The Astral Woman - complete!

I found out about a festival Vimeo announced with David Lynch as one of the judges for the experimental category. As 'Astral Woman' is an experimental short and because I really respect David Lynch, I wanted to finish my short in time to submit it to the festival.

The short, mostly live action, involves a very short animated sequence that I planned to use After Effects to complete, but I really didn't know how to use After Effects. The short also was shot MOS, so it required an entirely fabricated sound scape. It took weeks for me to complete the animation as I stumbled over the large learning curve of After Effects and progressively decided how I wanted aspects of the image to look.

After completing the animation, I had one week to do all of the sound design. The short only came out to about 3mins, but I couldn't decide what I wanted it to sound like and I've been working a full time job and my work day ends about 6 or 7pm every week day. I'm also a morning person, my creativity happens mostly between 8am and 3pm. Basically, I didn't have much time and felt a lot of pressure to complete the film.

I started on the sound design and then called my friend Peter Schafer who lives in Rochester, NY and asked for his assistance with the project. From 7pm to 12am each evening, we sent files across the internet and updated the sound and image properties. Peter added sound to the sound I had in place and then I added sound to that, then I did the final mix, adjusting levels and adding filters. Peter created a quick animation for the opening title and I added the title itself. I completed the end credits, exported the video and finalized the upload to Vimeo at around 11:15pm on the day it was due(by 11:59pm). I paid the submission fee and officially submitted by 11:22pm. Then I biked over to Williamsburg and met up with a friend for drinks.

Whew.