Principal Photography Done

Ah, we got it. At 1:30am on the morning hours of the 2nd (which thanks to daylight savings time, means we get home by 1am), we completed principal photography on my movie. Now is where the real fun begins (and the real magic happens). Of course, I'm a little shy on hard drive space, so before I can load up the 2 hours I got on Saturday, I have to cut together the footage I got on the 18th.

Not that this shoot was without its shortcomings, but my experience from day one helped me get through day two with fewer problems, so my 2 hours probably has more usable footage than the 3 1/2 I got on day one. Of course, it seems that some people have difficulty learning lines still which created additional frustration among the cast, and I think he was feeling even more this time around. While I expected issues, the tension rose as the shoot wore on. However, I'm hoping that the multiple takes of his lines will yield enough to make him look like a solid upstanding amateur.

Some things that went well, though, had to do with my desire to rehearse the scenes first and walk through it without the camera in hand. It allowed them to solify their lines and actions, and allowed me to see where they wanted to be without forcing them into a hole within the lens. We did that for Scene 33's reshoot, and I managed to get a single take that I think I'll use uncut, since I enjoy one shot takes.

We will likely have sound issue with the outside shots, however, since we got all kinds of miscellaneous sounds out there that can't be cleaned up such as wind, dogs, church bells, and traffic. Yeah, the pickup on the Engineer's mike is so good that he was getting traffic on the expressway at least a half mile to a mile away. We'll have to get everyone together in the room that we did our initial read-through in to re-record a lot of the outdoor sound. I really hope that goes well, as one person did not like acting along with a recording of another part that needs to fit together seamlessly in a single uncut take. I can only imagine how she'll do trying to re-act with herself.

Now the issue is getting an NLE that I can use easily enough and has enough features to warrant bothering with it. I'm still syncking up the sound in Windows Movie Maker and I plan on doing the rough edit in it, but need something more robust to make it look consistent in color and sound, as well as doing some minor effects on the video here and there to either clean up some pixels or lower the light to make it look darker. That sort of thing.

It's kind of a long road, but there is a festival deadline on December 16 that I want to make if I can. So we've got to get this sorted out as well as finding a way to either extract the sound from the final video or it'll need to be worked before hand, which is kind of silly since why work 6 hours of sound when you're only going to use 90 minutes of it. Haven't got it all worked out yet, but we're going to have to soon cause I want to get editing here.