CAT | Filmmaking
19
A Brief Note on Goals and Shooting/Final Cut Ratio
Comments | Posted by Jared Scheib in Filmmaking, Project Updates
We’ve shot 451.44 GB of footage which translates, at 14.92 GB/98 minutes, to 49.42 hours (49:25:20 h:m:s) of footage shot. Our goal for the first month is, as Ashley mentioned, to shoot 75 hours of footage, 40 of which should be interview and 35 of which should be active. While we don’t know the breakdown of interview to active footage shot, that means that we’re 25 hours short of our goal, with 5 days remaining to meet our goal until Ashley goes home to Oregon for a few days for Christmas. That means 25 hours in 5 days, which actually should be attainable if we’re diligent: just 5 hours a day. After all, we’re at TVN from 10am to 8pm every day on average anyway, so we should be able to get there! Just need to ramp it up a little.
Our original goal for January, then, is to shoot 100 hours. To give y’all a sense of perspective, for our previous version of Life’s Waltz, we shot 28 full tapes (42 minutes each) of footage that we cut down to a 16:30 minute film, which boils down to about a 71:1 ratio of footage shot to footage included in the final product. Given we’re aiming to shoot 175 hours total (a goal that may or may not be met, of course, but we will try!) for the feature version and cut it down to, let’s say, a 90-minute film, this would yield a ratio of about 117:1! Maybe we should just stop now and save ourselves time in the editing room! No… but let’s just say that the editing process will be neither quick nor easy! “Fun” may be the word I’m looking for.
For Life’s Waltz, we use two microphones to record sound:
The first microphone we use is our Sennheiser MKH 416. The MKH 416 is a short shotgun condenser mic. This means it’s designed to be super directional, so when you point it at something, it (mostly) records sound from a narrow window directly in front, while at the same time it rejects “off-axis” sound. Because it’s used for picking up sound from the specific source that it is pointed at, it’s ideal for dialogue recording. Not-so-coincidentally, the Senn 416 is known in the Hollywood industry as the traditional workhorse found on sets everywhere.
We hook this bad boy up to a boom pole or use a pistol grip for hand-held audio. It sits inside a muffy blimp (in the lingo, a “Zeppelin” with a “windjammer”) to create dead air space around it and to block disturbances such as wind, etc.
Secondly, we have an AKG CK93, which is powered by an SE 300B power supply. The microphone is actually a tiny capsule (as you can see–above the blue line is the whole microphone!) that can be changed out for a whole series of capsules that have different ideal uses and pickup patterns.
This microphone is attached to the camera itself (cameras generally come with low-quality mics). The CK93 is a hypercardioid mic which means that it picks up sound in a broader, heart-shaped patten. Think of its “pickup pattern” (the field in which it best records sound) as an upside down heart.
We first slip it through a rubber shock mount and then attach the shock mount to the camera using a cold shoe mount. A cold shoe is one that doesn’t supply power. You may have seen flash bulbs for still cameras that mount to the top of the camera and draw upon electricity from the camera to produce the light flash–that would be a “hot shoe”. Our on-camera mic also has a mini-blimpy, or a baby ball gag (I don’t know where they got that name from!), over it to create dead air space around it.
A lot of people have asked me, “When you sit down with your subjects, what do you ask them?” or, “How do you get people to say the ‘right thing’?“
I hate to disappoint, but there is no” right or wrong” thing for any of our participants to say. The beautiful and fascinating thing about the documentary process is that the characters speak to us; we don’t craft them. The only thing in our control at this stage in production is the ability to create such an environment for them so that they are comfortable with opening up to us.
Generally, we begin an interview with basic questions: “Let’s start with you telling us your name, age, where you’re from…etc.” And off they go! Sometimes we can’t get a word in for the next 2 hours; and sometimes, getting anymore information is like pulling teeth! 
After a few minutes, we get more specific: “Tell me more about the first time you met your husband…” This approach helps in getting the individual to restate the “question” so that the footage will make sense if the audience didn’t hear the original question.
After a few more visits, and after the subject is even more comfortable opening up to us, we might even go the random route: “Tell us about your first kiss…” or “How did your marriage challenge you?“
It’s wonderful to hear about the amazing moments from when widows/widowers first met their significant other–I especially love when couples correct each other, “No, it happened this way!“
Sometimes it goes this way:
Husband: “Well, I was making $75 a week–”
Wife: “–no, you were making $100 a week, or I wouldn’t have gone out on that date with you!“
Here are some other things we think about when filming:
1. Never interrupt anyone at anytime! Unless the roof is about to cave in or that person’s life is in danger…
2. After the individual is done speaking, we allow for a grace period of silence. Interestingly, this is actually when some of the most remarkable personal information is revealed.
3. And, I’ve been told by a friend (it’s you Cecelia, if you’re reading!) that if you let someone sit for 7 seconds in silence, they’ll eventually speak up. Our culture is predisposed to talking, talking, talking, so if you give them those 7 seconds, they feel compelled to fill the silence (this coincides with #2). And more than often, they do!
4. When you’re interviewing 2 people at a time, we usually want to cut ourselves out of the conversation and get those two to simply interact with each other organically. So we look away and avoid eye contact! (but re-establish eye contact when the moment is over so that they do not think you are just ignoring them!) Whoever’s operating sound will look down at the mixer and the camera operator will look down or away. This helps to characterize those individuals and generate more interaction between the two to make it feel like a simple conversation between the two caught on camera.
Please feel free to comment with any questions, we’re happy to answer! I will post more techniques we use in the filming process in the coming weeks…
24
Learn It, Live It, Love It
Comments | Posted by Ashley Karitis in Filmmaking, Project Updates
Well, tomorrow is our first day of shooting! Since my arrival, Jared and I have been familiarizing ourselves with the newly arrived equipment, setting up our work flow, and goal-setting. This process has involved anything from reading manuals at seemingly laborious page-by-page speeds, assembling each and every part, and actually getting both sound and picture up and running and doing “tests.”
As tedious as some of this preparation may sound, the plus side is that we certainly have found many awesome features to our Panasonic HMC150 ! For example, the camera offers three ways in assisting focus:
1. The frame “expands” or zooms in (punches in, in the industry lingo) on the center of the original frame. You can then focus on that original center, and it quickly punches back out.
2. You can also choose to place a graph in the top right of the flip-out LCD screen. The graph shows a fuzzy, exponential-like curve that becomes more circular as the object comes more into focus.
3. Lastly, there is a focus-assist feature that accentuates the edges/contour lines of anything in the frame that is in focus. So, when your object is finally in focus, those lines jump out a lot to indicate the achieved focus.
Isn’t that awesome?
I might as well add/admit, that if our Manfrotto Tripod was actually a real man, I would already be head over heels, weak in the knees, falling for “him”. I’m that in love with it!
Our work flow in this context is the way that we will operate as a team from the beginning of shooting through our final cut of the film. To start, we will be filming anywhere from 3-6 hours a day. This is dually convenient since we will then have the remainder of the day to both transfer our footage to the hard drives for editing; and also, these shorter days will give the individuals with whom we are working with a chance to get comfortable with us and our equipment (the last thing we would want to do is impose on anybody’s home!).
As we continue shooting, we expect to spend more time with our participants (the “stars” of the film!) through conversations, activities, and their respective lifestyles. Much later in production, as we accumulate hours and hours of footage, Jared and I will take breaks to generate some “rough cuts,” or some loosely compiled scenes around 20-30 minutes to see what direction our characters are taking us in. These rough cuts will in effect re-direct our shooting, and so forth. As we discovered while making the previous, shorter version of Life’s Waltz in our final semester at USC, a documentary’s story is created in the editing room. Unlike fiction film, where you start with the story/script and create the film based on that, documentary (at least for us) is the opposite: shoot a bunch of footage, then find the story/script in the editing room. This then has bearing on how we will proceed with shooting, so it’s a reciprocal process of “writing” the story in the editing room with footage already obtained and then refining our focus of what we shoot based on the emerging story.
Lastly, Jared and I have some personal, creative, administrative, and technical goals. These goals include everything from maintaining our Life’s Waltz blog to learning how to transcode footage and exercising some self-discipline in getting enough sleep (my body likes 7hrs minimum 
as we essentially dedicate our lives to this project.
Technical Goal #1 for Ashley:
1. Improve sound mixing skills and boom operation while shooting.
That’s a mouthful, but basically, I’m a less experienced with sound and other technical components of production than Jared. I’m sure this frustrates him at times, so I’m making it another goal of mine to observe and absorb as many of his superhero-gonna-figure-out-just-about-anything googolplex of skills to help improve our production efficiency too.
Initial unpacking… wow, we were like kids in a candy store!
All of these boxes came today.. and this isn’t everything.
The camera.. the fabled Panasonic HMC150.. we’ve spotted it…
Untouched.
It’s so unexpectedly lightweight – I can feel the power!
Bogen/Manfrotto tripod (sticks) with 503HDV fluid head
Yay, K-Tek 110CCR boompole! (This is what the Sennheiser will be mounted onto so it’ll look like one of those microphones you notoriously know the image of from Hollywood sets, with that grey blimp on top and the sound guy with the headphones on.)
LaCie hard drives to store our footage; Trascend 16GB SDHC 6 Class flash memory to record onto from camera (goodbye tapes, hello solid-state!)
Sennheiser 416 Short Shotgun Mic; AKG CK93 Hypercardiod Mic plus SE300B power; some XLRs cables for good measure!
Wow… this is incredible. This whole weekend will be dedicated to getting used to the equipment and workflow.
More later! (And more equipment tomorrow!)
