We were away in South Korea over the Halloween period so I didn’t end up putting together the customary “making of” post.

Halloween has been and gone, but that doesn’t mean we still can’t enjoy spooky things. If you haven’t already seen it, check out this year’s Newforge Studios horror flick, Desperation.

Having the office finished made editing the film a much more pleasant process than working on the laptop on the sofa. The desktop PC has shifted around from room to room before finally making it to its rightful place under the new walnut desk.

Filming

On this project I used a combination of the Blackmagic Cinema Camera 2.5K and Canon 600D. The Blackmagic produces excellent cinematic footage, but it is a pain to lug around and the high crop factor means much wider lenses are needed for the wide and medium-wide shots. The 600D is much more versatile, but also consumer orientated, so the footage isn’t as nice and looks a tad amateurish at times.

The greatest challenge (as is often the case in our films) was sound recording. Unfortunately given the tight turnaround time and my single-handed production, I was unable to use off camera sound and a boom setup. I settled for the Rode VideoMic attached to the 600D which produced an uncomfortable level of background noise, but at least there was some usable audio. When you’re trying to finish a production in a weekend there have to be some compromises, and audio quality was one of them. Thankfully Calum’s music helped smooth over the rough edges.

As usual, I edited the project on Adobe Premiere Pro CC. Seeing it all come together is my favourite part. Colour matching the two cameras was tough but I feel as though I managed a fairly consistent colour profile despite vast differences in the input footage. Given how little time we had, and a sick actor in the starring role, I was pleased how the film turned out. Let me know in the comments if you have any feedback, or suggestions for next year’s production.

Thanks for joining me on this brief cinematic detour. Next time I’ll be back with another chapter of In Search of Seoul.