Technical Difficulties

Technical Difficulties During the Filming Process

The majority of technical difficulties I faced were during the actual filming process of producing my short film:

• The Camera- While I was filming for "The Huge Snooze", on multiple occasions the camera would automatically stop recording the scenes, and would present me with an error message informing me that the "Footage has been Automatically Stopped". I at first put this down to the camera running out of space, but then I'd check through the memory card and it would have more than enough free space, and would immediately allow me to film afterwards without having to get rid of anything. However, we had more takes which were not disrupted by the error message than we did with them so it wasn't too much of an issue; just an annoyance. 

• The Battery Life- The battery life for the Cannon EOS 550D was a ridiculously short duration. We would only get a couple of hours of footage out of it before we had to recharge the battery, which would take anything from 1 hour to 1 hour and a half to do, before we could continue filming again.  The main issue with this was that to achieve a genuine Film Noir effect without the use of black out curtains meant that I needed to film at night; and I needed to make sure my actors weren't too tired or too annoyed that they couldn't go on any longer. We finished filming at 4am on the 31st of October and the actors were both so tired that they were dropping lines and making mistakes throughout the dialogue scene between Lotta Clivage and Marshal Mallows; despite being professional actors who were very much used to acting so don't usually make these mistakes.

• The Tripod- When I borrowed a tripod from the school's media department, there was only the one left and it happened to have one if it's three feet missing. This meant that whenever I used the tripod, I could never get a perfectly straight shot. I got around this issue by putting the footless leg at the back with the two legs with feet at the front, and I lowered the two front feet to try to make all three legs match. This was never much of an issue as the tripod was sturdy enough to keep the camera still, and I did manage to make the camera straight, so the tripod still fulfilled it's function as a tripod. 

Technical difficulties During the Editing Process

However, there were also a few minor issues during editing:

• Matching Footage to Audio- Because I was matching the visuals to the soundtrack; which consisted of diagetic sounds such as sound effects, and non-diagetic sounds such as the music and the narration, I had to make sure that the visuals and the audio lines up perfectly; like making a music video. For example, in the scene where Mallow is describing the way Lotta's looks, the camera zooms into her eyes when the narrator (Mallow) says "Her eyes were the kind of green that would make envy jealous..." the actress looks up towards the camera as the word "eyes" are said, as well as lifting up her eyebrows when the word "money" is mentioned. However despite the timing of this matching perfectly with the audio, the actress reacts by opening her mouth in shock before the narrator says "As for her breasts". I got around this issue by cutting the footage into two halves, the first half was from the beginning of Mallow's description of Lotta's appearance up until the description of her lips, and the second was from the end of the descriptions of her lips up until the end of the description of her breasts. For the latter, I slowed down the frame rate ever so slightly so that the actress reaction was in time with the audio, but not too much so that it is noticeably slower. The result was unnoticeable as the footage looked the same speed as before, despite the timing now being a few seconds slower. It worked perfectly. 

• Filming Footage without a Backing Track- As the majority of the footage was shot with the backing track playing out loud so that the actors knew what to do at certain times, like how one would act if in a music video, it became quite problematic to film edit some parts of the film that would have had to be filmed without a backing track. For example, when we were filming the scene where Mallow is tidying his office in an attempt to make it look presentable for Lotta's entrance; which is shown at 250 frames per second to a sped up version of 'We're in the Money' to create a much more comical scene, the original footage was obviously filmed in normal speed so we couldn't work to an actual time, we just had to estimate. When I came to edit it, the footage was longer than the sped up section from 'We're in the Money' was, and if I made the footage faster to fit in time with it, the footage merely skipped like a movie being fast forwarded rather than Benny Hill style sped up footage. Therefore, I went back to the audio editing program and put the tune back in. This was a positive things though as the extended tune is actually funnier than it was prior to before.