Matze hat etwas angesprochen, dass dem gesamten Kernteam irgendwie noch unangenehm konfus ist: die konkrete Handhabung der "alternativen" Sounddesigns.

Matzes Anliegen: wir brauchen eine klare Trennung von Versionen des Films. Sowohl auf Bildseite, als auch auf Tonseite. Aus rechtlichen Gründen (Was, wenn ein Sounddesigner, der dazustösst, geklaute Samples nutzt?) als auch aus persönlichen Gründen (Was, wenn ein Beteiliger des Kernteams nicht mit einer speziellen Vertonung in Zusammenhang gebracht werden will?)

We need a trailer for The Last Drug until Tuesday. And we have two suggestions (rough cut):

I spoke about the licensing plans for our 2008 HD feature film release "The Last Drug" at the EmergeAndSee Film Festival:

Ich hab mit den Greenscreen-Aufnahmen noch mal am Opener für den Turing Test geschraubt - als Ausgangspunkt für eine gemeinsam abgestimmte Version. Was mir gut gefallen würde wäre, wenn ich ein Musikstück hätte auf das ich animieren kann ... also soetwas wie einen Jingle, der 20sek oder 30sek lang ist. Möglichst mit einem Tusch endet und dann langsam wegklimpert. @Tom und Looza (und Peter und Hagen, wenn ihr gerade Einspielmoeglichkeiten habt): koennt ihr mir da einen Vorschlag machen?

@Stefan und Gerald: Meinungen, Skizzen wie es aussehen sollte, Länge?
@Gerald: Hast Du bereits Hintergründe für die Bühne, oder ein, zwei Renderings für mich?

I finished the first edit of The Last Drug, with which I was totally content, at new years eve! It must have been some kind of subconscious psychological thing, telling myself to get it done in 2007, and it worked. Here are a few facts: including the credits the movie will be about 80 minutes. I would love it to be a bit longer, but the story was told and we learned from our first movie to don't get to much in love with the pictures instead. The movie counts about 1.500 cuts. Spun, a drug movie from Jonas Akerlund, is famous for it's 5.000 cuts, by the way. There are a few single-shot movies as well; the first one I know was Hitchcocks Rope. The regular number of cuts is said to be around 700, whatever that means.
My editing workstation was a Core 2 Duo 2.4 GHz, 2GB RAM and 2.5TB on a few SATA, IDE, Firewire 400 und USB2-harddisks, with two 1680x1050 TFTs. Nothing unusual.

The tool was Adobe Premiere CS2. Route 66 was edited on Avid Express DV, but Avid had no 720p25 support at the time I started editing (can you believe this?), so I had to switch. Which turned out to be a good choice; all in all I was comfortable with Premiere - I would use it again. Final Cut was no choice, since I was never into Macintosh. I tested Cinelerra on Mandriva-Linux, but the gross interface turned me off all the time (don't underestimate the importance of look and feel, especially in creative fields) and Cinelerra is said to perform not too good - which would, amongst the open source development style of it, be the number two reason for me to use it. Can someone validate this rumor?
Unfortunately we had no energy left, to concentrate on the editing tool, since this is our first feature film project. I hope we can collaborate with the Cinelerra community on our next movie to maybe improve the interface a bit.

My workspace in Adobe Premiere was looking like this:


The handling was better than with Avid (which is a matter of taste and for some editors almost a religious decision). The import of footage, pictures and audio was way better: more flexible with different codecs and space saving, since Premiere can work with different codecs, whereas Avid always creates a copy in its own format. And finally, compared to Avid Express DV, the functional range is broadly bigger.
Premiere is worse in terms of performance and stability: at the end of the project I had about three to five crashes per session, mostly when it had to handle different codecs at a time. I had to split the movie project into four smaller projects to be able to handle it at all. I used up to 6 video and 9 audio tracks, usually one to two video tracks and three to four audio tracks.
All voice-, effect- und music tracks have been separated, to make sure every single sample can still be edited independently by our sound designers Tom and Philipp, when I deliver the final audio tracks. That's the timeline, by the way:


I'm waiting for the feedback of our crew right now, to adjust the final cut and prepare the project for the next phase: compositing and sound design.

Tom turned out to be some kind of "The Last Drug" quality manager, which is not exactly the type of job, where everybody is glad to hear what you have to say. That's why we have to give out some credits to our Senior Sound Designer, since his critics are constantly improving the film.
His latest suggestion concerns the way the drug is being taken by the protagonist in the movie: orally. It simply doesn't work the way it was supposed to. The protagonist seems to have too much control over the dosage, when it should actually be controlled by the machine. The initial plan was to let him wake up several times in some kind of hypnotized state, taking the next dosage of the drug. But it looks more like "all right, let's take the next cup" instead of "damn, this poor guy gets another shot!"

On a recent Saturday in a theater in Dresden: the first "The Last Drug Sounddesign Competition Meeting". Every now and then someone we don't know comes by and asks for the "memory game". Is that part of the game already? I brough the working cut with me and the sounddesigner introduce themselfs:


Think of this Sounddesign Competition like this: Imagine you enter a DVD and before the film starts a menu pops up where you can see four musicans at work. If you highlight any of them you can hear what he is doing. And if you finally choose one, you will watch and hear the whole movie with the sounddesign of this artist: in a psychedelic electronic style, with a classical score, with guitar sound or with a hiptronic style soundtrack!