Audition and Valentine's Day (no, not those ones)

I've just finished the final touches on Audition, and it's uploading to Youtube as I type. It would already be up, but my internet connection faltered two minutes before completion and I had to start all over again. Woe.

I'm very pleased with this little film, it was a lovely concept and everyone really pulled together to make it as good as possible. Bay is a tremendous performer (the dance he does was improvised on the day, and he put up very well with our requirements for repetition. I especially like some of the lighting effects we got in the Ath with just a single redhead as a backlight - it isn't great as illumination, but you just get this outline of a dancer in a dark auditorium.

Cutting was a fairly straightforward process for most of it, choose the best shots for performance and framing, match on action etc. It's testament to Sam's direction that scenes like Bay leaping out of bed cut together so well. My biggest challenge was the dance sequence, which was shot from many angles, with the added excitement of slight variations in the routine. Very tricky. I ended up using six different video tracks before honing them down to a single one, trying to balance between using the best shots and cutting according to the music. I'm pleased with how it turned out, I think it looks very good.

The rest of it was fiddling with the sound (never underestimate the importance of good sound), colour balancing an exterior shot which was rather rushed and over exposed and adding titles. There was also the issue of the time, which had to be under 2 minutes and 20 seconds for the Virgin Shorts competition. Sam and I sat together at my monitor debating whether or not a shot could stand to lose two frames, or just a single frame. Several things were cut in the interests of timing (including one of our actors completely) but I think what we have now is a very sharp story. I used a bit of a tv trick with the titles, layering them over the final shot in  a way which intrusive, but which does keep out time down. The finished article came in at exactly 2 minutes, 19 seconds and 24 frames.

And here it is:



Also, long long overdue, here is the film Chris, Meg and I made back in February. Meg wrote, she and Chris also starred, I edited and we shared the camera responsibilities: