JULY 2024
July 31, 2024
OVERVIEW
Welcome to our very first Monthly Report! This will be an ongoing series to document our progress on our projects and our development as a film production house. In these reports, you will hear from each of the three founders of AUGURY HOUSE about our accomplishments, difficulties, research, and things we’re looking forward to.
ACCOMPLISHMENTS
We have many new developments in the works! As we work on the edit of our new short film, we are also prepping for our promo campaign and a new rebrand of AUGURY HOUSE as a whole. Here is an overview of what we accomplished:
Kevin’s Summary: At this point, we are pretty much all ready for launching our short film! We’ve been sitting on the project with many things pretty quiet, which will pay off. When it comes time to roll things out, we will have just about everything ready to go and will be well assured that our entire approach will be comprehensive and thoughtful! Instead of taking things on a week by week basis, we’re hoping that this little bit of public hiatus will ensure that the next time we become more active on our internet presence, it will be for the ends of driving a serious and innovative film production company. One big part about reorganizing our project management was in regard to our early years of AUGURY HOUSE. When we first started, we knew we would eventually get to film production, but wanted to naturally explore our interests and other modes of production. We’ve tried things from things including game development, livestreams, zines, interactive projects, radio interviews and many other things that didn’t really see the light of day. By reorganizing our files, it is now much easier to see the things we are currently focused on so everything is running a lot smoothly! I’ve also been learning more about web design for our new website and have been working with Carissa to ensure that the new page will have a unique and stylish look that is also professional, legible and fun to navigate! It hasn’t been easy, but I think the hardest part of the learning curve is well over. It also helps that the Cargo 3 interface is pretty capable and easy to use!
DIFFICULTIES
Kevin’s Summary: Although we’ve had a bunch of successes and accomplishments, there have been some difficulties as well! For me, my hands have been full with audio design and sound repair. I’ve been doing a bunch of my own foley as well as sourcing some foley off of SPLICE. Additionally, we have been using some of the audio off of the filming camera which, by itself, isn’t the best so it can sometimes require quite a bit of restoration and editing. This has been my bigger project for building film audio and I’m anticipating that the entire project will take around 700 individual sounds. It has been a pretty big learning curve so this has probably been my biggest challenge in the past month!
BTS
A shoot at the beach
Kevin’s Foley Lab
Here is my makeshift foley studio! I used a small closet at the bottom of my staircase and usually looked to record at night when everything was the most quiet. For some bathroom related sounds, I adjusted the setup accordingly, though the recordings picked up a decent amount of reverb off of the hard walls and hardwood floor. My setup consisted of a lightweight light stand, a zoom f3, and a blimp and a shotgun mic. A clamp secured the F3 to the light stand which allowed me to monitor the recording while making the recording at the same time. Not the most ideal setup, but it worked!
RESEARCH
Kevin’s Summary: I haven’t had a lot of time to cut out for research given our production and promotional work, though I have been listening to some film podcasts on my drives and reading books at night! I’ve been listening to Film Riot, the No Film School podcast, The Film Finance & Distribution Podcast and the Indie Film Hustle Podcast - to be honest, I don’t listen to much of Indie Film Hustle because they have so many ads! My favorite is the Film Finance podcast though it is a very slick and well put together operation - not really for consistent week to week releases. As a whole, I enjoy listening to how people finance and distribute their films. Although there are a lot of methods on how to make a film, at the end of the day, the most important thing is to make an objectively strong film. I think we already have a pretty good idea of what our capabilities are and where we can use our past projects to create a unique campaign for delivering our film. On top of this, I’ve been starting to read some Stanislavski books at the recommendation of Carissa to get a better idea of some theories surrounding acting. It has been a lot of fun and I have been learning a lot! I’ve also picked up 7 Plays by Sam Shepherd and I’ve really liked True West. I haven’t read many plays so that was a fun experience too. It’s giving me more ideas on how to write scenes as well! I’ve also read the music interview book between Seiji Ozawa and Haruki Murakami which has been a fun and insightful read on making music at a high level.
GOALSKevin’s Summary: much of our goals revolve around the launch of the film. I’ve had my hands full build a lot of documents, spreadsheets and plans for how we’re going to approach our promotion, merch, and our new website too. On top of that, I need to spend more time developing the film as well! There is a lot to do, but at least the goals are pretty straightforward! Small progress goes a long way!
Welcome to our very first Monthly Report! This will be an ongoing series to document our progress on our projects and our development as a film production house. In these reports, you will hear from each of the three founders of AUGURY HOUSE about our accomplishments, difficulties, research, and things we’re looking forward to.
ACCOMPLISHMENTS
We have many new developments in the works! As we work on the edit of our new short film, we are also prepping for our promo campaign and a new rebrand of AUGURY HOUSE as a whole. Here is an overview of what we accomplished:
- Developed a new cut of our short film, The Filial Brat
- Developed a new promo plan for the short film
- Developed new merch for the short film
- Developing a new pitch plan for the short film
- Drafting concepts for short form content
- Created and launched a new website
- Added new lenses to our filming collection
- Reorganized our project management
- Continuing developments on our longer term projects
Kevin’s Summary: At this point, we are pretty much all ready for launching our short film! We’ve been sitting on the project with many things pretty quiet, which will pay off. When it comes time to roll things out, we will have just about everything ready to go and will be well assured that our entire approach will be comprehensive and thoughtful! Instead of taking things on a week by week basis, we’re hoping that this little bit of public hiatus will ensure that the next time we become more active on our internet presence, it will be for the ends of driving a serious and innovative film production company. One big part about reorganizing our project management was in regard to our early years of AUGURY HOUSE. When we first started, we knew we would eventually get to film production, but wanted to naturally explore our interests and other modes of production. We’ve tried things from things including game development, livestreams, zines, interactive projects, radio interviews and many other things that didn’t really see the light of day. By reorganizing our files, it is now much easier to see the things we are currently focused on so everything is running a lot smoothly! I’ve also been learning more about web design for our new website and have been working with Carissa to ensure that the new page will have a unique and stylish look that is also professional, legible and fun to navigate! It hasn’t been easy, but I think the hardest part of the learning curve is well over. It also helps that the Cargo 3 interface is pretty capable and easy to use!
DIFFICULTIES
Kevin’s Summary: Although we’ve had a bunch of successes and accomplishments, there have been some difficulties as well! For me, my hands have been full with audio design and sound repair. I’ve been doing a bunch of my own foley as well as sourcing some foley off of SPLICE. Additionally, we have been using some of the audio off of the filming camera which, by itself, isn’t the best so it can sometimes require quite a bit of restoration and editing. This has been my bigger project for building film audio and I’m anticipating that the entire project will take around 700 individual sounds. It has been a pretty big learning curve so this has probably been my biggest challenge in the past month!
BTS
A shoot at the beach
Kevin’s Foley Lab
Here is my makeshift foley studio! I used a small closet at the bottom of my staircase and usually looked to record at night when everything was the most quiet. For some bathroom related sounds, I adjusted the setup accordingly, though the recordings picked up a decent amount of reverb off of the hard walls and hardwood floor. My setup consisted of a lightweight light stand, a zoom f3, and a blimp and a shotgun mic. A clamp secured the F3 to the light stand which allowed me to monitor the recording while making the recording at the same time. Not the most ideal setup, but it worked!
RESEARCH
Kevin’s Summary: I haven’t had a lot of time to cut out for research given our production and promotional work, though I have been listening to some film podcasts on my drives and reading books at night! I’ve been listening to Film Riot, the No Film School podcast, The Film Finance & Distribution Podcast and the Indie Film Hustle Podcast - to be honest, I don’t listen to much of Indie Film Hustle because they have so many ads! My favorite is the Film Finance podcast though it is a very slick and well put together operation - not really for consistent week to week releases. As a whole, I enjoy listening to how people finance and distribute their films. Although there are a lot of methods on how to make a film, at the end of the day, the most important thing is to make an objectively strong film. I think we already have a pretty good idea of what our capabilities are and where we can use our past projects to create a unique campaign for delivering our film. On top of this, I’ve been starting to read some Stanislavski books at the recommendation of Carissa to get a better idea of some theories surrounding acting. It has been a lot of fun and I have been learning a lot! I’ve also picked up 7 Plays by Sam Shepherd and I’ve really liked True West. I haven’t read many plays so that was a fun experience too. It’s giving me more ideas on how to write scenes as well! I’ve also read the music interview book between Seiji Ozawa and Haruki Murakami which has been a fun and insightful read on making music at a high level.
GOALSKevin’s Summary: much of our goals revolve around the launch of the film. I’ve had my hands full build a lot of documents, spreadsheets and plans for how we’re going to approach our promotion, merch, and our new website too. On top of that, I need to spend more time developing the film as well! There is a lot to do, but at least the goals are pretty straightforward! Small progress goes a long way!