Do You Hear the Wolf?
An Update on Our Upcoming Feature Film, Wolf Stories
Some of you know I’m also an independent filmmaker. So this week’s post is an update on how our feature film, Wolf Stories is progressing.
First, a synopsis: When burnt-out college professor Peter MacTire accidentally becomes a werewolf, he and his concert cellist/professor wife Julia embrace the change to thwart an evil occultist plot, save the college, and their marriage. It’s a werewolf-comedy for the art-house crowd.
To catch up, last summer Writer/Director Daedalus Howell (also my husband) and I did a 24-day film shoot covering over fifteen locations with twenty actors for the werewolf comedy.
My roles are Producer and Production Designer. I’ll reveal more on my love of Production Design (including making fake food for a two-day dinner party shoot) in another post!
As of right now, we have a wonderful editor, Joshua Khoi Tran, who is cutting the film and working his creative magic making this werewolf rom-com as werewolf-ish, rom and com as possible.
The job of the editor is to use the footage and narrative structure to creatively amplify and underscore the messages and stories —and the humor — that began with the script and emerged in the production. He’s doing an amazing job.
Shannon Ferguson of Longwave is currently creating an original score for the film along with Rebecca Roudman of Dirty Cello. Our actor who plays cello in the film doesn’t actually play, so Rebecca was instrumental (haha) in showing her how to look as if she does.
Next up will be the foley, color correction and sound mix.
Foley is all the sounds you hear in the movie except dialog and music. Literally. If you hear someone open a door, walk down the street, or set down a glass, those are all sounds that are added in later.
The color correction is just what one might think, correcting the color so it all matches and also so that it evokes the mood desired. Different places in the film might have different kinds of color, but they also have to all connect and coordinate. Even our black-and-white film Pill Head had color correction to make everything look like it’s in the same movie!
The sound mix is where the foley tracks, music tracks and dialog tracks are all placed together and optimized for various formats. For example, when we had the sound mix done for Pill Head, there were certain sounds that were mixed to come from the back of the theater, or the sides. And for Amazon, there’s another, different sound mix since viewers aren’t in a theater.
We’re in the home stretch and we’re excited to share the film with you all soon. I’ll keep you posted when we have a trailer!