So after MONTHS of delays and procrastination on it, I’ve finally finished the editing on and shipped out my latest film, a short horror idea centered around a local DJ, “Radio”. Check it out up on YouTube (in 720p HD, no less!) over at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UN0szeAZaJ4. Or, feel free to view it below!
If you’re interested in some of the technical principles I came across while shooting this, read on. The biggest problem I ended up having with this film was loss of my audio takes from the shoots: I shot the film in my camera’s 24p mode which wraps the 24 progressive frames in a 60i stream, thus necessitating a reverse telecine process to extract them out. When doing this in After Effects and rendering out the subsequent frames, I lost all my initial audio takes because AE’s default render options doesn’t include audio–I’ve since learned to ALWAYS check that audio rendering is enabled. I ended up recording all the audio in separate takes and dubbing them in afterwards–lip-syncing is almost impossible on film. The second thing I really learned about in making this film was the importance of storyboarding. Although I shot a lot of b-roll and had all of the shots I wanted, I realized both while shooting and editing that my mis-en-scene looked a bit capricious, as if I didn’t really have a grand idea at the time as to exactly how I wanted to scene to look. I realize now that, by storyboarding out the exact process and shots beforehand, it’ll probably make shooting go a lot faster and ensure in editing I know exactly what goes when.
