Short Film: Project One

Today’s lecture was given by Helen McCarron and Claire Butler and was about working self-employed and everything you needed to know to accompany this.

This followed on nicely from Lucy’s lecture as it went more into detail about the logistics of working freelance and even went into a little bit of detail as working as a freelancer when paired with being a teacher which is something I’m highly interested in doing.

They outlined areas such as income, tax, types of self-employment, registry and other considerations which was useful as these were areas I hadn’t even considered or thought needed to be addressed from the get go.

Furthermore, they outlined some pros and cons of this type of work which was helpful as it has cemented this form of work as a likely possibility for a future career as many of the down sides are supplemented by working as a teacher alongside this.

‘The 100’ sound design

I chose to conduct some research on the sound design of the TV series ‘The 100’ as whilst a post-apocalyptic film unlike the Oblivion which I previously researched the scene is set in a living environment, this setting is incredibly similar to that of the film we are working on. This consists of a rich living environment, with multiple factions of humans at odds with one another. This relates to our film greatly as our main character is also at odds with a faction who either reside or are known as ‘Sector B’. As there are so many similarities in script and setting there is so much inspiration that I can take and apply to my own sound design for this film.

Furthermore, in the conducted interview, the sound editor laid out a few steps in which he takes when sent a new episode of the show. These steps could be used when looking at editing and creating the sound design for our film especially that of the spotting session, in which the sound editor goes through and watches the picture edit making notes of key points in the film in which sound design could play a key role.

https://www.asoundeffect.com/the-100-sound/

Today was our last day on set, which we were filming out at the abandoned building. Today we were able to get hold of two radio mics for the actors, however we ran into trouble with the 633 and its recording. We managed to get all three tracks recorded ok for the most part but for some take only the boom would record without the radio mics. Unfortunately, due to time constraints we didn’t have time to rectify the problem on set as we were unsure how and finding someone to aid us would have stopped the filming for that day as we were on location. Fortunately, the two actors we recorded dialogue with that day are university students so any takes that are completely unusable we would be able to get the actors in for ADR. One further problem we encountered on the day was that it was extremely windy, and the wind was really ripping through the building. This meant we really had to think about where we were positioning ourselves, a lot of the time we position ourselves between pillars or walls as to not get the wind directly into the mic, however this was not always easy with particular camera angles, so proved to be quite the challenge.

Today’s lecture was presented by Lucy Mitchell, a freelance post production sound editor and mixer.

This lecture was very interesting for me as this too is an area of work I would like to go into, as well as the possibility of working freelance.

Lucy brought up some interesting points, bout about how to get a job and then techniques we could use to make our lives easier once conducting the job.

As with most jobs in the creative industry Lucy stated that work experience was key and thus working on as many productions as possible would be a key aspect of landing a job as work experience and a portfolio is physical proof of your abilities. She also stated that at the moment there is a large amount of available work within the games industries for sound editors and mixers. Furthermore, just as Luke stated in previous weeks, large companies are more likely to start you off as a runner, whereas smaller companies may employ you as an editor straight away. And there are benefits to both of these approaches, as whilst with the latter you with go into the desired job straight away you won’t be working on very notable projects and they are likely to be lesser known however you may be promoted to being a mixer a lot quicker, however with the larger companies it will take you a lot longer to progress however the projects you work on will be of higher credit and thus carry more weight when applying in future.

This lecture laid out some very good points for consideration, when searching for work in the future and is something I will look back on for reference.

Today, we finished up recording at Hartsholme park and then moved on to the house location. These scenes had very little dialogue and as we were in an isolated space these scenes came out very quiet will little happening. Therefore, we will have to create some ambiences to layer over the recordings when in post-production. Today was a short day of filming and nothing majorly went wrong. Again, we didn’t have access to the radio mics, but this didn’t matter due to only having one actor on camera and with very little dialogue.