Postmortem: “Starship Farragut: The Capitancy”
A few weeks ago I got a very interesting offer. The fan-film project “Starship Farragut” was in desperate need of a composer for their pilot episode called “The Capitancy”. The film crew and cast was full of passionate individuals hoping to achieve the best film possible. They had a deadline already set in stone by the premiere at a Science Fiction festival in Baltimore, but unfortunately, the composer they had worked with in the past had to drop out at the last minute.
This left them with a 45 minute or so film with no score to speak of and a little more than 2 weeks to complete it!
Like a fool, I agreed to score the film for a few reasons:
- It was sort of an insane deadline, and I enjoy seeing if I can “pull it off” (I’ll save you the suspense and say that, yes, indeed it worked out pretty well in the end)
- It was a great opportunity to work with a project team that I could tell would be critical but also easy to work with.
- It was my first crack at a longer-format film project
Things started off pretty well. I rearranged my work schedule so that I took a few days vacation and spread the hours out over the two week period. I discovered in this intensive writing session that the sweet spot for me was about 4-5 hours at a time of writing/composing. After that, I’m pretty much creatively drained. I can continue to do more mundane tasks like email/discuss with colleagues, copy and paste things around and do some basic mixing, but other than that, I’ll need some sleep in between to get anything accomplished.
Of course, that would be the IDEAL. In this case however, with so much to get done, I had to resort to all sorts of devilsh devices to keep my body awake. Most instrumental was coke zero and bag of nestle semi-sweet morsels. The combination of those two gives you a pretty good buzz.. and that often helped me work wee into the hours to sometimes 4 AM.
Also, I started to see some incredibly horrific things with my computer in term or horsepower. It was hitting the threshold. And often. Something needed to be done. (Foolishly) thinking that surely what was to blame was my slow hard drives, I whipped out the plastic and immediately ordered a very sweet external SATA RAID drive with accompanying PCI SATA RAID card for my Power Mac G5/2×1.8Ghz. Through an immense amount of trial and error, it actually turned out that the culprit was NOT my drives, but the amount of RAM in my machine! However, I’ll save that little puzzle for my next post…
As things progressed, I very quickly started bouncing MP3 samples to the director/producer to get feedback. It came fast and furious on a more-than-once-daily basis! My general day went like this for almost two weeks:
- Get up and go to work from about 8 AM - 2 PM
- Call my contact, the manager of Neo F/X, who was handling the CGI for the film, on my way home on my cell phone to get the latest from the producers
- Lock myself away in the studio until dinner
- Eat quickly
- Resume work until 2-3 AM with breaks for private lessons, rehearsals with other musical groups, or various other things that were on my schedule at the time
- And then, later in the process, upload my finished mixes to Dave Cebrowski of DCWave.com who was doing the mastering of all of the sound elements.
It became pretty grueling pretty fast but the excitement of working on the project kept me going!
At the same time, just coincidentally, I had loaded up my studio with several more gorgeous libraries (true strike 1, true strike 2, and others…) which I (of course!) had to make use of in this new project! For anyone who has owned one of these massive libraries, they can appreciate the huge amount of sheer exploration it requires to get full use out of libraries like these. Needless to say, this added additional time to my writing because instead of thinking “hey, this would be the perfect place to use THAT sound”, it became, “there’s gotta be a sound like that around here SOMEWHERE!?!?”
All in all, things turned out well and I’m proud of how it came together. I even put together a mastered version of all of the music and created an inexpensive album of the music that’s now up for sale at soundclick.com. (If you don’t want to buy it, you can still listen to several of my tracks on that previous link!) The producers were also very happy with my work and have asked me back to score the second episode, called “For Want of a Nail”. Should be fun! I’ll be sure to write about the experience when that is done (Q3 2007) so stay tuned!
Watch “Starship Farragut: The Capitancy” for Free!
