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.