It's a Wrap!

Whew. We finished our shoot of 'The Assassin' last night. Many thanks to Doug, Andrew, Scott and Caitlynd.

We had a great time, lots of laughs. Lots of surprises too. Doug really nailed the dialogue. Andrew turned out to be a natural at blocking. Scott kept the boom mike out of the shots and Caitlynd saved us from some mistakes as our script supervisor.

Some of the footage is terrific. Most of it however reveals that we are still amateurs. There are lighting issues, continuity mistakes, and several good takes were wrecked because I missed the fact that someone or something was visible in the background that shouldn't have been there.

The sound is incredible. Scott's boom work, my fancy Azden microphone and the DVX100B's onboard 2-channel recording system gave us very good sound. Not quite professional but definitely top of the line amateur.

I'm trying to cut the pieces into something resembling a film. It's proving to be very hard. Some sequences just don't fit together well. The shot of the Assassin looking at the flash drive in his hand is a total write-off, I have no idea how that's going to play out in the final cut.

I may have to cut the film very differently from the script and what we'd visualized, for the sake of making it work.

The good news is, I've spotted many of our mistakes and have figured out how we'd fix them if we were reshooting. That information will be invaluable during our next shoot. I have no doubts it will be much better. Best way to learn is by trying, eh?

I'm going to try to finish post-production on 'The Assassin' by the end of the month. I'll post some stills later to show you how it turned out.