Feature Film Entirely with A1+Brevis

[Douglas Joseph]

Andrew Waite, typically if you got one cam and you're shooting dialogue with two actors over the shoulder, you record one take behind each actor, then just cut it up. It's always work best for me. The trailer looks great! You had a pretty good shallow depth of field going on in a few of those shots. Hope you can sell the film. Good luck, dude.

[Andrew Waite]

Yeah, I usually shoot a master shot (non-over the shoulder) until everything is perfect all the way through the take or scene. Then I will take note of positions for continuity. Then will move to the first over the shoulder shot...it's at this point that I focus audio just on the one person who we see completely... I have the other actor run through their lines as well just so I can get the reaction of the person we see, but I don't care if they flub their lines, we can't see their lips... we're just going to over lay audio from another take. Then I repeat with the other person. That's pretty much it.

[John Markert]

Did you shoot on tape and if so did you get any dropouts? Or did you shoot to hard drives?
Keep us informed every step of the way of your journey to get this film out to the public and money in your pocket.

[Andrew Waite]

John,
Both. We shot tape (Sony Premium), and over 20 tapes didn't get a single dropout! We also as a redundancy used a hard drive and captured via Adobe On-Location on a Mac Book Pro using Bootcamp. It's a good thing we did too, because at some point during shooting a grip got mixed up and loaded a tape we had already recorded on when I asked for a blank! Moral of the story, NEVER REWIND A TAPE, ALWAYS use the write protect tabs, and MARK YOUR TAPES!!! It worked out ok because of the hard drive backup.

[John Stakes]

Looks great! I noticed you didn't buy the flip module until after this project...What did you do to get the image right side up when shooting?

Great looking setup btw...

-JS


Oh yeah...and once you got the adapter on did it change anything else with your image besides getting rid of the fringing?

[Andrew Waite]

i had to just flip in post... using he simple rotate filter in FCP. this was a hassle because anytime you added a filter or effect you had to render. so besides eliminating CA/Fringing, it was a big time saver, and it also helped with sharpness. oh, and of course made monitoring a lot easier as well.

[Jacques E. Bouchard]

Originally Posted by Andrew Waite

John,
Both. We shot tape (Sony Premium), and over 20 tapes didn't get a single dropout! We also as a redundancy used a hard drive and captured via Adobe On-Location on a Mac Book Pro using Bootcamp.

I use the same method and software, but on a PC platform. The only problem is my dual-core laptop's fan sounds like a wheezing old man if it's warm in the room and the mic will sometimes pick it up. I shot a short last summer and it was 100 deg in the room, in post I was wondering what that faint whislte was in every take. So I bought an extra-long firewire and keep the laptop further away now. :-)

Do you have a blog where you talk about the technical aspect (pros, cons, pitfalls, etc.) of shooting a feature with the XH-A1? I'm planning a feature for next year as well, and I'd like to know what to expect.

Good luck with the film.

[Jacques E. Bouchard]

Originally Posted by Jack Walker

It looks good!

Which SAG contract did you use? Is it SagIndie? If so, which one? What was the budget?

Thanks!

That's gonna be a problem for us. In Canada, ACTRA doesn't have anything comparable to SAG's contract. The best they do is 50% of scale, and even then it seems to be with extreme reluctance. on a micro-budget feature, that can eat up most of your budget.

Have any "hosers" had experience working with ACTRA (or Quebec's UdA) before? I cold use some informal tips.


J.