.

Once that was done we began preparing for the mix. By the end of Thursday afternoon we had started mixing the first reel. By the end of yesterday (Friday) we had done a grand total of four-and-a-half minutes of the film. And that’s without reverb or stereo positioning. At this rate, even if we worked every day between now and the premiere we probably wouldn’t finish on time. Well, it would have been an anticlimax to the whole Soul Searcher experience if there wasn’t one last massive problem to solve.

Richard Brake dropped in yesterday to record his ADR for Van Beuren’s swordfight. Since his part was so popular on the end of the last Soul Searcher trailer, I asked him to record a voice-over for the final trailer, which he made an excellent job of.

Did I really write that much rubbish about grading in the last entry? Anyway, the Aliens look continues. I’ve now graded half the film. The last of the effects are done, apparently, but there’s still some tweaking and cleaning-up to do before I get them.