With 3 days to go before hand in, I made the decision to stop the editing for the film and restart work on a trailer instead. There were many factors behind this decision, plot inconsistency and poor acting, but the main decision was made because after after trying my best to sort it out, the audio was beyond poor.
Some of the scenes were ok, the outside scenes which we filmed on the first day came out ok but the rest of the film was barely audible. I had chosen to use the Kodak Playsport to make the film with as the quality of the video (1080 HD, 60 Frames Per Second) came out really well whilst testing it before we started filming, but I had not thought about checking the quality of the audio until it was too late.
This is obviously a massive lack of preparation on my part, and something that I am deeply frustrated about. As I said, the outdoor scenes were actually ok because we were far from any interfearing noise such as traffic but the audio for the scenes inside The Kings Arms was impossible to hear. I spent a few days taking the audio out and playing around with it in Nuendo, an professional recording program, but there was nothing I could do to save it.
Without the scenes from the pub, the rest of the film was pointless. It was these scenes that were meant to set up the rest of the film.
So I stopped the editing and began work on making a trailer instead. I think the trailer turned out ok considering, but it certainly wasn’t what I had intended to make. I used what I could from the footage that I could use but it ended up not featuring much of the original audio, and I provided a voice over for it instead.
The trailer completely defeated the point of what I had set out to achieve. The soundtrack we had made for the film was ditched in favour for some music from a CD I have that is a compilation of music from film trailers.
In a way it’s kind of interesting to see how different the film looks with the music I ended up using in the trailer. It comes across as a very cheesey film, almost like a chick-flick, which is not the vibe I was getting when editing the original film to the music we made. That was meant to be a lot darker but you don’t get that at all.
I’m obviously very disappointed with the way things turned out. If I had thought about doing some tests with audio beforehand this would have turned out very differently. Instead, the final product is something I can’t say I’m proud of but I have learned some very valuable lessons in terms of pre-production. I hope these are mistakes I can avoid in the future.
