I have been working on the edit and I’m satisfied with its current state. I still need to tweak some cuts to optimize the flow of the story.
The audio recording of the second actor is planned for next week and in the first week of January we’ll do a re-shoot of a couple of scenes I’m not happy with. Those are mostly scenes where we used the green screen. The main reason is that the pacing of those scenes just didn’t work in the cut I have now. I will shoot some scenes in a different way, using other angles to create the illusion that the actor is in a bigger space than he actually was.
Also, the end scene did not work out as I envisioned. This was mainly due to the lighting of that scene. I was not happy with it when shooting but it was already very late and I didn’t have a solution to the problem at that time. Later, at home, thinking about the scene, I had that “Aha” moment and (hopefully) found a way to get the lighting that I want for that scene. I already modified the set pieces to be able to pull this off.
Re-shooting scenes isn’t ideal as you need to get your crew together again and reproduce the situation you had the first time. So, I thought about why these scenes “went wrong” as I really planned as much as possible beforehand. I made a storyboard and a shot list. I made lighting diagrams. All this helped enormous during the shoot. It was very easy to explain how a shot should be framed and what the lighting should be.
The problem was that I was directing, playing director of photography and camera operator all at once. Especially operating the camera and directing at the same time resulted in me focusing more on the technical part than on the overall outcome of the scene playing in front of me. So, next time, I’ll try allocating someone to help me handle the camera and playing the role of camera operator when needed so I can focus more on the performance of the actor and the scene itself while the camera is rolling.