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Or watch it here in a smaller format:
Omar and Firaz is our 2009 Mosquer Awards Comedy submission. We didn’t win but we heard a lot of positive feedback on the movie, and most importantly learned a lot about the process.
Check out the rest of this blog to gain an insight into our challenges and hopefully you can learn from our mistakes!
So Firaz and I decided to make a movie for Mosquers 2009.
It. Was. Hard.
Easier said than done. On this site, we document our experiences, as well as giving you (perhaps a fellow Mosquer film producer) an in-depth behind the scenes look of our movie.
Feel free to discuss your experiences as well, and we can hopefully raise the bar for future Mosquer films, helping others to get a good knowledge-base for film-making.
There actually is a story behind how we came up with the concept of the movie. We had originally planned on doing a totally different script for our movie. The only problem was that we were hard pressed on finding actors. This was partly due to the fact that the people we had slated to be actors all ended up going backpacking to various parts of the world. We approached other people but they were not willing to act.
As we were preparing for filming, testing our sound equipment, playing around with software and such, it finally dawned on us that we weren’t going to be able to film what we had originally planned. So at around 3 in the morning we decided to scrap our idea and come up with a concept that we could do with the resources we had available to us. We brain stormed for about an hour or so hashing out ideas no matter how idiotic and how unfunny. Personally, I kept looking around my basement and asking myself, “What is funny in this room?” After some hardcore brainstorming, Omar and I came to the realisation that the situation we were in at the moment was actually quite funny. We sat there and began hashing out a rough script. At the same time, we began improving potential dialogue and punch lines we could use. We actually ended up doing a dry run of almost every scene in what became our final product. By around 5 in the morning, we had come up with a script that we would film the next day.
The next day we gathered our production crew and ran the script by them. After some consultation, we worked on getting our camera angles ready as well as further improving our script.
We actually faced a number of challenges. The biggest was the time we had to film our movie. Our cameraman was in town only for two days. And we didn’t want to switch cameramen because one, he had some experience under his belt and two; he was already familiar with how the camera we were using was behaving. So whatever time we had with him was actually very precious.
Having realised our extreme time constraints, we spent the first night of filming perfecting our camera angles as best we could, trying to avoid shadows and other things that would have disrupted our shots. On top of that we practised and experimented with the boom mic we had and as well practised our lines with the camera recording so as to get comfortable in front of the camera. We ended our day at approximately 3 in the morning that night.
The next day, we began filming at around 11 or so at night. The efforts of the previous night actually proved to be beneficial in that we had a relatively smooth period of filming. We had some instances where some scenes took longer to film than we had anticipated but overall went well because we had a rough map and outline of what direction we wanted to go and that made things a whole lot easier. We ended filming at around 4 in the morning or so.
We noticed however, a lot of the major ideas in our movie came about during the actual filming. For example, the “what the hell this is!?” line was an idea that our cameraman actually came up with in passing during the middle of one of our breaks. Perhaps it was because of our strict time line but then entire production crew’s creative juices flowed all throughout filming. This only goes to show that no matter how perfect one thinks their script is, it can always be improved.
Even though the first half of our film was roughly five minutes of live action, it took quite some time and effort to make it. Omar and I learned that no matter how short the production may seem on paper and in terms of time, there is a significant amount of work that goes into each and every single second of filming.
We learned a lot from this experience and Inshallah the next movie we make will be twice as good as the first one.
Firaz.
During the production, Firaz and I (Omar) were hoping to spend a bit of time on this. We especially wanted to spend some time creating a moody atmosphere in the “Tariq and Yousef: The Reality Behind the Facade” mockumentary. We looked at other documentaries and wanted to create the same dreary feel that some of their music uses, to depict something wrong. We also thought that Firaz’s “Oh Firaz, WHAT THE HELL THIS IS?!” quote would have been funny to sample for our end credit song, so we were looking forward to making that as well.
At the same time I needed an excuse to use a $400 VST (virtual synthesizer) I bought, that would emulate an Orchestra. Omair (our friend who helped out in recording) loved playing with that synth and was looking forward to helping out.
We left it as the last thing to do in our Post-Production, and as time went on we saw that we couldn’t afford to spend much time on this area. When we finished everything else, we had an hour and a half to write all the music. And at this point Omair couldn’t be a part of this process.
By the way we made the music on my PC, using BUZZ (an open source ie. free music sequencer/mixer/productiontable/recorder/etc.) very powerful stuff that’s very hard to use. I’d suggest an easier program, the easiest is Fruity Loops and it only goes for $90 or so last I checked.
So the first sacrifice we made was the music for the documentary. We thought that to keep consistant with our cheesy presentation (in our minds, our characters “Omar” and “Firaz” were a bunch of untalented hacks who think they’re hot stuff), a cheesy synth chord or sweep would have sufficed. Basically holding down one key and playing with the filter knob was what I was thinking. But we were running out of time, and we just held down C on a synth (a free one called EVM UltraSonique) on a patch called Ionizer, that has a sequence controller to generate a melody. I was thinking of having different melodies, or different synth patches for the different scenes in the video, but Firaz pointed out that we literally have no time and we should just slap the same thing all over. So with the exception of the Baby invasion scene, we did. It did add to the whole cheesy feel in the end. The Baby invasion scene was done using the free Superwave P8 synth (gated it). Having that in there also helped to add a tiny bit of variety. Oh, and the cake ruining scene did use my fancy Orchestral VST.
And then we thought we had to have a song in the beginning. The reason for this is because the audio in the beginning consists of Firaz tapping and myself shuffling papers, something that will be very quiet, it would prompt people to turn up their volume when they shouldn’t. By having a little jingle, it would let people know the appropriate volume to have it at. We spent way too much time on this, a good 1/2 hour just trying ideas (ideally I’d like to spend a whole day searching for something, but we had no time) and I just climbed up the C Major Triad up the keyboard, and I asked Firaz if that reminded him of the end of them for The Office. He said yeah, and we should adopt it. So I played C, E, G, E, C, E, G until he interrupted me and told me to end it with a C an octave higher. So yeah, as you can see our creative process is a bit lame. It’s fitting though, considering most of the movie’s ideas were developed on the spot. I look forward to when we make something with a bit more pre-planning!
And then the credits song we were all itching to do. At this point we had a few minutes we could devote to it, and I could see Firaz drifting in and out of conciousness. We were hoping to build this great ultimate song spanning multiple genres…but I figured to just get it done, to crack open one of the many “sketches” I’ve written. That is, 4 bars of an idea I had for a song. I had one song that I sketched out the emulated the French House sound (popularized by Daft Punk to Western Audiences). But I had issues getting my sample on key when sped up (I sampled “Jive Soul Bro”, an old WWF theme song for The Slickster). So we prep up the “Firaz!” sample, cut it up so it’s on beat, and play it, and it sounds pretty good, but you can hear that funk sample sounding weird with my bassline. After 20 minutes of trying to tweak it, I give up and just go with a simple off-beat bass. Now, the sound I used was from another free synth called AAA Donk Machine. “Donk” is basically a donky sounding bass sound, and it has spawned a genre of dance music (that is despised by many). But I figured it sounded good and so we used it, and then used some side-chain compression to give the song even more of a bouncy feel. After deciding to let go of that one funk sample, making the song took 5 minutes, and I suppose you can hear that it’s quite simple. Oh yeah, I did add a synth to fill out the mid range, and gave it a simple rhythm (some of the rhythm comes from the compression). So ultimately this song we wanted to spend a lot of time on took 25 minutes of playing around and 5 minutes of composing it once we decided to keep it simple.
In the Credits Firaz is put as “MC Farooq” and I’m “nrXic”, which is my artist handle, check out my tunage here: http://www.myspace.com/nrxic (oh yeah gotta sneak in that plug)
Check out the song here, or download it (right click and select “Save Target/Link As…”) and pump it up at your wedding.
For the audio I (Omar) bought a pretty cheap 8-channel Behringer mixer that had 2 XLR inputs.
We were thinking of getting wireless mics for all 5 of our actors (well, until we found they weren’t gonna show and we came up with the idea of just having Firaz and I in it), but then realized one boom mic would have made our lives a lot simpler. So I got an Apex mic and when trying it (along with 40 ft of XLR cable) on Firaz’s laptop it gave us a bit more noise than what we wanted.
So we attributed it to the laptop, I brought in my PC and the sound was reduced, but still there. When using Audacity’s noise filters it introduced a warbly sounding artifacts. At that time it was too late to try another setup, so we stuck with it.
To record, we had the mic on a part of a broken mic stand, and that taped to a broomstick. Firaz’s youngest brother, Bilal, held it for the great majority of the scenes, while Omair monitored it through headphones while it was being recorded on the computer. I didn’t do a great tape job (duct tape was used) and so sometimes the rubbing of the broomstick and the mic stand caused some unwanted noise. The job was hard on young Bilal’s arms, and we had to make sure to give him breaks. The job was hard on Omair’s ears too, as sometimes Bilal would inadvertantly (or not) have it hit a surface.
After it was recorded, what we did with the raw files was to first use the Noise Removal Tool, then I compressed it (quick attack, 3:1…could have been a bit much), and then gained it. The following is an image to demonstrate the difference (click for larger image).
Before on top, after processing on the bottom. As you can see the compression took out some of the dynamics (there are less loud parts and quieter parts, it’s generally smoother for a more “even” listening experience), and there is no noise on the bottom one (look at the start of the file on the left side).
For the “Tariq and Yousef: The Reality Behind the Facade” portion, I did the same but didn’t compress it and added a bit of a bass boost, which hopefully gave it more of a personal narrative feel to it.
In general I’m not very happy with how the noise removal worked out. We’ve noticed on some sound systems (like a car’s), those artifacts come out real bad and are too distracting. On stereo systems where you got the “Disco Smile” going on (bass and treble boosted with the mid-range around normal) it’s definitely noticable. My desktop speakers, headphones (consumer quality) and TV though, sounds fine. I can hear it when I listen for it, but most of our test audience (ie. friends and family) didn’t notice it.
The best thing to do is to eliminate it at the source and I fear that the fact that I used the phono out from the mixer was a part of it, plus there is a lot of electronics in that area, maybe it’s a shielding issue? If any experts know, please share!
-addendum-
Since the filming I’ve done a bit more research and found a few ways to get rid of noise. One is to plug in my mixer somewhere else. During filming it was plugged into a powerbar that was plugged into another powerbar that was full of a lot of other stuff. That and the mixer was sitting by a whole bunch of other electronics…so I’m not ruling out interference and I think it’s a good plan to have it somewhere else. Secondly, the noise filter in Audacity has been improved in a beta version as it has an attack setting and a filter to help take out the warble sound. After trying the beta version on the raw recordings we had for the movie, it sounded excellent…just perfect. And so I suggest getting the beta version of Audacity (version 1.33 onwards will have this improved filtering) if you want real clean audio. Funny thing is that the beta was out when I was making the movie, I should have reinstalled the program at the time and our audio would have sounded even better.
