Bloggin' On: Adventures in Filmmaking and Other Musings for January 27, 2020

Illustration Credit: Pixabay

Hello there! Welcome to another installment of Bloggin' On, my blog-within-a-blog where I don't write reviews or dabble with political commentary. It's early afternoon on this Monday in my little corner of Florida, and the weather outside isn't frightful; the current temperature is 66℉ (19℃) under cloudy skies, and the low tonight is expected to reach 55℉ (13℃). It was supposed to rain this morning, but there's no evidence outside that any precipitation fell here, so that part of the forecast was off.

My friend and filmmaking partner Juan Carlos Hernandez updated me over the weekend about the progress of our film Ronnie and Her Two Nincompoops. (That's the working title Juan chose; I don't know what he and our producer - and Juan's wife - Adria K. Woomer-Hernandez will choose.) The "shooting" (principal photography) phase is over, now Juan, Adria, and their son Anthony are doing post-production work: editing, getting a few pickup shots that Juan needs, and ADR (which stands for Automatic Dialog Replacement), which entails re-recording the dialog with the actors to improve the quality of the sound in the finished film.

As part of the post-production process, Juan is also working on the score. We don't have a budget large enough to hire a composer (say, like John Williams) to write music, much less get someone to perform it for us, so we have to use what we can. Right now, Juan is hoping to find an instrumental cover of Bill Danoff, Taffy Nivert, and John Denver's Take Me Home, Country Roads, as well as a nice rendition of America the Beautiful.

As I mentioned a few posts back, Juan thinks that this is the sound/style he would like:

I'm not sure how he's going to accomplish that task, but I know that when I suggested Suo Gan as the opening and closing theme for A Simple Ad, he found a way to do it.

So far, though, it seems as if everything is coming together with Ronnie and Her Two Nincompoops; from what Juan says, the film will probably have a running time of around 21 minutes. It's definitely not a feature-length Hollywood extravaganza, but compared to the first completed film we worked on together, it's freakin' Gone with the Wind. 

Other than that, I don't have much in the way of news. I'm still in the research phase of my new literary project about World War II, so it will be a while before I start writing the first draft of a manuscript. I have some idea about the plot and characters, but I'm not at a place, mentally anyway, where I can just go, "Aha!" and start telling a story. Once I'm done with the research and I'm comfortable in the world of the tale I hope to tell...that's when I'll start.

Anyway, that about wraps it up for this edition of Bloggin' On. I have to go eat lunch and maybe go listen to some music in a room that isn't my office, so until next time, Gentle Reader, I'll catch you on the sunny side of things.