But of course!

I never spoke of how shooting the promo for The Ghost Recordist went! I must say, the nerves hit me when we went out on the shoot, I had never produced anything like this before and I knew it was on my head if an actor didn't show up, or we forgot equipment, or the food sucked or anything at all, basically. A million things could have gone wrong, but they didn't, thankfully. I found that, once everything and everyone was on set, managing resources was much, much easier, and I felt much more at ease than the night before, and part of my job was to keep calm and be organised (or at least appear to be). I acted as a consultant to a stressed out Niall, a sort of stage hand for props and lights, a chef, a time-keeper, and comic relief. Oh, I also took lots of nice pictures.

Shane Showing Alan the art of boom swinging.

Actors between takes.

"The lonely light."

More actors between takes.

All in all, I'm happy with our two days of shooting. The last scene of the first day took far longer than anticipated, Niall and I should have thought about that one more, but other than that, everything went like clockwork, we had everything we needed, and everyone was satisfied.

The Blogger Returns

So I haven't posted on this in a while. The plan was to write a little post after each production was finished, but as you can see, that didn't happen. My excuse: I got a new hard drive and had to transfer my OS, and all my (1 TB) of data to it, which rather restricted my access to my computer for some time. Well, at least I'm no longer living in mortal fear of my hard drive failing! So now I must use my incredible powers of human memory to recall events from a whole week ago... Oh boy.

Isolation, I had high hopes for the sound design on this one. I'd thought of possible soundtracks and crazy experimental sound effects, and imagined how they'd play out with the natural ambience.

Minimalism.

That's what I was hoping for, dense but simple sound. Production sound was fairly simple for this one, the dialogue was fairly sparse, so most of the work will come in post. One of the lines peaked in literally every take, because of a fault with the level meter in the Zoom I didn't notice til afterwards, so it looks like it's going to stay distorted. James reckons it's not worth getting the actor back for one line of ADR, not for the promo anyway. I'll just have to be more careful on the main shoot, and trust my ears more than the technology. The rest was great though, I really enjoyed working on the project, stressful though it was, and I can't wait to get editing.


I knew I wouldn't have as much to focus on for Who's the Mother?, as it's quite dialogue heavy. I just made sure the recordings were clear, with the mic as close as I could get it, and the levels were good, standard protocol. Because there's so little else going on audio-wise however, the dialogue does have to be pristine, as any mistakes will be that much more noticeable. I'm hoping it's all A-OK. I would like to do a soundtrack to this one, and I'll be fighting for it. Something with acoustic guitars, similar to Juno (which is one of the film's influences, so, negotiation points). Post production will consist of a lot of mixing, so it may be a little tedious, but I enjoy that sort of thing in small doses.

Success!

My first collaborative shoot went off without a hitch, thankfully. We filmed the promo for Seven Minutes With Beibhinn over the past two days, and we didn't have a single catastrophe, which is more than I can say for some of the other projects I've worked on. Oh, by the way, David Wolfe and Stephen Fennesy's production is now a comedy drama called Seven Minutes With Beibhinn, unfortunately there were some complications with filming in the seminary. Probably should have mentioned that first. Ah well.

Everything was well organised, call sheets, shooting schedule, and top notch food. It's safe to say any potential chaos was avoided, and all was calm. The camera (Sony NXCAM) was a real pleasure to use, once I got the hang of it, the white balancing was a little finnicky at first. The zoom and focus are smooth as butter, and it's got a lot of features. The shots were mostly static and simple, which gave me some time to get back into the swing of working a camera, but at the same time, I'd love to try some more difficult ones to see what it can really do. We found that the lights cast fairly obvious hard shadows even with diffusers, so we just bounced them off the ceiling, using them as fills, combined with natural light.

So the shoot went well, I'll be giving away more detail during the presentation of course, but that's it for now. Next up, sound recording for Isolation.

A bit late to the party

Well, I realise I haven't really posted on my work experience yet, so I'd better get started. Let me first say this: Finding work experience when you've got so little is HARD, it doesn't just help to know the right people, it's completely necessary. I've asked a bunch of people that just haven't got back to me. It's in this regard I'm so lucky I go to a college with really helpful tutors. I've been offered a work placement on Leticia's newest feature documentary, Land of Amber, and having been given a peek at the rough cut, and suffice to say I am rather excited. I will of course be doing post production sound for the piece, and I'm confident I'll do a good job. More to come when I get started, hopefully soon.