work flow

One of many things that can make or break a production, especially when going at break neck speed, is work flow. How images get in and out of the camera, then into an editing program.

What really saved our butts was SD memory cards(the same ones used in digital cameras), the format of the Panasonic HMC150. A 32 & 16 gig card gave us over 6 hours worth of recording time. Thus never having to stop to down load footage, bring an extra lap top, or hard drive, which would have been the case using the P2 format.

Each night after shooting, the SD cards were plugged into an adaptor(same one used with digital cameras and cell phones) plugged into the USB port of a mac pro tower. The footage was imported, binned, and documented before being backed up on a second hard drive. The SD cards were then cleared for the next day of shooting. Made for some pretty long nights, but luckily the ingesting was able to be multi-tasked along with documenting and binning. Backing up was done over night, clearing the SD chips early the next day.

Over all this work flow ‘worked’ pretty well. There was some downloading on set the days we were using the X200 camera with P2 cards. The only downtime when actually shooting was waiting for the SD cards to be cleared when they weren’t. Easy workflow is one good reason to shoot with an HMC150.

Character interlude

meet Marty

SHOOT RECAP - continuity

If there was one thing, just one thing, to have more use of during this shoot(besides of course TIME) it would not be camera gear, locations, lights, grips, gaffers, craft service, or sound equipment... it’d be... FULL TIME continuity.

Oh how this little project would have gone so much smoother with someone, taking note of all those actors being here, there, who’s hand was doing this, head turned like that. Yes, you can edit around this stuff when ya got lots of coverage, but shooting up to ten pages a day didn’t allow much of that. The actors did remarkably well, considering, but still TOTALLY paid in post... totally...

Paid in other ways too with basically no one keeping track of all those lines of dialog? In one example, the script had to actually be modified, solely to fix when one of the actors referred to on thing one way here and another way there... a flub that would need no correcting if we had a freaking continuity person.

Yes, the Real Deal had his crew were constantly taking pictures of sets, but props still kept moving around all over the place. A continuity person, any continuity person, would have been just what the Real Deal needed to keep his peeps spending more time on their real jobs.

And speaking of real jobs, it was left to the actors to keep track of their wardrobe, where and when. Luckily, our story takes place during a small amount of time, meaning very little ‘costume’ changes. But sure would have ben nice having someone besides an actor keeping track of all that stuff.

Having said all that, we actually did have a continuity person for about two days, inclusive of the 11 page mother of all scenes when we REALLY needed it.... and needless to say for those two days, Tom was the most popular person on set.

photos by Suzan Jones

Character Interlude

meet Eddie