The Journey of the Film
I did not actually make a screenplay for this project. I just had a very clear idea of what I wanted to do. I had an outline of points, and I filmed based on those.
The was my first experience with the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 6K. And while it does great in low light, it does NOT have autofocus. And this is especially bad in low light. And because of this, there is one out of focus shot in the film that I did not notice when first editing. While this is unfortunate, it's a learning lesson!
This is sort of post-production, but it happened as I was filming. I recorded foley for many of the sounds in the video. This was required as part of the project requirements. Foley recording was quite fun. While there were some instances of it not syncing great, it was mostly a good excercise and learning experience.
Lighting was a very intentional choice in this project. The main chapter of the film, titled "The After After Hours" was entirely blue, to show this sense of sadness and loneliness. And I had to very intentionally set up lights for this. While it could be achieved in post, too, doing it live really made editing easier as well as made it a lot more immersive while I was acting/recording.
The red light that I would stare at most nights was vibrant. It was bright. It was clear from my dorm room. And yet... that light was OFF the night I had to record, which was immensely frustrating. And therefore, I used another red light in the sky, but it was much smaller, and made the ending a LOT more confusing. This is a key production issue I wish I had planned for, and while it probably could have been fixed in post, at the time, it wasn't something I had done or knew how to do, and therefore, this ultimately turned the entire film on its head. While I think the film still generally workds, it is a major aspect of it that I wish was different in retrospect.
Because I had outlined the visual language so clearly in the recording process itself, all coloring was doing was bringing it to a bit more vibrant of a color space. Additionally, I didn't have too much footage, so cutting it up was quite easy too.
I made sure to clap quite loudly before my takes and before my foley takes, which made syncing really easy. This is a trick I learned back in high school and one I have really taken to heart. Mixing the sound was quite easy, and from there, I made a synth-bass heavy piece of music to really sell the weight of the emotion of the central character.
