A CLOSE SHAVE Video Bibliography

Jungle Trip After A New Life, we decided that we better do some training on our own before we do anything else for competition.

We have everyone on the team come out with a story brief and whoever got the best story outlines is required to write a simple script and direct the video. It was to be a simple exercise for us.

Eventually, Eileen got the job. The story is about two guys who was lost in the jungle while on a hiking trip. Unknown to them, they were being stalked by a mad man. Somehow they managed to escaped the jungle and the mad man without knowing it.

Production Process Well, the story requires that we go to the forest for shooting and we recce the place and remember the route there in adavance. It was really supposed to be a weekend trip for us as we get our equipments and load the van for the journey to the forest. It was Saturday morning then.

This time we had a 100 watt light for our night shoot and more batteries. The shot went well into the night and then it starting to rain. We rushed our way to the van which then make itself out of the muddy tracks to the main road. We took this opportunity to charge our batteries as well as get some slumber.

Shooting was fast as we did not emphasized on acting, the exercise was more for practising my editing. We wrapped our production on Sunday afternoon.

Editing Because this is a suspense drama, I had to do some fast cut. It will be difficult if I was using the method I did on A New Life, i.e. using the pause and play button. By now, I was working in a local institution as a video technician and they have a Betacam SP suite as well as an U-matic and SVHS suite. I was not allowed to touch the Betacam, so I sneak to work early every morning to edit in the SVHS suite as I was more familiar with it's setup. Everyday, I edit about 2 hour before I logged off and pretend I just came to work...hee..hee...

It was a nightmare trying to get frame accuracy on the SVHS. The suite has no sync signal to hook up the machines and it is only a cut only suite...no A/B roll. But it is already a luxury compared to Hi8. I could do insert video and audio seperately and I could lay music after the edit.

It occurs to me that we need better system of logging shots so that while editing, we do not have to spend unneccessary amount of time seperating the good shots from the bad ones. From that point onwards, we have numbers beside each screen in the script so that the Production Assistant could logged down the shots for post-production. This came in useful when we started our project for Learner is Rich.

A Close Shave was much better in terms of sound quality and visual pace then A New Life. But shooting in Hi8 and then transfering the tape to SVHS for editing is not such a good idea in analog video world. The video quality was really bad and not much detail can be deciper. Which is why Betacam is lurking somewhere in my mind.

More experiences can be found as you explore Video Bibliography.