So the picture was locked - we basically had a show. Except that after picture editing we still needed sound editing, music composition, a main title created, color correction and some ADR. Not to mention that PAX was fast approaching and we were desperate to get our first episode released before that so when we told people about it, they could actually go see it.
The first task was finding our post audio guy. This was already done. Alex Escott had been with us at some of the early pre-production meetings and was originally going to record all our location sound, do all the post editing and music composition. In the end that didn’t really happen. Alex wasn’t able to be on set for our shoot days. And part way into the sound editing for episode 1 it was pretty clear that real life was keeping him too busy to do all our episodes. So Geoff had to find another sound guy.
Still, Alex did a great job on the first episode. He created all the game sound effects from scratch and composed the music, including the main theme which still gets stuck in my head. Geoff found Chris Sweet online I believe, and he agreed to take on episode 2 and 3.
We always knew that sound editing was going to take longer than we expected – this was our experience on the pilot. This time was no different. That’s one of the hardest parts – just waiting. But we did all of this outside of regular work hours so we know how hard that can be. Luckily we still had some other things to take care of.
Geoff created our awesome opening sequence. He works in video games and VFX in real life so I think he always planned to create something pretty cool, I just didn’t know what that would be. He took about a week and never really gave me specifics, he just told me to wait. When I saw what he’d done I was amazed. Actually, he sent me a version before it was ready and I wasn’t amazed, but once I saw this version I was amazed. We threw together a few more ideas and came up with what you see now. I think it gives a really professional look to the show and Geoff did a really great job!
You also might be surprised to know that there are some visual effects in Thwackers. Nothing fancy but it was nice to fix a few things that could have otherwise ruined a great shot. There was one shot where Mikey was sitting back and his foot just poked into the bottom of the frame right before a cut. No big deal but it was very distracting and looked like a mistake so rather than have to trim the edit for an awkward cut, Geoff just painted it out. Same thing with a boom peaking into frame. Gone! It’s very handy having a VFX artist around. I think Geoff did all our fixes in a day.
We also needed to do some color correction. The show looked great, Glen did a really nice job but I work at this big fancy post production facility full of equipment and talented colorists so, why not? James Telfer was kind enough to do this on his own time. Geoff did the color correction for the pilot and it was agonizing and took a long time. James has been doing this for years and since we have all the gear at work he was able to do it all real time with no rendering. I can’t believe the difference it makes – he really punched up the color and make the show sparkle. And he was so fast!
One of the final pieces was recording a small amount of ADR – the gay bashing kids in episode 3. We enlisted the voice talents of our location sound recordist John Motyer. He did a ton of takes, some really funny stuff and gave us a lot of choices. Of course by the time we decided that John was our guy it was the week before the release of episode three. He had to record the audio, drop it off to me and then I had to digitize it and get it to our sound guy so he could put an effect on it and drop it into the show. And this was days before release. Still, it got done. Basically we decided not to ask anyone’s kids to actually say this stuff for us. I’m not going to be responsible for corrupting a kid.
It was interesting editing the good bits of this dialogue together too. I’m sitting at home listening to the foulest thing over and over again. I’m actually surprised that we didn’t get any negative comments from anyone about the gay bashing kids. Either no one wants to say anything or we treated it in a responsible way. At least that’s what I hope we did, it’s what I was trying to do. Ignoring it won’t help it go away so let’s take a look at it. Sometimes comedy is a great way to hide the fact that you’re addressing an issue and getting people to think about it. And like I say, I don’t know how successful we were in that, but we tried.
So at the end of all this, all the pieces came together and somehow we had our show! Three finished episodes of it! Now it was time to set it free into the world.
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