Silent Horror DVD

[Ekkebus]

Ah yes, the JOY of Tim Ekkebus being on screen. Finally the movie is entertaining. MUAHAHAHAHA!!!!

[gobbleskat]

Claire's audio is the Dragon Twins of Silent Horror. Seemed like a good idea at the time...what i would give to have subtitled her lines.

[ARMCANNON]

Claire's audio is the Dragon Twins of Silent Horror. Seemed like a good idea at the time...what i would give to have subtitled her lines.

Nah, it was a good idea. It just should have been executed better. Hold off a little more on the audio effects. There's ways to get a similar sound to what you were going for without losing so much clarity.

I'm sure you were tainted because you already knew what she was saying, so you could easily tell what was being said because you knew beforehand. Meanwhile an outside viewer has no idea. Oh well, that whole "learn from your mistakes" garbage and stuff.

[liam]

i'd also like to point out that final cuts audio effects are fairly limited, aside from the eq i've never been a huge fan of them. seriously if you have a pc export your audio out and use goldwave to do effects, I mean how much better does it get t han an easy to use FREE audio edititing program.

[ARMCANNON]

Yeah, you could set your recording preferences to "stereo mixer" and it will record whatever you hear out of your speakers.

Use goldwave (or whatever audio program) and play the lines you want on the movie player, extract the audio, mess with it, and then replace with the "wet effects" version of the audio. I just did this yesterday extracting some audio from a live video tape performance.

[It's Raining Ben!]

I did that some with Snake actually, but at that point in our audio careers, we had no idea how to do that. We're kinda learnin shit as we go here. That and we're finding different programs to help us along the way too.

[ARMCANNON]

I did that some with Snake actually, but at that point in our audio careers, we had no idea how to do that. We're kinda learnin shit as we go here. That and we're finding different programs to help us along the way too.

Amen to that man, I'm in the same boat as you guys.

[Ekkebus]

Yeah, if X-strike has one major weakness right now in terms of skill its in audio. While there are some X-strikers with musical knowledge and Darrin can whip up a tune in a pinch, none of us have extensive training in sound editing which is why we decided to outsource it with Project Snake and it took a lot longer to get it released.

[gobbleskat]

As evidenced by the 'key and safe' scene in Silent Horror, i should never be put in charge of sound effects, much less mixing.

The vocals on Claire were not so much for effect, but to mop up poor initial recordings. I definitly believe less is more in most cases, but hoped that an extra layer of sound would blend the bad audio with the good a bit better. Honestly, despite is being dificult to understand, i still think it sounds better than what WAS there. The lesson learned is don't do your ADR next to a whirring computer fan.

[Valeyard]

Yeah, if X-strike has one major weakness right now in terms of skill its in audio. While there are some X-strikers with musical knowledge and Darrin can whip up a tune in a pinch, none of us have extensive training in sound editing which is why we decided to outsource it with Project Snake and it took a lot longer to get it released.

If you don't mind revealing a couple of trade secrets, where'd you outsource the audio? Also, who does your DVD replicating?

[Ekkebus]

Audio was outsourced primarily to a guy by name of Haroon Piracha, whose game remixes can be found on ocremix.org. He had wanted to help us out with Silent Horrors sound mixing but contacted me too late in production. So I kept him in mind and he ended up mixing about two-thirds of Snakes audio in about 2 or 3 weeks. After that he got a job as a game tester and became very difficult to get a hold of. The last third was done mostly internall save the two final scenes which were done by our boards own Mahler and a friend of Jaekwons out in LA.

[gobbleskat]

Said LA Rob's credits include Blade: The Series starring Sticky Jones of Onyx! I'm six degreed to Onyx!!!

[Trio of 9999]

It was such a joy when Tim finally had his first scene, it was like "Oh my god, a character with personality!"

He was acting well... he has no personality in real life... and he is so modest.

Darren was also a great character to watch.

That's because Gollum was a great character to watch.

One thing I noticed was a few times that there were longer pauses than there should have been between lines said during a conversation, disrupting the flow.

I'm glad you brought that up... it was something i never understood that made it through editing into both Silent Horror and RCR, and was something i really wanted to keep out of Snake.

It was said that the female lead was emulating how a Resident Evil character was. I felt that style of acting was more detrimental towards the total picture and outweighed staying as true to the game as possible.

She is not, in fact, emulating anyone in particular, nor any style. Putting aside the many jokes we have made, this was Sara's first acting role, as far as I know, and she delivered the lines to the best of her ability. The problem is, the character is more funny to laugh at, than to laugh with. However, if you don't see the humor in her "delivery," then the line just seems badly acted. She plays a very different role than what was orignally written by Rory, (which, i understand, was written for a different actress... check out the art section for the original script), and i was very turned off by her performance at first. However, upon repeated viewings, i think her performence, deliberate or not, works well for the genre (since it is a genre film... not based on one game in particular, although mainly Silent Hill and RE) and type of film, and balance with the other characters' serious tone. I can see how if you interpreted it as "RE-speak" it would come off as a poor attempt at that style.

She sure has some quoteable one-liners though.

[ARMCANNON]

Ha, good response.

I definitely was taken aback during her performance during the "abortion" scene. That was definitely an OMGWTFBBQ moment.

I can imagine finding good actors for low budget films to be pretty close to impossible. Especially for such an esoteric genre. But you guys have been pumping out decent stuff for a while now it seems, and the quality just continues to go up (judging from the Snake trailers). I'm sure talent will start migrating towards your efforts if they haven't already.

If you guys ever need an extra or whatever, message me up.

[gobbleskat]

I think a better way to criticize the performances in the movie is to blame me for not being a more specific and motivating director than to blame the very unpaid and generous-with-their-time actors that did in fact go through hell to get the job done. Another drawback of it being my first time in the chair was that I didn't realize I could be more demanding with peoples performances until very late in the production, but in truth it's hard to demand a lot of your actors when they have already given you quite a bit, it's 3am and 9 degrees, and your spot light is about to die.