Eight Hours

First of all, Blogger is pissing me off. It hasn't automatically created paragraph breaks for a while now like it used to, so I have to go in and edit the Html myself. And now on top of that, it won't let me title my posts anymore. I can't even put the cursor in the box. BAH!

Tuesday, July 10th -- NOTE: Yay! I've got my titles back! I checked the Blogger "Known Issues" page, and it said they're working on fixing the problem, but in the meantime to click in the very upper right hand corner of the title box, and it worked!

Now that I've vented about that, about our short film shoot Saturday night. Wow that turned into a looong night. I had estimated that we'd be completely done with the whole shoot by 3 am, but I wasn't able to wrap Emory until just after 4 am, and then Kim and I still had more to shoot after that. She and I got back to my parents house just as the sun started to come up at 5 am.

But Kim and Emory were both awesome! Professional, committed, helpful, patient despite that fact that filming took longer than expected. And I really liked both their performances, they both brought a lot of honesty into their characters.

The biggest problem was lighting. And unfortunately, that's always gonna be an issue with anything we shoot, since I don't have professional lighting equipment. I want to go back and reshoot some of Kim's footage with better lighting, I really liked her performance but you can't see it very well. I'm also missing a bunch of footage that I didn't get because it didn't really involve my actors, so I left that for later.

I also feel, after preliminary editing, that the visual feel of this film won't be professional, because there were a lot of hand held shots in a moving car, so the picture isn't always steady. Another peril of amature film making. Those two aspects disappoint me (lighting and hand-held shots), because we really want to put up professional-looking material, and those two things are incredibly limiting that way.

However, on the positive side, this short film is much more complex than what we've filmed before, and in all other aspects it's editing together nicely.

Funny story: We had plugged the camcorder into the TV and were watching back some footage we had filmed on the back porch. All the dialog was echoing weirdly, it was really spooky sounding. At first we thought it was because we were using cell phones for the scene, and somehow the cell phone was causing an echo in the recording. But then we realized that some of the dialog without the cell phones was echoing too. So then we thought the echo was being caused by the plastic roof over the patio. So we moved out from under the roof, and filmed all of the shots for that whole section over again. As we watched the new footage back, that was echoing as well. Then Kim said, "Maybe the echo is coming from the camcorder?" She was right, I had left the view screen open while it was playing back, so we were hearing audio from both the camcorder and the TV, creating the echo. I felt so incredibly blonde at that moment. DAH!