This week we finished the bulk of our shoot for our short film. After finding our feet on the first day it was quite a smooth process and we managed to work productively as a group. The actors were great, very patient, enthusiastic and happy to help out. Because we had to wait for the shop to close, we couldn't start setting up until 8 and usually ended up finishing around 3am. We now have just one short scene in another location and some green-screen footage to film.
We suffered from two significant set-backs, however. One that was resolved before it had any actual impact on the project, another that's irreversible we're all very unhappy with and we'll have to continue to deal with.
Firstly, after a month of pre-planning and organisation, we arrived at the shop and unloaded our three cars worth of equipment when security turned up and announced our filming had been cancelled by health and safety, and that we'd have to leave. It turns out the shop's manager, who okayed the shoot and organised our supervision with her staff, didn't have the authority to allow us and our kit in the shop after closing. It turned out that everyone was informed of its cancellation four-days prior apart from us, who weren't informed of any issues at all.
Luckily, after a long conversation with security and phoning the shop manager and head of health and safety, we were given the clearance to go ahead and film again, despite issues with our risk assessment and preparation. Thankfully, this was resolved pretty quickly, before our actors arrived and we could quickly move past it.
The second issue was that the JVC's we used to film on (which are usually reserved just for third years) suffer from an defect that, after they've warmed up, causes them to produce "hot"/dead pixels. So the majority of our shots are now decorated with 4 or 5 red and green dots. We didn't notice this until we uploaded the footage in an edit suite, and there's not really any way we could have prevented it without prior warning.
From the tutors point of view (after being convinced it wasn't us being negligent) is that we can't be marked down for it, but no one is happy about it at all. Our tutors wanted us to re-shoot all the affected scenes, and so did we - with the knowledge that we'd benefit from doing a better production job a second time round, but it didn't seem feasible with the deadline/budget/actors availability. The other, significant issue, is that it will probably be difficult for any film festivals to take the finished work seriously - which is a requirement of the brief. The larger the image is shown, the more prominent the pixels will become.
My main worry now is the quality of the audio, as all sound is diegetic and dialogue-heavy, and all the atmos noise (such as the fridges and freezers) is very apparent, and the levels tend to peak and distort during the argument scene. I really want to avoid having to do ADR (dragging the actors into a recording studio to re-record and sync their lines.)
We aim to have a first rough-edit in place by Wednesday, and I'm looking forward to seeing how it comes together.
No comments:
Post a Comment