EOD Final Steps — Finishing the Film

by Michael D. Sellers The previous post talked about the efforts underway to get the production elements ready for MovieBank and Quantum’s  Eye of the Dolphin promotion (trailer, stills, press kit, electronic press kit, etc). Parallel to that, here at the studios we are doing the final steps to create the final release version of the Eye of the Dolphin feature. The things we are doing now are subtle finishing touches and/or administrative technical things, but the level of activity is intense and there are some interesting and exciting aspects.FINAL SOUNDMark Linthicum (sound mixer) and I have been going back through the film another time, doublechecking and enhancing things like the exact choices of dolphin sounds at each point in the movie where we see dolphins. We have previously assembled a library of over 500 sounds. Previous versions of the film had good usage of these sounds — however I’ve been doing additional research and coordination with some dolphin research specialists and based on those inputs I’m making some tweaks.We have also made subtle changes in some of the other scenes — for example, adding some children’s voices in the background in a couple of scenes, calibrating and fine tuning the wave sounds (adding more texture and depth to these sounds), adding enhancements to the underwater sounds when dolphins swim by, and checking final balance of dialogue vs effects and so on.All of his has been done “offline” on computers. Today we go “online” and check the work on a full theatrical mix stage where we will check the work, then make any final adjustments offline over the weekend — then back to the mix stage for final final and Dolby encoding on Monday. Then we will truly be finished with the sound.FINAL PICTUREThe picture has been “basically final” for a long time. However, there are little things still being done such as adding one dolphin digitally to a shot which currently only has two (and theoretically should have three, although no one has ever said anything about it); correcting a slight motion defect in one underwater dolphin shot; and correcting one mis-cut that no one has noticed or commented on, but which is a glitch and should be fixed.CREDITSWe have also launched a very exciting last minute effort to do a major upgrade on the end titles. This came about because, since we are doing a digital intermediate with film-out, we can do something a lot more attractive with the end credits than the current traditional “white credits on black background”. Instead of that, we are going to have a series of frames from the movie converted to “painting” looks as the backgrounds when the main titles come up.Here are some work-in-progress samples: