The DVD is complete and the first meeting has been held. It went down well, but this is just the first tiny step in what will doubtless be an epic process.
Getting the edited 2K (full resolution) pilot onto DVD proved to be an epic process in itself. Due to the system at MFX being crammed to bursting point with other projects, we were unable to view the online with sound, so it wasn’t until I got it home and played it with the soundtrack that I realised that a shot here and shot there were out of sync. No-one was to blame – it was a combination of technical factors born of a complex edit, filled with flopped shots, reversed shots, upside-down shots, anamorphic, non-anamorphic, artwork sequences and of course the FX.
But every time I watched the online, I noticed another shot that was out. In the end, about a dozen needed fixing. Now, my poor old PowerMac G5 isn’t too hot on playing back 2K material, and I certainly don’t have the software or hardware needed to edit DPX – a format commonly used for scanned film footage, in which each frame is an individual still image file. So the only way to re-edit the online was by moving, copying, deleting and/or renaming these image files. With a bit of help from Shake (an application designed for compositing with DPX files, amongst others), I eventually got the online to match the offline. I was then able to convert it to Quicktime and give it a basic grade, before burning it to DVD.

On Friday, Carl and I went to MFX in north Soho to approve the online which the company has kindly been doing for us here and there over the last few weeks. This was no mean feat, pulling together film footage that had been scanned in three different batches, plus effects shots from five different artists, and the introductory artwork sequence. The logistics of getting the material to MFX in the first place, from all the disparate sources, were challenging in the themselves.
But now it’s all come together, and we were able to watch the completed, full resolution edit. It looks great, but there are still a couple of FX tweaks required before we can move onto the grade. Since the company we hoped to be grading with have had to pull out due to other commitments, unfortunately we’re not going to have a 35mm print in time for Cannes (now just three weeks away). Instead it will be DVDs for now, with a print to follow in the summer.

The FX, I believe, are finished. Tomorrow John, the compositing supervisor, will give them all the once-over, and barring any last minute alterations, they should go to the online editor in the next few days. Big thanks to MFX, who are very kindly providing us with said editor and associated edit suite.
Once the online is done, just three steps remain to complete the pilot: 1. grade (adjust colour and contrast levels to make the footage look its best), 2. transfer the digital master to film, and 3. process the film and combine it with the optical soundtrack.
Henning has pretty much finished the sound for the intro, which I just have to conform at HD quality so it can be dropped into the online edit. Aside from that, I’m hard at work on the script, to make sure that once people have been dazzled by the pilot, the screenplay lives up to it.
And speaking of dazzling, Ian recently showed me a sample of the information pack which will be handed out to viewers of the pilot. He’s painstakingly made it in the style of a period document, complete with wax-sealed envelope and thick, watermarked pages.

Work on the VFX continues, even though the deadline has passed. Meanwhile, Henning is now working on sound design for the pilot’s intro – a sequence of concept art narrated by Kate Burdette which serves to elucidate the story so far.

The Dark Side pilot now has a lovely surround sound mix. Once again, huge thanks to the SAE Institue in Dalston, this time for giving us use of their state-of-the-art Neve DFC suite.
The day got off to a bad start, with the mixing desk refusing to output any sound all morning, a fault eventually ascribed to a previous user messing with the settings. On the plus side, this allowed me to have productive meetings with both Carl – now Dark Side’s official producer – and Aidan and Joe. The dynamic duo are now back on the case full time with the puppeteer paint-out work. If you’ve seen the latest podcast you will appreciate just why this particular part of post-production is taking so long. Six more shots have effectively been signed off this weekend, which is good progress in the face of the looming end-of-month deadline.
By lunchtime the Neve was cooperating, and Henning and I began translating the stereo panning from the pre-mix to 5.1 panning, to envelope the audience in the sonic world. The five speakers in the 5.1 system are centre (used for dialogue and any other sounds that have to be locked to the screen), front left and front right (used mainly for spot effects and the odd bit of foley and dialogue that happen just off screen), and rear left and right (where only music and background atmosphere dare to roam, save for the odd special effect). The point one in 5.1 is the sub-woofer, which handles the low frequency effects, giving the soundscape scale and literally making the room shake where necessary. The mix sounded huge in the studio, and will sound even bigger in a cinema or screening room.
We got through the positioning far quicker than I had expected, and were soon onto balancing: tweaking the levels of the various tracks to ensure clarity of dialogue, impact of effects and effectiveness of music. We finished on time at 8pm, an achievement for which credit must go to Henning, whose dedicated preparation made sure that everything went as smoothly as possible, and whose talent, of course, made the mix sound as brilliant and epic as it does.

Henning and I spent Thursday and Friday working on a stereo mix for the pilot. Although I probably don’t need a stereo mix, time will be limited when we do the 5.1 surround mix at SAE in a couple of weeks, so this was somewhere between a dry run and a pre-mix. We were able to see if any sounds were missing or not in the right places, establish effects filters for things like the Swordsman’s voice, position things in stereo (which is at least a start for when we come to position them in surround) and decide what would be the dominant sound at any given point. Although short, the pilot has plenty going on with all the mechanisms, sword-fighting and of course dialogue.
By the end of the two days we had achieved a lot, but we still need to work on certain sections. The last little break-through we made before I left involved the Swordsman first coming to life. Henning had created a dramatic effect on the robot’s opening line which worked well to increase the danger, but impeded the clarity of that line and distracted from Isabelle’s line which was being delivered at the same time. For those reasons we had binned the effect, but this had left us with a hole just before the Swordsman came to life which completely killed the drama. Unsure what the solution was, we had gone on to other things.
One of these things was to experiment with an early shot looking into the training room through a porthole in the airship’s hull. Having previously mixed this with an interior perspective, for the sake of consistency, we now tried switching to an exterior perspective for this shot – adding wind noise, making the propellor sound much more immediate, and muting Isabelle’s “hello”. This alteration really helped set the scene for me, since I couldn’t afford a model shot of the airship in flight. So we kept it, and returned to the issue of the sonic hole before the Swordsman re-animates.
Now we realised that we could take the “hello” we had cut from the porthole shot and drop it into the hole, increasing both the drama and the comedy of the moment in one hit.
And that’s why post-production is the best bit of filmmaking.