PRODUCTION

“I’M GOING TO STEAL THE DECLARATION OF INLUSTRATIO” – THE GALLERY

The first day of shooting was December 10th; we set up in the SMC common room, hectically arranging equipment and moving furniture around. Since I was the editor of the project, the privilege of sound recording was entrusted to me; having never used the F4 ZOOM channel mixer, at least not by my lonesome, I was relatively anxious about the entire process (despite an equipment run our group held a few days prior).

Syncing the mixer and our radio microphones was relatively simple, but we stumbled across a massive obstacle right before the beginning of the shoot – the pair of Tentacle devices we took out for timecode syncing was not working. I emailed Peter North, to see whether the settings were perhaps making it impossible for the mixer to read the external timecode, but as it turned out when I shifted the devices around – one of the cables was simply not working. Issues and retrievals was closed at that point, so throughout the shoot I made sure the emphasise the importance of the clapperboard (so that audio syncing would not be a living nightmare in the editing process).

During the shoot, I decided to keep all of the recorded dialogue quite heavily under-recorded; last time I used the mixer, although the audio quality appeared perfect within the device, during the editing process it was heavily distorted. This time around, I was running the risk of inconsistent background noise, but after watching a video on YouTube explaining what the audio options are, I was feeling moderately confident with my entire operation.

Apart from audio I did not partake in any particular responsibilities; every once in a while Patryk did consult shot composition and such with me, especially when shifting the perspectives, but apart from that it was a relatively straightforward process. At the end of everything, I recorded some ambient audio, as well as applause, so that it could be used consistently in post.

THE MARCH OF THE ENTS – THE HOLLIES

A day or so after the gallery shoot, Patryk and I held a very unofficial meeting on his bedroom floor, going through the storyboard and annotating it with dialogue, as well as some last minute changes to shot ideas. Unfortunately I have misplaced it somewhere since then, but we did bring it to the next shoot, and I am pretty certain that it was of help at least a little bit.

The forest shoot differed quite significantly from the gallery one. We were all (with a heavy emphasis and me and Patryk) feeling the immense pressure creeping in. After some production miracles, we arrived at the Hollies on the morning of December 15th, with a whole lot of equipment and an odd mix or exhaustion and energy. Our lead was not there, and he wasn’t replying to messages, but initially we were not panicking since we could focus on the scenes of the empty forest and those of the Man – or Patryk, in this instance.

The scenery portion of the shoot went calmly, I was mainly manning the smoke machine and walking from tree to tree in attempts to produce nice shots. The weather was beautiful, and the lighting truly splendid. Then, we moved on to the shots of Patryk. This time, we had a working tentacle set, so I was not stressing too much about the audio. However, since Patryk was the man in front of the camera, temporary directing responsibilities were bestowed upon me. I was trying to listen to the audio, monitor the looks of the shots, as well as advise on what lenses to use (since apparently I was the person who had the most knowledge in that area, and not our camera person) all at the same time. Despite the cold weather, the sheer multitude of tasks kept me more than warm for a majority of the time. Patryk’s black eye was also created by me, using the most basic makeup palette known to man – it was nothing spectacular, but it did the job.

As it turned out when we looked at one of the shots of Patryk, the camera was not recording backup audio at all. In the gallery, we had a boom mic plugged directly into the camera – in the forest, we attached it to the ZOOM recorder. It completely went over my head to change the settings within the camera at the beginning of the shoot, being so preoccupied with everything else. As soon as I found out, the settings were changed, and I could only hope that the job I was doing with the ZOOM was good enough for us to use.

Andrew, our lead, did end up arriving to the set (despite us being almost convinced he was not going to show up), and I was back to simply recording audio. The remainder of the shoot went more calmly than its beginning, and everything was turning out relatively hassle free. At one point, the clapperboard disappeared out of the picture – we were trying to save time as much as possible, since the sun was setting quickly. I was extra aware of the timecodes, checking them religiously to make sure I would not be left with impossible to sync audio. Other than that (and the fact everyone was absolutely freezing), we were quite satisfied with how everything was turning out. After the last shot, which was actually suggested by Andrew, we wrapped up, and the shooting of INLUSTRATIO was complete.