At the international premiere of The Red Machine, which took place at the Edinburgh International Film Festival, we introduced the world to the Red Machine cocktail, which was created in honor of the movie’s appearance at EIFF  by filmmaker and mixed-drink connoisseur Aaron Vanek.

It has reappeared periodically at other screenings — but for those of you who want to try it at home…here’s the recipe:

The Red Machine
2 oz. gin (Aaron used Plymouth)
1 oz. Rouge cherry liqueur from Combier (makers of the original triple sec)
1/2 oz. fresh lime juice
1/2 oz. homemade grenadine syrup
Three dashes of the Bitter Truth’s Jerry Thomas’ Own Decanter Bitters
Club soda

Mix all but soda in shaker with ice. Pour over ice in a tall Collins glass. Top with splash of club soda.

To garnish: slice an orange wheel, and put a stemless maraschino cherry in the middle of the wheel, and cross two toothpicks through them both (like an elaborate “machine” garnish)
***
This is inspired by the many different recipes for the Singapore Sling; this skips some crucial pieces (like missing keys in a code) and substitutes others.  Aaron figured that Singapore Sling is roughly Asian, and it uses gin, which is the blood of the British Navy…

One of the things we needed to figure out as we made The Red Machine was: what was the movie going to sound like?  We decided before shooting that we wanted it to sound like it looked, meaning we wanted it to evoke the period through real sonic details as much as possible–we wanted to try and make the world of the film look and sound like it would have in 1935.

Production itself was fairly straightforward, sound-wise: our production mixer Jesse Felt mostly concentrated on getting good, clean recordings of the dialogue and effects.  But after we wrapped, the fun of sound design began.  We spent considerable time researching and imagining what things sounded like back then.  We liked the notion that it was a more mechanical time than it is today, with gears and rotors and pulleys and machines much more in evidence.  We started toying with the idea of the sound of the world as something along the lines of a Rube Goldberg machine.

We wanted to distinguish the two worlds of the story–the spies and the thieves–through sound design, just as we had done with visuals.  We wrote a lengthy and detailed sound design script, in which we tried to imagine what each scene would sound like, and how that fit into the whole.  We tried to give each space its own sonic character, but also tried to give both worlds a unique sonic fingerprint: the world of the Navy and the spies was colder and more harsh and mechanical, while the world of Eddie and the thieves was warmer and more organic and musical.

We bought a small handheld recording device called the Zoom H4 and pointed it at pretty much everything we could think of: restaurants, stores, cars, buzzing streetlights–nothing was safe from our prying ears.  Alec started building soundscapes, one noise at a time.  After there was a rough shape for each scene, Steph would come and have a listen.  She very often had the same request: how would it sound two octaves lower?  We soon came to call this “Stephalizing,” and it was remarkably effective.  Not only did it lower the pitch, but it also altered the timbre of whatever sound was treated, generally in unpredictable but fascinating ways.

One of the things we wanted to explore was whether there were any alternatives to standard movie music.  Instead of a traditional score, we thought the film would be better served by a combination of source music (e.g., music coming from radios, phonographs, musicians in nightclubs or even on the streets) and ambience.  We were also drawn to the musicality of machines and water rushing through pipes.  But as we developed the soundscape further, we thought it might be fun to try some score.  Steph asked Alec to rough out some demos of possible musical directions, which he did, keeping the instrumentation to what would have been available in 1935 (e.g., acoustic guitar, drums, upright bass, bass harmonica, brass, etc.).  To our mutual surprise, many of the demos fit the movie perfectly, with little or no amendment (although Steph often asked that certain instruments be lowered in pitch by an octave or two).

We also licensed a couple of fabulous pieces of wild marching band music, which were brought to us by our ace music supervisor Kaz Smith.  These were done by the Hungry March Band (from New York) and March Fourth Marching Band (from Oregon), two very large marching bands that are loud and raucous and barely under control.  They fit the mood and tone of the movie perfectly.  One of the most knowledgeable journalists who’s written about the movie, George Heymont, also noted that the Hungry March song that we use, “Jupanese Juju,” is actually a jazzy variation of Bizet’s smuggler’s theme from Carmen….and it also plays over our trailer…

In our short film Gandhi at the Bat, we had to take a minor league baseball stadium in Bakersfield, California and turn it into a replica of Yankee Stadium as it looked in the 1930s:

This was how the park really looked when we shot:

And this is how it ended up looking in the movie:

This kind of effect is known as a digital matte painting (or in this case, because it added to what we actually shot, a set extension).  Matte painting used to be done with real paints, sometimes on glass, by masters like Albert Whitlock and Peter Ellenshaw.  Now, as far as we know, it’s all done digitally; we make our matte paintings using Adobe Photoshop and Adobe After Effects.

Having created the matte paintings for Gandhi at the Bat, we had confidence that we could do them for The Red Machine, too.  And so we did — though it was a much bigger job, because we had to do all different kinds of digital matte paintings.  Here are a few examples.

Very early in the movie, we encounter our thief Eddie Doyle breaking into a jewelry store in the middle of the night.  This is is the store:

This started as a daylight photograph, which we turned into night.  We also had to paint out a considerable amount of visual debris that we didn’t want, and we added a lot of extra detail, including things like the lampposts and the theater down the street.  If you see the shot on the big screen, you might catch a few of the inside jokes we tossed in there: the jewelry store is Cortland Jewelers (after our producer Ken Cortland); there’s a club called Mr. Dino’s (after our sound mixer Dino Hermann), and there’s a store called Horan and Sons (after our production designer Mel Horan, who does indeed have two very fine sons).

This next one is the exterior of the Japanese Embassy:

It seems so simple, but we’re actually very proud of this one.  This building really was the Japanese Embassy in Washington DC in 1935.  It’s still standing, so we went to Washington DC and took a photograph of it, then built this shot around the photograph, painting out a lot of non-period details like modern cars and orange safety cones, and adding moving video elements, such as the flag on top of the Embassy and the moving trees behind the building.  (Fun dead-celebrity note: Alec shot those moving trees in the Los Angeles-area cemetery where Michael Jackson is buried!)

At one point in the movie, our thief Eddie takes our spy Coburn into the criminal world of Washington DC.  This is the back-alley cigar store where the crooks hang out in between their capers:

This shot was assembled from a variety of still elements — some shot around Los Angeles, some taken from archival photographs — plus numerous video and animated elements to help bring it to life.  On the left side of frame, you can see an alley cat eating out of a tin can; that was a cameo by one of our house cats, Julius.

We also were extremely fortunate to have a guest superstar matte painter.  Mark Sullivan, one of the greatest matte painters around, created this gorgeous view of the Office of Naval Intelligence:

The car and the building in the foreground are what we shot; everything above and behind was all Mark…

…with possibly the best music video ending of all time.

http://www.grist.org/cities/2011-06-28-the-continued-relevance-of-reclaiming-the-urban-memory

http://www.core77.com/blog/materials/gms_plexiglas_car_from_1939_19612.asp

Very inspiring:

http://secondstory.com/

Especially this, a project of theirs in a place that’s very close to our hearts:

http://secondstory.com/portfolio/works/top-ten

http://www.geekologie.com/image.php?path=/2009/07/22/computer-hardware-2.jpg

Knowing of our passion for codebreaking, Tara Zucker (beautiful female spy) sent us this link…

http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/world-war-ii-codebreaking-machine-fully-rebuilt/

…which in turn led us here:

http://www.tnmoc.org/

…which reminds us of this wonderful movie that opened for The Red Machine at the Durango Independent Film Festival:

http://greendotfilms.com/richard-farmer/under-god-trailer/

http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/06/elliott-erwitts-best-picture-the-next-one/