Big Mama

For our third listen-along session this week, we heard the Lux Radio Theater production of Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious. This was a little different from our earlier shows. Except for Moon Grafitti, all the others originated in written literature, although The Butterfly was the only one that didn’t adapt …

No wire hangers

We had a great live tweeting session last night with Mildred Pierce on DS106radio. Everyone seemed to be involved and enjoying it. A few things stood out to me.

The first, as we have seen (heard actually) consistently in these sessions, was the impact of sound. Simple background sounds …

Ready set design

Blade Runner has some fascinating set design. It seems like most science fiction up to that time either presented a clean futuristic utopia or a primitive post-apocalyptic dystopia. In Blade Runner, it’s dirty, chaotic, run-down and overcrowded. The shiny and new exists alongside the old and decrepit, like in the …

Wanted: Kidnapper

Someone’s gotta get this guy. Someone who knows the true value of a dutch oven.

I grabbed his picture from the video with MPEG Streamclip and trimmed out the background in Photoshop. I googled for the border and the background layer, but I didn’t keep track of where I found …

Evil editing

The story on Touch of Evil is that the movie studio took Welles’ film, re-edited it and re-shot some scenes. When Welles saw what they had done, he wrote a letter, 58 pages long, explaining what needed to be done to fix the damage. In the 90s, suoerstar sound designer/film …

Killer’s Moon

For our final live tweet-along, we had a double feature of The Killers and Moon Grafitti. Some of the participants had read Hemingway’s story, and were caught off guard by how much Siodmak’s version differs. The filmed versions just use Hemingway as a jumping off point.

An interesting thing I …

Dispatch from the dark: Audio layering

For this week’s dispatch, I made a video out of my Audacity window so you can see audio layering in action. Just like in Photoshop or GIMP, layering is where it’s at in Audacity. You can mute them and move them around and turn them up and down. You can …