So it has been a week or so since we last chatted here in our little chat box screen thing, and it has been a busy busy week. On Monday we all met here and worked out a plan for filming Don’s idea for a short. So basically We broke the script down, did a read through, discovered where we wanted to do our VFX. Assigned the gathering of props for people to bring. We also made it down to our woodshop to scrounge through the scrap bin for sacrilege.
And Wednesday was the filming day, but more on that in a moment! First though I’ve had some folks ask me about about the gear we use and about gear rentals.
Gear & Gear Rentals
We have a modest but really awesome filmmaker kit with a Black Magic Cinema 2.5k that I got used on craigslist, as well as an assortment of jibs and rails tripods etc.. Lighting is something that I will get into in a later conversation but basically what i am saying is that sometimes you need to rent gear, and when you rent that gear you probably should think about getting it insured! I personally have a very expensive business policy that covers us in the event of an loss/theft/breakage etc but you might not be so lucky. So you can use GearPolicy.ca  They are a Canadian insurer and they are super easy to use. And they will give you an insurance certificate for your rental house so you don’t have to jam a huge deposit on your Credit Card. To work it you simply choose your rental house from the list, say how much you are insuring, how long you are getting the rental for and where it will be stored and before you can say Bob is your Uncle they will tell you how much money to give them. Simple right!? I have played around changing the amount of money and the rental time periods and it always seems to give me the same cost of $98.70. So essentially for a hundred bux you can insure your rental gear for the duration of your shoot. Now that might seem like a lot of money but if you are renting lets say a ronin, and a Black magic 4k for the weekend and you manage to drop them both in the ocean or you were robbed at gunpoint by a Clown in a pink unitard, You personally would be on the hook for about $8500 dollars. that is um. a lot of money in case you didn’t know! Not to mention that not every indie film maker has room for an $8500 deposit available on a visa to do the rental in the first place. So when you are working out those budgets I can’t highly recommend something like this enough. 

ADR
We last we talked we told you about a scene we filmed in my truck. I also mentioned that we weren’t able to get the greatest audio in the vehicle. Some folks pointed out that the issue might have been mic placement to which I say Yup That’s it! That is what was wrong with that! Essentially we couldn’t fit the Mic and Zeppelin in the front with out Obstructing Sean’s driving even more then we already had or without it being in the shot. I probably could have fit the bare mic somewhere up there fine but I have taken our truck down to many narrow logging roads and bush trails to ever be abale to shoot though those side windows. They are scratched to hell :)  Which meant that the window had to be open a little to fit the camera though which meant I had to keep the zeppelin on the mic for the added wind noise which basically meant that I couldn’t fit it anywhere in the front. My initial solution was to use my my lav mic on each of the actors and then supplement that with what could get from my Rode mic pointed from the back seat. But on film day my Lav mic developed a loose connection at the 1/8in end so it was filled with cracking and loud pops unless it was held perfectly. I will have to take a soldering iron to it but i couldn’t really do that on the side of the road so we did the best we could with the Rode/Zeppelin combo and while it isn’t bad but I thought we could do better.

SO ADR 
Basically Shannon and Sean came over one afternoon and we popped down into the Recording Studio and quickly set up a microphone. The microphone I was using is an AT4050 with a Prim-acoustic Vox Guard. All of which I have from my many musical adventures. That said I could have used our regular rode NTG1 microphone with any thick blanket hanging over something to soften reflections. There is a whole professional ADR System involving prompts and beeps and queue’s but I don’t know much about that we just hooked up the Laptop to the mixer via Firewire and brought the video up and they just clicked and spoke clicked and spoke till they felt it was good recording it all as one long take and them matching it up after. Bringing the audio into Premiere  you could roughly line up the waveforms visually and then adjust as needed with both audio tracks playing until they sounded like one track. If you are having trouble lining everything up because you are locked to moving a whole frame you can hide your audio units by right clicking the time line and unchecking Show Audio Time Units. this will allow you to move and adjust your audio in milliseconds as opposed to full frames. Doing that we get this. – Awful right? We we haven’t added our room yet – and we haven’t added the specific sounds from the Truck like the window rolling down and up the glove compartment opening that sort of thing. Adding these elements will help sell the shots. Right now it is odd looking & sounding. But not bad for the first try! 
Filming a new short
as said at the start This past Wednesday we filmed Don’s idea for a short project – What would Jesuses do?  This was a simple shoot all one room all one scene that we could shoot fairly quickly and easily. Folks got here about 5 PM and started the making costumes and props. While I set up the main camera. We actually didn’t start rolling film until around 8 PM but we had it in the can at shortly after midnight. Thank you again to everyone who stayed much later than we had anticipated we needed to. I think you will be excited with the outcome of all of your hard work. We will get to that in the upcoming weeks as we edit it but what I want to talk about today is our BTS footage.  We basically planned and setup our BTS footage to be as important as the main filming and I am so glad that we did. We managed to capture some fun moments but I didn’t see or know about until I was looking at the footage at 3 AM :)
So Look forward to seeing that but in the meantime as per the tradition enjoy our resident clapper loader Dan and his antics throughout!

That is pretty much the week!  we are meeting again tomorrow to talk about it what projects we want to do next. The script writing for art film is trucking along at a really good pace. I am super excited with where this idea is going Sean is the man who is going above and beyond to make that happen. I also resurrected another idea that I had at the end of the last century and we started some work on that as well. We are also super excited to welcome a few new members to our group who are coming out tomorrow and are super excited & all GunHo to join us in our ridiculousness. It should make for a fun group and I am so Excited to see what we come up with. Would you like to be part of our fun group I say this every time but seriously you don’t have to be an actor you don’t have to have any knowledge of any of it most of us don’t. If you just want to be creative and have fun with a great group of folk join us seriously join us I can’t say this enough we want your ideas your import your creative . It is a lot of fun and you can give us as much or as little time as you like. Are you an actor that wants to try your hand at writing join us are you a writer that wants to try your hand at acting join us are you a director wants to try your hand at cinematography join us are you a janitor who wants to join us click here here for more dan clapping it up.