Week 8

We met on the 22^nd at 8:15am, with the actors to arrive at 9:00am. This gave us 45 minutes to correctly prepare the camera/lighting, design the set, and for me to set up and test the audio equipment.

Our film is set at night time (hence the title 20:05), but the kitchen had large windows without any blinds, letting in lots of unwanted light and making the kitchen unusable. Our solution to this problem was to sellotape bin-bags to the outside windows, which blocked light from coming in and made it seem like night time.

The next day we met back up at 6:00pm to shoot 20:01, the scene of Jamie talking to Ben while walking home. I only encountered one problem on-set (or so I thought at the time), which was my struggle to remain hidden from the camera while recording. Unlike our filming inside (which allowed me to easily hide from the camera’s field of view), outside our character was in motion and the camera moved to follow him, consequently meaning I had to hide in-between cars and behind walls to best capture Jamie’s dialogue as he walked. In fact, in a few unused shots you can see my bright orange headphones poking out from behind a bush.

Due to us filming outside, my pistol-grip mic inadvertently picked up unwanted background noise. To counter this, I recorded Jamie’s monologue on a tie mic and also the atmos sound of outside, so I had the option to simply delete the footage’s audio and instead overlay both separate recordings, adjusting the tracks individually to find the right balance. In theory, my plan worked. However, it was only when it came to the assembly that I realised the tie mic had been rubbing against the collar of Jamie as he spoke, meaning all I had was the pistol-grip mic’s fuzzy and inconsistent audio. As a workaround, I’ve pulled small clips of audio from takes that we haven’t used in the film but that had clear sound, and stitched them together to form Jamie’s full sentences. This was a rather grueling process, and has taught me the importance of checking my recordings on-set where I can easily rerecord any poor audio.

I first started assembling the film at the end of this week, and throughout I tried to follow lessons I’d learnt from other established editors. One piece of advice that stood out to me in particular was from Eddie Hamilton (editor of films such as Mission Impossible and Kingsman) in an interview he gave to the film theory website So the Theory Goes. When discussing the editor’s influence on the audience, he stated that “the editor is manipulating the audience from the very first to the very last image. People want an emotional experience when they go to see a film, they want to be manipulated… so it’s very important we are aware of the power of that”. I found a way to apply this idea to a problem I had with the opening shot of scene 2, where Jamie comes into the house and takes off his hat and jacket. Our take of this dragged and overran massively, but it was the only shot I had of him coming inside, which was information important to the film. It was then that I remembered Hamilton describing the power of emotional manipulation on the audience, and I had the thought to briefly cut away to something else and then return to Jamie at a point much closer to the end of the clip, which manipulates the audiences sense of time to deliver a more streamlined sequence. I had b-roll footage of Beth sitting on the couch between takes, and after finding a short moment where she was staring in the direction of the door and appeared very angry, I had my emotionally impactful and manipulative cutaway. This brief insert primes viewers to dislike Beth, who’s sulky, dissatisfied demeanor evokes negative reactions from audiences, and makes them more invested in her psychological abuse of Jamie.