Boom's in shot

When I agreed to do VFX on the film I thought there would be 2 shots to do - the crazy mirror scene, and the crazy powder drop scene - this changed quickly.

Crazy powder drop scene never happened, there wasn't enough time and we just didn't film with effect in mind which would have made the entire thing a lot harder. But the crazy mirror shot? We had 3 attempts at this shot before the final try, 2 with me and 1 on the second day of shooting because we were ahead of schedule. Now our dancer was wearing green so common sense meant we had to use a blue screen, right? I mean, what can go wrong? Somehow the natural lighting from the location made the blue section of the RGB pixels in her hair the exact same hue of blue as our blue screen - something we couldn't notice until we go into post and tried to key out the screen, and ended up with a clean key of the mirror but also her hair was missing alongside it.

I worked on fixing it with Phil and tried a lot of different keys to try and fix it, changing saturation to get more of a difference before keying it out, using multiple keys at the same time to make a difference. When my last resort was rotoscoping a friend offered to try his hand at fixing it - he got the shots to match up but the blue screen was still a mystery to him so I have the project file with me, it's just a case of cleaning it. Tomorrow I'm going to be rotoscoping a lot - or I may find a solution on adobe.com, We'll soon find out.

Now you see him

Now you don't

One of my jobs was also cleaning up the shots - in some shots you can see people in mirrors, it was destined to happen at some point and my general threat on set was 'if you're in shot, you VFX yourself out'. But when it's the boom in shot, you've just got to deal with it. I spent today masking it out and trying to fill it with something similar, frame-by-frame, as the shot in question is not only a moving shot it's a shot in which the camera was dutch and returned horizontal meaning tracking wasn't the easiest either. I ended up tracking it manually rotating and moving a cover up as and when needed - hopefully you can't see it. When we take this film into festivals and I've had more time to work on it I'll have taken out the fire exit signs, the plugs and anything that ruins the overall aesthetic of the film.

Also update we got the VFX mirror shot working! It took a lot of masking (from Phil, I had seen enough of masks today) but we got it working and now it's in our final edit.

It's not a music video

When I took on the role of sound designer I knew from the beginning that I wanted diegetic sound recorded on set.  At first the soundtrack was heading more in a soundscape route but as it evolved it became clear that music would be needed - but the piece needed grounding. As soon as you take the diegetic sound away from a film you're in silent movie territory, it's more a music video and is more focused on the music than the image and I wanted to make sure that didn't happen.

Before we started production I wrote the music to go with what I imagined the piece to look like on the assumption that I could add the foley tracks, synch sound and have a re-edit once the piece was filmed. However I ran into problems.

Day 1 in W103 - I still had my sanity

My main problem was I had wrote most of the music before the piece was made, meaning that when we got on set there was no guarantee it would work. What I found was the overall 'atmosphere' of the film wasn't what I had imagined meaning that the music just didn't match up in post - there was no saving it. I spent 2 days in the Protools studio adding foley sounds, synch sound, changing chords, adding instruments, taking instruments away, trying to be the drummer I was destined never to be. At the end of the 2nd day I knew it was pretty must over, I just needed James to confirm it for me, in case there was some fix for it that I was oblivious too and in all fairness there was, the solution was to re-write. Still not one to give up easily I decided to try and re-write over night, Meg and James gave me some reference tracks - I reverted to my theatre routes and got influenced by Sweeney Todd, many violins were played that night. The next day I begrudgingly admitted defeat and returned to my edit suite. 

The opening after my night of re-writing

A friend who had been giving his opinion on the music through out the production agreed to compose a new track in time for hand-in so that I could focus on my other roles - still keeping me as sound designer, just not music composition. 

Since I had been integrating the foley/sync sound with my music the basic layout for the soundscape had already been laid. I just needed to clean it up and make some decisions on which sounds should take prominence. Taking away the music also made me realise that we were missing some sounds. Nirav our sound recordist on set was amazing (when he wasn't in shot) and told me early on that the microphone I had originally booked out just wasn't up for the job we were asking of it, it didn't have the power and just wasn't made for the amount of movement we needed to make. (At one point he used a C-stand - you could hear his pulse through the boom pole). But this sadly made the sound from out first day shooting (powder and bath) pretty much unusable and I had to work around it. Also with the complexity of this shoot we couldn't get that close to the dancer as when he did he would be in shot in at least one mirror.

After getting the soundscape pretty much done I booked out a zoom and decided to get the rest of the sounds at home. This was just the sound of the dancer hitting her body gently and a few more water tracks. Water was easy, I just really wanted a sound to match up with her foot entering the bath becuase it seemed so bare without it - standard setup of me holding a sponge over my kitchen sink. The body sounds where a bit harder. We recorded some in the foley studio (I think Em actually bruised herself punching her shoulder?) and we recored some on set but it didn't sound natural because we were so far away. So decided to hit sausages. It makes sense, honestly, it was the raw meat thing and the only thing I had was sausages - I read it the Sound Effects Bible. I just ran with it and it worked.

Tomorrow is the day we finally export - I have to finalise some VFX, finish the sound, get the music approved and finish the edit. Then export. It's going to be fine. Just fine. 

Finally, an answer!

We wrapped on the Sunday, gave equipment back on the Monday morning and by 10:30 I was sat in Avid waiting to go. At the end of every shoot day we had all stayed back and watched the daily rushes and I made a mental note of what worked well, what didn't, which shots would need major editing, which were fine on their own - that kind of thing. My problem was that the station I was booked on was being used by someone else who had set 150 files transcoding over the morning. The upside to this was I got upgraded to the Symphony suite, which just makes life better. 

I sat and transcoded everything from the Sony codec to Avid codec and named all my files - this took all afternoon as we had around 60 rushes, so I named them, named the sound we recored live on set (it makes sense, honestly) synced everything up and left for the night. Come Tuesday morning I've made a rough cut of the edit trying to keep continuity the best I can and get a general overview of length and pacing. I had the bulk of the edit down by the time Megan came by to have a look and give her opinion. Now by this time I had already watched the rushes a lot, too many times to be honest. So that meant that sometimes I'd act on the feedback, others I'd know from the other rushes just wouldn't work match-up wise. But we tried different things, trying to match up the edit in a different way that may not match up perfectly continuity wise but the match of the movement makes you over look it. 

During transcoding 

Transitioning between the scenes was causing problems as when we originally storyboarded the transitions we were filming everything in one location which meant we could literally film her walking from one room to the next, however that's not what ended up happening. This film had relied so much on continuity and match-up editing so far it almost felt strange to break from that but the main problem was - the match-up wasn't working. In the powder scene the edit had to be montage 1) because it was simply to hard to film for continuity whilst using powder 2) In movies the happiest scenes are always cut to a montage, some slow-motion shots, some fast. Mainly because the point of a 'happy scene' isn't to show the happiness taking place, it's to capture it. It is one of the few emotions where encapsulating it and embracing it as an editor is more effective than leading the audience by the hand and trying to make them experience this specific version - they have their own versions to dip into, it's the audiences empathy that make it effective. It's also a great way to signify time passing without using built-in transitions. 

After our tutorial with Rachel we noted we really needed to fix the scene transitions - I was in Avid pretty early one day and started a new sequence to completely rework the montage because I simply wasn't as happy with it as I was with the others. Here I just let myself do whatever I wanted really - there was no stipulations to meet. This resulted in some changes to the final edit because I realised there was a more experimental answer to my question.

Meg colour grading

When I brought Meg in to watch it again with the changes she liked it and it made me sleep better at night! I even made some changes to cut down on time (because I felt like it was a bit too long - just a bit) and my rule was if Meg didn't notice it missing, it didn't need to be there in the first place. Meg colour corrected because I just can't - not good at it, plus I needed to leave that Avid suite. But we are now in the final stages of editing. I had to drop the visual effect (powder drop) because I simply didn't have time to make it anymore, there's a few more that need to be fixed (get out of shot Ben and Nirav!) and the mirror shot but we're getting there.

 Now to sync sound and export. 

When all is said and done....

'It's a wrap on My Daughter'

I really regret not posting about My Daughter for so long because so much happened in a short space of time and now I just have too many things to say all at once - it's a real issue.

During the Easter break we met our target for fundraising (actually we went a bit over which helped us a lot  - we didn't have to starve on set!) which meant that when we came back we hit the ground running.  I took on the responsibilities of a 2nd AD to make life easier and made call sheets (can be found here, here and here), booked cars, was the main contact for the Van Hire company (who were lovely and helped us out a lot) and just took the time to make sure everyone got to set, on time and ready to shoot/rehearse. 

Shoot days varied in enjoyment for me simply because I would be so preoccupied with planning things (or even making food at one point, no-one got food poisoning I was rather impressed) that I wouldn't be a point of contact for crew which wasn't an ideal outcome. On set I like being kept in the loop of whats going on, are we on schedule or are we not? Which piece of equipment needs repairing in time for tomorrow? That kind of thing. My biggest headache was the bath simply because it leaked - which is quite possibly the one thing you can't really prepare for on a shoot like this. After using our limited phone signal to try and find hardware stores (Firstly to find the missing plug which had been left at the wrong location, secondly to stop it leaking) we happened to run in to a neighbour of the hall who gave us his duct tape which was amazing - we tried to pay him but he was lovely and just gave us it.

The first lot of duct tape was me - which was terrifying. I had not prepared for this mentally and it was freaking me out, mainly because the day before I had received a bit of a lecture of the hall caretaker about how much the village prides itself on it's victorian flooring, the same flooring this bath would flood if something went wrong. I put layers upon layers inside the bath and did the best I could on the outside before we started filling it up. Halfway through the shoot however we noticed it starting to leak, a group lifted the already full bath in the air whilst Lawrence was laid underneath and I was trying to give him tape as quickly as possible. It felt like something out of a Carry On film - but we finished on schedule and got all the shots we needed! 

Shoot days after that didn't seem as stressful. Nothing could really compare too it really.

As soon as we got the final shot down I had a line of runners complete with buckets ready to empty the bath as quickly as possible. It took around 10 minutes to empty, it was rather impressive. 

My view when on the floor watching for leaks!

But other than that shooting went fine, I realised I have an ability to re-arrange plans quickly, no-one got hurt in a potentially dangerous environment, the crew seemed happy enough and our dancer wants to work with us again. 

My only criticism is that people need to speak to me on set, people say that on set I freak out easily which is true when I don't know what's going on. If I walk onto a set and see a camera team looking concerned whilst looking at an already faulty follow focus I'm also going to be concerned. Whilst people realised that I was the producer and I did have authority over things that happened on set occasionally things would happen and I would just not know about it because I was busy doing other things and no-one had kept me informed. Which at one point nearly resulted in some equipment not being fixed because I had instructed people to leave it in storage rather than take it home to be repaired. It was that, that made me realise I needed to have more of a presence on set before I run of and do odd things that needed to be done because no-one else was free to do them, which I still did occasionally but at the end of the day, that's why I had runners. I couldn't afford to miss parts of filming because I was making tea or making phone calls - I had worked on this film for 4 months and I wasn't enjoying seeing it become a reality.

Please don't read this on the assumption it was awful - it truly wasn't - it was one of the most successful, organised and straight forward shoots I've been a part of and in the end we've created something we can be honestly proud of. Things that went wrong were things that we had in the back of our minds anyway so they weren't a huge surprise on set. It's just during the shoot I felt very out of place, maybe it's because Producers don't really have the artistic license on set or have specific jobs to do, or maybe it's me being afraid to speak up on things I'm not 100% certain of. I loved the time I spent on set engaging with the project and I'm glad we as a team put as much pre-production hours in as we did because seeing the pay off was worth it.

With this in mind, the last day of shooting was the best for me. The most relaxed with people joking around, finishing ahead of time so we could go and grab food from a (very nice) burger van. It was just a nice atmosphere to wrap on and when all is said and done the crew were fantastic and we utilised all their skills to their full potential. 

Now we have a beautiful film - and like I said no-one got hurt from set or me trying to punch them because they got caught in the mirror during a take. 

PS - Oooo also forgot to mention we came in £40 under budget! We were running over a one point which was a major concern for me (which results in a few cut backs) but when the locations dropped their price in return for film credits we were bang on budget. Then because of the faulty follow focus (it was a big inconvenience on set....it wasn't fun) we were reimbursed for a days use which will now go towards some festival entires we have lined up.

You can see more of my bugeting/expenses report here - it's a bit confusing to anyone but me, but honestly it does all make sense.