Short film diary - Week 21...

I'm afraid I'm going to be a bit rubbish this week! Not only is this post really late, but it's also going to be really short as I'm really busy. Also, if that weren't bad enough I'm moving flats next week so will probably have to put the diary on hold for a bit. If I get chance I may throw in a couple of short-film related blog posts to make up for it but I can't promise anything.

Anyway, last week we mostly did ADR. I would do one of those patronising Oscar-style intros about what ADR is, but that's what the internet is for.

We ended up re-recording the dialogue for the whole film. This is not necessarily because we need it, it's mostly as a back-up and to give my sound editor a number of options. Personally I'm hoping that aside from the exteriors we can mostly use the sound we recorded while filming but we shall see. It took a long time but the actors were all really good at it, even those who had never done it before (I was very impressed!), so it was a fairly easy process.

We tweaked a couple of performances and changed the emphasis on a couple of lines, even adding some lines where necessary to fix issues that had come out of the feedback we've had. But mostly I just wanted everyone to repeat what they did on the day we shot because they were pretty awesome performances already.

I also realised I am no good at this bit. I'm not sure I have an ear for dialogue, which sounds pretty bad coming from a writer. I'm fine with it on the page and know how something should sound. I'm okay with working out how it should be performed but in isolation I often struggled to tell whether a delivery was better, worse or exactly the same. It's like if you say the same word over and over again until it completely loses its meaning and starts to sound like a foreign language - I'd just lose all perspective on it. But I did make a lot of notes beforehand so anything I knew needed fixing got fixed which is the main thing. And my sound recordist is awesome and super-experienced so he made sure we got a couple of really good takes of each line.

Anyway, that's it! Need to pack and do writing and stuff. Will hopefully have an update on the next stages of the short soon.

Oh, and totally sign up to the Facebook page if you haven't already - there are like pictures and stuff...