Jeff Toyne is a composer whose oeuvre includes feature films, many shorts — including two nominated for Academy Awards, composer for “The Two Coreys” on A&E and is renowned for his extensive orchestrations for Hollywood features such as District 9 and Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.  He splits his time between Vancouver and the States; back in December of 2008, we met up at his Los Angeles studio to discuss his career and insights into composing music for the moving image.

WOODY: How did you get started in music?

JEFF: I was thinking about music as a career in high school.  What solidified it for me was the summer I spent at Interlochen in Michigan, which is a wonderful music and arts camp.  At school, I did well in most subjects, but music really challenged me.  I wasn’t a prodigy by any stretch of the imagination, but I played the piano well, so I went to university with piano as my instrument.  I started on a music education track, which allowed me to learn the basics of many orchestral instruments, but my secret desire was to switch over to piano performance.  I had a wonderful piano teacher who was actually one of the only students that Horowitz ever admitted to teaching, and he was a great pianist and a really great guy.  Previous teachers had allowed me to develop some bad technical habits that I was always able to overcome, but the only way for me to get to the top level of repertoire would be to stop everything, go back to basics and rebuild my technique from the ground up.  That would take a year or two, but I needed to perform a recital at the end of every semester.  There was just no way to go all the way back again unless I took a year or two off.  So performing fell away as a possibility for me, and at the same time I took more advanced theory and composition courses, for which I showed aptitude.  I became more interested writing music, so I did a Masters in Composition.

WOODY: What were some of the first compositions you worked on?

JEFF: Growing up taking piano lessons, I’d improvise something and my teacher would say “you should write that down.”  One of my first experiences writing was in high school.  I put together an R&B band that had a horn section, but the players didn’t play by ear, so I transcribed and arranged the horn charts for them.  In retrospect, that was a really good exercise to fuel my interest in composing. The last year of my undergrad I did my first film score, which was a feature that I recorded with a 13-piece big band and an eight-piece chamber ensemble.  I had no sequencing software; I wrote it in Finale.  And that’s how I was synching to picture; I was playing back in Finale and pressing play on my VCR.  When I came to USC I was so ready for that course because I had actually scored a film, not knowing how to do it.  So I had all the questions.

WOODY: What made you decide to go into film composing instead of focusing on other types of work?

JEFF: By the time I was in my third or fourth year of undergrad, I saw the music that I wrote and the kinds of composition that I was interested in, had a place in film.  I was interested in aleatoric composition, pandiatonic stuff…  The serial stuff wasn’t really where I wanted to go; even the new tonality was interesting to me, minimalism as well, and all these things had places in film.  I’m not just a “classical music” guy, I had experience in Jazz, Blues and Rock as well.  I struggle now as a film composer to find a hole that people can niche me into, but I came to film because of eclecticism.  I imagined that I could actually make a living – get paid to write music and have orchestras record this music.  This seemed like the way to go.

WOODY: That sounds like a good way to come about a career where you get paid for it, and you work with world-class musicians and sync it to the film, and it becomes an emotional experience for people and their understanding of your music.

JEFF: I really believe that Wagner’s idea of gesamtkunstwerk is alive in film today.  I think films represent his idea of total artworks.  They bring together artists from every field to completely envelop an audience in every sense and involve them in the story.  If I have a score that’s attached to a film, that’s the way to reach the most people.  The Beatles or Madonna may reach more people, but I think a couple of people saw Star Wars!  So I’m really happy to be involved.  One of the reasons that I think directors like to work with well-known performing artists, is because of the idea that you’re bringing in people who are experts from other fields.  If you come in and you’ve already sold a couple of million records, then maybe we should listen to your idea before we tell you how it’s going to be.  They have something they can offer, something they can bring to the film.

WOODY: So you’ve worked with Ed Shearmur on a couple of things.  Tell me a little bit about the collaboration between the two of you and what you did for him and also the value that you’ve taken out of it as a composer.

JEFF: I started working for Ed straight out of school as an assistant.  I was really lucky to be recommended to him.  I’d just graduated USC, and he was looking for a new assistant.  I think they recommended three or four people based on the software he was using and the kind of things he was looking for. So I started off getting tea and making sure lunch happened at 1 o’clock and making sure the couch didn’t go anywhere.  He was really linear about the responsibility that he doled out, but it began very much in the technical arena.  Some of my first tasks were sorting out word clock issues and making sure samples were organized and loaded.  After assisting him for a month or two, my first musical job was cutting together piano takes for K-PAX.  He was really searching for the right piano sound for K-PAX.  Giga piano was new at that time, so he had a pass done with that, and he went to Capital Records and he recorded on Nat King Cole’s piano.  He recorded a Disklavier and he wasn’t completely happy with any one of them.  He wanted to be able to A, B, C any pass at any one time, so he had me go in and slice those performances to match each other.  So that was my first slightly musical job. Then at some point, I think on The Sweetest Thing, I did some music copying.  After a year or so I got a chance to orchestrate a couple of cues on Reign of Fire, which was a big opportunity, and then I started doing more orchestrations for films after that.  I worked for him for about three years full time.

WOODY: What were you able to take from that, now yourself as a composer, having worked with someone like that?

JEFF: One of my USC instructors said that if you’re an assistant, you can see how a composer does his job; how he interacts with the director, producers, engineers, musicians; and you’re right next to the heat, but it’s not your heat.  That’s a really great place to be.  You’re a fly on the wall.  You’re assisting someone who’s working at the highest level for A-list Hollywood films and you can see how they’re doing it and you’re involved.  You’ll inevitably make some mistakes as you’re learning.  But that’s his career that you’re making your mistakes and learning on.  So that’s a really valuable chance to be given – to cut your chops on somebody else’s dime, in a way.  I’m really grateful for that experience.  Ed is an uncannily gifted musician and film composer.  He’s just a force to be reckoned with.  Here’s a guy who has amazing classical chops, concert pianist skills and rock ‘n’ roll credentials to boot.  He brings those two together.  And he’s one of those people that will never ask you to do anything that he couldn’t do himself.  It was quite intimidating to work for someone so talented.  In addition to the musical component, he was adept at understanding the drama and getting inside the structure of the movie and the interaction of the characters.  His ability to get to the heart of what the filmmakers were trying to do dramatically and how the music may affect them — that was really impressive.  It’s one thing to write a beautiful piece of music, but it’s another thing to have that beautiful piece of music be the right tone and start at the right time and be the right emotional variant that makes sense dramatically.  He was very good at that.

WOODY: Tell us about the process of composing a film.  When do you get involved, and how do you start the process with the director?

JEFF: I like to be involved as early as possible, even to the point where I’m reading the script and having conversations with the director before they shoot to discuss themes and what the sonic landscape might be like.  And having that kind of time takes away some of the pressure, especially on a lower budget movie.  As a filmmaker, you can give a composer all of this time in lieu of the fact that you can’t pay them very much, but you still want it to be really good.  I’ve found that if I’m able to be brought in really early it’s nice to have that in the back of your mind somewhere just fermenting and having conversations, thinking about how it might go and maybe even putting down some material that the director can have on set or they can at least be thinking about.  So, I’d like to be brought in as early as possible, but generally the real work starts to happen once they have a cut to look at.  One of the main goalposts in the production schedule is the spotting session, when the filmmakers have an edit and they’re ready to start thinking seriously about the sound.  So they come in, and we watch the film.  Spotting always takes longer than we think it’s going to take, at least eight hours for a feature, sometimes more.  We talk in detail about where each piece of music is going to start and, if there is a temp score, where it is starting and where it should start and what it does and what it’s supposed to do.  These discussions can really become quite protracted and abstract.  It’s an important step of the process.

WOODY: How do you approach the work when a director comes to you with a temp score?

JEFF: I don’t have a problem with temporary score.  I think a temp score is a good way to have both of us point at something and talk about it objectively.  Composers will generally say that they want directors to talk not in musical terms, but in dramatic terms.  They want them to talk about character and emotion and mood and feeling; how they want the audience to react; as opposed to, “Oh, I think this should be an oboe or cello.”  What a temp score can do is it can allow you both to say, “Okay that music there, I don’t know what it is, but it works with this scene at this moment for some reason.”  Or, “Here I don’t like it, there’s something that is not right.”  And at least it allows you to very quickly say, “Yeah, this is a great place for music to come in, this is a great place for music to come out and this mood is kind of what I was going for.”  So in that regard a temp score is a useful tool.  And we can’t deny that they are absolutely necessary when the directors need to show their film to other people and get finishing funds or to submit to festivals or get distribution.  They need to show the film in the best light they possibly can.  There’s going to be a temp score in there whether you as a composer listen to it or not.  Where the problem generally comes in is when they’ve spent a lot of time with the temp score and are having a really hard time getting away from the temp score or are not really interested in trying a new approach.

WOODY: How do you combat that when a director is really attached to a piece in their temp score and they feel that you the composer are not getting what they want?

JEFF: You have to pick your battles.  Depending on the situation, as a last ditch effort, if it seems there’s nothing else that you can possibly do, you can suggest they try to license the piece.  “If I’m not going to replace this, you should really license this.”  The last film I did, I went around a couple of times with the director who was having trouble getting away from the temp.  He had a song at the end of the film that when we first started I could tell he loved, and they were supposed to be able to license it.  So I said, “You know what, if you’re going to license this song, I will take the melodic motive from this song and I will weave this into the rest of the film.”  Music can offer this to a film: unity and diversity.  So we’ll have this little motive that will tie everything together and after we’ve heard these little fragments, then at the end of the film we’ll hear the full song and it’ll feel familiar and satisfying and everything will be great.  And so we did this and a week before they were going to mix the film they said, “You know what, it turns out that we can’t really get this song unless we pay another “x” dollars, can you replace the song?”  And I thought, “Can I replace this song that you’ve been living with in an edit for two years, that you’ve had in your record collection for five years before that, and when you were writing the film were probably listening to this song?  Can I replace this?  Of course I can, no problem.”  I did kind of drag my heels for a few days, saying, “Are you sure,” giving them time to flip-flop back.  Finally he said, “We’re really sure,” so I finally did it and I spent another two or three days on it.  And I thought I had come up with something.  Then a couple days later they said, “you know what, we decided to pay the extra money and get the song.”  So that’s a situation where I can’t say that I won or lost.  The film got made, the filmmaker got what he wanted and the lesson there is that people will always find the time and money to do what they really want to do.  Sometimes the way a song is of its time suggests not only the meanings of the song, but also the meaning of the situation that the filmmaker was in when he first heard it and the things that were going on in the world.  But at the end of the day, I keep in mind that we’re all working towards having a good film that affects audiences.  I basically have a can-do attitude about it.  I’m not super precious about the music.  There’s a push and pull between the needs of the film and our need for artistic integrity.

WOODY: I go through that all the time as a sound designer and mixer because the choices made ultimately are not mine.

JEFF: Exactly.  But that being said, nine times out of ten the filmmakers have really good reasons for the choices that they make.

WOODY: Absolutely.

JEFF: Their ability to see the film from beginning to end in one vista is amazing.  I definitely get myopic sometimes.  In the same way that they have to trust me to deliver their score on time and on budget and do a good job and get what their story’s about, I have to trust them that they’ve been living with this a whole lot longer than I have.

WOODY: Do you set the cue points, the director or both?

JEFF: The last couple of films that I’ve done there’s been a temp score.  Either an editor (ideally a music editor, but usually the picture editor) or the director have already kind of gone through a couple of times, at least for themselves, to see where music might go.  Often, as in Shadow in the Trees, we may come to a couple of points in the film where there isn’t temp music and I think we might try having a cue.  I generally leave it with, “Let me try something and if I think it’s working I’ll show it to you, and if I don’t think it’s working I won’t.”  That gives me options. We have these kinds of conversations about whether or not we think this should be here or there, and if so, why.  And then we’re into it, we’re starting to do show and tells, (what we call the meetings after the spotting session), where usually a director is coming over to my studio, or I am occasionally sending QuickTime movies over the internet or sometimes mp3’s for them to slide into their timeline.

WOODY: And these are sort of sketches or demos even though it may be an orchestrated piece?

JEFF: Nowadays, demos are expected to be pretty detailed.  If it’s a director that I have worked with before, and we both have confidence in their ability to extrapolate from a sketch, then I don’t need to spend as much time on the demos, and can spend more of my time writing.  If they’re really nervous about how it’s going to go, then I’ll make the demo more fleshed out and more “convincing.”

WOODY: What kind of timeframe are we talking about from your spotting session to really having fleshed out cues?

JEFF: Well, a composer is supposed to be able to crank out anywhere from 3-5 minutes a day.  That’s really smokin’.  The big boys do that.  They’ll do fully realized, big orchestral demos like that, 3 minutes a day for sure.  So if you’ve got a schedule where you’re scoring a film and you have six weeks to do it, and there’s 60 minutes of music in the film…it starts to just play out.  You need to be showing the director every couple of days a certain amount of music so that they’ve seen everything and you have time for notes, changes, music prep, recording, mixing and everything like that.  I heard that Danny Elfman usually has two parties when he gets a job.  One’s a going away party, and one’s a welcome back party when he’s done.

WOODY: Let’s talk more about the process for you.  Do you find that you are generally the composer, the performer, the recordist and the mixer?  How do you break that out?

JEFF: Yes, but at every opportunity I will hand off a job to an expert. I’m delighted to have a mixing engineer at least mix my music.  Sometimes it’s just a matter of time, there isn’t enough time to get files over to somebody and back or to have somebody come in.  In terms of performing, to be honest with you, I would really rather have somebody else play.  The piano part I can go in and tweak the midi, but we have a beautiful grand piano out there (in the tracking room of my studio).  I’d rather bring in a pianist with great touch. I remember one time I had a violinist come in and she was trying to play along with the demo and for some reason it just wasn’t happening.  After a couple of takes, I asked her to play with a little more vibrato and a little more portamento.  And she said, “Oh, I was trying to get it to sound exactly like the demo.”  I said, “No, no, I want you to play like a human being.  The reason I brought you in is because the demo sounds like that.  I don’t want it to sound like that!”  When somebody’s interpreting your music, there’s another level of musicality going on there.  I tend to write for instruments in a way that they’ll sound the best.  And I really try to avoid situations where I am trying to do something with samples.  If I know I’m going to be doing a synth score, then it won’t be an orchestral sound.  And if I’m using orchestra stuff, then I’ll try and write in a way that’s idiomatic for the instruments. I really do believe that this is a collaborative art form, and I’m happy to not be here by myself all day.  I’m delighted to have someone come in and music edit, someone come in and do the copying and bring in any performers I possibly can.  But the best experience is to record with an orchestra. That’s the juice for the composers.

WOODY: Have you been thrown for a loop on shows?

JEFF: This is where the spotting session comes in and you kind of have to know your audience, as small as it is.  I’ve worked with Steve McLaughlin and one of his big successes was with Badly Drawn Boy for the score for About a Boy.  He said that a film composer only has an audience of one.  You only have to convince a director that your music is good, sometimes with a producer or a little committee.  But even at best you’re convincing 15 guys or girls that this is good music as opposed to someone who goes out and tours their album and convinces a hundred thousand people that their music is good.

WOODY: Have you found yourself in a situation where you’ve had a spotting session and you thought you were on the same page and you’re presenting cues, yet they’re scratching their head going that’s not really right?  Or has the temp score sort of solved that and you understand what they want?

JEFF: I’ve definitely been in situations where I’ve just missed the mark and there are different reasons that happened.  As a student there was one film that was supposed to have authentic Japanese kabuki theater music. Under time pressure I just fired up the sampler and put anything remotely Asian on there.  The director came back and said, “No that’s Chinese, and that’s a Thai gong, and that’s Korean, that is Japanese, but it’s not kabuki and I really need this to be authentic kabuki theater music.”  So that was a huge miss and a failure to listen carefully to what the director had already said. Film music can occasionally give a composer the opportunity to dive into unfamiliar territory, and explore exotic instruments and musical styles. This is an opportunity and a risk. It helps to be a quick study, but more importantly to hear what your director is telling you.

WOODY: When you’re creating a score what sort of problems arise?

JEFF: There’s occasionally a conversation that kind of goes around when the demos and samples don’t really show the score very well, but you know it will sound great when played by live players.  There’s only so much of that that a director, especially one without a lot of experience, can really take.  So sometimes I have to go back and spend more time that I really wish I didn’t have to spend polishing a demo that’s going to have many elements replaced by recorded live players.  On indie films, it’s a soul-crushing conversation to have to say we don’t have the time to spend this level of detail on every single cue because we’ll just run out of the amount of time and money that is available for this movie. So what happens is directors often on indie films have to wear producer’s hats, and I often have to wear my agent’s hat.  They’re trying to get the best for their film, and I have to somehow be gently realistic saying, “You need to understand that I really want your film to be great, and I want to do a good job for your film, but we don’t have unlimited time and money.”  Unfortunately, especially when they’re doing it for the first time, they’re doing everything at a low-budget level so they don’t really know, necessarily, what things actually cost.  Composers like to be problem solvers.  We like to find creative ways to solve problems and our number one problem is often they don’t have enough time or enough money.

WOODY: Do you have any kind of theory for composing or do you have a way of working in terms of the creation of the music?  Or is it just really inspired by the picture and the story?

JEFF: Every project is different.  I tend to try and find something that I can use as a starting point and often it might be an instrument that makes sense as a voice that relates somehow to the characters in the story.  I’m usually driven by points in the story that we can take and extrapolate out into musical references. Usually films are thematic and they generally fall into either one theme for the whole movie or themes for individual characters and/or ideas.  When they have themes for individual characters and ideas, they start to resemble more classical opera forms.  Most of the films I find myself working on as the orchestrator or the composer, you say, “Oh this guy is on the screen and he’s doing this and there’s his theme.”  It’s a pretty accepted practice.  In film, melody is king and we’re generally writing melodies that have significance that we can attach to dramatic ideas.

WOODY: How do you go about getting work?

JEFF: When I was just starting out as a student at USC, I went down to the film school to put a poster up that said “Composer Available,” next to the poster that said “Composer Wanted.”  I did a lot of student films.  My main kind of networking has been just to stay in touch with the directors that I met when they were students.  I also get a lot of work from friends of mine that are composers.  A lot of work.  My first student film in LA was from a friend that couldn’t do it.  And he said, “Why don’t you get my buddy to do it, he can do a good job.”  My first television show was from a friend who was a composer who couldn’t do that show because they needed specifically a Canadian composer, and he only knew one Canadian composer, so he said, “You should call Jeff, he’s Canadian.”  It’s funny, I remember reading a marketing how-to and it said make to sure that people know what it is that you want to do.  So, just tell your friends and family, “This is what I want to do,” you never know who they’re going to run into that is looking for something like that.

WOODY: On a different note, tell us about your composition “No Fanfare” for the 2010 Winter Olympics.

JEFF: “No Fanfare” was a commission from the Vancouver Symphony.  When Vancouver was successful for the 2010 Winter Olympics bid, the Symphony decided to commission young composers to write short, 3-minute works on Olympic inspired themes.  They specifically said not to write fanfares because there are already so many great ones out there.  And so, the title of my piece is “No Fanfare”.  I thought if I said it’s not a fanfare, if it sounds a little fanfare-like then you can’t blame me, it says right in the title it’s not a fanfare.  But it also made sense with what I was interested in exploring musically.  I was interested in exploring musically some of the emotional landscape of the athletes that compete and don’t really do well by gold, silver and bronze standards.  If you compete and you place 76th, yes you’re proud that you went to the Olympics, but I wondered what that was like. I wanted to have a piece that was exciting for the audience, so I imagined a race where there were people racing at the same time, not against the clock.  If you start the race and freeze-frame somewhere in the middle, then consider all the possibilities that expand forth in separate timelines, nobody has won and nobody has lost yet and everything is still possible.  At that moment everyone is a potential winner and everyone is a potential loser and that’s the most exciting part of the race, when it’s actually happening.  Musically this had nice tie-ins to the Winter Olympics because you’re thinking of freezing things, flash-freezing a moment, and you have reflections in ice and things like this, so that’s kind of how I got into it musically.

WOODY: And that was played when exactly?

JEFF: The Vancouver Symphony performed it a couple of times in 2005, and now they have it in their repertoire.  I haven’t really spent a lot of energy pushing it further into the classical concert world, but that was a very blank page: writing a piece of concert music after being in film for a couple of years.  I have been exploring that side of music further.

WOODY: What advice would give a new or first time director in terms of collaboration with a composer?

JEFF: I think one of the bigger pet peeves is that music comes as an afterthought, that directors start to think about music really late in the process.  Maybe they’re thinking about sound late in the process, but this is half of the experience.  People are taking in the film through their eyes and their ears.  Directors have so much to think about, I know they do, to make a film.  There are so many different parts that go into it, but you can get a lot more out of your composer (or any crew member) if they feel that their job is valued and their contribution is valued because you’re thinking about the music early.  My advice to a director would be to think about the sound and music when they’re writing their script, when they’re doing their prep, when they’re shooting. Begin talking and thinking about music even at that early stage.  There’s nothing more stressful than being out of money and out of time and having to come to somebody and say, “Can you drop everything and do this?”  That’s really, really difficult to do.  And I really don’t want to have to say no to somebody.  Part of my job is to go on a journey and figure out what it is that this movie is supposed to be.  But films don’t get made overnight.  If you have a conversation while you’re in pre-production then you’ve got plenty of time to think about what it might be.

Human hearing of frequencies is calculated on a scale of hertz or cycles per second.  The commonly defined range of human hearing is 20 hertz to 20,000 hertz per second.  A graphical EQ device, be it a hardware version or a software plug-in like those shown here generally work within that range. (Depending on your age and life experiences your hearing may be markedly less than this…)   In the application of boosting or cutting particular frequencies there are also a few controls which determine how the boost or cut will be applied.  The first is the particular frequency itself, the second is the amount of boost or cut, usually described in decibels, and third is the “Q” or width of the boost or cut.  If the horizontal line is flat, as shown here, then no EQ processing is happening.

10 band parametric EQ

Looking at the photo here you can see the controls just described.  This particular EQ is a 10 band EQ meaning that you can affect 10 different bands or frequencies at one time.

The graph indicates the frequency to be affected sorted with the low frequencies at the left of the graph to the high frequencies at the right.  Each ‘band’ has several controls – on/off, the type of “curve” to be applied, the gain or amount of the processing, the frequency where things are being applied, the Q of the processing and the overall input of the source and the output after processing.

Bell EQ curve

Here is a bell curve which looks sort of like a – bell.  This is a very common way to apply EQ to a particular frequency.  The Q is set to very wide so it is affecting a wide range of frequencies that are near the key frequency.  Applying EQ to satisfaction is to determine the central frequency to be affected, the size of the Q and the shape of the curve and the amount of gain that is being cut or boosted.

Shelf EQ curve

Here is a shelf curve that sort of looks like – yes – a shelf.  Different EQ makers apply this differently and this one makes a slight cut prior to the boost.  By the way these are pretty extreme boosts being made in these examples to more clearly show what is being discussed.  Often EQ will be applied at much lower boosts or cuts and at several different frequencies.  The idea with EQ is generally to do as little as possible to affect the desired change.  You can easily mangle the recorded audio to something unacceptable.

Low Pass and High Pass filters

This picture shows a different type of EQ – the curve at the left is called a “High pass” filter and the curve at the right is called a “Low pass” filter.  These filters will remove all of the frequencies at the cut off frequency.  So, in this example, the high pass filter removes all frequencies below 100 hertz and the low pass filter removes all frequencies above 10,000 hertz.  These are very useful filters for removing unwanted elements of recordings.

These “pass filters” are powerful tools for affecting the recorded audio being processed.  Here are a few examples that might shed light on their particular usage.  Let’s say that your boom man has trouble holding the pole and his fingers are creating small “boom” sounds during the recording.  Often these noises are very low in the frequency range and are difficult to hear without a sub-woofer.  A high pass filter may remove all of the noises without affecting the quality of the recording.  Or perhaps the tracks sound a bit “murky” so a slight presence boost at 2.5K or 3.5K may help “lift” the voice and a small cut at 300 – 400 may remove a bit of “boominess.”   If you look at the EQ that has a low and high pass filter applied you’ll see that it creates a “band” of frequencies that will pass through it.  The other name for this sort of setting is a “band-pass” EQ and these can useful in a number of ways.  Since band passes limit the frequency range of a recorded signal they are useful for many things. Many devices such a telephones have a “limited band-width” so you can mimic this bandwidth with a band pass filter. 

Notch at 1K

Let’s say you hear a steady noise in your recording that is present in the upper frequencies.  You may want to try a “notch filter” which can notch out the offending frequency.  Here several bands are tied together to really define the notch.  The idea here is to carve out only the offending frequency and try not to disturb anything else around it.  As you can see a graphical EQ is a very handy way of visualizing your sound.  Mix engineers will often “sweep” the notch along that horizontal range of frequencies until the frequency range to reduce or add is pinpointed.  Notches can be very useful in eliminating any type of steady state noise.  Steady is the key idea because if the noise or sound oscillates to other frequencies then the notch is no longer relevant since it is specific to only a narrow range of frequency.

EQ is an amazing tool with many useful applications.  However it is not a miracle device and it is most certainly not a noise reduction device.  It can indeed reduce noise but it is less successful at that than a dedicated noise reduction device is.  There are “broad band” noises such as air conditioners that cross many frequencies at one time.  They usually can not be notched or pass filtered out.  They will require some different processing, but if you need simple boosts or cuts or if you have tones that need to be minimized or emphasized in your recordings that are steady state, EQ will be the right tool to use.

This is merely a quick explanation of this wonderful, misunderstood and useful tool.  Experiment with EQ and learn how each of the controls affect the frequencies.  Learn how cutting and boosting achieves different effects and how specific frequencies affect specific sources.  Listen to the world at large and imagine if you had to use EQ to recreate the sounds you hear.  Walk by a stone building with music playing inside, loud but boomy and distant, what EQ curves might be applied to a standard music track to achieve a similar sound?  Listen to the world around you. This in time will guide you on how to use EQ to mimic the sounds in and of everyday life.  And then use those ideas to create the sounds you hear from this world – or others. Comment with thoughts, ideas or questions at will.

I was recently mixing a broadcast project with some serious audio issues.  These production issues are always a head scratcher.  There was an interview of two subjects sitting side by side.  One was distorted and sounded like they were in a wind tunnel, the other sounded clean.  The scene cut between a two-shot and individual close-up shots of the talent.  None of the audio cuts even remotely matched even though they were sitting next to each other!   Blasts of clean audio cut to distorted audio cut to the wind tunnel.  I was asked to “clean it up a bit.”   Easier said than done!

I started checking through my box of tools to tackle the problem and several fit the bill.  I won’t name the other programs but one of them wouldn’t authorize although I’ve owned it for over a year.  Their website was useless for this and they wanted me to pay for support.  I can’t quite figure out how these companies have the gall to charge me to figure out why the program I bought and paid for won’t load.   But … that is a rant for another day!  Let’s just say that I have had these problems with this company before and now I’ve finally “washed” my hands of their noise reduction product and them.  (hint, hint…)

RX has five separate modes for tackling tough audio problems.  These are not unique to iZotope since these are the types of tools generally found in similar sorts of programs.  However the iZotope implementation has a wide variety of parameters to adjust how the source file is being effected.  These are very powerful tools with a real range of abilities.  A brief description of each is -

Declipper – a repair algorithm that finds and repairs analog or digital clipping or overmodulation.

Declicker – a repair algorithm that finds and repairs clicks and crackles from recordings.

Hum removal – a repair algorithm that finds and repairs hum and buzz.

Denoiser – a repair algorithm that finds and repairs pesky broadband noise problems.

Spectral Repair – a repair algorithm that finds and repairs random noise within an audio file.  Pretty cool feature.

Unfortunately for me I had to use each of these tools on this interview.  And they rocked it.  The hum removal is an adjustable comb filter that takes out the main frequency hum and it’s associated harmonics.  (Comb filters are filters of many small bands that graphically look like a – comb.)  This has many parameters to adjust and worked like a charm right off the bat.  Next I had several bits of horribly distorted audio.  Using the declipper tool I was able to make things sound less awful.  Not great but definitely better.  I can’t blame RX on this one, fingers pointed squarely at the sound recordist.  Each of these tools have a box where you can audition only the portion of the audio which is being filtered, adjusted, manipulated or repaired.  I wanted to check that the decipper was actually addressing the issue and when I listed to only the audio to be repaired lo and behold all I heard was distortion.  So although it didn’t “fix” the file it took some of the edge off.

Next up was the A/C – wind tunnel problem.  This was a real treat.  I used the denoiser tool to clean these audio bites up.  As is the case with other similar tools on the market you find a “clean” portion of the noise (huh??) and “train” the filter what to remove.  Once it’s trained you process the file.  There are a couple of denoiser algorithms and I found in this case the “offline” ones worked best.  I am working in ProTools and you can run the RX tools as inserts to process the track in real time.  Since these had so many different noise problems I hard-processed the files and rewrote them.  These higher powered algorithms are not available as a real time insert and instead process offline – or in other words rewrite the file with the processing.  The difference was stunning.  All of a sudden I was able to match the audio files to sound like they were actually – recorded well!

This is a highly effective tool for audio post.  I have not used it specifically on music sources but if you check their website out you’ll see several powerful demonstrations specific to music.  I have used all of the major software vendors for noise reduction as well as the high-end hardware units.  Now this can’t compete with the dedicated hardware solutions but it’s not thousands of dollars either.  If you find yourself up against difficult audio restoration in your projects I would highly recommend RX as a solution.  These tools can make you a hero to the producers who want a “little clean up” on their horrible audio recordings!

Simply put an OMF file is a digital container of all the audio files, edits, crossfades, pans and volume automation from your non-linear video editing platform.  It is a mighty handy tool compared to the old way of doing things. 

Here is a screenshot from Final Cut Pro.  You can see that there are eight tracks of audio, the top four of which are muted.

There is volume automation, panning information and a general temp mix in this edit timeline.  When we export the OMF from this timeline it will include tracks 5 – 8 only.  The OMF sees those muted tracks and leaves them out of the final export.  Most sound editors will want it all.  So I’d say unmute before the OMF creation.

Also a small FYI for those of you still using Final Cut 5 and below, the OMF is not a full spec OMF file.  It will not include volume automation, which if it’s feature length can create whole lot of extra work.  Not that you won’t re-mix from the ground up which is usually the case, but the temp mix can be a real time-saver for long projects.

I’ve also included a screenshot of the actual export of the OMF from the Final Cut Program.  Nothing fancy just a simple pull-down under File/Export – you can see – Audio to OMF.

You’ll get another dialog box after that which will give you a few options.  One is the handle length or the amount of audio that will be included on either side of any cut.  Handles are very important and contain loads of valuable information for a sound editor.  I generally ask for handles to be at lease five seconds if possible.  The default in FCP is 30 frames or one second.  Another option is to include volume automation and I would also add that functionality as well.  You can also choose to include crossfades which can be re-created by ProTools or the program that will be importing the OMF if they are not included.  There was a bug a while back in OMF exports that was related to crossfades.  This is no longer an issue.

What has just been detailed here is merely the mechanics of creating the OMF file.  As you can see it is a pretty simple and straightforward process.  Avid, FCP and other leading non-linear video editors offer some sort of OMF functionality and exporting them are all about the same process.  Make sure to mark an in and an out point create the accompanying movie file as well as the OMF from these same stop and start points.

Now that we have detailed the process of the OMF export what should be on the timeline in your non-linear video editor?  In my humble opinion, in a world of “less is more”, for audio post I would say that “more is more”.  If you have alt takes of lines, include them.  If you have roomtones include them.  Please.  Pretty please.

In fact I’m going to stop there.  Roomtones are a key component in audio post.  Period.  Notice the use of the word – key.  Not optional, not “if I can get to it”, not anything other than – key.  Not having roomtone is like writing without an eraser, a delete key or white-out.  Whoever digitizes the original camera tapes or dats will surely come across them.  Digitize them and stick them in a folder to give the sound editor or better yet as I advised cut them into your timeline and export them with the OMF.

I often ask the production recordist why they did not include roomtones and am generally told that they did indeed record them.  But somehow they never found their way to audio post.  So what happens to them?  They get lost in the shuffle with the mistaken assumption that they are not all that important.

In general picture editing gets a bit of time to complete their process.  Sometimes months and sometimes a year will be spent creating the final locked picture edit.  At the end of that they want the audio edited, mixed and output pronto.  So the best picture editors assemble their audio in a meaningful way to make the audio editors task simpler.  One thing that must be remembered is that all of that audio will be picked through, sorted, rearranged and cut to different tracks by the sound editor since it is their’s and the mixer’s job is to create a set of mix stems.  The editor had to create only one stem – a stereo temp mix.  And because of that many picture editors get lazy and just have their audio fall any where there is is room on an audio track.  This is fine for their temp mix but will not do to create a proper mix.  If Sound effects and music and dialog are all jumbled in the timeline – they will also be jumbled in the OMF.

Who cares?  “The audio guy will sort it all out ….”  The person who will care is the person who foots the bill.  Why?  Because they are going to be paying good money for studio time and an experienced sound professional to do basic housecleaning on the OMF.  It may sound minor but audio post deliveries are always tight and getting tighter and to waste a whole lot of time on things that have nothing to do with sound design and mixing is also a waste of the Producer’s money.  If you have a feature length project where the audio tracks were assembled willy-nilly it will take considerable time to sort out.    I have received OMF’s when opened reveal that the boom track and the lav track swap from take to take.  My job is to find “the best” sound and make that sound better.  If the boom sounds best then that means I have to audition and sort every single sound bite to determine whether it is the boom or the lav.  There may be thousands of these audio files in the timeline.  If the editor has diligently always put the boom on one track and the lav on another then he has cut my prep time considerably and I can concentrate on the task of making the movie sound even better.  Feel free to comment with questions since this is a huge topic that I’ve barely touched on.

Todd Sklar, writer and director of “Box Elder” has just wrapped the first leg of his nationwide tour for the film.  The tag line for his movie “Box Elder” seems to sum up what it’s all about best – “On the the road to nowhere, these guys call shotgun.”  Todd took time out from scheduling the next leg of the tour to talk about directing, the tour and of course – sound.

WOODY: Many first time directors are more attuned to the visuals and the technical aspects regarding the picture than the audio and the recording process on set. Did you find that to be true for yourself?

TODD: I would say that for me story and performance always come first, but visually, as the technical aspect of the film, I understood that better. In a weird way sound is something that I am very acutely aware of when I am watching films but I have no practical production experience with it what so ever. It was more so the lack of know-how in the translation from point A to point B. I love overlapping dialogue and I really wanted that. I would always source “Mash”, you know how great that is.

WOODY: Altman was a master in his use of sound and production dialog.

TODD: Exactly, exactly. But I did not understand necessarily how much effort and work he put into that you know? They don’t have audio commentary tracks on DVD’s with sound guys talking about how you approach sound. The first time I watched “Boogie Nights” P.T. Anderson was talking about how they got that first tracking shot and so I can understand how to do that and plan how to do that. A lot of it was just not having the experience to understand how difficult of a thing production audio is. And the weird thing is, going into making the film I had so much research that I was doing and everybody, any idiot who’s made a film in the world would warn you and tell you how important sound is, and I was well aware of that. But you really don’t understand how it’s your number one priority if you do not know what you are doing. You should be listening to the sound guy and telling everyone else to shut up. That’s a learning lesson without question.

WOODY: And have you made other pictures as well?

TODD: I have made some shorts, but I would not really even consider them shorts. I would call them “film experiences” because they are all so flawed in their own little way. I have no background in film and didn’t go to film school. The only reason I made shorts was to get that hands-on experience and to learn story telling through the lens in a hands-on approach. Every one of the shorts I made was way overtly ambitious in every aspect of the medium, the story telling and everything. That way I could try to stretch myself and figure out how to do certain things. So they are all very much flawed and hard to watch.

WOODY: So that was inspiration to go ahead and tackle a feature-length project?

TODD: (Laughs) Yeah. It’s interesting because my technical prowess didn’t actually grow that much. I think my ability for story telling has always in its strongest form been natural instincts and intuition and what not. The thing that kind of progressed me into doing a feature is just the last short I made before this feature was around twenty-eight minutes long and that was heavily condensed with a lot of scenes. It was really too heavy and that was in its shortest form. I just could not fit all the things I wanted to do in a story in less than ninety minutes. So for me, I didn’t set out to necessarily write a feature, but I think the first treatment was twelve pages longer than my first draft of the script, which was like 160 pages. (Laughs) Either it’s going to be a TV show or it’s going to be feature.

WOODY: So you out grew doing shorts?

TODD: Pretty much. And only in the story telling aspect. At that point I did not even feel comfortable making another short as far as my technical skills go. I had to pick that up at a much more relevant pace to match the story telling.

WOODY: So in terms of actual time from when you finished the script to actually wrapping was what, 9 months or a year?

TODD: Yeah, a little bit less than that.

WOODY: And how about the post process? How long did it take you to get from wrapping production to a locked picture edit?

TODD: That was a crazy experience as well. (Laughs) Our editor Kamau [Bilal] was editing overnight the rough cuts of each scene that we shot during the shooting. So we had our first actual rough cut of the film I want to say less than five or six days after we wrapped. So that helped a lot. That really expedited the initial post process. Then from there me and Kamau worked together every day for a little less than 2 months. We did one day of re-shoots and then just edited around 18 to 20 hours a day between me and him. And I want to say we wrapped around mid September and had picture lock in the beginning of February so that would be about five months.

WOODY: In terms picture cutting, did you think that was about right?

TODD: I thought it was unbelievably fast. Our ethos during the whole process was that we were going to make the best movie possible and we’re not going to have any deadlines, festival or other. I worked at Sundance that year, so I was gone for a month doing that and then we did an initial round of ADR that took two weeks, so we had about a month and a half of that five months where we weren’t cutting at all. So technically it was really more like 3 1/2 months. And I thought for that, that’s just incredibly fast for a movie that going into it with as much improvisation as we did and also leaving ourselves as much exploration room as I needed to figure things out. I thought 3 1/2 months is pretty incredible to burn through and find the story that we did. That said though, keep in mind that Kamau and I were literally editing 18 to 20 hours every day during that period. So as far as actual hours go, it’s probably not too quick compared to a regular production, but as far as actual days go I thought it went pretty quickly.

WOODY: What format did you shoot?

TODD: We shot in HD. We used the Panasonic HVX and it is 720p and stereo sound and we used the 35mm adapter and shot most of the film with either the 35mm lens or a 50mm lens. Some of our close ups, especially the outdoor stuff, we used an 80 to kind of get the faces to pop out a little more. But a lot of that with the lenses works out because of the campus. (University of Missouri, the setting for “Box Elder”) My DP and I worked together a lot in preproduction talking about different styles and the kind of things I was interested in and the films that influenced me in general. He did a great job of understanding what about those films I liked and then we were intuitively able to create similar things. So in a weird way there is not a lot of rip off shots if you will. They’re very kind of (Jim Jarmusch) “Jarmusian” and Wes Anderson like with the relation between characters and space and settings. I think it helps tell the story because the whole idea was keeping the campus as a character in a way.

WOODY: How did you do your production audio?

TODD: That’s a really good question. We had the wonderful Jesse “C-Nug” Brown who was mixing and doing boom at the same time.

WOODY: Wow, that’s always a challenge.

TODD: (Laughs) It really is. This was his first feature as well and so it was a nightmare for him but he was a trooper and he did an unbelievable job. Primarily we used a Sennheiser Shotgun and some wireless lavs as well. For a little while we were using plate mics just to get production audio around the set, but mostly we just shot with a shotgun, a boom, and tried to keep the sound as natural as possible. Our production audio was easily the weakest element going into post and that was primarily because of my inexperience, again technical inexperience. And for C-Nug this is his first feature and his first time working with any of us, so he didn’t know anybody on set. It was very hard for him to kind of step up and say “hey guys I think you need to do this” or “I think we need to do that.” He did try to do this and unfortunately we didn’t listen as much as we should have. Thank God he was a trooper about that because a lot of people know they’re right and they should if they know their job, and you’re telling them to shut up or don’t worry about it. They will just storm off or get grumpy or say “I do not want to work with these people.” C-Nug was just like you know “it’s cool, let’s do it your way, we will worry about it later.” And he never once in post when we had sound issues was like, “I told you so”. You never heard him say that one time. It was always “what can I do to help.” So we got really, really lucky to have a personality like that on set even though we kind of did not utilize him as skillfully as we should have.

WOODY: Prior to “Box Elder” had you had any post audio experience?

TODD: No I didn’t. Most of the time whoever is [picture] editing for me would do all of that for me. It’s a very interesting thing – I’ll say three of my four shorts the DP ended up doing the editing and did a lot of the sound design and the other one the editor did a lot of the sound design and sound effects and cleaned it up. I never recognized this until looking back, but in almost everyone of those processes I was in the editing room you know like twenty-four hours a day being a partner in every decision until – “now I’ll just clean up the sound and we will look at again it tomorrow.” And I can’t believe that I never once considered what “cleaning up the sound” was. It’s pretty amazing especially knowing that I would break and I would go and stay up for twelve hours and think about a new scene to shoot and the editor would stay up for twelve hours “cleaning up the sound” but I never connected on how intensively he was working on that. So my lack of experience in post sound definitely crippled the film a little bit.

WOODY: So when you began to focus in more on just the audio were you horrified, did it open more doors for you or did you see it as a chance to change the pacing or to help scenes in a way that you hadn’t prior?

TODD: That’s very interesting. In every other facet of the post-production phase I did a good job in making sure to stay creatively thinking “how can we make the film better.” How can we take this and creatively either fix it and find a creative solution or use it to our advantage and to the film’s advantage. But at that point with the audio we had tried so many things and failed so many times that I had become more lenient there than ever before. It’s either – we are going to try and fix this and get it the way I want it or we are just going to bite the bullet and do what we have to do. And that was my attitude going in. But then after working on it and focusing on it and realizing the possibilities that were still there even though we were in a time crunch, it opened up to me – we are still creating a film here! What I really look forward to on the next one is doing the post edit for the sound as a whole new other edit again. For first time filmmakers, especially in a time crunch and budget crunch, it’s a tough thing to remember that you’re not just fixing the mistakes, you’re supposed to be creative. I looked at it more as a “mistake fixing” scenario than a creative one.

WOODY: Kurosawa said something like, “Cinematic sound does not merely add to, but multiplies two or three times, the effect of the image.”

TODD: That is great. That is really good. I’m probably going to steal that.

WOODY: If you were advising other first time feature directors, do you have any advice either about the production audio or the post audio process?

TODD: For post audio I would say take half of your post budget and dedicate it to post audio. And that’s a minimum. And I would also say take half of the time you’ve allotted for post and dedicate that to post audio.

WOODY: You know a lot of people will think you’re crazy for saying that. (Both laugh)

TODD: Here’s the thing. We had a production with “Box Elder” that was the epitome of “we have one less day” or “one less … thing” than we need. And that said, throughout the whole process, from every aspect, from money to time to resources, everything, the only thing that we actually ran short on was time and money for post audio. We got away with everything else. Everything else we found a creative solution to make to make it work, make it fit. I would much rather error on the side of having too much time and too much money for post audio verses the other. I don’t think you would waddle around if you had extra time. You are already so close to the finish line. And my advice regarding the production audio is, and this is so repetitive because everyone will tell you this, but it’s the most important thing in the world. I was very well liked by my actors and my crew was very supportive but the biggest aspect of my production for me was to protect the actors, to make sure they had an atmosphere and an energy where they could create and people weren’t inhibiting that or offending them or making them feel uncomfortable or make them feel like they had to perform. And a lot of that was because of the natural energy and the creative energy and what not. But I think that the sound person, whoever is doing production sound should be defended and respected by the director in the exact same regard. Especially because it is so often that the sound person is looked at as the evil guy on set because “oh no, we didn’t get it because of this or that” or “I’m not quite ready yet because I’ve been waiting on you guys and now I have to start doing my job.” It’s definitely a job that everybody on set doesn’t really take into consideration and it’s so important. So one thing I will be doing next time out is being as conscious of my production sound person as I am with my actors and just as protective. You know C-Nug was amazing – being on set in his first feature, he doesn’t know anybody there, and it compromises that situation and makes it so much more pressure filled. I really feel like it is the filmmaker’s obligation, it was my obligation to say “Are we okay? Is the refrigerator on?” Because that way if he says “no, we need fifteen minutes” I’m on the hook. I’m the guy who makes that decision and says “you know what guys, I know we want to shoot this, we want to make the day but we need to wait fifteen minutes to get the sound in.” He’s not being the bad guy, I am. I think that is part of what being a filmmaker is all about, being the bad guy, making sure that you are the one making those decisions. Because everyone who is there, they showed up to make your film. They don’t care if they have to wait fifteen minutes – they came that day to do what you needed them to do. They didn’t come that day to do what C-Nug needed them to do. That’s not his responsibility, its mine. So I think the biggest thing for any future filmmaker is to make sure you are responsible for your sound person. That is totally your responsibility. And that was like the biggest thing that I learned- because I did not recognize that at all – I didn’t defend him at all and that should have been an absolute priority. It’s incredible to think that like I was so protective of these actors because it was their first time, I never once considered to think about that for the sound person. Yeah man what a trooper, what a guy.

WOODY: So now you’ve packed up your film and you’ve taken your show on the road. You are driving around the country, bringing your film to the masses. How did the actual tour concept come about?

TODD: I originally came up with the concept before I was actually writing the script, or it was right around that period of time. It was primarily based around my experience that I had with booking bands and concerts in Columbia, the college town I went to for school. I had a lot of success with graduate marketing and e-marketing and event planning and event coordination and event booking. I didn’t have any background in that so I was using a lot of hustling, just kind of intuitive skills to make that happen. I felt like if I could do that with bands in a small college town then I could probably do it with movies. Not too different of a business. And when I started to explore that, the difference between the two of them I found was that it really wasn’t that different of a business model. It was just that the movie industry on the distribution side of things is a lot more of a mess than the concert industry. So in actuality the situation is more stacked in my advantage to book a film in a town and make it an event than it is with a concert, which is really eerie to think about because it is such a different trade off on the financial side of things. But based on that I had a pretty large social network in different college towns and I did a lot of road trips, so I knew the country fairly well and felt that I had the right guys in place to come along with me to make it all happen, so it was kind of fundamentally based on that. And also at the South by Southwest festival there was a panel that Richard Linklater was on. It was right after he had sold “Fast Food Nation”, and they were asking him the things he was shocked by as far as new trends in filmmaking were concerned. The questions were geared towards digital cinema and how did he think technology has affected cinema. He said how he was shocked by how technology wasn’t changing cinema. He was blown away that when he sold “Slacker” at Sundance in ’91, I think it was, the same person who had sales rep’d for him then was his sales rep when he sold “Fast Food Nation.” He was just blown away that every other aspect of the industry had changed ten times over in the last sixteen some odd years but not with the infrastructure – those same people were still doing the same jobs. There just had been no change what so ever. And that to me was like, if this guy thinks that there is a problem then I am not crazy and maybe, just maybe, we have not a solution but the beginning of something. So that was just a real source of inspiration.

WOODY: And how has the tour experience been?

TODD: The tour went pretty well man, it was pretty crazy. It was a good venture. We ended up showing the film in a little over thirty-three theaters, which is a good amount for any independent film and ended up selling about nine thousand six hundred tickets or a little more than that. So, yeah, we did well with that. With that said, the whole idea of the first tour was to kind of make it a beta stage for the distribution model itself. We took a lot of risks and tried every trick in the book at cost effectiveness. We ended up spending more money than we should have, but through trial and error we made a little bit of money. We need to make a lot more, but it was good. It was defiantly an incredible thing. It was amazing to see, you know, a couple of hundred or so odd people in the theater every night watching your movie. The great thing is getting to know your fans. These people become zealots because it’s your audience and you’re doing a very direct marketing, doing a niche-oriented first hand, person-to-person target marketing. You’re picking up people who you think and kind of know are going to love the film and getting them in there and knowing that they’re going to love it is a very inspiring thing.

WOODY: So how many times did you end up watching the movie?

TODD: You know its funny. I watched it all the way through at start for I don’t know, I didn’t get sick of it until maybe half way through the tour, then I would kind of watch it in parts. Then it got so busy towards the middle of the tour that during the screenings I would be working outside the theater still trying to set things up for the rest of the tour, so I ended up not watching it for about a month and a half. Then I kind of missed it. So the last few weeks I started watching it again, which is kind of nice.

WOODY: Sometimes when I re-watch a picture I spent a lot of time with after a break I often find that I take something new and different away from it.

TODD: Totally, see that’s the best part. That was the first experience for that with me finally with the film, to see it with new eyes for the first time at the end of the tour, which is really nice.

WOODY: Many filmmakers make their project and just shop and shop and shop it hoping a sales rep or distributor will pick it up. I really admire your proactive approach to getting your picture out to audiences.

TODD: I think a lot of filmmakers and not just filmmakers there are a lot of people in the industry in general, I think it might be more of a producer/investor thing than a filmmaker thing, and they don’t make content for themselves and they definitely don’t make content to story-tell. They don’t make the content to show it to people, they make the content to either make a profit or build or progress a career in some way shape or form. So then the idea of making a film, then the plan is to sell it and the investors will make money and the producer will have a blue star on their resume and the filmmaker will get to make another film and everyone is happy. That’s the goal. Where as with us, I already had an investor group interested in making my next film before I had even started shooting this one. There was no pressure what so ever to try and get my next film made. I had no interest in progressing a career and neither did Brock [Williams - Producer of Box Elder]. We just wanted to make a film so that we could show it to people. I think that’s the other thing that didn’t necessarily play into the actual distribution model but the thing that kept it alive the whole time from like November 2005 or whatever to actually touring it, the fact that no one got in the way of saying, you know, maybe we shouldn’t tour. It’s just that we all wanted to make this film to show it.

WOODY: So what’s on tap for the next Todd Sklar project?

TODD: (Laughs) Well we are touring again in the fall. We’re going to the west coast then we are touring in the east coast and we are going to make a documentary while on tour this time. That’s going on and then summer of next year the plan is to make another film. I have a script that I wrote before “Box Elder” that’d kind of a little bigger in scale that I want to make going across the U.S. and kind of like a little road movie and hopefully a with a lot of the same people.

WOODY: Can’t wait to see it.