Well, I hate listening to myself on camera. In this post I’ll talk about the difficulties I’m going through with this movie, and how I intend to address them.

As noted in my last post a few weeks ago, I intended to add in a narration to make the story clearer to the viewer, part of which I’ve now done. I finally got to use my lavalier mic, which was great, but frankly I think I got better sound from just the camera itself. It’s hard to tell.

I sat on my film for about a week without really doing anything because frankly, I got sick of watching it. That’s not to say I don’t like my own movie, but constantly watching the same 5 minutes of footage was mind-numbing and I needed a break. Taking a break though is a double-edged sword, because I’m facing a bunch of problems with the film, and quite frankly it’s nearly too late in the term to really do much about it. We’re kicking it into high gear for this last weekend.

Problem #1: The sound of the river

In the second draft that I posted, there is a long sequence about a minute long where Tim is showing me the bait he is using, and he’s talking. There are two problems with this sequence, one is that the sound of the river is overwhelmingly loud, and the second problem is that the camerawork is shoddy. I opted to take out this scene because it really fell flat for what I wanted it to convey.

My issue though is that the entire scene from start to finish has the sound of the river in it, and the river is very, very loud. I can’t go back and re-shoot it for a myriad of reasons, but chiefly because Tim is away for the weekend.

My answer to this problem is to use b-roll footage during phases where Tim finishes speaking. I can get shots of birds, of trees, of nature etc. and just cut those shots into the movie so that it breaks up the tedium of the river. I’m not entirely sure if it will work because it could just make the river sound more jarring.

Problem #2 There is still a lot left to film

I haven’t been able to set up a time with my gardening friends, and this is very lamentable. The sheer amount of work left to do for this film is actually insane, and because of my ‘break’, I feel like I really shot myself in the foot.