I’m done trying to write these posts like chapters in a manual. I’m going to start putting stuff up as I think of it. If I miss something, or you can’t find it, comment below or message me and we can talk directly. I’m fine with having a chat.

Here is some information I will impart on you if you’re ever interested to make a movie:

Write to the resources you have now. As I’ve stated before I purposely made this movie with the resources I accumulated from years of making shorts. Typically most filmmakers DON’T do this. They lay a rap down about letting their creativity run wild and writing the perfect script and then getting funding. But those big dollars never come in. I don’t know one filmmaker whose made a movie like that. Also, I read a lot of filmmaker biographies, and found all my Hollywood heroes had budgets and parameters set by that budget. They had to figure out how to do with financial constraints, so damn it, you will too. Besides, everything costs way too much. More than you’ll raise your first time out. Trust me, if it ain’t free, don’t include it.

The number one thing to look for in a cast or crew member: Enthusiasm. Everything else will fall into place. Anyone can be excited and eager to help out in the beginning, but most people get burned out and flakey after a while. If you’re not working with enthusiastic people all the talent in the world will be meaningless when they stop showing up.

Also, pay attention to how much you’re working your cast and crew. They’re doing you a favor. Try and do them a solid by not wasting they’re entire weekend or keeping them up late on a work night. I over compensated for this fear by stretching shoot dates sometimes months apart. There’s a happy medium in there somewhere.

Whoever is directing should also edit. Shooting a film is like a football game (note: I don’t watch/like football but I find the concept of sports intriguing. What a wiener kid I am). You will spend so much time carefully planning every detail in pre-production, but come game time you’ll have no idea what will go wrong. You need to be ready to make crucial creative decisions in the moment, multiple times through out the shoot. If you’re also editing, it will be so much easy to make those in the moment decisions because you won’t have to explain it to some one else later.

Speaking of editing: FOR THE LOVE OF GOD edit while you shoot. Even if your production will only be a few weeks (keep dreaming) you will have the colossal task of putting it all together. Edit while you go and you’ll be assembling it while it’s still fresh in your head. If any mistakes are made you can incorporate them into the re-shoots, or change the production accordingly so you won’t have to re-shoot. It takes a giant job and breaks it up into smaller, easy to manage jobs.

Hair: It grows, it gets cut… and the ladies always be changin’ it, amiright fellas?!?!?!? But seriously if you’re shooting over a long period of time (like over 3 years for instance) hair will change. It’s not as obvious in real time but it will be when you edit footage together. Mind the facial hair too.

For my next film I will make something with a more ensemble cast as opposed to one main actor throughout the story. This caused scheduling and availability problems. And why wouldn’t it? I’m not paying the guy. Having an ensemble cast, specifically one who are not all in the same scenes all the time together, will make it much easy to schedule and shoot. Your performer friends have things to do on nights and weekends (like perform for instance) so all of them being in the same place at the same time is hard to orchestrate. Dole out the parts and the scenes evenly amoung a group of actors and you increase your chances of getting it done quicker.

Sound is as big of a nightmare as people say it is. No joke: get your sound game in order up top. People fuss about cameras. Editing software. Computer specs. What mics do you have? How will you be recording sound? Go so far as to incorporate your production process into the early stages of writing your film. If you got shitty mics, write something where bad sound is an asset. Make a silent film if you have too. That might sound excessive but if you have shitty sound: that’s a wrap on your film. Bad sound will ruin, absolutely ruin, your film. Beware!

Hisssssssssssss bad audio hissssssssssss is the hisssssss bane of hisssssssss most filmmaker’s hissssssssssssss existence. hisssssssssss Certainly mine!

Bad sound is, for me, at the top of a list titled: reasons your film sucks. Bad audio will instantly take any viewer out of your short.

That annoying hiss you get comes from several sources. The most common are:

• air conditioners
• heating
• refrigerators
• computers
• buzzing soda machines

The hum of these appliances go unnoticed in our daily routine, but once it makes its way into your perfect take, it’s all you notice.

What can you do about it? There’s a production solution and a post-production solution, both of which have helped me greatly.

Production Solution

I don’t have a separate microphone. The one on the camera is the one I use. I’ve learned to record my audio separately, after I get all the shots of said scene.

It’s simple: Before you move on to the next scene, have your actors stand close to your camera mic and go through their lines. Pretend it’s a radio play and they’re sharing a mic. When you edit, you’ll have a clean & crisp audio take. You can always record it days later, but doing it right then and there gets it out of the way, and the actors still have the material fresh in their minds. Their performances will match up better.

Don’t forget to get ambient area noise. Record 20-30 seconds (at least the length of the scene) with no one speaking and get a good background audio take. ESPECIALLY if your scene is outside. Again, we tend to not notice airplanes going by, but when the sound is only in your close up and not in the wide shot, everyone will notice when you cut. Pow! Your scene is ruined.

Listen to Dan Harmon and Rob Schrab of channel101.com (They mention more than sound. Great advice. Watch this whole thing!)

Post-Production Solution

I recently shot a short in a wine shop which had 4 different refrigerators running in the background. The audio was crap. I got the ambient background, but it was not enough. I knew this would happen, so I planned to re-record the audio (aka ADR).

The good news is: it wasn’t necessary. ADR is crucial when the audio is unusable, but if the problem is ONLY hissing, let me recommend Adobe Soundbooth. What this program does (among other things) is remove hiss from audio very well.

Allow Mike Petrik to explain:

Its actually pretty simple to clean up, if the raw audio is presented correctly. The way you gave it to me was perfect. Note: I edited my short to completion. Then exported each audio bit one line at a time. Turned out to be 13 4-second tracks. During each audio clip, there were long chunks of speaking, as well as long chunks of silence. Since the hiss is constant throughout both the silent part and the talking part, … I sampled a chunk of the audio that was silent (no speaking), which was filled with loud ass hissing sounds. Once sampled, I can use just that isolated hiss, bring down the noise and decibel level, and apply it to the whole audio clip, which then gets rid of the hissing during the talking parts too. Make sense?

Basically: You select just hiss on a track, select the de-hiss option, and it removes that noise from the track. It also has levels you can control to fine-tune it.

Here’s a little before and after from the Coke Zero sketch:

“Sounds great, Joe, but I don’t have the money to purchase expensive software! I thought you said you weren’t going to spend any money! Choke to death, you bastard!” -You

Easy. I got me a free copy courtesy of Mr. Bit Torrent. If you have some sort of moral compass and don’t want to “steal”, a hiss removal option exists in the free audio program Audacity.