Top 5 Mistakes from shooting Season 1 of Crafting a Career in the arts!
Not checking for hidden sounds - like a hidden hot tub! Always check for hidden sounds, double and triple check to make sure there is nothing hidden around a wall or heavy curtain.
The Royal Alberta Museum graciously gave us a spot for interviewing an artist. However we were not equipped for such a large wide open space (it was right in front of the momma and baby mammoths!). For sound we should have used a lavalier attached to the H6 Zoom recorder and created a padded barrier on each side of the subject so the sound didn’t travel so much.
Using two cameras, with two vastly different colour codes - A Canon and Blackmagic. Wow, it took forever to colour match the film to each other, even with the “match colour option” on Adobe Premiere.
Not booking enough time with the subject of the interview! Often we needed an extra hour to caption B-roll and the interviewee only was available for 3 hours at a time. What we should have done was come back an additional day, if it was possible, to capture more footage.
Not capturing a long enough sequence for b-roll. I usually let the camera record for 20-40 secs, HOWEVER, often the first 10-15 seconds are unusable because my hand is shaking so much and often something happens during the recording, such as someone walking in front of the camera or if we were outside a bug getting caught in my hair. I would say the optimal time is over a minute to 1 min and 30 seconds. That way you have many options available for your 10-18 second b-roll spot.
Copyright Amy Skrocki 2022. The spot where we had the interview.