Short Film — “Copper Wire”
There is a version of this where we hired a bigger crew and solved most of these problems with money. It would have been faster. It is not obvious that it would have been better, and it certainly would not have been finishable.
Gallery 12 photos · 2 MB
The edit ran long, as edits do. The first assembly came in at nearly double the final length and included an entire sequence that we still think is good and still had to remove.
What the gear actually did
By the third day we had stopped fighting the weather and started building the schedule around it, which is the single most useful thing that happened on the whole production.
- Transcode overnight, never during a session.
- Keep the offline media on the fastest volume, the masters on the safest one.
- Name the bins after scenes, not after dates.
- Export a reference cut every evening, even when nothing changed.
Nobody watching will know how the shot was made. That is the entire point of making it carefully.
Notes from the edit
Sound was the part we underestimated. It always is. The camera work forgives a great deal more than the mix does, and audiences notice the difference long before they can name it. The full rundown lives on the about page, including the gear we no longer recommend.
- Ingest to the working volume and verify the checksum.
- Generate proxies at a quarter resolution in a codec the machine decodes in hardware.
- Sync audio against the mixer feed rather than the camera scratch track.
- Lock the assembly before anybody opens the colour page.
One last thing. The plan was simple enough on paper, which is usually the first sign that the day will not go the way anyone drew it. We arrived with a shot list, three cases of gear and a rough idea of how long the light would hold.
Every frame here was captured with equipment that would fit in the back of an estate car. That is not a boast about resourcefulness, it is a constraint that shaped the coverage from the first day onward.
Genuinely surprised by the monitor comparison. I would have bet on the opposite result and I would have been wrong.
Been following since the first archive post. This is the one I will be sending to people who ask what the site is.
The section on the lighting setup answered a question I have been asking on three forums for a month. Thank you for printing the actual stop rather than describing it.