This Spying Life

Hey everybody!
We’ll be having our premiere screening on the MSU campus in East Lansing on Friday, December 7th at 7 pm. We hope to see you there!

In the meantime, here is our brand-new poster. Enjoy!

Hello, all.
The evenings of November 7th and 8th are naught but a blur to us on the production team. On the first night, we stopped working at about 6 am, and on the second, we didn’t stop working at all. It seemed like the Adobe suite had a pathological need to undo all of our work, even in spite of multiple saves and autosaves. First, the audio would drop out, then AfterEffects would remove the shots we stabilized.

We also spent hours crafting supplementary music in GarageBand on the 7th, only to watch the film again the next night and decide most of it was terrible. And beyond the issue of the quality of individual songs, we had reached an awkward limbo – not enough music to qualify as a full soundtrack, but too much to provide just a light touch. More often than not, its appearance was jarring, rather than welcome. So we junked most of it. I guess this is what happens when you can’t afford to pay your composers and you give them three weeks to work.

This experience has also given us boundless respect for audio editors and technicians. Audio was the single most baffling and frustrating part of post-production, be it ADR, boosting clarity, or smoothing transitions. We still weren’t able to get the audio exactly where we wanted it, but there’s another place where it would’ve been nice to have a bit of a budget. Paying a capable sound editor might have done wonders.

This is not to say that we’re not satisfied with our final product – we shipped it off to SXSW a week ago today, and we wouldn’t have done that if we didn’t think it deserved to be screened there. But like most creative endeavors of this magnitude, creating a film is a process of compromise. We’re not going to get exactly what we want at every juncture.

Anyhow, we’re still hard at work. A finished poster will be posted in the next couple of days, and we’re hard at work creating the DVD. We’re also in the final stages of setting up a premiere on the Michigan State campus in East Lansing, and we’ll keep you posted as the details coalesce.

And last, but obviously not least, we’ve put together a trailer that we all really like, and we hope you like it too.

Best described as a cross between Brick and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, This Spying Life is a different kind of thriller. Students at two different colleges are engaged in a prolonged espionage war with each other, trying to give their schools the upper hand in procuring state funding, athletics, and general prestige. The focus lies on one side of the war, at Elliott Ness College, where the two leaders of the school’s “intelligence agency” (the ENIA) are forced to recalculate their strategic environment when a “defector” transfers from Mohler University, the opposing school, and asks to join the agency. Combining a spy thriller and a love story, with comic elements and a running commentary on college life, This Spying Life has something for everyone.