Meet Our Studio Intern: Shalayah Smith!

There is an ancient Latvian saying that you measure a friendship by how much salt you have used by eating together. Salt added to a meal just by a pinch meant it took a long time to build a friendship. Nowadays we use salt by spoonfuls so friendships are faster to seal. Since my interns, assistants, studio producers and managers and me eat lunches together we probably are pretty close to somewhat knowing each other. That’s why I enjoy interviewing my interns - to sum up the relationships from their point of view..

But when Shalayah’s last day of internship came I was away on my trip to Stuttgart, so Yasemin had to step in. She interviewed Shalayah, edited the footage and did a very good job at it.

Shalayah came to our studio by a suggestion of a friend who had a friend who worked at the Red Hook Initiative, an organization that connects local young people to opportunities that may help them to fulfill the most ambitious of their dreams. Shalayah gave an impressive interview and later proved herself as a hard working, persistent intern. Being intelligent and articulate made her a fun lunch mate.

Now that she is off doing other things in other places we wish we shared more salt with her.

THANK YOU, Shalayah!

Meet Our Studio Interns!

Internships are tricky, just like any other kind of human relationships. You have to find the right match to make it work. 

Our studio operations are small - we have only 2 up-to-date computers. And I am very busy working on 27565 large and small details that make the film, which makes me regard the idea of having another person in the studio as a distraction. That's why we are selective about who we let in the studio. 

The two interns who started to work at the studio in January 2018 - Joon and Frankelly - came to the studio by chance and by the strength of their interview. Their hard work, confidence and competence, as well as their sense of humor made them an excellent match to our studio. 

This is Joon and Frankelly's last week at the studio. They both are graduating from their schools and the internship and I would like to introduce them to you.

Here's a video with Joon. I ask him a few simple questions. If you are curious how he got the internship and what value he sees in it, here're his answers:

Please check out Joon's work on his website:

http://www.jooniepark.com

Thank you!

Signe

PS On Thursday I'll post the video with Frankelly

Happy New Year!

It is clear now - the 2017 was like a drunk gift-delivery driver. You watched it with hope and anxiety: will it run me over? will it remember to give me gifts? Running away from being hit while trying to get closer to the gifts was quite a task. But we managed it, somehow.

Now we wake up in the middle of night with a new anxiety. It has become obvious that 2018 is not going to be the same as 2017. The needles have moved, the accustomed points of references discarded. New piñatas are craving the abuse. Will I avoid suffering? Will I succeed to eat, work and be merry?

Facing my old fear in front of uncertainty of future, I drew 4 cards for happy 2018:

Happy New Year!

With love and gratitude

Signe

Studio News from John, Part 2

I'm back with part 2 of my look behind the scenes at what goes in to making an independent animated feature.  Last time I talked about getting grant money and running a successful Kickstarter campaign, but what comes after that?  What happens after some production money comes in?  

I think most people might be familiar with the plot of "The Producers", where a Broadway impresario and his nebbishy accountant raise a ton of money to produce a play, then realize they'd be better off in making the worst play ever, and keeping all the money when it fails.  As tempting as that may seem, thankfully the world of filmmaking is not like that.  I imagine that there's more of a responsibility to spend the money wisely, because now that there's a community that has expressed interest in contributing to a film's success, the real-life producers now have a renewed determination to make the best film that they can. 

Some of the Kickstarter rewards packed up and ready for mailing...

The first few months after the Kickstarter campaign were spent mailing out as many of the rewards as possible.  I've seen other campaigns take months or even a year to start sending out rewards, but Signe wanted to get going on that right away.  So some of the pledge money that came from Kickstarter went to creating the reward items and buying mailing supplies and postage.  Then it was time to focus on production, getting things into a higher gear.  

The "LOVE CARDS" that were part of the Kickstarter Rewards sent to backers.

Most of the money raised on Kickstarter was spent on recording the film's soundtrack, which will be a combination of spoken dialogue and songs.  So there were costs for recording studios, sound engineers, the composer's fee for creating the songs, and then the actors' fees. Some of the cast members were based in Los Angeles, so that meant travel expenses for Signe and Sturgis to supervise the recording of their parts, as well as the costs of a second studio and recording engineer in California.  

Signe Baumane and Sturgis Warner during the West Coast actor recording sessions.

The production went through the Screen Actors Guild to secure the best possible voice talent for "My Love Affair With Marriage". (I could probably write an entire blog post about dealing with SAG, that should probably be my next topic...) And part of hiring union actors means payroll taxes, contributions to pension funds, workers compensation insurance, and so on.  I'll get into more detail on this next time.

Sound designer Jeffrey Roy during the voice recording session at 3rd St. ADR in Santa Monica.

18 actors recorded their roles in April 2017 in New York, another 6 were recorded in May in California, and the last two in June and August.  Signe and Sturgis were on hand for the entire sessions, to give the performers direction and the background information about the story to get all of these pieces of dialogue right, and then came the task of assembling all of these pieces into a soundtrack, much like a giant jigsaw puzzle. 

It took several weeks of working with editor Arjun Sheth to select the best takes and put them together with the temporary versions of the songs composed by Kristian Sensini (who also created music for "Rocks in My Pockets") but as a result, it seems that the film's English soundtrack is nearly complete. (A Latvian version will come later...)  

Editor Arjun Sheth putting the best dialogue takes together at Final Frame.

It's a little strange to think that right now, you could listen to the whole film of "My Love Affair With Marriage", and not see anything.  Film is a visual medium first, but the sound also plays an important role, and I guess you've got to start somewhere, right?.  Now the arduous task of creating images to go with all of these sounds can begin, but that's a good thing to talk about next time.