"Join This Group?" Post-production

It's over. We finished it. Editing went down in about ten hours over two days, and the result - a fine looking short.

We did the rough cut early in the week. It took about four hours to capture and log the footage and assemble the cut. The focus is a little out in some spots, but the audio sounded better than I thought it would. And we noticed we inadvertently had a lot of product placement - specifically for Apple Macs and Coca Cola. Our editor is pretty well versed in Final Cut Pro, so she knew all the little tricks to cover for mistakes.

The fine cut happened last night, over about six hours. We had to use different facilities, which meant sharing a room with fourteen other computers and a large group that took over half that space. Tried editing sharing a pair of earbuds recently? It's difficult. That's another reason why it's especially important, when you can't judge on your own perceptions alone, to watch the volume levels when editing. We also had to add in the voice over narration, which meant using the sound room. Unfortunately, it didn't want to work initially. We played with all the preferences, checked the connections, and even asked the student technician for help. When nothing worked and we were about to give up in desperation, we decided to restart the computer entirely.

Apparently that is key, people.

It's great to work on a project that you enjoy while you edit. We were giggling at jokes we'd heard over and over and over again. Maybe that had something to do with the hour of the night. We burned to CD at around 1:00 AM, and almost immediately I was able to screen it to a couple of friends.

You, too, will be able to screen it soon. Just watch for our main website to be up and running!

"Join This Group?" Production

Principle photography ended Sunday April 6th. We encountered some difficulties with equipment and extras. Student productions should run on as few characters as possible. One of our principle actors we had to shoot without the boom mike, again, and without any lighting equipment. We also had very little time with him, so we may have to do reshoots. We didn't manage to get some shots, so we might have to rearrange the script a little in post.

We'll fix it in post.

A week after principle photography and we haven't been able to watch the footage. The biggest concern is most definitely the sound. Half the main actors were filmed without the boom mike. The other thing to look forward to is seeing how some of the more... creatively filmed shots came out. We needed some shots that scanned headlines, so we tacked the papers up to the refrigerator and put the camera on a chair and slid it across the floor. It'll be interesting to see how those shots turn out.

Editing should start on Monday, April 21. Hopefully we'll be able to screen the footage before that.

"Join This Group?" Production

Our first day of shooting was today. After our production meeting yesterday, things needed to be shifted some. The storyboards were changing up to shooting and are still changing, actually.

Shooting itself went pretty well. The equipment office forgot to give us the XR cable, so our first segment we shot with just the camera's mike. We went back before our next shot and got the cable. Now every segment we shoot we have we're shooting it both with the boom mike and without so we have good audio coverage. The talent worked pretty well, and it's really sorta sad that we can't review the footage daily. Because of the XR cable incident, we were running behind schedule. We were going to shoot the Facebook "screenshots" today, but since we're going to be in a computer lab tomorrow we thought we'd just do it then.

We're moving around a lot tomorrow and working with quite a few extras (comparatively). Each day presents its own challenges.