As previously stated, this blog is to help us grow as filmmakers. As such, it only makes sense to analyze our own work. Taking in what we did well and learning from mistakes will provide a solid foundation that will improve future releases. As such, I will now critique our first video The Last Chip.
1. The Limitations
I think it is prudent to discuss the limitations that we faced while producing The Last Chip. This entry should not be construed as trying to make excuses. It should instead be viewed as a list of hurdles to overcome.
First off, I would like to say how a phone can be a difficult thing to film on. We used my Rugby Pro smartphone for all the scenes. This presented a number of problems. The video quality itself I felt was pretty good for having been on a smartphone but still not ideal. An important issue that was faced was the sound quality of the phone's microphone. A lot of the scenes had to have the sound completely muted and then dubbed over in order to make them not sound like they were recorded with a potato. This dubbing presented another issue that will be elaborated on in the section Post Production, but I will simply say for now that we were not prepared to properly deal with sound related issues.
Another issue presented by filming on my phone was the lack of memory. After having done a decent amount of shots, my phone's capacity piqued. It then took more time than I would have liked to upload the shots to Google Drive in order to delete them off my phone and proceed. This slowed down the momentum of our filming. We were in the zone, but then had to take a large break. This also meant less filming time as we were needing to film the entire short in a day. A simple solution would be to buy a larger SD card and/or have the videos upload whilst filming.
Physical limitations and general inexperience contributed to a rather slow action. Having never choreographed a fight scene, it all seemed very intimidating having to throw punches at your friend and make sure you block the incoming hits. General concern for each others well being slowed down the action and the force of our attacks. It also does not help that I am a little out of shape and really had to limit the fighting to punches as I can barely do a sidekick above my waistline. To remedy this, I have been looking into certain camera techniques such as under-cranking to speed action up and using certain forced perspectives. By forcing perspective a person could be safely out of the way of an attack, but from the perspective of the camera look like they got hit. This safety net would help speed things along. And before I forget, I am trying to get in shape. That should help both with filming and living.
2. Post Production
This is what killed it for me. As you might have noticed, this blog was started back in August, while The Last Chip was not released till January. This occurred due to many reasons, but the main reason was due to the post production that complicated the whole process.
As was noted above, we had certain sound related issues. My phone's microphone did not do the greatest of jobs in terms of the sounds we made. Certain scenes had too much background noise going on that we had to mute those scenes and dub over. This meant trying to use the microphone on my computer for my own parts. Again, too much background noise that using Audacity to filter out just made the recordings sound horrible. After much experimenting, I finally found a decent setting for Garage Band that worked (in conjunction to putting an ice pack under my laptop so the fan would not ruin the session).
We were also determined to use our own sound effects due to having difficulty finding public domain ones that sounded good. By the end, we used only a handful of our own recorded sound effects. The bright side would be that I managed to find a decent website for sound effects at freesound.org. The only drawback was making sure that the license for use was Creative Commons 0 and then providing the appropriate attribution. This greatly reduced the sounds that we would prefer to use as a lot of Creative Commons 0 sounds were no better than the ones we recorded.
In the end I added Guile's theme to help cover up some of the less then stellar sounds. It also added a better mood while viewing which was a plus.
3. Conclusion
All in all, this was a good experience. After reviewing the process to create a short film, I feel confident that our next will be better. The issues faced are a combination of lack of experience and money. The money problem can be remedied through simple budgeting to afford better equipment. The lack of experience will be solved by simply filming more and studying great directors. As such, you can expect this blog to churn out more analyses of films so that were might learn better techniques and improve our ability to tell a story.
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