walla walla walla

May all your birds be full-breasted. And tender. And… juicy.

We’re off to the island to get us some bird and so Maigen can meet Mother. She is bringing a pecan pie. I am bringing laundry.

Just in time for autumn and Xmas shopping Maigen has posted some perfectly ideally thoughtfully perfect gifts and she’s even willing to sell them to you. Contact her: tokitikki@gmail.com. Serious – what better gift is there than a 24/7 available hug?

Progress on AdrianTaverner.ca is at a crawl. I have about forty images ready for sale but some still need that three- or four line write-up. I have trouble with those. So often my images don’t even want captions. They prefer to trigger thoughts on their own. Start their own conversation with you. Still, designer davin insists it will add to the presentation. I’m game to try. It just takes some time to write.

Work is going very well. I programmed the walla for episode 103… I just Googled “walla” to link you to a handy definition but they all suck. Walla, or “With ALL Actors” is part of the post-production audio process where group or specific voice is added. This can be the background conversations in a crowded restaurant or just the breathing of someone running. It’s true that in those packed club scenes there’s no music and no actual talking. It’s cheaper to keep the set quiet and add walla than it is to bring the actors in for an ADR session later. Crazy, but that’s Hollywood. So in a walla session you’ll have a director and a bunch of voice actors standing around a couple mics in front of a video monitor syncing with the action. I did it a few times a couple years ago for Andromeda, Stargate and something else that might have been Amazing Tales or whatever. So Much Fun. I’ve been, like, a hundred dying space soldiers and aliens. And one drunk alien.

Anyway, I went through the show frame by frame and slated all the spots where additional voice needs to be. It took about eight hours to do a thorough job on a 45-minute episode. Now that I have some idea of what to do I should be able to get that down to four or five hours next time. Audio production takes a long time. Any idea how long it takes to do the sound effects for a minute of a car chase? A day, if everything goes perfectly.

Speaking of time: it’s 3:30am. I have a boat to catch in the morning. Happy Turkey Day, all.