Shoot Day 2/Lessons Learned

Actually I'll probably keep the lessons learned bullet list running as I work through post on this because sometimes you don't learn the lessons until you're trying to cut it together.

I think today went really well, though I haven't started looking at the footage yet. It's still copying to the hard drives for backup and then Avid will need to transcode it. Then I'll start looking through it. I have 6 weeks to get through post, so I don't have to rush to edit, but I'd rather get a first pass done sooner rather than later in case I really do need to do a pick up on something. I'm not expecting to, but you never know.


The actors were all pleased with how organized I was. Student films usually aren't really. But our call today was 1 to 5 and we were pulling away from the location to go to dinner at 5:03. Yay me. Of course I don't get all the credit. The crew was on top of things, the actors were all sharp (mostly), and there wasn't too much that went wrong. The weather didn't entirely cooperate. Partly cloudy sucks. I'd rather it be entirely cloudy or entirely sunny. But I really didn't want to move them to the dingy wall. We made do, it'll be fine. It was incredibly cold and windy doing the outside stuff. I'm concerned about the sound, but haven't listened yet. I thought I learned about shooting in the cold from Killer, but part of the problem was I wasn't expecting today to be cold. I was thinking it was going to be like yesterday. Must get better at reading the details of the weather. I wasn't the only one at least. Everyone was dressed for yesterday and freezing.

I did one steady cam shot. Aaron took this. It's my only behind the scenes from the 2 days.

Lessons Learned

• Read the details of the weather
• Apparently I forgot to include my phone number when I sent out the schedule to the actors. That's a big thing to double check. It ended up not being a problem but was definitely my bad.
• Don't trust the led on the camera. Really I should already know this. We shot an opening sequence that had Ellen and Alec each walking into the cafe. Inside at the time were the two actors playing the cops. Standing there we could see them, but looking at the display on the camera it was dark in there and we couldn't see anything other than vague shapes. So we only did it once because it was cold instead of asking them to move and doing it again. Now that I'm looking at it on the computer I totally see them and see that they're cops. That shot is unusable and I don't have another. ALWAYS DO 2 OF EVERY SHOT NO MATTER WHAT. One for safety, I already know this.

Hmm... apparently so far I think it went well.