Weekly Reflection #2

Bah! After all my experience with film making, I somehow forgot that anything that can go wrong will go wrong. This week I learned that we are not going to be able to film the rest of our movie until the 18th. This is making me very nervous. Our initial schedule called for us to film last weekend, but someone in our actress's family got very sick so she couldn't come. Now we're cutting it close. I am hopeful that we're going to be okay any way because we are ahead of schedule on editing the first part. This week we actually finished editing Act 1 and all of the footage we've filmed for Act 2. We put a lot of effort into the audio this week. First, I found a solution to the problem I told you about last week where we wanted to edit our voices out of the scenes on the Metro but keep the background noises. In the very beginning of the film we drowned out the voices with some calm, low key music from the Free Music Archive. It's just loud enough to block the stage directions keep the ambient noises in the background. The ambient sound we liked the most but that we thought would be the most difficult to retain while also taking out our voices was the rattling sound of the train on the tracks. Since this train sequence is supposed to be suspenseful, I decided to try dubbing a heartbeat in the background that grows louder and louder. This effect seamlessly removes our talking but retains the metro sounds while also serving the cinematic effect of emphasizing the actress's nervousness. Unfortunately, I was not able to show you this footage on this blog because it isn't compatible with my PC, but you can click here to hear the opening music track. One other success this week was that Mr. Bustillos recorded an AMAZING voice over for the fake introductory radio broadcast that starts the film. He sounds just like a newscaster reporting breaking news in a dramatic way. After hearing him I wondered why he didn't go into the radio business.
Now that we got so much done last week with our existing footage, we don't have much to do this week. We really need to finish filming. Until then I guess we can keep polishing and editing to make the film even smoother and more professional looking than it already is. I can get cracking on this after Tuesday when I finally get take my AP NSL test. I've been studying constantly for it so after I take it I'll feel free as a bird..... and ready to work on a different project  - this film!