I know alcoholics call a blackout weekend a lost weekend. This felt very much like that without the booze and I wish I could black it out.

I’m exhausted and relieved. This past weekend I did ADR for “Dog’s of Chinatown.” It was very important that we got everything perfect. Eric Jacobus and Ray Carbonel from the Stunt People were flown out from San Fran to Greensboro for ADR and to shoot some pickup shots. So we had to get everything done while they were in town.

Thursday
I should of seen this coming. We began Thursday night and had another Hard Drive die on us, this one was a 1 Terabyte Lacie drive. We really need to bite the bullet and buy a RAID system so we can avoid this mess. The drive fell on it’s side and was ruined. I tried everything to save it but it’s gone. Luckily we have 2 other Hard Drives with all the material backed up. This drive was important. It had all the previous ADR placed on the timeline so when we record Eric’s lines we could drop his in and listen to the other recordings. Didn’t happen. Oh yeah we planned on having a screening of the rough cut on Super Bowl Sunday. Had to inform the peanut gallery that it was not going to happen. Thursday night Eric and I got 25 out of 108 minutes done that took about 4 hours.

Friday
4 hours on Friday, we rolled up to 40 minutes.

Saturday
12 hours on Saturday we rolled through the entire film. Micah came by to listen to the audio. That was when the shit hit the fan and splattered all over us. I have the gear to do this but at that moment I was not aware of how to get rid of an annoying noise that was killing the recording. So I turned down the equalizer. I got rid of the buzz but I also made the audio flat. Not good for the main character to have flat audio. My ears are not tuned to pick that up. Micah’s are. He came in and immediately was worried. Eric was flying back on Tuesday. So we had to re-record his audio on Sunday.

I can’t say enough about Eric. He showed up to my house with 3 loaves of Sourdough Bread from a San Fran bakery. What a class act. He remembered my glutton lust for San Fran Sourdough. He also is a great professional. Didn’t complain once and understood what had to be done. Only thing he said was, “lets get started early.” I made a mistake and I’m fortunate to have a great team around me to understand that it would not happen again.

Super Bowl Sunday
I’m a die-hard NFL fan but also extremely proud of “Dogs of Chinatown,” there was no doubt which meant more to me. If you must know I was pulling for the Giants. I’m a life long fan of the NY Jets. Being a fan of the Jets you must know that I share the same passion of hate for the Patriots. 14 hour day on Sunday but everything was finished with Eric. We got it done. Throughout the evening I kept getting calls from my friends about the game in which I let go directly to voicemail.

So I set our DVR to record the Super Bowl. We finished around 11:30… Football time. What a great game. 4th quarter 10 minutes left in the game… 10 minutes left on our DVR!!! If you translate 10 minutes of 4th quarter it comes out to about 1 hour. So I didn’t get to see the most amazing end to a Super Bowl. Angela was pissed, not at anyone in particular. By then I shrugged my shoulders and went to ESPN to enjoy the highlights.

Monday
Ray Carbonel and I began his ADR and it went smooth. Ray is one of those people you just wish you could be around all the time. He always helped on the set and off the set we would sit down and talk politics. We wrapped up in about 7 hours. Eric came back in and we recorded sounds for the fight scenes. Long, but good overall day.

Tuesday
Eric flew back to San Fran. There were a few takes we had to redo with Ray. This was frustrating. All the takes we recorded on this day had an annoying electric buzz in the audio recording. We couldn’t figure it out. Micah and I tried everything from changing XLR cords, mics, mixers, AC outlets, input devices into the computer. Everything until we moved the mic away from the CRT monitor. It was emitting a nasty hum. The only reason we used that monitor was so the actor could see how they said the lines. Boom, 4 hours into it we finally figured it out. What a pain in the ass. We wrapped up later than we should of, but we did it. I would say about 96% of the ADR for the entire film is done. No one got hurt either. Everyone stuck together and worked the problem out before taking off someones head. That is a good production team. I’m burned out from doing ADR so I got 2 days off until I get back in the studio and do it again for “Z13:The Zombie Within.”

If you are curious what products I use to capture the audio. Here is a list of my gear. It could be better but it gets the job done. For some reason I have to jack up the gain in order to get decent level on the USB connection. Something I’m not happy about. If anyone has some suggestions about what gear to get please feel free to comment.

Mixer: Alesis MultiMix 8USB

Microphone: Samson S11

Pop Filter: Stedman Proscreen XL