I received an email a couple of weeks ago from an acquaintance from film school. He told me that he had shot a ten-minute short film in February, but was having some difficulty putting together an edit, as he is not an editor. This first time director needed some help, so I agreed to edit the piece for him.This project had its share of problems, technical and otherwise. The film is set almost entirely to music (I’ll get back to this in a later post) with a fair amount of voiceover. The biggest problem that I had was that the lead actor’s dialog was horrible. This could have been the film’s saving grace because the actor never speaks on screen. At my request the director had the dialog re-recorded, but did not hire an actor to do the recording. He opted to record the voiceover himself. It turned out better than the original voice track, but not a well as it could have with a decent actor.Now for some of the picture related problems. This is actually a list of some things to watch out for during production that could come back to bite you in post.
- Watch for gear and crewmembers in the frame. This is not just a responsibility of the camera operator. Every member of the crew should be watching out for this one. Usually there are ways to cut around this problem, but that doesn’t work if it happens in every take for the duration of the shot.
- Do not use auto iris on the camera when moving from indoors to outdoors or vice versa. As a matter of fact, don’t use auto iris EVER.
- Do not use auto white balance. White balance the camera properly. If you don’t know how to white balance your camera, check the manual, or try an online resource for help. dvxuser.com is a good source of information if you are shooting with Panasonic products.
- Stripe your tapes before shooting. I can’t tell you how many times I have worked with footage shot in 24P that gets edited at 29.97 because there are loads of time code breaks in the tape. Time code breaks occur when a tape is rewound in the camera for playback and the tape isn’t forwarded to the same frame where recording ceased. Many cameras have an “End Search” feature that brings the tape back to where it should be. Striping the tape is more reliable because you don’t have to remember to use “End Search” when the pressure is on during production.
- When shooting complex hand held camera movements, it is a very good idea to do a few less takes, and try a couple of takes on sticks for safety. It’s usually a good indication that the shot is not working if you are on take fourteen, and there are no lines for an actor to flub.
- Lighting continuity within a scene is essential to creating a believable scene. It’s okay to have some small discrepancys with the lighting, but when a wide shot is so dark that you can barely see the character, and the close-ups are so well lit that night looks like day, there is a problem. The old adage “Fix it in post” can work sometimes, but more often than not, it just doesn’t fly. No matter what anybody tells you… garbage in = garbage out.
I’ll stop there for now. The moral of the story is to hire an experienced Director of Photography. If you have an experienced D.P., you will turn out a much better film. I have some other notes to share regarding the producer’s responsibilities, but I’ll save that for another post.
