"Lesson in Life and Death" - A Day 7 Studios production

It's official, we have picture lock!!! :thumbsup:

It's now up to the sound, music and vfx guys to work their respective magic now
 
Just heard the first cue from the composer! Fantastic!!

I had a specific style in mind for the opening scene and he captured that style perfectly. I'm so excited I keep playing it over and over.

If anyone needs a composer I will highly recommend Randin Graves
 
Thanks guys! I had great fun with this. I did three WestFest dramas within a couple weeks (two just in the last 3 days!), and it was a great exercise to give each one its own musical identity.

Of course, I just uploaded the rest of the score to Larry. Let's see if he still loves me in a little while. :)
 
Well as luck would have it I did enjoy the rest of the score. There are some unique and interesting cues in here and I think they marry well with the visuals and add to the story very well.

I like when the score is more like a character of its own, telling its own piece of the story, rather than just emotional punches to tell the viewer how they should feel at a particular moment. While it's hard to really develop anything (character, story, music, etc) in such a short piece of film, I think Randin's music does a good job of this.

I did have a small note for him, waiting to hear the outcome of that. Though fortunately the original version is definitely usable if my note turns out to be a flop (yep, I'm a big enough man to admit when I make a mistake) :)

I'm looking forward to finishing this film and hearing what people think about it .. I hope you all enjoy it as much as I am.
 
Larry I just saw your Dime Novels, what a great idea! At the begining of 310 to Yuma, Bale's son is reading about Crowe's legend in a dime novel. And in Unforgiven (I think?) there is a dime novelist throughout the movie writing down everything that happened. It's an interesting concept because the books would be published on the east coast and they would really spread the gospel and folklore of the wild wild west.
 
Thanks, glad you liked them. I thought they were an interesting concept for quickly informing that the kid is interested in the "glory" of outlaws. These books would have been like the comic books of the old west.

I've actually considered writing stories and actually printing a couple complete books, just for fun, about characters from and around my story. If we ever do the feature, like we hope, they could be utilized as props.
 
The dialog edit and sound design are done, I heard a rough mix yesterday and it sounds great. Final mix is occurring now.

VFX are in progress (muzzle flash and two wire removals where we accidentally caught a power pole in frame)

Score is done and sounds excellent.

Opening titles are done and are beautiful. End credits were finished, but seemed a bit rushed, being slowed down a touch and the composer is going to expand the music cue to fit. One embarrassing note about the credits ... Sam (curugon) graciously made himself available to do the titles and credits. I carefully typed out all the credit info for him to create the end credits. When he sent me the animation I watched and realized in horror that I'd left his name out of the credit list (this may explain why he's not answering my latest e-mails) :)

Hopefully we'll receive the last of these pieces today and/or tomorrow then tomorrow night Brandon can assemble all the individual pieces, finish color correcting and apply the grading we decided on.

This means I should have a finished film this weekend ... I'm so excited to finally see it all together!
 
Nice A-Team quote :thumbsup:

Yea, I'm really enjoying the process on this film 100 times better than my last experience. On my last dvx fest entry (Hero Fest) I was doing most of this work myself (I had some help cleaning up dialog and I had a composer). This one has been so much easier. I prefer giving notes and approvals than trying to figure out how to do to the tasks myself, especially when there are others that are so much more talented than I at each of the disciplines.

Just got the final, extended (and corrected) credit roll. It is the right speed and length now. Feels very good. Passed it on to the composer to get the end credits cue extended. And just heard back from Ryan, the audio mixing will occur tonight. Just need to get a hold of my VFX guy.
 
Hero Fest Larry? Man that was fall of 2006, I think that was the fest that inspired me to start making shorts. Welcome back to the fray my friend.
 
It's true I did learn a lot, I wish I'd done a few more films in between there I might have learned some of the things that I instead learned while doing this film. However, the point of these fests was always to get people out actually making films rather than talking about it, and actually improving along the way. I know that in both cases I have grown in knowledge and capability and definitely look forward to the next project to use what I've learned and to learn even more
 
Just finished up compiling most of the film together, got the opening credits sequence, end credits (both done beautifully by Sam Balcomb!) and the mix from Ryan in. Waiting on the final two effects shots from Nate, and then this thing will be finished. I also finished the color grading tonight, which was pretty painless :) Larry and I worked on what he wanted in the final look using some screen-shots I had sent him, and I used those as reference tonight and the process was fairly simple and quick.
 
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