In my day “Rough Cut” / “Half Cut” used to mean something else..
Now I even find myself say “In my day”…
I have entered a parallel universe!!!
Anyway. So I have managed to finish a trial rough edit of Pillow Talk. It seems to have turned out reasonably well. There were only a few relatively minor continuity issues and the fact that this film required constant smoking and drinking of whiskey was a miracle. I say relative because depending on your viewpoint an open door that is meant to be jammed shut could be a very large continuity issue!! In this case it was OK. Then again, I don’t know whether I was just getting blind to the continuity blunders after 13 hours a day of watching and editing the footage. It is amazing how much one misses after a while or when you expect to see one thing you do not see anything else. Psychologist would have a field day!. Actually come to think of it, they already have… Gorillas on basket ball courts come to mind.
Other than that the visuals could do with a good colour grade as the entire film has an amber glow and it would be good to have that consistent throughout. But even the native footage was pretty good in terms of colour and lighting. Well done Andy, your new baby performed well.
However, the bane of my existence this weekend.. the cause of the bald spots on the side of my temples .. has been the sound. Oh that nemesis!! Thankfully on the whole the sound was salvageable, if not from the actual takes then from different camera angles the dialogue could be patched in. However, next time I am forcing myself and my crew to EAT before the shoot!!!!The tummy rumbles have wrecked a chunk of the dialogue. Just one section of the shoot, around 10am on Saturday was swamped with rumblings near and far. The trouble was that that time slot was dedicated to a single portion of the script that was not to be shot from any other angle or camera position. That was it.
I tried to clean up the audio as much as I can using Soundbooth and Audacity but not being a sound engineer I now have my actor sounding like she is talking to us from the depths of the Atlantic. All fine if I was shooting a Titanic remake, not if she’s meant to be a couple of feet away talking to her baby’s soft-toys.
If anyone has any suggestions on how to resolve my sound issues editorially, please shout! I’d be very happy to offer you a sound credit and dinner/a pint in exchange for saving the day for us. The alternative would have to be dreaded ADR and painful lipsync or even a re-shoot and I would dearly like to avoid putting my actors and crew through all that again.. as nice as it was the first time round.