OK! So we decide to shoot quickly and economically one day. Well
quicker than we normally shoot anyway. So Shoogly and myself are up at
7 am (unheard of!) And off we go to our first real location shoot, our
local Safeway store. So we were trying to do our outdoor "spanky shots"
with our new dolly (a Safeway trolley), we start at about 8.05 am and
by
8.15 am we've shot it from two different angels, TWICE! So it's off
into
the shop for our interiors. We have one bit to do but spanky director
and
crew we are we decide to shoot it from three different angles. We get
it
all great first time due to shoogly's best acting yet. And at 8.30 am,
we are finished our location shoot and sitting on our asses.
So we take a slow stroll home and decide to shoot our house interiors for the film. Something like 10 different shots; we do it all handheld, as our tripod camera adapter seems to have been abducted by aliens. SO we set up for the shots, shooting quickly, all handheld and within just under an hour we have all the house interiors we can do that day.
So here we are something around 10 different camera angles, and our crew of two go to check the footage and like I said shoot quickly and get things done in one take, and be prepared for mistakes. We notice and on screen cameo appearance yup there is our unemployed (for the day) tripod sitting right there in the shot, not giving a shit that he is showing a bit leg or half his head is missing!
Do we shoot it again? Do we diddly! The spanky director decides he will edit round it, use two jump cuts, cutting out the most offending shot, and carry on, and hey it will only be a little visible now. He He! Giovanni Pistachio or Ed Wood you ask? Well a little bit of both me thinks.
Be prepared, be very prepared to accept these mistakes when you shoot quickly, and then find your ass a way to get around it!
Ok! So we were gonna try this "spanky" (as Pistachio calls it) dolly
& zoom type shot for the shots outside the supermarket. Well! We do
actually shoot them; we took each shot twice, one just dolly-ing, and
one
dolly-ing and zooming at the same time. Well you have to experiment
right?
Anyway what happened was since we did not have a real dolly, and we were using a shopping trolley instead. When we do the dolly/zoom bit it was waaaaaaaaayy too shaky. And when we did it with just the dolly it was just a little shaky.
So I guess when doing a dolly/zoom shot to get the effect Hitchcock did in Vertigo or Kassovitz did in La Haine, I guess you have to have a real dolly set up.
Ohh well you can't blame us for trying, well you live and learn huh?
Well I guess working and making films at the same time sucks. We
were supposed to try and stick to a one-month shoot. But this one
turned
out at seven weeks. , The reason? Well coz our main actors and myself
had
to fit it round our work schedules. It seemed that we spent more time
working
at weekends this time round, when we should have been shooting.
But still we were really only filming for four days... So I guess if we hadn't been working we would have still shot it in one month.
So, well the plan now is to shoot our next short "The Return Of Monica", hopefully, in two days. Which would get us back on schedule and we would hopefully only be one week behind instead of four.
How can Giovanni compose when he can't even read or write music?
Well I cheated I think!
How did I compose the end soundtrack? Well kinda simple really, well that's my story and I'm sticking to it! Ok, Well, I snaffled a couple of sound samples off of the movie soundtrack, just little bits of noise and dialogue, Pulled together with a little piece of dialogue off another movie. Mixed with a little sample off a Pitchshifter album, and well snippets of music and FX that came with the editing program.
So I flip open Microsoft's sound recorder program, yup that wee thing that comes along with your PC. Insert the sound speed them up, slow them down, dump them in the middle of pieces of music, and well play around with it for two hours, and hopefully at the end of that time, I turn out something that passes as a music soundtrack/mix and hopefully sounds ok, & is hopefully mildly amusing too. Now it might be a little more complicated than that, you might have more or less knowledge than me, about making a piece of music, but you'll never know until you try, and if you don't try, you wont know if its ok and if the next time round you can make it better. Or of course you could just go the whole hog and learn all about music composition, me with the little time I have now, I can't do that but it's up to you to decide if you need to take it that far, and if you have the time to do so.
And I am telling you if I can do it so can you, so bung it up and give it a try.
Well ok, retake it. So far we usually get our shots done in two
or three takes, maximum. , but not now, due to our new brilliant on
screen
talent, Shiona Russell.
So first day of shooting, nice easy day, and here we are up to eight takes! But well take eight was the best one out of a probable three that I could use.
So we go now to probably our longest scene which is planned to be all one shot, without any cuts. It's probably gonna turn out to be our longest dialogue scene too. But having our actress remember her lines, act and use the camera too almost all at the same time, and getting it all in one shot, is maybe our tyrannical director asking too much for Shiona's first movie.
So after a few trial runs Shiona decides she can't do it all in one take and we decide to make it two shots with a fade. So we shoot the first shot to its end and here we are, take 9, and it's perfect!!!!!! Reading her lines and acting with no director interference whatsoever, and the director reviews the footage and it's great. Along with Martainn's acting in this movie too, this is some of our best acting yet, not of course forgetting Kirsty's Lisa, in "Second Time Around".
And so we have some of our best acted scenes in "Mouthwash". So TAKE 9? Well I can live with that!!
Well I kinda decided that after "Mouthwash", that
I would be writing no more infidelity short films. With "Second
Time Around" being the first one, about a woman cheating on a man.
And "Mouthwash" being the second, about a man cheating on a woman. So
fairs,
fair no need to do any more after that right? Well I was wrong! After
seeing
a letter in the letters page of a daily newspaper we decided, well that
is, I decided that for now there would be just one more, just one more!
Well it's going to be an infidelity one, but a comedy one. So we can
poke
a little fun at our first two infidelity films, and so we can poke a
hell
of a lot of fun at the people who wrote into the newspaper, and who
inspired
us to do this one.
So what is the next, and possibly last, infidelity films? Well you will just have to wait and see huh! Well ok then! It's called "The Return Of Monica" it's a comedy, more of a comedy than "Mouthwash", maybe a little less disgusting than "Mouthwash", but we hope a lot funnier. And well that's for everyone to decide. But we all watched it and thought it was funny as hell, so congratulations all round to my cast and crew for a wonderful job!
We had a couple of we problems while editing this film with Videowave.
It's not a major problem. But it can cost you lots of
work
and time.
During editing, occasionally, Videowave is shutting itself down. This can be pain in the ass when you've just precision snipped 5 shots and are halfway through finishing the next, and poof it's gone!
So what we have been doing is, after we edit shot or a scene, right click on that scene in the storyboard strip and press save, and save it as scene or shot whatever it is. Then click on the file menu and save the whole storyboard of all the edited scenes, this saves them in the order you have them on the board, and with the edited version of the shot you have edited. So if you programme does close down, then all you have to do is reopen Videowave, and it should open this file up into your storyboard, exactly as it was edited.
Do this after you edit each shot or scene, and though it may add a little time onto your all round editing time of the film, it's a hell of lot less, than having to edit a lot of scenes and shots all over again.
On top of this if you re-edit & save a scene again and again, delete the film reel of that scene in the scene display window. This is the reel that is displayed after you edit your scenes not the original file. What happens for example is, if you save edit on shot five times and save it five times as the same file name, then you will only have one file on your computer for it, but will have five film reels displayed in the scene window pertaining to this file. They should all be the same so just delete four of them. This is just so your scene and file display window does not get clogged up with too much unneeded stuff, when editing with lots of shots and scenes this just adds to time spent looking for files and makes it more time consuming than it needs to be.
Another slight problem we were having is with the sound. We have this tightly edited montage at the beginning of them with music over the top of it. And when we produced Mouthwash to the computer, a lot of this was dropping out, but only on certain bits.
At first I thought this was because during the time the machine was producing the video the screensaver was clicking on. But I re did it with the screensaver switched off, and it still happened. So I think I recall a similar thing happening on the last film and I believe it was fixed by reducing the size of the video screen, output size (the size the video file screen is when you play it back)
As we are opening it and putting up to full screen when we record it onto videotape, I did not want to reduce the screen size too much coz this makes the full screen display fuzzy.
So we reduced the video screen size at producing stage by one place, and the sound still dropped out on the outputted video but only in two places, and it's hardly noticeable. Compared to the first try.
Total editing time this movie approximately 9 hours. That's including composing the two-minute end piece of music for the film. Getting the opening montage as precise and close to what I originally thought as possible and most importantly, getting the music to end on the exact spot in the montage where it was supposed to.
2 Bottles of mouthwash
£3.00
2 Toothbrushes
£2.80
Cheers
Giovanni Pistachio.
© Owned By Giovanni
Pistachio
14/01/02 01:25:47
Giovanni can be contacted at:-
giovannip@pistachio-films.com