RECORDING PLACE | wk5, p1

Haylee and I met at the suites yesterday to organise our shoot for the following morning and to work on the edit. Haylee working primarily on the interview rushes as I concentrated on the footage (e.g. prime sweater shots and cutaways). Haylee managed to condense the interview down to four minutes thirty, and then again to just under three minutes.

Today we returned to the Queen Vic Markets to shoot with Ariel a second time. We were lucky enough to lock him in once more before he leaves town for a holiday. This time we focused solely on visuals, hence we only brought the Canon Mark iii DSLR and a table top tripod. We were satisfied with the audio we had captured from the first shoot.

We were quite pleased with the shoot until we uploaded the footage in the editing suites and noticed the footage was a little off. The image quality wasn’t as rich as the previous shoot. I was really confused at this point given the ISO and the white balance were all balanced to the environment and lighting.

Then the most upsetting thing happened — we somehow lost our original footage. It was somewhat unclear as to how it completely deleted from the server. But I instantly knew in my gut the moment Premiere couldn’t locate the media in the editing sequence it was gone. Call it ‘filmmakers intuition’. Haylee was more optimistic and had one of the RMIT tech guys assist us in trying to relocate the footage. Within ten minutes we collectively decided to head straight back to the Vic Markets and re-shoot. At this moment I was so happy to have Haylee as my partner-in-crime. We have a mutual CAN-DO attitude. No hurdle is too big–just do it!

It was disappointing that this happened but it was also the catalyst for some very important lessons to be learned. Firstly, always back up and catalog/name your uploaded footage and sound. And, secondly, check the camera settings thoroughly before you shoot anything. Heading back to the QVM, I sat down and looked thoroughly through the camera menu/settings to try to identify why the image wasn’t as clear and lush as our previous shoot. Doing this I discovered that someone had adjusted the shooting style from Neutral (which we were using previously) to Cinema (which caused the image to be flat and grainy). I felt this also inspired me to trust in a good camera and lens to do it’s ‘thing’. No need to play with the image style, shoot RAW and unfiltered and adjust the style in post, if needed.

We were lucky that by this point Ariel had warmed to us and was supportive and happy to give us a little more of his time. I think Haylee and I both learned a lot from this single day. In a sense I am pleased it happened because it is a valuable learning curve and a slight kick in the face regarding pacing and organisation.