Sunday 19 August 2012

There And Back Again (or, Traffic-Driving Hobbit Reference #103,074)

A tricky one last Friday. Attempting to film closeups to slot into a scene shot three weeks earlier...

I 'd already had one experience of this that made me decide 'never again', but faced with the prospect of getting the same seven cast members together again, this was most definitely the lesser of two nerve-shredders.



The shooting went well enough except for the inevitable weather problems (since I was relying on natural light); it was far too bright - and consistently so when on the previous occasion the sun spent the morning playing peek-a-boo - and having had problems with a discrepancy between the image as it appeared on camera and the image that presented it self to me in the editing software, I was reluctant to take the exposure too far down. But a swift experiment with the footage when I got home seemed to (mostly) allay fears of incompatibility.

A slightly more serious issue was when I realised there was a very simple, wordless shot I could have got which would have been ideal for establishing Caron in the scene. Would have taken fifteen seconds. (Well, okay, this is filming - it would have taken three minutes, but still...)

However, absolute despair being the mother of sleight-of-hand, I then realised that if I order the shots slightly differently I can achieve the same effect with a different shot. You can save almost everything with some thoughtful editing, as long as you have a good cast and you can see them - hear what they're saying (the last being particularly important in my films. What, a visual medium? Where?).

And of course, since I so am dead set against reshooting parts of scenes to fit in with earlier shoots, any rumours that I might have reshot another bit of another scene in the afternoon are totally unfounded abd both actresses involved are mysteriously unavailable for comment. But had we done that, I'm sure it would have worked out fine - even if the location I described as lovely and quiet (oh, why did I open my mouth?) did suffer from low level machinery rumble most of the afternoon...

Anyway, it occurred to me after the last post that I was so wrapped up in the actual shoot, I completely forgot that we now have a trailer online. It was warmly received at the Brighton Filmmakers Coalition One Shot Challenge Screening, but will likely be slightly revised to incorporate some of the reshoot footage.

Oh, and speaking of reshoots, of course I never do them, but if I had decided to reshoot a bit of the countryside footage because we were completely screwed sound-wise by the wind, and if I had been unable to organise it until a month later, we might have had a slight flora-based discrepancy:







So, it's a really good job we didn't have that to contend with, eh...?

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