I'm back with part 2 of my look behind the scenes at what goes in to making an independent animated feature. Last time I talked about getting grant money and running a successful Kickstarter campaign, but what comes after that? What happens after some production money comes in?

I think most people might be familiar with the plot of "The Producers", where a Broadway impresario and his nebbishy accountant raise a ton of money to produce a play, then realize they'd be better off in making the worst play ever, and keeping all the money when it fails. As tempting as that may seem, thankfully the world of filmmaking is not like that. I imagine that there's more of a responsibility to spend the money wisely, because now that there's a community that has expressed interest in contributing to a film's success, the real-life producers now have a renewed determination to make the best film that they can.

Some of the Kickstarter rewards packed up and ready for mailing...

The first few months after the Kickstarter campaign were spent mailing out as many of the rewards as possible. I've seen other campaigns take months or even a year to start sending out rewards, but Signe wanted to get going on that right away. So some of the pledge money that came from Kickstarter went to creating the reward items and buying mailing supplies and postage. Then it was time to focus on production, getting things into a higher gear.

The "LOVE CARDS" that were part of the Kickstarter Rewards sent to backers.

Most of the money raised on Kickstarter was spent on recording the film's soundtrack, which will be a combination of spoken dialogue and songs. So there were costs for recording studios, sound engineers, the composer's fee for creating the songs, and then the actors' fees. Some of the cast members were based in Los Angeles, so that meant travel expenses for Signe and Sturgis to supervise the recording of their parts, as well as the costs of a second studio and recording engineer in California.

Signe Baumane and Sturgis Warner during the West Coast actor recording sessions.

The production went through the Screen Actors Guild to secure the best possible voice talent for "My Love Affair With Marriage". (I could probably write an entire blog post about dealing with SAG, that should probably be my next topic...) And part of hiring union actors means payroll taxes, contributions to pension funds, workers compensation insurance, and so on. I'll get into more detail on this next time.

Sound designer Jeffrey Roy during the voice recording session at 3rd St. ADR in Santa Monica.

18 actors recorded their roles in April 2017 in New York, another 6 were recorded in May in California, and the last two in June and August. Signe and Sturgis were on hand for the entire sessions, to give the performers direction and the background information about the story to get all of these pieces of dialogue right, and then came the task of assembling all of these pieces into a soundtrack, much like a giant jigsaw puzzle.

It took several weeks of working with editor Arjun Sheth to select the best takes and put them together with the temporary versions of the songs composed by Kristian Sensini (who also created music for "Rocks in My Pockets") but as a result, it seems that the film's English soundtrack is nearly complete. (A Latvian version will come later...)

Editor Arjun Sheth putting the best dialogue takes together at Final Frame.

It's a little strange to think that right now, you could listen to the whole film of "My Love Affair With Marriage", and not see anything. Film is a visual medium first, but the sound also plays an important role, and I guess you've got to start somewhere, right?. Now the arduous task of creating images to go with all of these sounds can begin, but that's a good thing to talk about next time.

Hello to all the fans of Signe Baumane and her animation! I'm John H., her office manager and she's asked me to help her update her blog once (or maybe twice) a week while she's in production on "My Love Affair With Marriage". I'm sure she'll still post on this blog when she can, but her main focus right now is to keep animating her new feature so that it can be completed in a relatively timely manner.

That's partly how I came to work for Signe, though we've known each other for over 20 years. We worked together for Bill Plympton for several years, with Signe on the production tasks like painting cels and helping to shoot the animation, and me taking care of the office work, like dealing with film festivals, accounting, e-mail and other day-to-day tasks. A little over two years ago Signe called me up and asked me to come in for a day and do some consulting. I was only working part-time then, three days a week since one of my two part-time gigs had folded up shop.

So I went to visit Signe in her studio in Sunset Park, Brooklyn - she told me that she was planning to start production on her second feature, but she was concerned because her day tended to fill up doing a lot of other tasks, leaving little time for animation. So I asked her what these tasks were - answering e-mail, dealing with festivals, accounting - and it started to sound really familiar. I've done all of those things as an office manager, so I suggested that she get herself an office manager. "Great idea!" she said, "But I can't afford an office manager." So, why not get a part-time office manager - and that's when I realized that I was an office manager, and I was available part-time, so it just sort of made sense.

It could be just like the 1990's all over again, I figured, with Signe on production and me taking care of the paperwork - though now we're in the digital age of filmmaking and I'd have to learn some new things, like how to send files with new-fangled things like FTP and WeTransfer and Dropbox. But things like payroll and accounting are still the same, no matter where you go, so I volunteered to get involved on her new, independent animated production, "My Love Affair With Marriage".

My first task on the production end of things was to copyright the script in October 2015, which at the time was just called "The Marriage Project" and it was not much more than a rough treatment then, without dialogue. In January 2016 I started re-typing it all with the help of screenwriting software into the proper format, while Signe was writing dialogue for the characters, so that each time we made a new draft, there was more dialogue to add, replacing the story beats in the treatment. By June of 2016 we were on the 20th draft and the script was essentially completed and ready to be copyrighted again.

By then it was also time to apply for some grants, like the NEA Grant, the Sloan/Tribeca Fund and the U.S. Artists Fellowship. And while we were unsuccessful in getting funding from those sources, the project had received funding from Women Make Movies and NYSCA, so there was paperwork to be done in order to give those organizations reports on how their funding was being spent.

By the time January 2017 rolled around, Signe and Sturgis had begun the Kickstarter campaign to raise funds for the production of "My Love Affair With Marriage", and I helped however I could, whether it was spreading the word on social media or just watching the pledges coming in, and trying to reassure them that the campaign was going to succeed. Once it did, I began packaging and addressing the rewards that we could fulfill right away, while making notes about the ones that we'd have to send out later on.

Next time I'll bring you up to speed on all that's happened since the Kickstarter campaign, which is recording all of the actors, completing the soundtrack, building the sets and starting the animation. Catch you then!