I mentioned recently that I had “finished” working on the music for “The Music of Jo Hyeja.” Well, last night we well-and-truly finished work on the audio, except perhaps for swapping in one musical track. We went over to Mediact, an organization that exists to help develop and promote the independent film industry in Korea,m teach people who to make films, and help people complete projects without having to sell everything they own. The sound engineers we hired work there, and helped us master the audio for “The Music of Jo Hyeja” for what is probably a lot less money …
Category: FILMMAKING
The Music of Jo Hyeja — “Music” Finished, Sort Of
The last mention I made of this project was to note that we’d done some recording with the haegeum player from the band 잠비나이 for the soundtrack. Since then, I’ve been off and on constructing music tracks from samples — both of the haegeum, and of other sounds I collected over a 48 hour period: water going down a drainpipe, the hum of car engines, growling, and so on. As of right now, my work on the audio is done except for one step: the audio post-production work, which we’re scheduled to do on Friday at a studio. (I’ll have …
The Score for The Music of Jo Hyeja OST: Composed, But Rough
I didn’t think music composition was a skill quite as loseable as, say, a foreign language, but today I got my comeuppance. While back in the old days I could have cranked out a whole minor piece in a day, I spent that much time just working out a few fragments for the score. (Okay, one reason is that I’m not all that great with the notation software and had a steep learning curve to climb; it’s really not intuitive in many ways, though I’m sure once you’re used to it it’s great.) One of the most frustrating parts of …
The Music of Jo Hyeja: An Update (AKA My Work Begins)
We now have a deadline for getting the music and foley, as well as the final editing, finished for The Music of Jo Hyeja, and that is the 9th of March. This became our deadline because that’s when we will be taking the final cut of the film to get the audio postprocessing done. (By some kind of organization in Seoul that supports independent filmmakers by dong this kind of work for them, either inexpensively or free of charge — to the filmmaker, at least.) This means I have a ton of stuff to do, especially because we also learned, from …
Tinker Tailor / Nameless Gangster
Miss Jiwaku and I have lately seen two movies worth the price of admission: one that is #1 in Korea (범죄와의 전쟁 / Nameless Gangster — yeah, the English title is really unfortunate), and one that I’m pretty sure won’t be playing here for long: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. I won’t say much about the latter beyond the observation that I learned something watching it: there’s no point in trying to watch an actually good, actually challenging movie in a CGV cinema. While I’ve gotten used to the audiences at anyplace except Cinematheque behaving like idiots, I hadn’t yet tried …
What I’ve Learned Shooting The Music of Jo Hyeja, Day 4
Well, there technically wasn’t a “Day 4” as this was a three-day shoot, but we worked about fifteen hours on our last day, actually finishing at close to 4:00am on Tuesday morning. I think it’s pretty easy to imagine why I didn’t have a lot of insights to post (or energy to post them) at the end of shooting last night. But thinking over yesterday, there are a few insights I have: Wrapping up shooting feels good no matter how bloody tired you are by the end of it. We sent our star home in a cab at close to …
What I’ve Learned Shooting The Music of Jo Hyeja, Day 3
What I’ve learned today… Well, I’m freaking tired, it’s past 11:00am, I have classes in 11 hours, and we’re not yet done. In fact, we’re just on a break because the SD card in the camera got filled up. All of that isn’t something I’ve learned, but it is something that’s stopping me from putting together very much. I’ll try post some thoughts and insights tomorrow…
What I’ve Learned Shooting The Music of Jo Hyeja, Day 2
Things I learned on day two of our shoot: Whatever the administrators say, refusing to turn on the heating system in our building until the ambient temperature is 5°C is evil. We’re not Inuit, after all. This isn’t normal in Korean housing situations, is it? It seems new to me… and our actors were commenting on how cold it is in our place. A cast and crew goes through food like nobody’s business. The helpful thing for a low-budget production without people to run off and get food is that, once you get time for a food break — can’t …
What I’ve Learned Shooting The Music of Jo Hyeja, Day1
We just finished day one of three shooting The Music of Jo Hyeja. I’m excited by the footage I’ve seen, and my feet and back hurt like hell. (It was a long day.) I should probably just go to sleep, as we have two more long days ahead of us, but I want to take some notes… so I’m posting now. Here’s what I’ve learned: Having one person around who is a serious pro-type, who is further up the learning curve than you are, and who is excited about the project, helps immensely. Miss Jiwaku asked a friend from her …
The Music of Jo Hyeja Proceeds Apace
I mentioned a while back that Miss Jiwaku and I are working on a Korean adaptation of the HP Lovecraft short story, “The Music of Erich Zann,” which we’ve titled The Music of Jo Hyeja. It blows my mind to say it, since last weekend was overloaded, but… we’re shooting it this weekend. We’ve got some of the locations locked in, we have some leads for things we need, and we just held auditions last week for the main parts. I was a bit worried, as one role in particular was seeming to turn out to be difficult to cast, …