stray dogs

Sam's Inclination Sam is the director for this project. His favorite movies are mostly gangster related and this affected the way he shoot his short video. Needless to say, there is a few gun shot scene but alas, there is no flare to be seen, instead sound effect suggested there was gun shot. The video was shot in Betacam SP format with a gain boost of -24db to increase graininess, the desired feel that Sam is looking for. Cinematic bars was added during post-production to give it a film look. Fake blood was brought from Toy 'R' Us and I must admit, looks real! Editing Editing was done on the AVID MC 1000, this is a nonlinear editing system and I am using it for the first time to cut a short video. Because of it's fexilibility, very tight editing could be accomplish. The opening title consists of fast cut using footages shot from a Sony VX1000 miniDV camera. Title was created from within Media Composer and some fast cut was used as well. This create the illusion that the words are flying around the scene.

There was not much visual effects to be done for the rest of the video except to do some freeze frames and superimpose titles. Most of the time was spent deciding what to be imposed on the scene and how to place it unobstructly.

After the video was cut, it is still very raw because there was no effect and no music. To make things worst, there was some scene where ADR has to be done. In one of the scene, there was a constant rumbling noise where a dialogue was taking place, it was so critical that we decided to do an ADR for that entire screen. The actor and the actress affected was not able to do the dub on the same day and we had to record each of them on different days. After that, we still had to add some ambience sound to the scene to increase realism. To top it all, Sam has to go in the sound booth and do some dialogue as well.

There was also a large chuck of effects sound we have to add. Some of the effects such as raining and thunder could be found in the sound effect library while some, we have to create our own. For instance, the sound of the newspaper being flip over by the wind was created inhouse.

All in all, audio took a longer time during post-production then was cutting the scene together. Logging of footages into the computer was another matter altogether. I think the weakest part of the whole project was the gain boost which really make the video look like it was shot with Hi8. Ironic because I tried for so many years trying to get my hand on a Betacam and here it ends up looking like a Hi8 video.

Cast of stray dogs

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