I visited Paula, our sound effects lady, in Burbank this morning. With every other room in her building locked up for the weekend she was working hard cutting in sound effects (SFX) for the movie – trying jet noises and space effects for the band’s van as it drives down the Eastern Seaboard. All this hard work will hopefully get us some extra laughs and helps all those drive-bys work. (Remember the Sphincter Unit Day 2?)

Next stop ADR. While the ADR session the other day was for stuff we hadn’t recorded today we shot ADR on stuff we had recorded. Doug and Jerry both came in to re-record lines that were messed up by trucks driving by or by noisy Englishmen shouting directions in the background. This is where the AUTOMATIC of Automatic Dialogue Replacement comes in though it’s not frankly very automatic and a real pain in the butt for the actors who (rightly) would prefer to stick with what they said on the day. Some directors make actors re-shoot their dialogue for the whole movie – they say Jackie Chan even has a sound-alike! But 2gether don’t need stunt-voices they do their own stuff!

ADR stands for Automatic Dialogue Replacement and that’s what we started doing this morning…(another term for it is looping). What is it? Well, for instance, when Buss finds Mickey in the skateboard park there are loads of other kids in the background hanging out but we can’t hear their voices. All we recorded on the day was the sound of Buss and Mickey talking – everyone else was miming so that we would get a clean sound track. Today we had a room full of young actors going through every scene in the movie putting words into the mouths of those folk in the background. Andrea, our ADR lady, had made a note of every shot in the movie which needed ADR and given cues to the sound guys who placed three beeps (the countdown to start talking) before every scene that needs this background chatter…which is also called WALLAH.

Meanwhile I’ve been watching the on-line take place. Now picture is locked we have taken the off-line (the edit which is inside the computer) into the video editing bay and we are matching every picture in the off-line with the perfect quality pictures you will see on your screens in just a few weeks. As each reel has been completed I’ve taken it across town to a small dark room in Santa Monica where Marc (the DP who shot the movie for us in Canada) and I have graded the movie picture by picture. Actually that’s a huge fib. Marc & I sit in the back and watch while Brian (the bass player in Doug’s band Pegasus) twiddles the knobs so that Chad’s close up matches his wide shot.

And at last 2gether have a web site! Just four months after we first suggested it I found it on the MTV web-page today.

The 2gether family grows daily. Today we ran through the movie and pointed out every sound effect, noise of a passing truck, dialogue imperfection out to the sound crew. This afternoon we repeated the process all over again for the music team. We looked at sections where we hope Camara will create musical score for us and tried musical pieces as disparate as Gerry And The Pacemakers and Trent Reznor to set the right mood.

Damon worked all through the night AGAIN last night…I think it is likely that when this movie airs no-one, and I mean no-one, will have worked more hours on this movie than Damon.

I think we may be close to locking picture! Tomorrow morning we show Maggie the final cut for her approval. If she’s OK with it we “lock picture”. This means that all the images in the movie have been irrevocably chosen and the sound guys can finally go to work. They have an enormous task ahead of them – with so many cuts and so many songs in the film they will be ordering food through the middle of the night just like we have for the last two or three weeks.

Having survived on a diet of fried egg sandwiches for weeks Bill, our esteemed producer, came in last week and told us that we should turn in all receipts for meals because we’ve been working such long hours. So we’ve raised the calibre of our comestibles a notch or two and had sushi two nights running. The result has been a new slogan echoing round Shaw’s editing hut: “Dining like Kings, working like slaves!” Maggie and Bill have been very generous over the last few days having laid on a big spread the other night and today they sent over a masseuse to rub our aching backs. Very nice gesture only we all felt like crashing about half an hour after our backrubs. What we probably needed more was some of that stuff they make out in the valley that you always see cops hauling away bags of on the 11 o’clock news!

Unsung heroes of the set # 975…assistant editors. Damon Fecht is our assistant editor and Damon has been working like a dog. During production he’d stay up every night digitizing the dailies and over the last few weeks he’s taken a beating that even Mr. Hussein and his most able torturers would be hard pressed to improve upon. It’s Damon’s job to know where all the dailies are, do all the dubs, maintain the avids, take the phone calls, make Jonathan his tea, arrive before us and leave after us. And believe me that last bit takes some doing all on its own. He’s been wearing an old Yessongs T-shirt today (a bootleg valued at $15) and yesterday came to work in collapsed sandals and no socks because we’ve been working him so hard that he hasn’t had time to do any washing! And he never complains, takes a load of stick from the lads in master control and has to listen to me playing my guitar all day long to boot. I’ve been home and writing this for 30 minutes already and I bet he’s still in the edit room backing up the avids. Damon please go home and drive safe. WE NEED YOU.

Last week Maggie said to me, “The end of the tunnel is in sight and I don’t think there’s a train coming!” Today I see that glimpse for the first time. We showed her the movie this morning and she laughed, I laughed, Jonathan laughed and Damon laughed. We’re locked! I can’t believe it – just some picture tweaks, two weeks of sound, colouring, on-lining and mixing and we’ll be done! You’ll be watching the movie in less than 4 weeks time.

Best of all I nearly made it home before dark. Jonathan will have dinner with his wife and kids tonight for the first time in weeks and I came home, sat in the bath and listened to the Isleys sing “Don’t Let Me Be Lonely Tonight.” Bliss.

And while we relax Damon is still at it – cutting lists for the first four reels so that the sound editors can get to work in the morning. Our little film factory continues to churn away…

Back in October I a friend of mine called me. He said: “I was speaking to Linda today who said she’d heard that the movie you’re making really sucks.” Now this Linda (name changed) happened to be an old friend of mine so her words really upset me. But what upset me more was that she was judging a) a film that she hadn’t seen and, more importantly, b) a film that hadn’t been shot! With friends like that etc…

Today the phone started ringing once more. The rumour mill has started up again only now the rumours are along the lines of “apparently the movie Nigel’s made is really good.” I confess that it’s great that the town has decided to like my work but what’s confusing to me is that only about ten people have seen it in anything like its finished form. I’m really proud of this film and want it and 2gether to do fantastically well but would trade this early buzz for some reason in the world. Dear reader, please be kind to my little film after I’ve spent so much effort on it but also be kind to every other film you might wish to see no matter what anybody says and remember these words from Richard E. Grant’s funny book ‘Withnails’: “I ponder the question that’s always asked, ‘Did you know at the time (you were filming) you were destined to be in a hit or a howler?’…Three answers spring forth. Casablanca was considered ‘unreleasable,’ the Dakota plane was considered ‘unflyable’ and the Titanic ‘unsinkable.’”

Have the courage to form your own opinions and don’t give two figs what a movie does at the box office in its opening weekend.

Bill finally arrived at noon yesterday but not before more dramas had delayed his arrival. We set to immediately on the new footage. By 1 this morning we were looking in really good shape so I ordered Jonathan home for four hours much needed sleep. We were back in the cutting room by 6 this morning.

It was quiet as the grave on Seward, Damon was fast asleep on the sofa in Declan’s room, we were getting loads done and the dawn was breaking over the Griffith Park Observatory when it happened….the computer crashed. After two hours of frantic calls to tech support we realized we had lost hours of footage from the avid – the complex computer system we use for editing nowadays. After an 8 hour delay we were finally back in business but there was no hope of finishing all the fixes we had hoped to include in the cut for the execs. Depressed and frustrated we pressed on delivering a cut we knew could have been close to perfect if the Gods had been with us.

And in the middle of the temp mix the band rang up – they’d just seen the vid and were full of happiness and joy. If no-one ever sees the film it would have been all worth while just for that phone call. Tomorrow we can finish a cut…I’m sure of it.

The post team send out their thanks tonight to an unknown man somewhere in Vancouver who managed to stop our resourceful producer from getting on a plane today. I’m not happy that this Jobsworth stopped Bill from flying down here, far from it, we all wanted to receive his precious cargo but the ramifications of his actions have resulted in us getting a little more sleep and another 24 hours to deliver our next cut. Let me explain.

Maggie and Bill went up to Vancouver Saturday to shoot some extra footage we felt necessary to hype up the rivalry between Woah! and 2gether. Meanwhile as Jonathan sweated over his Avid we hired Howard and his lads to start on the graphics and John and Sienna were working hard to deliver their sound bytes all for inclusion in a cut that was to be delivered by 7pm tomorrow night. Needless to say we all were running behind schedule.

Bill was ready in the transfer house in Vancouver this afternoon like a runner with his arm out poised at his blocks on the third leg of a 4×400 relay but the film was late. He missed 2 flights and was within seconds of reaching the third (and last) before the trusty gent in Vancouver prevented him from boarding his plane. Consequently the film will not be in Jonathan’s Avid in the morning, consequently we can’t get the cut out by the afternoon, consequently we all get the extra time which we need so badly and can make so much use of.

It must be noted here that Maggie and Bill have bent over backwards to get us extra time and help in the editing room and it will all make the film better, and God knows I’m aware of how hard Bill tried to get that film to us in LA tonight, but evenso we’re glad to have this extra moment of space. I’ve been able to speak to the graphics people and the music editors and their relief was palpable – they’ll all have much more to give us tomorrow when we assemble the edit and thus we will all have a better idea of how the film is working.

And you know what maybe Bill’s happy too. He’ll get to travel down with his luggage.

As I type I know that teams of folks are busy at their screens all over town rendering pictures and cutting sounds that will make this little film of ours breathe. All these people are like workers in Frankenstein’s lab sewing the monster’s sinews and synapses into place and as we all turn our backs momentarily to grab a coffee its eyes flicker for the first time and its muscles start to twitch. Pretty soon it will have a life of its own and we can sit back and watch it stomp across your TV screens!

I’ve never had kids but today I got a fleeting sense of what it might be like…

2gether played at the MTV conference thingy in Puerto Rico last night and word has come back to us that the place went nuts and they had a standing ovation. Suddenly I felt a tinge of regret…this is the first time they have done anything like this without ME! They exist in a world without their director (dad) unit…they have a life of their own. I feel suddenly stranded, left out, excluded but also intensely proud that all the things that Buss taught them are paying off. Even so I hope the little buggers (lying in the sun by a swimming pool today by all accounts) send us a postcard!

Maggie gave us her reaction to the assembly of the movie today. I was summoned to the MTV bunker and my knees were wobbly as I waited for the elevator. “It couldn’t be more painful than the intrusive teeth cleaning I had this morning,” I told myself. And I was right….phew!

There are many more hurdles to overcome yet but this was an important one. Maggie is the person who first heard the pitch, the first person who sat in her chair and wondered what 2gether would look like. Without her there would be no 2gether at all. And by and large she seems pretty pleased with the results but feels we need to spice up the first act. I don’t disagree. This is the bit where film-making gets really creative…how do we take the scenes we’ve got, truncate them, move them around, flesh them out and intercut them so that the movie is better, faster and funnier?

This may seem like an admission of defeat but it’s nothing of the sort. The footage is good, I’m intensely proud of the performances, it does exactly what it was supposed to do but now we can actually see and feel what was on the written page and we need to mould it so that you, the viewer, will be entertained, intrigued, amused and entranced. You’d be surprised how much of this goes on in film-making. Hey, Woody Allen has shot some of his movies twice!

P.S. They rejected “Flying Hooves Of Steel.” Time for me to remember Buss’s John Travolta Rule…