by Nathan Stout
Am I the only one around here that seems to be posting topics about ‘making of’ and such???
Episode 1 of Season 3 of According to Whim is eighty percent done.
We only shot for two nights and we have twenty minutes of screen footage. That’s good.
For our ’10 week goals’ this time around, Chris wanted episode 1 of season 3 shot and posted. I am still not done with season 2 but I agreed. The plan was to shoot three minutes of the script each Thursday. With this and that we were forced to combine a couple of days and we had to shoot six minutes each of those days. We did that twice. We should have only had twelve minutes of footage but we came out with twenty. I think it might actually be twenty three but who is counting?
We took the approach of heavy ad libbing on scenes (not necessarily ad libbing acting, but adding to scenes with stuff that wasn’t on the script). For instance there is a scene where Chris walks up to the front door and knocks. I come to the door and open it for him. While we were shooting this I decided that my character should be doing something interesting while Chris approaches the house. It was decided that I should be having a fight with one of my overgrown fish (ala a fish shaped pillow). We shot the whole thing, and a scene that should have been thirty seconds is now two minutes. Additions like that (that are entertaining and not just to soak up screen time) are what we are pushing for.
A few days back I encoded the footage and started editing. We seem to have the same fare we usually have no matter how hard we try to do it better each time. We have enough angles but there are always inconsistencies, bad camera positioning etc (aka we needed a camera man).
It all still looks good. It will do just fine. Chris was wanting the flow of some of the scenes to be similar to the look of the show ’24’. That required a lot of camera cuts and movement. It works well enough but no one is going to confuse us with that show.
In one scene I am talking over a fan (running on high) and a bubble machine. We needed to cut that audio and dub over my voice with normal room volume levels. It was a little tricky but it works well enough. There are also a few special effects shots of Miguel on the television that I will have to aftereffects-in but that’s about all.
There is a lot of audio editing to do as well. I need a lot of music to place over certain scenes too. Then I will need to make credits and ‘next time’ bits and we will be done.
On a side note I did finish posting episode 2 of season 2 to the website today. I have basically cut out scenes we have yet to film. I will put those back in later so we can have complete television edits of the show ready to go to public access.