From the title of this post, you can take a pretty good guess as to how I spend a good deal of time during the pre-production stages of film work. However, attending meetings, while an important aspect of the process, in order to work out dates with whoever needs to know and to make sure schedules are workable, the direction we should be going in with the sound design and music, it is not the only part of pre-production, especially in a team this size, with the number of projects we have ongoing.
On the project I am in charge of sound wise (Immort) we have had fairly regular meetings, especially in more recent weeks, as filming details change and we start getting through more materials from the director.
With filming yet to happen, it is hard to get too stuck into things, due to the lack of visuals. Luckily on this project, an animatic has been produced as a form of storyboarding, which has meant that we have at least an idea of what will be needed after filming and VFX are completed. Combine this knowledge with the script and designs from the VFX team and we have some concrete visuals to work from, if not exact details on how exatly they’ll look and work within the context of the film. To this end, we have started producing audio content, something I’m calling ‘Concept Audio’ as it may need to change as the project progresses. We are starting now so as to alleviate some of the work-load down the road, as this time of year, most of our projects are still in pre-production so our workload is comparatively light compared to what it will be like later down the road.
Using Google Drive, I have uploaded documents which detail my ideas for the sound direction of the movie, as well as a document where everyone can detail what they are working on at any given time, so that we don’t overlap in terms of the content we produce, this allows us to keep up to date with all the progress as well without having to meet up any time we have a progress update.
This is in relation to learning outcome two.