Let's go see a movie

Today I got given a DVD of a film I engineered sound on a while back. It was a single day shoot involving over a dozen cast members all playing on character, one after the other.

The film "Delusions" was one of two films I did sound for that got sent off to the Cannes film festival, the other being a film called "Displacement", which was a final year film project for some film students.






















The shoot went really well, with a rigorous schedule kept to so that the younger cast members could go home at a reasonable hour, and with a good level of professionalism from the cast and crew.

Upon watching the DVD though, I despaired again at the ability of film-makers to discern quality from crap.

The sound wasn't uniform; they chose to use the sound from whichever shot was on screen, which meant on-board microphones for the other two cameras (the wide shot didn't have a microphone so that wasn't an issue.) So in one shot the sound was tinny, then another it was full and louder. There is one part where the shot changes halfway through a word and the second half is lost.
I'm not saying the sound recorded was amazing but all cameras were running at the same time so my boom audio could have been used for every shot.

Other issues included bad focus, panning, tracking, framing and some editing where it repeated a frame in the new shot.

I think i'll stick to non-video recording in the future.

The upside is that apparently BOTH films spelt my name wrong in the credits for cannes, so people won't know I worked on them if they say the sound is bad.