Lifehacking - look back in exhaustion

I've just finished my short film - Lifehacking. It was a really good experience - hard but good. I've been making short films and cutting together bits of footage taken on holiday and on events for a couple of years but this is a different order of magnitude. Doing a whole film from beginning to end and making it as good as you can make it is a big step up. I've learned so much about sound (I need to get much better - or get someone else), setting up the camera (I feel really comfortable with all the manual modes now and I'm pretty sure I know how to get the best out of the camera in any given situation), and loads about colour grading and colour correction.
The way I put the film together was this:

• First I did a rough cut of each scene as a separate project in Vegas. For each one I would leave it about a week and then go back and see where I could cut more out and where there were transitions that seemed uncomfortable.
• I then went through and did the colour correction and grading. This took many more passes than it would now as I had to learn the effect I was trying for as well as how to do it. The Red Giant Colorista tutorials on Vimeo were really useful for this as Stu Maschwitz takes you through the look he is trying to achieve in real detail. Since the controls are a bit different in Vegas then I had to figure out how to get the same effect. Unfortunately Vegas' secondary colour correction masking tool doesn't seem to work quite as well as Colorista for selecting skin tones so I struggled a bit until I found this Vegas tutorial that taught me all about compositing. Then I was flying! I'm really tired of the modern style of colour grading where everything is a sludgy blue/green/grey and skin is a putty colour (See BBC Sherlock). I went for an old fashioned Technicolor look. I'm especially pleased with the night-time scenes on the sofa as I was able to darken the background and relight the face. Unless you know, you can't really tell.
• I then assembled a rough cut of the entire film and handed it off to my brother Matt to add the music. I then left it for two weeks so that I could come at it fresh.
• Two weeks later I rewatched the whole thing (it was getting really tedious by now and hard to stop my mind wandering) and also listened to it right through without watching. I made a set of notes which I have reproduced below. I then went right through the list, fixing everything I could. The final edit took a full day, including re-recording (ADR) the voice for the entire first scene.

My gear

• Canon 550D with 28-55mm kit lens and 50mm f1.8 - Brilliant. Like Crazy was made with a 7D which is basically this camera in a metal body. Now the 600D is out you can get this much cheaper: For £500 you get a camera that you can make a pro film on. The 50mm lens cost £90 new! Great for shooting indoor scenes if you live within its limitations (No IS - Can hunt for focus in low light - though I now use manual focus with the preview screen zoomed in)
• Zoom H1 Digital recorder. Lovely and small. Great with the Lavalliere as you can slip it in your pocket.
• Audiotechnica stereo mic. Nice neutral sound quality although the output level is a bit low.
• Lavalliere (tie clip) mike. Really handy for outdoor shots where you want to reduce background noise.
• Asus X53E Core i7 laptop - Great! Renders 720p HD straight out of the camera at a little better than real time and a really complicated scene with colour correction and compositing layers at about half speed. I no longer have to bother with transcoding. The only problem is the vertical viewing angle on the screen is very small (the side to side viewing angle is fine, strangely so two people can easily watch the same thing, as long as their heads are at the same height) so you have to make sure you're looking directly at it to make sure you're seeing the colours accurately. When I can afford it I will buy a decent HD monitor.
• Sony Vegas Platinum - I'm a real fan of this. Once you're used to the interface it's really fast to use and you can do anything on it that you can do with high-end pro packages. The only thing that I wish it had from the Pro version (which is 10 times the price) is scopes and the ability to split the preview screen to make it easier to grade across scenes.

I'm now on to my next project, an adaptation of a short story by Checkhov. I will definitely use actors for this one, and hopefully my brother will come in to do the sound.

These are the notes that I took on the rough cut of Lifehacking:

Notes on lifehacking
====================
Sound
=====
Scene 1
-------
- Phone ring too loud - Done
- Less bass on the vocals
- Replace "Bank Account"
- Check "Bank Account"
- Clunk after "Still a bit hot?"
- Clunk after "mystified"
- Vocals are at about -18dB
- Background at about -48dB

Scene 4
-------
- Equalise vocals between 2 takes
Scene 5
-------
- Phone ring too loud. Needs room reverb?
- Reduce top end on vocals
Scene 6
-------
- Phone ring - scene 5
- Equalise vocals between scene 5 and 6
- A couple of vocal glitches. Replace?
Cut scene
---------
-Replace sound with wildtrack without wind-noise
Scene 7
-------
- Vocals a little harsh on top/mid - equalize with scene 6
- Vocal should shift to centre for final headshot

Visuals
=======
- Check beginning credits
- Replace font on Voidstar
- Narrower, smaller sans serif font
Scene 1
-------
-Improve secondary colour correction when seated to darken the fence in the background and pop the face
-Close-up needs colour correcting so it matches rest of scene
Scene 3
-------
- Can cut to seated shot earlier
Scene 4
-------
- Redo colour correction on front shot
Scene 5
-------
- Redo colour correction to darken background while relighting face
- Skintone is good! Replicate in scene 4
Scene 6
-------
- Match skintone with scene 5 and between medium and close-ups

- End credits

Lessons learned from making Lifehacking

Yesterday Matt sent me over a new cut of my short film, Lifehacking, with some music that he had added. It sounds great!
I'm now going to leave it a week and then do the final edit.
In the meantime I have been thinking about the things I've learned from making the film. Here they are:

The Good

The camera (Canon 550D) is great and the 50mm, f1.8 lens is a must have at only £90. It means you can shoot in pretty low light conditions and still get a decent result (see the last scene for an example of this)
Towards the end I got into using the magnify function to check the focus - vital when you've got the aperture wide open.
Sony Vegas is a fantastic editor and my new Asus core i7 laptop just flies. I no longer even bother to transcode the video off the camera, it's fast enough without reformatting - as long as you remember to keep the power plugged in.
I found the tutorial videos on using Red Giant Colorista really useful in learning how to use the colour correction tools in Vegas. Though I found myself wishing I had the power mask feature most of the time!
Using the Zoom HA-1 with a Lavalliere worked very well for recording the outdoor scenes. I found it easy enough to sync the on-camera sound with the recorded sound.
Just going out and shooting, even in quite crowded areas, was a lot easier than I thought it would be. People naturally seem to stay out of your way. I asked before filming the cafe scene but they were more than happy to let me go ahead.


The Bad

The sound for the inside scenes is a bit reverby. I put the mic roughly where the camera was. I should have close miked all the scenes and then recorded some wild-track.
If you have an actor in his 40s, don't write a script that requires that he looks down a lot. Very unflattering.
Some of the inside scenes are not quite in focus. I ended up shooting at f2 or 2.2, rather than f1.8 but it's still very hard when you're trying to guess where the actor's face will be. This would have been so much easier if I hadn't been both the actor and the cameraman.
In one of the outside shots there is a wooden fence going straight through my head. I wish I had noticed this at the time of shooting.
It's best if your lead actor has either very long hair or very short hair, especially if you are going to shoot over an extended period of time. My hair was in between, and when I had it cut, I had to wait about 6 weeks for it to grow back to the right kind of length

Things I'd do differently next time

Get actors instead of doing it all myself. I did it this way out of frustration because I'd been speaking to an actor about a collaboration over the summer and for one reason or another it hadn't happened. Next time I will definitely stay behind the camera
I need to be much better at sound recording. For my next film I'm hoping that Matt will be able to help out with the sound.
Because the script allowed me to read off the laptop screen, I didn't learn all the lines. I think I got away with it, but I wouldn't do that again.
I would also like to get someone to do continuity. It was really hard to remember what position I was in and where everything was between shots. There were a couple of scenes where in one shot I had my arm up and the other I had my arm down, which really cut down the options when it came to the final edit.