FINALLY, I had a chance to watch this! Congrats, Splatt, I genuinely enjoyed it. It was very well made, and I really enjoyed the performance of "The Stranger." Love the last line also. Way to go, and thanks for sharing!
Hey,thanks TM! Making it was a blast. Bernie (the stranger) stepped in and literally saved us at the last minute after the original actor I had cast proved to be unreliable. Bernie was also one of the stars of my previous short film, so it was cool working with him again. You should have seen everyone's faces when we gave him that meat cleaver and told him to go town..after we shot the take that made the final cut, jaws were hanging open . By the way,that's a watermelon with blood pouches taped to it that he's chopping up off camera. We jokingly referred to it as the Watermelon of Doom. The image of the watermelon meat and fake blood splattering underneath the glare of the red filter looked even more like actual gore than we could have planned..so that went well to say the least.
I was wondering how you did that scene! It did look good. It also sounded really good, did you add sound or was the watermelon murder enough?
Nope,no additional sound (save for the musical score), nor did we need to take the soundtrack from an alternate take of the same scene and apply it to the one we used (which is something I've had to do on previous films). That's real time noise you're hearing. . We simply got in low with the boom mike,which in this instance was being held level below the frame, in space closer to Bernie's side, about half a foot away from his ribs.That's also why the crackle of the plastic (when he puts the hand in the baggie) is so clear..the mike stayed in the same place for all of the takes during that particular scene. That way it was close enough for the extremely sensitive (and powerful) boom mic to capture clear crisp sound while also being far enough out of the way of his physical movements so as not to have him accidentally bump it . It's not pretty when that happens. Case in point: Right around the same time of year that we were shooting Supply & Demand ,one of the other graduates was also shooting a short film, which eventually screened as part of the same showcase where mine premiered. He actually
did have an incident involving the boom operator accidentally hitting an object with the microphone during filming..and because they only did one take of that scene, he couldn't lay down a replacement soundtrack for that clip in post. The scene was important enough to the flow of the narrative that he couldn't excise it from the finished film. So we're all sitting in the theater watching the film and actually getting into it (it was a really well written drama that was overall a solid effort) when we come to this one scene where one of the main characters is walking up a staircase. there's no dialog in the scene and the music is very low key....and suddenly we inexplicably hear this loud, heavy thump on the soundtrack, appropo of nothing. Good lesson in why the boom operator has to be on the ball at all times. No kidding..probably 70% of issues that are unrepairable in post are sound related.
