12 Films. 12 Weeks. There are worse ways to spend a summer.

a film-by-film tech journal by Keith Boynton

Film #8: Spirits

Shot on the Canon 5D Mark II, a.k.a. Derek’s Miracle Toy. The 5D, like the Nikon D90 (of “Queen Bee” and “Old Love” fame), is one of these new HD-video-shooting digital SLRs that are taking the low-budget film world by storm. We wound up using this camera (and Derek) for the next two shoots (as well as for “Be Like a Duck”), and with good reason: it’s awesome. It’s portable, it’s inconspicuous, it gets great images, and it’s not as fussy as the D90 (which I still love, Robb!). For this shoot, it was especially vital to have a relatively innocuous-looking camera, since we were filming all night on a subway platform without permission.  It’s amazing what this baby can do with just the available fluorescent lighting.  I’m thinking of buying one myself …

Film #7: The Proposal

Shot on the JVC HD 110. This was our first shoot with a genuine Steadicam system (we used a homemade one for “Old Love”), and also the first shoot where we were frantically chasing daylight to get the film done. The ten minutes it took to mount or dismount the camera from the Steadicam made the experience all the more nerve-wracking. We shot the film mostly in sequence, at a breakneck pace, getting very little coverage and very few takes. In the end, we got extremely lucky with the weather, and I think there’s an authenticity to the light that we wouldn’t have gotten under more sane conditions. Still, it was a stressful experience, and not one I’m eager to repeat.

No technical problems, thank God. And since there was so little coverage, putting a rough cut together was a breeze!

Film #6: Script 2

Shot on the Panasonic HVX200. Not much to report about this one. As on “A Summer’s Day,” we used lavalier mics, courtesy of co-producer Brian Testa, and although we got some wind noise in them, it was pretty easy to edit around. In truth, I was amazed at how clean the audio was, given all the air traffic, ground traffic and air conditioning our naked ears were treated to.

Film #5: Captivated

Shot on two JVC HD 110′s. This is the one where it all went haywire. Because the dialogue was improvised, we needed two cameras; one belonged to DP Giuseppe Pugliese, and one he had to rent at the last minute from a friend. The latter camera gave us some trouble — dropped frames during recording and capture. But that was nothing compared to the audio issues. For some reason (perhaps related to recording the audio into both cameras simultaneously), all the sound was recorded much too “hot” — that is, too loud — and therefore sounded peaky and distorted, especially on Mike Lavoie’s lines. The in-camera audio didn’t have this problem, but it was soft and distant, and bringing it up to snuff was beyond my meager audio-editing capabilities — especially with our deadline looming.

In the end, we re-recorded most of the dialogue in the movie, using a shotgun mic and our trusty Zoom H4 recorder, in the basement where the scenes had been originally filmed. I synched it all up to the best of my abilities, but in the finished film there are several moments where the lip movements don’t quite match the audio, and — more troublingly — we lost a lot of the clothing rustle and footsteps and other atmospheric noises that help make a movie feel real and grounded. All of this is reparable, of course, but it’s probably best to bring in someone who really knows his or her stuff. I’m a decent picture editor, but I’m way out of my depth when it comes to sound.

Film #4: After Perfect

Shot on the Sony V1U.  Like on “Sublet,” we suffered from our failure to possess a basic piece of lighting equipment — in this case, gels.  The cool daylight coming in through the windows didn’t match the warm tungsten light of our Lowell kits, resulting in an oddly mixed lighting scheme.  Not the worst possible problem to have, but it would have been nice to give ourselves other options.

Film #3: Sublet

Shot on the Panasonic HVX200.  This was the shoot when our lack of C-stands became a major drawback.  We have a couple of Lowell light kits that include stands, but they’re fussy and flimsy little things.  Time after time, we’d get in a situation where we wanted to rig up a light, or a flag, or what have you, and had to become extremely inventive, instead of just using the right tool for the job.  We lost a lot of time to these MacGuyver-esque episodes, proving that, if you want to do any significant lighting, a few C-stands are definitely a worthy investment.

Film #2: A Summer’s Day

Shot on the Canon XL2, onto miniDV tapes.  This is the only 12in12 film we’ve shot in a non-HD format, and with any luck, it’ll stay that way. When your distribution format is a little box on the Internet, it might not seem like HD would make such a big difference, but somehow it does.

This is also the first film we’ve ever done using lavalier mics.  I’d heard horror stories about the interference they can pick up, but they worked like a charm.  Another tool for the bag of tricks!

Film #1: Old Love

Shot on the Nikon D90 with several different Nikon AF lenses.  Sound recorded separately into a Zoom H4 recorder and synched up in Final Cut Pro.

The D90 served us wonderfully well on “The Orchid Man” and “The Queen Bee of Mushroomtown” (see Previous Work), but on this shoot it became a bit of a diva.  Blame the heat.  Under normal circumstances, the camera shuts down after five minutes of continuous “live view” mode, to keep it from overheating.  Unfortunately, “Old Love” was shot in a stuffy apartment and out in the blazing sun, which meant that the camera would shut down well before the five-minute mark — sometimes without warning.  At several points during the day, we had to take a ten-minute break just to let the camera cool down.  This may not sound like much of a disadvantage, but when you’re trying to shoot a nine-page script in twelve hours, it starts to feel like a pretty major setback.