Teacher Central: The Project That Had to Be Reshot
As I had blogged about in last week’s blog entry ‘In, Action!, Out! Filming for Teacher Central’, our edit suite had technical issues that prevented me from starting the edit immediately.
Although I was able to prepare my workspace and even have a quick test as to whether the lighting of the green screen was alright (spoiler alert: it was), the prevailing lag of any footage playing did not allow me to properly sync the visuals with the audio clips as it would constantly jump back and forth.
Which was the task I set for myself on Thursday.
Thursday, 28thMarch 2019
However, after Thursday rolled round, we were left devastated as to the outcome of the shoot. But I will come to that in a bit.
Issues with Footage
On Thursday, the issue with the playback lag of the footage was resolved, and so I sat down attempting to sub-clip the video clips with the correct audio clips. For this, I first watched back the footage and created an Edit Decision List.
Although I kind of expected that we would require to have some pick-ups done after that rushed and quick shoot last week, when I watched the footage back I immediately realised that we had to pick up some more shots. This was due to the fact that our actor repeatedly looked into the camera at crucial points in the narrative. Whilst these were all only quick glances, it definitely broke the cinematic illusion and distracted from our story.
Another issue that we had with our visuals was the clothes change effect that we wanted to exploit. I’ve already blogged about it in my last blog entry, but due to the massive time crunch that we experienced, we were only able to take one take each for this effect. And as it turned out, the position of our actor – which was crucial for the effect to work properly – happened to change too much to make it work. It all seemed like a massive jump cut:
The same went for another three shots that were supposed to create another effect: the Dragon Ball Effect (as blogged about in my blog entry ‘Beat‘Em Up! How to Film A Punch’).
Here, the issue was a literal jump cut: Whilst our crew had filmed that shot from three different angles, two of these shots were less than 30° apart from each other, resulting in a jump cut. Furthermore, the positioning of the character within the frame was off, as he was centred in the middle of the frame for the frontal shot, but was on frame left for the right angle shot and on frame right for the left angle shot, thus foreshortening his looking room:
Furthermore, watching back the cafeteria scene, I realised that we had a massive dutch angle in the shot that did not quite work with our project. Watching further, I also realised that one of our extras wore their ‘film crew’ shirt in the background and that our actor did not wear any shoes (this was due to the fact that we previously filmed them standing on the floor part of the green screen and wanted to avoid footsteps). How an entire crew and actor – including myself – did not pick that up was beyond me. However, I noted this shot down as a pick up and moved into sound.
Issues with Sound
However, since I had still not been given access to the sound report sheet and no information on when I could have it, I sad down labelling and ordering the audio clips digitally in Avid while listening in myself. Since we recorded 31 clips on three channels, resulting in 93 clips in total, I assumed that this would take a while.
However, it didn’t. For while I quickly found out that Track 1 contained all ambient sound that was recorded with the boom and was able to label a couple of takes, the sound quality of that channel progressively deteriorated with each take, leaving almost no sound recording on the track the further I progressed.
Even with the volume turned all the way up using speakers, I was less and less able to understand my slate markings. The ambient sound was botched. Whilst I would still be able to just about use them as a scratch track, the ambient sound itself was botched and would require a lot of additional foley work and wild-track recordings.
However, as we still had two channels to use, one for each character, I thought that this was only a minor setback. Until I listened through the entirety of channel 2: the channel for our narrator.
Sadly, this channel was incredibly loud to the point of almost distortion. Although this was the opposite of the problem I encountered the previous track, it was obvious that I would have to do a lot of postproduction to make this issue less apparent.
However, I listened in some further, noting down the slate markings on the audio clips of those shots that I deemed to be visually good prior to this.
Until I heard nothing anymore.
I double-checked that I had clicked on the right clip (I did) and on the right channel (I did). However, the sound channel was completely empty and I heard nothing. I checked with the script and although there was no dialogue scheduled for this part, I was still at unease.
For there was not even any foley on that channel.
I listened through the rest of the clips for that particular channel but the result was the same. Whatever happened to the mic in the meantime, it stopped picking up anything whatsoever.
To make sure that I had a full assessment of the situation, I then checked channel 4: the channel for our main character Tyler.
However, that channel was entirely empty as well. Looking at the first clips that we recorded on this channel, almost nothing was picked up. Whilst the sound monitor in Avid picked up some static, there was nothing that I could hear. I quickly progressed through the clips, but the issue stayed the same.
Until I came to the clip that had a bit more sound picked up.
I checked the slate number on that sound clip and realised that it was the same clip where channel 2 suddenly stopped picking up sound. And it was the exact clip for which we changed location.
From all it seemed, the sound channels had been swapped with the relocation.
I then listened into the rest of this particular sound channel. However, the signal was not as intense as I thought it would be, but it rather seemed to pick up the very faint audio of both of our actors. Since these two actors had been given radio mics, I thus assumed that both mics had been set to the same frequency and thus picked up both channels on these clips.
My Learning
However, as it stood, it was now obvious that we had to reshoot our entire shoot. We not only had issues with approx. half our footage, but also with our entire sound.
Thus, I informed our crew about the issue and asked our director to book actors, equipment, and photo studio for the earliest possible occasion for a reshoot. Half an hour later, this turned out to be Wednesday, 24thof April, exactly two weeks before our hand-in deadline.
The suspense continues.