up in the air
as i write, i’m 30,000 feet in the air, listening to some new music by deas vail, and enjoy the peace and quiet. i’d like to share a recent piece of work i was involved in. last thursday i got a text from a friend, john edgar, asking if i wanted to be involved in a 24 film fest playing the role as an editor. i gave it some thought, and decided why not. i had no idea what to expect of it, and i definitely didn’t expect it to be as good as an experience as it was. i met up with the crew on saturday, about 10am, and quickly realized on set that this was a legit shoot. we had a director, producers, real actors, and a real director of photography. This was a new experience. Most shoots I’ve been on had at most, a production assistant, multiple cinematographers, and a sound guy, so having a fixed position gave me a lot of time to just focus on what i had to do. the pressure was on. right from the beginning, technical challenges arose. to save time syncing and rough cutting scenes with dialogue i had intentions of using pluraleyes to sync the external audio with the DSLR. however, pluraleyes didn’t feel like cooperating with me, and wouldn’t sync the clips, so i had to manually sync all the dialogue. another good thing about this shoot though, was we actually had a script supervisor. we didn’t use a slate, but did say the scene and take numbers while the camera and external audio were rolling so things were easier. i want one of these on every shoot! so amazing and time saving. anyways, as the day closed, things were coming down to the wire. the contest closed at 9pm on saturday, and at about 8:30, final cut was still telling us that it was gonna take 56 mins to export. this was uneasing, but with the reassurance of a krazy cinematographer, we stopped exporting, switched on the high-preformace graphic card on my laptop, and boom, done in 15 mins, and delivered with 10 mins to spare. it was a close call, and a good experience. i hope you enjoy the final product.
