Music and Sound Effects!!!!!
It's definitely been a fun and interesting process so far trying to hear/critique/think about music and sound effects on Science, Sex and the Ladies. For years, we have all been obsessed with thinking about how the movie will "look" (as in style-wise during the writing process, during the actual shooting process, and over the years as it's been edited and as effects were added), and now we're finally really focusing on sound.
Granted, we were pretty obsessed with sound in one way - getting good clean voices recorded, but thinking about sound creatively is a different story.
All in all I'm having a blast. Nathan is our composer, now living out in LA...so our meetings are Skype style. He, like us, is doing all this crazy work simply for the love of doing it, and it's fantastic because we've all wanted to collaborate on something for years. He has been sending us scenes with his compositions (created with MIDI; not actually recorded with real instruments yet). Then Charlie, Barnaby, and I all try to get our thoughts together before we put our heads once again with Nathan's - for an old fashioned critique. It's a big ol'' ball of sweet, sweet collaborative. I ain't no music person, so just trying to put into words what I like and don't and why is kind of foreign, but Nathan is a patient dude, so it's been productive and fun.
It's crazy, though, because I have to watch/listen to it a couple times before I can really see how the music is fitting in. Charlie and I were talking, and we think it's because we're so used to our own sort of rhythm we had while cutting and effecting. The rhythm with which Nathan sees the movie and with which he's working from is naturally different and actually doesn't register with me at first. It's like it reveals itself to me later, so I think it's really cool having that newer, fresh perspective.
As for sound effects, Barnaby has been working hard on that. I've been watching it without sound effects for so long that it feels really weird at first. I have to kinda sit and digest it before I can wrap my head around what I like. This music and sound effect stuff is a challenge, and not just because it's stuff we've had the least amount of experience with. It's also because this movie is strange. It doesn't fit a genre, and there's not really precedent for this style, so we're kinda making it up; which is bad because it's hard, but super cool too because we have a lot of freedom.. The other awesome thing is simply that we are at this point in the movie making process, which means we are so, so, close, and I'm truly lovin' that.