Burn Out By Truman Urness

Week 1

1. A surrealist melodrama where the main character, Noah, is split between different parts of his life. Exciting things are happening around him, and even to him but he still fades into the background. It's based on this idea of being so 'burnt out' between juggling everything that we just barely make it through instead of excelling in anything.
2. Color grading! I've been messing around with my footage in the Davinci film emulator and it's been super fun, the skin tones are insane right now but it looks really great.
3. There's some work I have to do with compositing. I have a shot where I wanted to emulate a split diopter so I just had different depths of field from the same camera angle. Largely VFX though, when it comes to after effects I don't know much.

Week 3

I chose this clip from the movie Good Time because the way it was shot sort of mirrors a lot of my approaches for capturing conversations. It rarely goes wide, and stays in these close ups between two characters having a heated argument. In the context of the film, there's this palpable exhaustion from the events of the night but the conversation is still driven by an argumentative energy and tone. It's able to bounce around location without really confusing an audience more than we should be about the space the scene is taking place in. In my short, there is a whole corner of a room I'm trying to avoid showing because of how large and empty it is. When it's empty, I don't want the audience to be looking at it. I feel like that approach probably happened in this apartment-scene as well.

I feel so much better about my project than I did a week ago. I'm really happy with the reshoots I got to do this semester because I feel like the project finally has a beginning and end. I'm super excited to jump into sound editing because there's so much work to be done with FX and ADR that I think is really going to draw out the throughlines that I feel are missing.

Sound Article

Something I think about a lot when I watch movies is how exactly a sound editor is able to make something feel loud without it actually being loud. This idea of having someones shouting actually staying at the same overall level but still hitting us like a shout is incredibly interesting to me. I feel like this was touched on in the articles discussion of loudness, but I wish there was more on it. Furthermore, this makes the idea of truly deciding to go loud so much more shocking. I think about this all the time. It's why I don't like it when people ask to turn down a movie during the 'loud' part. The dialogue is at a comfortable level because it is comfortable. When a movie decides to be loud, that is the editor telling us 'this is how it should be experienced'; it feels like turning down the brightness because the colors are too vivid. Pitch isn't something I've thought about much, but it's given me some ideas for how I want to modulate a lot of my actors performances. I have one actor whose line delivery I don't really love, but I feel like spending some time with some filters, speed, and pitch shifting it's actually quite the blank canvas to work with.

I'm still waiting on the other half of my songs from my composer, and I think you can really feel it with this mix. It's so heavily scored in the first half of the short that it's jarring once the music drops out. That being said, I'm really happy with how the mix is working with the music. I always knew this was going to be a sound design heavy project, and I feel I need to take it a step further. My process started with building a sound library of FX that I liked, but I now see it's too uniform. Professor Hossain has been pushing me to make my sound weirder in a way that I think is really helpful. The movie is sort of psychedelic in nature and of course that implies patterns and repetition but my biggest fear with sound design is returning to normality. Right now the project really takes off and I feel it needs to continue pushing because when there are even hints of normality we kind of lose the energy. I did this thing in the beginning where I mixed my own sourced music from freesound with my composers score at a timestamp where I told him to drop out, and I really liked the effect of it. That being because the score is so electronic when we hear this tortured saxophone it's almost like the different side of distorting reality- electronic v practical. That was my larger idea with most of my more 'surreal' sound design efforts.