More Editing.

When I got into this indie film world, all I really cared about was writing and directing. I soon discovered that if you really wanted to get anything done, you had to learn to pretty much do everything. I mean, I do know plenty of people that do DP (director of photography) work as well as editing etc. However, it's tough on a low/no budget project to ask people to volunteer what could be hours of their free time to one of your projects and put up with you telling them, "well no... I actually wanted the sequence to look like this... "

My solution to this problem was to simply learn enough about things like editing and camera operation to get by and reduce my dependencies on other people.

While I'm far from being an expert at either editing or DP work (or anything film related for that matter) my skills seemed to reach a point where they were sufficient enough for other people to ask me to work on their stuff. That combined with the fact that I have a tough time saying "no" to people asking for help, is part of what has put me behind on LOD.

Last night was one of those nights where I felt compelled to try and knock another of these volunteer projects that's been on my todo list off the list in lieu of working on LOD.

The project "The Audition" is a short film that I shot and volunteered to edit way back in the spring. It's going fairly well and so far, the producers (Oxrock productions) have been pleased with the cut. The problem that I have though is that since my name will be on the film too, I'm agonizing over everything and it's taking probably way longer than it should.

While I like the shooting that I did, I'm a disappointed about a few things:

- The first is that being the first thing that I ever shot using an HD camera, there were some things that I guess I wasn't prepared for. For example, focus was something of an issue. We didn't use monitors to check focus, and since most of it was handheld, I was on auto focus most of the time. The Sony camera that was used did a fine job maintaining focus (given the lighting situation) but there were some shots where things ended up being a little soft.

- The other thing is that I'd wished we'd just used more light. The "prosumer" grade cameras that we use seem to struggle in low light situations. While this Sony was at the upper end of the spectrum, it struggled a bit too, which resulted in some picture noise in the black areas of the image.

- Sound. The sound bounces all over the place. It's totally usable (levels are all good, etc), but the feel is inconsistent because a combination of boom mics and lavalier mics (a tiny clip on mic that typically goes on the lapel) were used. There was a ton of room echo picked up on the boom mic, so trying to maintain an audio track that has the proper combination and balance of sound is difficult. The other thing is that the boom mic and the lav mic have completely different frequency response curves (one sounds a little brighter tonally than the other). I experimented with a couple of things last night to try and make things sound more balanced overall, but it's not trivial.

Overall, I think it looks pretty good, but there were some things to learn from and building on my experience and learning is the other reason I sign up for these projects. This one taught me the value of the location scout. While we did do a quick scout the day before, I didn't really pay attention to all the right things. The other thing is that doing the scout the day before is a bad thing because if there is a problem that's going to require additional resources (better mics, more light etc.) there's a mad scramble that you'd have perform to secure what you need, and that can affect the creative process and just stress everyone out.

Anyway... I've only two nights left to work on the LOD script and meet the deadline. While I feel it's doable, I'll be up late - no question.