But here we are. Michael Feldman, who directed the film, and I got to work on submitting our film to festivals, and on February 17th I’m headed off to the New Jersey Film Festival to screen our work. If you’re around, come and join us!

We’re second on the program, too, so if you have a problem with Film Festivals in general (an allergy to thick plastic-rim glasses and black turtlenecks?) you can duck out early. Here’s the YouTube embed in case you want to see exactly what we’re screening in New Brunswick, but in HD:

Apparently my film is helping students cheat on their homework. This isn’t too much of a surprise, actually. From watching the Insight data I can see that a lot of our traffic is coming from teachers and students all over the country. We’ve had traffic from high schools in the South and Upper Midwest as well as from the sort of course-supporting-materials sites generally used by universities.

When I set old texts, which I do a lot, I’m trying to show everyone else what got me so excited. The Seafarer an Old English poem that no one would come across in their daily lives, and it’s something so wonderful that I want to share it. Composing these pieces is my way of showing you what I love so much, and getting you excited.

I never thought that this film would end up in classrooms all over the country, but I’m incredibly proud that it did. And at least if the film is more engaging than the reading I’ve done my job a little bit right. Just watch out, WhiteBoyNJ, I only set the first half of the poem!

This project has completely taken over my life, and hasn’t let me do much besides work on it. So you’ll have to wait a little longer to hear how the Summer’s Twilight mime experiment went (hint: it went really, really well), and you’ll have to wait a bit to hear how color treatment is going on The Seafarer film (another hint: also quite well, though slowly since Victoria’s job just ate her life, too). Other stuff in the works includes a short film of Sean-David Cunningham playing the flashy solo piece I wrote for him, Cucumbers and Gin, as well as a couple funny art songs based on haiku written to replace the “employees must wash hands” signs at the new Journeyman restaurant in Somerville, MA.

All of that will have to wait till after November, 15th, though – I’ve got a giant event to produce, a website to launch, and a rather large (and growing) team to coordinate to get it all done. Come out for the launch, and come out to the Three-City Dash concerts in April – It’s gonna be great!

MTC Studio Launch Links:

Meet The Composer Studio
Buy tickets to the Launch here.
The facebook event is here.
MTC’s twitter feed is here.
MTC’s facebook page is here.

Heather Thompson, of Caedmon Tutorials found this page from WW Norton. As part of their Norton Anthology of English Literature they’ve posted a ton of online audio examples. For the Old English (Or Anglo-Saxon, depending on your preferred term) examples this is a great help. You can really hear the connections to modern English and to German. Unfortunately, to play the Seafarer clip you have to use Real Player, which is a really annoying little piece of software that I try to avoid. So I’m still on the lookout for something more practical – perhaps a nice reading in Youtube video form that can be easily embedded?

Heather’s job is, I think, probably one of the most fun jobs around. Her company, Caedmon Tutorials, is based in Ottawa and teaches the more interesting chunks of British literature online. Next Tuesday her class may or may not include a rough cut of the Seafarer film…. we’ll see what happens, and maybe what the students think of it…

In the meantime, if you want to see a great demonstration of the heritage of Old English, check this out:

Mike, the director, was on video chat, and so from time to time we’d pause, watch a segment of film with google chat on mute, and then wave at each other to turn the sound back on and go over notes. I’m not by training a filmmaker. Both Victoria and Mike went to NYU and are very good at what they do; I learned most of what I know from them. Despite my relative ignorance I wound up clarifying and focusing the conversation a bit – I guess that’s part of being a writer/producer – but it was an odd feeling. Really I’m just fantastically lucky to get to work with people this talented. We finished up with an (un)surprisingly lengthy discussion of file formats and how to send over the right clips without losing the details of the edit and the existing color work, and testing exports and renders and round-trip capable export file formats. Sometimes it’s hard to believe that this is the fast, modern way, but then I remember horror stories about cutting tape and film by hand with a razor.

We’re all getting together again to do the first actual treatment work next week. It’s going to be exciting seeing what happens, and getting closer to actually releasing this film so that you can all see what I’ve been scribbling about for so long. But for now, I have an evening to myself, and once I get through the irritating bits of office work I always seem to accumulate, I may be able to write some dialogue for Summer’s Twilight…

If you’re here looking for a voice recording of the whole poem in Anglo-Saxon, leave a comment or drop me an e-mail. If there are enough of you, I’ll see what I can do about getting one made. I love the poem, and having a recording of the original on the site would, I think, help place my version in context.

Let me know if you want that poem!

A lot more has been going on than just that, though. I’ve got a new title at Meet The Composer: Special Projects Manager. My work there has changed quite a lot from when I started. Instead of tag-teaming the development work with Ed Harsh and making sure the office runs I’m working on a new initiative involving a lot of cool stuff – web development, composers, ensembles, etc. – we’re not announcing much of it right now, but I’ll post more when I can. Well, in truth, I’ll post links to MTC’s announcment with lots of exclamation points, but you get the idea. It’s a great project and I’m really excited about it.

Last but not least, Thesia’s fundraiser for Passchendaele was last Thursday, and it was a fantastic success. The more I work with Thesia Arts, the happier I am to be producing with them. As artists, as producers, as people – they’re just a treat all around. The exact revenue is still being added up, but it’s just about what we’d hoped for in the budget, with maybe even a little extra. For a new fine arts production company in this economy, that’s fantastic news.

I came on late in the project, and so most of what I was doing leading up to the fundraiser was filling in the gaps to make what everyone else had planned run smoothly. That meant mostly doing some Twitter and Facebook marketing, prepping some food for the event, and spending the event itself in the kitchen pouring out the wine tasting. As a die-hard foodie, fairly serious cook, and all around organizational guy, the chance to actually work any kind of food service was really pretty fun. Everyone was sympathetic I didn’t get to enjoy the party, but I had a blast working out how many tiny pours of wine we could do per bottle, and plating trays of tiny tasting glasses and reminding assistant directors and actors pressed into service which wine this was and where it was from. Our stage manager, who’s worked in restaurants, swore I had actual experience doing this. That was probably more gratifying than I should really admit.

The film’s audio has two components right now, the solo cello part and the spoken poem. Zach’s added ambient noise to create the world of the film, including rivers, a construction site and a pile of rubble. He’s also added individual sound effects, like footfalls and jangling chains, to match the visuals of the film.

A big part of what we have to do is just refine the mixing of each sound so that it smoothly fits into the film. Sometimes a chain jangling is too loud, or resonates as if it were in a room instead of outside. Fixing those things is technically very difficult, and I’m glad to have someone as talented Zach working on this for that reason, but aesthetically it’s the easy part.

The hard part is figuring out when we need more or less sound in particular cases. For example, there’s a shot in the film with a bird on a branch.  We could have a sound of a bird chirping or not. If we do, it fleshes out the visuals into a more complete world. If we don’t, we leave the image of the bird to stand (or perch) on its own. There are a host of questions associated with just this chirping noise:

• Given the emotion of the scene and the film overall, do we want this to be a happy chirping bird, or a solitary silent bird?
• Do we want to put the bird into the foreground of the viewers’ mind by including the sound of the chirp, or do we want to make the shot seem more like a commentary on the shots that came before by excluding it?
• Does the chirp blend well with the rhythm and meaning of the poem as it’s recited?
• Does the chirp blend well with the cello part, or does it distract or interrupt a larger musical idea central to the film?
• What chirps do we have to choose from? Which are correct for the kind of bird it actually is and what it looks like it’s doing in the shot in our film?
• Which chirp is most appropriate to the emotional side of what we’re trying to convey with the shot?
• After all this talk of chirping, would it be better to have the sound of a twig creaking underneath the bird, or leaves rustling instead?

My biggest challenge right now is to figure out an overall goal of what I’m trying to accomplish, something I can use to guide my thinking as I come up against the hundreds of sound effects we have,  and the thousands more we have to choose from.

Mike and Zach and I are meeting on Saturday night to go over the cut and discuss our next step, and then of course hang out a little. It’ll be great to collaborate again with these two on these tricky creative questions, and of course nothing gives me more pleasure than combining work and pleasure like this. It’s one of my favorite feelings.

We’ve still got to finish up sound design and color correction, as well as some syncing issues going between Final Cut and Pro Tools, but the film is nearly finished. (By the way, if you have any insights on how to deal with a .03% delay issue going between these two systems, let me know in comments – it’s a really irritating problem.) The Seafarer as a film has been a long time coming, as it’s become the “when I have time” project for everyone working on it, with no firm deadlines and more pressing projects constantly coming up. That’s both good and bad, as it means people aren’t doing hurried work on it, but also that it’s taking a long time. It was really good to get the film up in whatever version in front of an audience, and hear what they thought, and how effective even something weird like this can be.

Last Wednesday, I went to my first Meet The Composer board meeting to make a presentation about a new initiative I’ve been working on. Hopefully as we get more of the details settled I can blog a bit about it here – it’s a very exciting project. The presentation went well, up at the ASCAP board room, and then I headed way downtown to the Stone.

I was wearing a suit for the board meeting, and the Stone is on Avenue C at Houston, so I looked a bit out of place. MTC’s board members even gave me grief about being the first guy ever to go to the Stone in a suit. Then my brother showed up in a similar pinstripe suit he was wearing for a work event, though, so there were two of us.

Zach Herchen opened his show at the stone with my solo piece, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. I wrote it for him initially almost five years ago, and revised it last year for his masters recital. He was fantastic. As a saxophone player he’s changed so much in the time we’ve been working together, and has really become a phenomenal musician. The piece requires him to take the horn out of his mouth and act, and though that’s uncomfortable for him, he’s very good at it, and the intensity and stagecraft he brings to his saxophone playing take over. I’ve never seen as rich and nuanced a reading as he did at the Stone. The character he created was so vivid – it wasn’t just the ‘text’ part of a chamber work, I wanted to know more about that character.

He also did works of John Crouch, David Witmer, Ying-Chen Kao and Paul Leary, and was joined by a good range of other talented musicians. It was a great show from top to bottom, including shouting into the piano, live electronics and coded radio transmissions from World War II. The Stone is a strange venue and far away, but if there are more shows there like Zach’s, I’m heading back in a hurry.

Now that that week is finished I can take what little time I have and get back to Summer’s Twilight, helping Alan Jeffries with his film cues, producing that documentary about Thornton Willis, and doing the usual round of program applications that the spring brings. You know, time off.