My goodness, these past few weeks have been so hectic I can’t even begin to explain it. Among all the problems I’ve come across, I don’t think anything could be a bigger obstacle than my constant role interactions and crossovers. I’ll explain.

I find myself to be primarily a cinematographer, someone who uses a camera to paint a certain portrait to evoke a certain emotion from a certain audience. Unfortunately, as everyone knows by now I’m sure, you can only go so far with simple photographic appeal. I wish I could say that my skills as a writer and director have flourished this quarter, but I find myself making stupid decisions as both. I’m not thinking as carefully about it as I would about the shots. I keep having to change my story because I didn’t anticipate how much time a certain aspect would take, or a specific part of the story conflicts with another… it’s been a struggle to keep everything in line. It’s completely my fault, too, because when I was developing the idea for this film I should have been looking at the entire work as a whole and not focus on specific sections. I used the Freytag pyramid to create a general story arch and creatively locked myself inside it. After I had accomplished this, I proceeded to think about the shots I wanted to make and how I could feasibly pull them off.

Unfortunately, this meant two things. One, I was no longer putting any more time into my story, dialogue nor characters. Two, I spent way too much of my shooting time trying to perfect certain movements — and in the end I barely used any of them due to general shoddiness. I never wanted to show something that looked unnecessarily shaky or blurry, and I’m sticking to that.

I’ve also been struggling as a director, as I find myself constantly forgetting to direct along with my other jobs as the writer, cinematographer, and audio man. This became too much early on in the project and I decided to ditch most of my dialogue. Unfortunately, it’s been the same way in all my videos. Definitely an improvement this time, but since I’ll be using voiceovers for pretty much every piece of footage with talking… it makes me cringe to think about the hours I have spent/am still spending on audio imperfections. It’s sad and it made me sacrifice my love for cinematography for those scenes as well. After a while and a few days of trying, I needed to get the shot no matter what I needed to do to make it work.

This film has taken a much different direction than when I first started out the quarter. I kinda wish I had stuck with a documentary-style movie as that really would have fit better/been easier to shoot and conceptualize. This project definitely has strained my creative veins in a way I have not experienced before. It has been worthwhile just for the fact that I’ve been doing something completely new and something I am not used to dealing with all myself. It’s an interesting burden and it has been a frustrating quarter, but I’m excited to show everyone the final product.

My goodness, these past few weeks have been so hectic I can’t even begin to explain it. Among all the problems I’ve come across, I don’t think anything could be a bigger obstacle than my constant role interactions and crossovers. I’ll explain.

I find myself to be primarily a cinematographer, someone who uses a camera to paint a certain portrait to evoke a certain emotion from a certain audience. Unfortunately, as everyone knows by now I’m sure, you can only go so far with simple photographic appeal. I wish I could say that my skills as a writer and director have flourished this quarter, but I find myself making stupid decisions as both. I’m not thinking as carefully about it as I would about the shots. I keep having to change my story because I didn’t anticipate how much time a certain aspect would take, or a specific part of the story conflicts with another… it’s been a struggle to keep everything in line. It’s completely my fault, too, because when I was developing the idea for this film I should have been looking at the entire work as a whole and not focus on specific sections. I used the Freytag pyramid to create a general story arch and creatively locked myself inside it. After I had accomplished this, I proceeded to think about the shots I wanted to make and how I could feasibly pull them off.

Unfortunately, this meant two things. One, I was no longer putting any more time into my story, dialogue nor characters. Two, I spent way too much of my shooting time trying to perfect certain movements — and in the end I barely used any of them due to general shoddiness. I never wanted to show something that looked unnecessarily shaky or blurry, and I’m sticking to that.

I’ve also been struggling as a director, as I find myself constantly forgetting to direct along with my other jobs as the writer, cinematographer, and audio man. This became too much early on in the project and I decided to ditch most of my dialogue. Unfortunately, it’s been the same way in all my videos. Definitely an improvement this time, but since I’ll be using voiceovers for pretty much every piece of footage with talking… it makes me cringe to think about the hours I have spent/am still spending on audio imperfections. It’s sad and it made me sacrifice my love for cinematography for those scenes as well. After a while and a few days of trying, I needed to get the shot no matter what I needed to do to make it work.

This film has taken a much different direction than when I first started out the quarter. I kinda wish I had stuck with a documentary-style movie as that really would have fit better/been easier to shoot and conceptualize. This project definitely has strained my creative veins in a way I have not experienced before. It has been worthwhile just for the fact that I’ve been doing something completely new and something I am not used to dealing with all myself. It’s an interesting burden and it has been a frustrating quarter, but I’m excited to show everyone the final product.

So I’ve been trying to work with audio recording for a long time now and it’s been a huge hassle. So much so that I actually considered turning my film into another silent film. Instead, I have very short, unfortunately shoddily recorded scenes with dialogue that really detract from what I was trying to do in the first place — create a seamless, non-amateur looking and feeling film. I’m really happy with all of my work in terms of cinematography and general direction… but audio recording has been such a big obstacle that it’s going to affect the quality of my movie.

I was advised to use the Zoom handy recorders from Media Loan, so after receiving training I did some tests. My editing software did not work well with the recorded audio files and made it extremely choppy. Sad, because the clarity was very nice. I worked with one for a few days and then had to return it with no useable footage/audio.

After that sad debacle I decided to use my roommate’s binaural microphones to record fairly clear, three dimensional sound. Cool thing, especially when I had two actors standing a little too far away from each other to be picked up at the same level.

Here’s a short Wikipedia article on the use of binaural recording – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binaural_recording

I used it a few times with good results, then slowly realized that the footage I had gotten really did not look good. It was really washed out and dark for some reason, I couldn’t pinpoint exactly why. I chose to reshoot the footage, and after an actor had to bail because of scheduling conflicts, with a new actor and a better location. I was allowed to shoot inside the Texaco near Evergreen campus for a few short shots then used the parking lot for my sequence. Unfortunately we were unable to use the area we needed for shooting because a group moved in, and even after agreeing to vacate the space for our use proceeded to stick around making noise and eventually returning to the area before we had a chance to finalize our other shots.

This meant we had to use the open parking lot where there was a lot of exposure to wind and the passing cars on Cooper Pt. not 30 feet away. It was tough to get the correct shots and the sun was shining so brightly that it was difficult to get the actors in focus and properly exposed without the background being completely blown out.

Unfortunately, this means that I will be having to dub over the footage with a USB microphone during the final editing today and tomorrow. It’s going to be very tough to match quality and pitch, and to counteract this problem I have about 10 minutes of audio recorded to use for background noise so we won’t have to use much audio at all from the actual shots. Sucks to have to do it this way, but it’ll be rewarding to do some new things with editing that I haven’t touched before.

So I’ve been trying to work with audio recording for a long time now and it’s been a huge hassle. So much so that I actually considered turning my film into another silent film. Instead, I have very short, unfortunately shoddily recorded scenes with dialogue that really detract from what I was trying to do in the first place — create a seamless, non-amateur looking and feeling film. I’m really happy with all of my work in terms of cinematography and general direction… but audio recording has been such a big obstacle that it’s going to affect the quality of my movie.

I was advised to use the Zoom handy recorders from Media Loan, so after receiving training I did some tests. My editing software did not work well with the recorded audio files and made it extremely choppy. Sad, because the clarity was very nice. I worked with one for a few days and then had to return it with no useable footage/audio.

After that sad debacle I decided to use my roommate’s binaural microphones to record fairly clear, three dimensional sound. Cool thing, especially when I had two actors standing a little too far away from each other to be picked up at the same level.

Here’s a short Wikipedia article on the use of binaural recording – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binaural_recording

I used it a few times with good results, then slowly realized that the footage I had gotten really did not look good. It was really washed out and dark for some reason, I couldn’t pinpoint exactly why. I chose to reshoot the footage, and after an actor had to bail because of scheduling conflicts, with a new actor and a better location. I was allowed to shoot inside the Texaco near Evergreen campus for a few short shots then used the parking lot for my sequence. Unfortunately we were unable to use the area we needed for shooting because a group moved in, and even after agreeing to vacate the space for our use proceeded to stick around making noise and eventually returning to the area before we had a chance to finalize our other shots.

This meant we had to use the open parking lot where there was a lot of exposure to wind and the passing cars on Cooper Pt. not 30 feet away. It was tough to get the correct shots and the sun was shining so brightly that it was difficult to get the actors in focus and properly exposed without the background being completely blown out.

Unfortunately, this means that I will be having to dub over the footage with a USB microphone during the final editing today and tomorrow. It’s going to be very tough to match quality and pitch, and to counteract this problem I have about 10 minutes of audio recorded to use for background noise so we won’t have to use much audio at all from the actual shots. Sucks to have to do it this way, but it’ll be rewarding to do some new things with editing that I haven’t touched before.

So I’ve been trying to work with audio recording for a long time now and it’s been a huge hassle. So much so that I actually considered turning my film into another silent film. Instead, I have very short, unfortunately shoddily recorded scenes with dialogue that really detract from what I was trying to do in the first place — create a seamless, non-amateur looking and feeling film. I’m really happy with all of my work in terms of cinematography and general direction… but audio recording has been such a big obstacle that it’s going to affect the quality of my movie.

I was advised to use the Zoom handy recorders from Media Loan, so after receiving training I did some tests. My editing software did not work well with the recorded audio files and made it extremely choppy. Sad, because the clarity was very nice. I worked with one for a few days and then had to return it with no useable footage/audio.

After that sad debacle I decided to use my roommate’s binaural microphones to record fairly clear, three dimensional sound. Cool thing, especially when I had two actors standing a little too far away from each other to be picked up at the same level.

Here’s a short Wikipedia article on the use of binaural recording – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binaural_recording

I used it a few times with good results, then slowly realized that the footage I had gotten really did not look good. It was really washed out and dark for some reason, I couldn’t pinpoint exactly why. I chose to reshoot the footage, and after an actor had to bail because of scheduling conflicts, with a new actor and a better location. I was allowed to shoot inside the Texaco near Evergreen campus for a few short shots then used the parking lot for my sequence. Unfortunately we were unable to use the area we needed for shooting because a group moved in, and even after agreeing to vacate the space for our use proceeded to stick around making noise and eventually returning to the area before we had a chance to finalize our other shots.

This meant we had to use the open parking lot where there was a lot of exposure to wind and the passing cars on Cooper Pt. not 30 feet away. It was tough to get the correct shots and the sun was shining so brightly that it was difficult to get the actors in focus and properly exposed without the background being completely blown out.

Unfortunately, this means that I will be having to dub over the footage with a USB microphone during the final editing today and tomorrow. It’s going to be very tough to match quality and pitch, and to counteract this problem I have about 10 minutes of audio recorded to use for background noise so we won’t have to use much audio at all from the actual shots. Sucks to have to do it this way, but it’ll be rewarding to do some new things with editing that I haven’t touched before.

So I’ve been trying to work with audio recording for a long time now and it’s been a huge hassle. So much so that I actually considered turning my film into another silent film. Instead, I have very short, unfortunately shoddily recorded scenes with dialogue that really detract from what I was trying to do in the first place — create a seamless, non-amateur looking and feeling film. I’m really happy with all of my work in terms of cinematography and general direction… but audio recording has been such a big obstacle that it’s going to affect the quality of my movie.

I was advised to use the Zoom handy recorders from Media Loan, so after receiving training I did some tests. My editing software did not work well with the recorded audio files and made it extremely choppy. Sad, because the clarity was very nice. I worked with one for a few days and then had to return it with no useable footage/audio.

After that sad debacle I decided to use my roommate’s binaural microphones to record fairly clear, three dimensional sound. Cool thing, especially when I had two actors standing a little too far away from each other to be picked up at the same level.

Here’s a short Wikipedia article on the use of binaural recording – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binaural_recording

I used it a few times with good results, then slowly realized that the footage I had gotten really did not look good. It was really washed out and dark for some reason, I couldn’t pinpoint exactly why. I chose to reshoot the footage, and after an actor had to bail because of scheduling conflicts, with a new actor and a better location. I was allowed to shoot inside the Texaco near Evergreen campus for a few short shots then used the parking lot for my sequence. Unfortunately we were unable to use the area we needed for shooting because a group moved in, and even after agreeing to vacate the space for our use proceeded to stick around making noise and eventually returning to the area before we had a chance to finalize our other shots.

This meant we had to use the open parking lot where there was a lot of exposure to wind and the passing cars on Cooper Pt. not 30 feet away. It was tough to get the correct shots and the sun was shining so brightly that it was difficult to get the actors in focus and properly exposed without the background being completely blown out.

Unfortunately, this means that I will be having to dub over the footage with a USB microphone during the final editing today and tomorrow. It’s going to be very tough to match quality and pitch, and to counteract this problem I have about 10 minutes of audio recorded to use for background noise so we won’t have to use much audio at all from the actual shots. Sucks to have to do it this way, but it’ll be rewarding to do some new things with editing that I haven’t touched before.

So I’ve been trying to work with audio recording for a long time now and it’s been a huge hassle. So much so that I actually considered turning my film into another silent film. Instead, I have very short, unfortunately shoddily recorded scenes with dialogue that really detract from what I was trying to do in the first place — create a seamless, non-amateur looking and feeling film. I’m really happy with all of my work in terms of cinematography and general direction… but audio recording has been such a big obstacle that it’s going to affect the quality of my movie.

I was advised to use the Zoom handy recorders from Media Loan, so after receiving training I did some tests. My editing software did not work well with the recorded audio files and made it extremely choppy. Sad, because the clarity was very nice. I worked with one for a few days and then had to return it with no useable footage/audio.

After that sad debacle I decided to use my roommate’s binaural microphones to record fairly clear, three dimensional sound. Cool thing, especially when I had two actors standing a little too far away from each other to be picked up at the same level.

Here’s a short Wikipedia article on the use of binaural recording – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binaural_recording

I used it a few times with good results, then slowly realized that the footage I had gotten really did not look good. It was really washed out and dark for some reason, I couldn’t pinpoint exactly why. I chose to reshoot the footage, and after an actor had to bail because of scheduling conflicts, with a new actor and a better location. I was allowed to shoot inside the Texaco near Evergreen campus for a few short shots then used the parking lot for my sequence. Unfortunately we were unable to use the area we needed for shooting because a group moved in, and even after agreeing to vacate the space for our use proceeded to stick around making noise and eventually returning to the area before we had a chance to finalize our other shots.

This meant we had to use the open parking lot where there was a lot of exposure to wind and the passing cars on Cooper Pt. not 30 feet away. It was tough to get the correct shots and the sun was shining so brightly that it was difficult to get the actors in focus and properly exposed without the background being completely blown out.

Unfortunately, this means that I will be having to dub over the footage with a USB microphone during the final editing today and tomorrow. It’s going to be very tough to match quality and pitch, and to counteract this problem I have about 10 minutes of audio recorded to use for background noise so we won’t have to use much audio at all from the actual shots. Sucks to have to do it this way, but it’ll be rewarding to do some new things with editing that I haven’t touched before.

So I’ve been trying to work with audio recording for a long time now and it’s been a huge hassle. So much so that I actually considered turning my film into another silent film. Instead, I have very short, unfortunately shoddily recorded scenes with dialogue that really detract from what I was trying to do in the first place — create a seamless, non-amateur looking and feeling film. I’m really happy with all of my work in terms of cinematography and general direction… but audio recording has been such a big obstacle that it’s going to affect the quality of my movie.

I was advised to use the Zoom handy recorders from Media Loan, so after receiving training I did some tests. My editing software did not work well with the recorded audio files and made it extremely choppy. Sad, because the clarity was very nice. I worked with one for a few days and then had to return it with no useable footage/audio.

After that sad debacle I decided to use my roommate’s binaural microphones to record fairly clear, three dimensional sound. Cool thing, especially when I had two actors standing a little too far away from each other to be picked up at the same level.

Here’s a short Wikipedia article on the use of binaural recording – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binaural_recording

I used it a few times with good results, then slowly realized that the footage I had gotten really did not look good. It was really washed out and dark for some reason, I couldn’t pinpoint exactly why. I chose to reshoot the footage, and after an actor had to bail because of scheduling conflicts, with a new actor and a better location. I was allowed to shoot inside the Texaco near Evergreen campus for a few short shots then used the parking lot for my sequence. Unfortunately we were unable to use the area we needed for shooting because a group moved in, and even after agreeing to vacate the space for our use proceeded to stick around making noise and eventually returning to the area before we had a chance to finalize our other shots.

This meant we had to use the open parking lot where there was a lot of exposure to wind and the passing cars on Cooper Pt. not 30 feet away. It was tough to get the correct shots and the sun was shining so brightly that it was difficult to get the actors in focus and properly exposed without the background being completely blown out.

Unfortunately, this means that I will be having to dub over the footage with a USB microphone during the final editing today and tomorrow. It’s going to be very tough to match quality and pitch, and to counteract this problem I have about 10 minutes of audio recorded to use for background noise so we won’t have to use much audio at all from the actual shots. Sucks to have to do it this way, but it’ll be rewarding to do some new things with editing that I haven’t touched before.

So I’ve been trying to work with audio recording for a long time now and it’s been a huge hassle. So much so that I actually considered turning my film into another silent film. Instead, I have very short, unfortunately shoddily recorded scenes with dialogue that really detract from what I was trying to do in the first place — create a seamless, non-amateur looking and feeling film. I’m really happy with all of my work in terms of cinematography and general direction… but audio recording has been such a big obstacle that it’s going to affect the quality of my movie.

I was advised to use the Zoom handy recorders from Media Loan, so after receiving training I did some tests. My editing software did not work well with the recorded audio files and made it extremely choppy. Sad, because the clarity was very nice. I worked with one for a few days and then had to return it with no useable footage/audio.

After that sad debacle I decided to use my roommate’s binaural microphones to record fairly clear, three dimensional sound. Cool thing, especially when I had two actors standing a little too far away from each other to be picked up at the same level.

Here’s a short Wikipedia article on the use of binaural recording – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binaural_recording

I used it a few times with good results, then slowly realized that the footage I had gotten really did not look good. It was really washed out and dark for some reason, I couldn’t pinpoint exactly why. I chose to reshoot the footage, and after an actor had to bail because of scheduling conflicts, with a new actor and a better location. I was allowed to shoot inside the Texaco near Evergreen campus for a few short shots then used the parking lot for my sequence. Unfortunately we were unable to use the area we needed for shooting because a group moved in, and even after agreeing to vacate the space for our use proceeded to stick around making noise and eventually returning to the area before we had a chance to finalize our other shots.

This meant we had to use the open parking lot where there was a lot of exposure to wind and the passing cars on Cooper Pt. not 30 feet away. It was tough to get the correct shots and the sun was shining so brightly that it was difficult to get the actors in focus and properly exposed without the background being completely blown out.

Unfortunately, this means that I will be having to dub over the footage with a USB microphone during the final editing today and tomorrow. It’s going to be very tough to match quality and pitch, and to counteract this problem I have about 10 minutes of audio recorded to use for background noise so we won’t have to use much audio at all from the actual shots. Sucks to have to do it this way, but it’ll be rewarding to do some new things with editing that I haven’t touched before.

So I’ve been trying to work with audio recording for a long time now and it’s been a huge hassle. So much so that I actually considered turning my film into another silent film. Instead, I have very short, unfortunately shoddily recorded scenes with dialogue that really detract from what I was trying to do in the first place — create a seamless, non-amateur looking and feeling film. I’m really happy with all of my work in terms of cinematography and general direction… but audio recording has been such a big obstacle that it’s going to affect the quality of my movie.

I was advised to use the Zoom handy recorders from Media Loan, so after receiving training I did some tests. My editing software did not work well with the recorded audio files and made it extremely choppy. Sad, because the clarity was very nice. I worked with one for a few days and then had to return it with no useable footage/audio.

After that sad debacle I decided to use my roommate’s binaural microphones to record fairly clear, three dimensional sound. Cool thing, especially when I had two actors standing a little too far away from each other to be picked up at the same level.

Here’s a short Wikipedia article on the use of binaural recording – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binaural_recording

I used it a few times with good results, then slowly realized that the footage I had gotten really did not look good. It was really washed out and dark for some reason, I couldn’t pinpoint exactly why. I chose to reshoot the footage, and after an actor had to bail because of scheduling conflicts, with a new actor and a better location. I was allowed to shoot inside the Texaco near Evergreen campus for a few short shots then used the parking lot for my sequence. Unfortunately we were unable to use the area we needed for shooting because a group moved in, and even after agreeing to vacate the space for our use proceeded to stick around making noise and eventually returning to the area before we had a chance to finalize our other shots.

This meant we had to use the open parking lot where there was a lot of exposure to wind and the passing cars on Cooper Pt. not 30 feet away. It was tough to get the correct shots and the sun was shining so brightly that it was difficult to get the actors in focus and properly exposed without the background being completely blown out.

Unfortunately, this means that I will be having to dub over the footage with a USB microphone during the final editing today and tomorrow. It’s going to be very tough to match quality and pitch, and to counteract this problem I have about 10 minutes of audio recorded to use for background noise so we won’t have to use much audio at all from the actual shots. Sucks to have to do it this way, but it’ll be rewarding to do some new things with editing that I haven’t touched before.