Besides putting together a rough cut of the first 15 minutes of the film to show at tomorrow's wrap party, I am now completely immersed in the process of acquiring music for the film. The Citypaper ad went up on Tuesday and so far I've gotten several replies from a wide variety of musicians and the CDs should be coming in the mail soon. The mp3s that I've heard so far are great and I've already stuck one into a scene. Filmmaker magazine just ran a great two part series on music for independent films, from getting clearance for big hits to whether to just go with music cues or to hire a composer or any combination. What I'm going for right now is to get as much music as I can from local independent artists and fit it in wherever I can and then fill in the holes by recording some stuff with friends. One thing that was mentioned in the article was the danger of dropping in some song that there's no way in hell you'd ever be able to afford the rights to as a temporary track to edit to while waiting for music that you can use, and falling in love with the scene cut to music that would cost an arm and a leg to secure the rights to. I swore I wouldn't do that, but I just couldn't resist seeing how the fight scene would go with Beat It going into Beat on the Brat and of course I love it that way and of course the finished product will be completely different and I'm sure I'll love it just as much with different music. So tomorrow is the big wrap party and the entire cast and crew is going to get to see what we have edited so far and I'm very excited. I held an informal test screening at work yesterday and it went over very well. People laughed in all the right places and even in some unexpected places. Despite the fact that they're hardly an unbiassed audience, and that they got to see one of our co-workers get killed onscreen by his own wife as well as seeing parts of our office used as a set, their reaction got me pumped to see the reactions of people who don't know anybody or any place involved in the film.