Reviewing the Rushes: My Mistakes

I took today's time off to run through the rushes and the production log in order to prepare the paperwork in tandem with the footage for our editor Lynley so that she will be able to take over coming Monday.

I was so happy (and even a bit proud) of what we achieved during our three day shoot on set in the sound stage. The shoot went smoother than I thought it would, and upon reviewing the footage on camera, I was happy to see what I could already achieve within only a few months onto the program. Which is why I was profoundly disappointed when I reviewed the footage on my Macbook today.

First of all, as part of the pre-production, I decided that I would devise and learn by heart my own personal workflow that was to ensure I was not forgetting anything important while taking the relevant shots.

So I sat down, created a plan, and tried memorising it in advance so that I would be able to immediately apply it when we started filming on Monday. I wanted to be prepared and ensure that I did not delay any of the filming just because I, say, refocused three times on one shot, just to forget checking the foreground and/or background of the frame or to use the zebra-filter to double-check on any overexposure in the footage.

This workflow with inbuilt 'quality control' thus looked like this and was the method I adhered to before every shot:

1) Find camera position

2) Frame shot

3) Check background

4) Check middle ground

5) Check foreground

6) Control zebra value

7) Control aperture value

8) Check OIS (handheld shots)

9) Pull focus

10) Final sound check

My goal was to prevent the usual fallacies that any student film commits, such as lack of focus, disregard for the foreground/background of a take, over- or underexposure, shooting out of set, etc. I wanted to implement a professional workflow as early as possible to get used to it as early as possible and, hopefully, save valuable time learning basic lessons much later down the road.

Now I know that the Panasonic AVC comes with a few caveats that you need to know in advance if you want to shoot proper material, such as the crop factor or the backlit LCD-display. However, I also realised that it has issues truthfully displaying bright areas of the image (as I found that these were predominantly areas where reflections of our LEDs flared up) and that it glosses over minor shakes in playback.

The footage looked more shaky than it did during filming and reviewing on the camera and oftentimes, you can see a lot of light reflections in the background even though I know that I specifically looked out for them in tandem with my lighting role. These reflections often hid themselves in highlighted spots in the background, so that I was unable to spot them through the viewfinder and/or LCD-display.

Furthermore, even though I constantly ensured to use floor markings, stand ins, and always pulled focus on the actor's/stand in's eyes to get a sharp image, I repeatedly found that not the actor himself but rather the background was in sharp focus, which unnerved me to no end.

It is so highly frustrating because I thought that I had found a solid and dependable means to avoid these kind of mistakes, just to realise that it still did not help much. I thought, that when I started out with a coherently adhered to workflow, I would be able to weed out a lot of mistakes and to get a bit closer to a more professional way of working.

I guess that I will have to go back to what I did with my 'Me, Myself, and I' and review the rushes much, much earlier. Or schedule extra time on set in between larger takes to pop the SD-card into my laptop and re-watch the image on a bigger screen to identify tiny mistakes right away and not only in edit.

Sigh... I guess, I am still more of a rookie than I would like to admit.