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The editing of the film was quite good, with basic editing choices and font selections helping to tell the story fittingly. There were a few scenes of special note, however. The first one is the opening credits, which blend photos from Shawn, Chris, and Ray graduating high school with shots of dividing coke, smoking pot, and loading a bong. To further tie the name of the film and the opening credit shots with the credit titles, each of the titles reveals itself in a puff of smoke. This instantly draws you into the film and makes you interested in what’s going to come up next. [Note to the Director: While this was a great intro, the white font you used for the text blended in with a few of the backgrounds, making certain names very hard to read. As such, you should either move the location of these titles to darker areas of the screen or you should put a stronger outline around the words to separate them from the similar colors of the background.]
The second scene occurs midway through the movie, as Shawn becomes more addicted to more powerful drugs. As his drug use escalates, his theft from his work also escalates and his perception of time blurs together. To show this concept, editor Corey Becker and Shahin used Final Cut Pro’s time remapping option and motion trails on a simple security camera shot and some close-ups of Shawn counting and pocketing money. The blurring acceleration is a simple, yet very effective way of showing Shawn’s perception. Another good editing scene is the scene where Ray decides to and wipe out his competitor in the drug wars, Kevin, by shooting him with a shotgun. While part of this was due to how creatively it was shot, the editing played a big part in allowing the filmmaker to portray a gruesome murder without requiring the special effects of a shooting. Sound effects, cutaways, close-ups, and some of the most realistic blood I’ve seen allowed the killing to seem both real and believable.
Use of Audio
Although they spent a few grand more on their first film than I did on mine, Shahin and crew ran into the same sound demons that I did. While some of the more intimate, closeup, indoor scenes have clean dialogue without distracting background noise, most of the longer shots and outdoor shots suffer from shotgun mic placement that is simply too distant from the actors’ mouths. This results in echoey dialogue contaminated with bleed-through from background noise like air conditioners, generators, and wind. Additionally, Raj Garewell (Shawn) consistently speaks too softly for the mic, making him hard to hear, and Cuffs (Carlos) speaks too loud for the mic, causing the mic levels to tend to red-line. Combine this with a few background characters that are barely picked up at all by the mic and a few lines used from alternate takes that don’t match up with the rest of the dialogue and you have the sort of audio challenges that I understand all too well.
I’m sure this fact is especially annoying to the director, as a good chunk of his budget went to renting a good boom mic and Tascam sound recorder. [Note to the Director: For future films, a good way to prevent these issues would be to combine a couple of good wireless lavalier mics with the boom mic, thus enabling you to get some closeup audio from the talent as well as covering additional locations with the shotgun mic. It’ll be more expensive to shoot this way, but much cheaper than trying to fix things in post.]
The only two options to improve these problems would be (1) to raise the amount of background noise to match your worst scenes, which will prevent viewers from noticing the constant differences in background sound but which won’t take care of the differences in audio quality or the echoey issue, or (2) to redub the entire film.
From my experience with these sort of audio issues, my advice is to redub the film. This is the solution I had to come to for my first film and, while it seemed an overwhelming prospect at first, it actually allowed me to finesse even better performances out of my actors. While redubbed dialogue must sync with the original to be believable, there is a lot of control the director has over how the actor says the dialogue in the redubbing process. . [Note to the Director: While redubbing isn’t a cheap prospect, you may be able to find a studio that will give you a discount on this project because of the quality of the story and the concept therein. If you can’t find a studio in Chicago that’ll work with you, Oakwood Sound Design, the studio that redubbed my first film, has a standing discount with Microfilmmaker Magazine to give a 10% discount to our filmmakers. You can check that out here, if you’re interested.]
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