Pergatory

So here is my third and final film for my independent practice. I think I've learnt more doing this shoot than during any other simply because more went wrong.

Firstly there was a problem with the audio so we had to do a little overdubbing. This was on the shot of the questioning girl because you can hear the rain in the background and the opening shot because my voice (monogamous man in hat) was too quiet. We knew the rain would be a problem when it started spitting down but we had to get things done so we always knew were going to have to overdub. Still, it's a pain in the backside to overdub: lip syncing difficulty wise was the lesser of the two evils compared to making the new overdubbed audio sit well within the rest of the rest of it. I added a little echo effect on the questioning girl but it still sounds a little weird if you listen for it. I also had to search for a section of a take with a long enough area without dialogue to double up as a wildtrack in both instances where the audio was faulty. It was all o.k in the end but this experience has still hammered home the importance of getting the audio right on set. If it does go wrong one would need a fair amount of time and someone who knows what they're doing audio wise to really make sure the overdubbed audio doesn't sound weird.

We hadn't scripted the opening scene with the two men so James (the writer) and I scribbled down quickly what I needed to say, James improved his remaining lines.

The second issue we had was with editing. This is an issue I only became accustomed to after I made this mistake. I didn't ensure that the actors were in exactly the same position between certain successive shots. This meant that once in editng there were some continuity errors and certain shots looked jarring when cut together. Next time I work on any kind of project where this type of visual continuity has to be maintained, ensuring that we don't have this problem will be my main concern as far as watching for mistakes goes. In fact for my final major project I think I'll try and ensure I have a script supervisor to watch for these kinds of mistakes.

Lastly there was a little problem with camera noise on the white abyss scenes. We didn't have any gain on the camera and we lit the set perfectly well but there was still a little noise on the raw footage. After chatting to a few people it became apparent that this noise was just something the camera had ended up doing naturally but for a reason we couldn't put our fingers on. In the near future I'm going to sit down with the camera and work out why it makes the image noisy as I certainly won't put up with it for my final major project. Still in the final edit I added a little film grain to work with the noise and so I think I've gotten away with it.

Below is the edit of the abyss scene with the above mistakes as well as the final edit.