The visual look of this film was an extreme mish-mash of looks that conflicted as often as they worked well together. This was largely due to the fact that there were a mix of outdoor, night scenes in Portland, OR, which were shot in a very run and gun fashion (with little to no additional lighting most of the time), and indoor scenes (which were lit more traditionally). The lighting was radically different, so that the night-vision options on the VX1000 (and VX2100, which replaced it when it was broken) had to be engaged to shoot outdoors. As such, there was lots of noise and static in these night shots. However, the indoor shots were much better lit and the auto-lux didn’t have to be engaged, so there was very little noise in those shots.
As strange as it may sound, audiences will only notice how problematic footage is if they have clean footage to compare it to. As such, to try and correct the current situation, if Mr. Bertling can make all the footage the same quality, then the film will cut together much more believably. To do this after the fact, he could try adding artificial Noise in After Effects (or most editing programs with their included Noise plugins) to his indoor scenes. If this isn’t sufficient, another stand-alone plugin that can add noise to footage to more replicate the other footage in the film is digieffects’ Damage. (A word of caution: Damage is designed for more severe damage to footage, so using it to replicate high-lux noise will require some experimentation and subtlety.)
For future films, remember to make all of the footage look the same quality as the lowest quality footage that is used. As such, if outdoor, run-and-gun shooting must be done without additional lighting, then it’ll be necessary to dim the lights in the interiors and turn up the gain so that all the shots are at approximately the same illumination and noise level.
(With that said, that’s not the course of action I would recommend. The course of action I would recommend would be to attach a preview monitor or laptop to the camera, turn off the auto-gain, and then add lights to any exterior shots until you have a clean, easily viewed image. That way, one’s lowest quality footage will still be very good and will cut properly with everything else. Obviously, this prevents the run-and-gun style footage that was used for most of the exteriors of this film and would require a different sort of script, but it would yield a much better looking film.)
Now, let’s discuss some of the creative visual elements that that Mr. Bertling and his visual department engaged effectively to help tell their tale. In the crime portion of the film, Lexie gets ahold of a night vision camcorder, which she uses to spy on the serial killer she’s trying to track down. As part of her investigation, she must go to extremely dark buildings where she must use the camera as a sort of night scope. The night vision allows us to get further into her head and feel the suspense that something might jump out at us from the dark. (A similar effect was achieved in the movie, Cloverfield, with their faux-“camcorder” footage.)
Another little touch that I really appreciated occurred later in the film when Rhonda visits her parents’ home. Since their entire family is deaf, the house doesn’t use an audible door buzzer, but, instead, causes the house lights to flicker when depressed. This was a nice element to include to further help a non-deaf viewer understand more about the deaf community.
We’ll go a little backwards on the audio, because, normally, we talk music last and start with the spoken word. In this situation, we’ll start with the music by Bill McGee which worked quite well and really did a good job of connecting most of the plot lines. The one complaint I would have with it is that it wasn’t actually a score as much as a CD of pre-composed music which the film was built around. The problem with this is that there are parts of the music that end abruptly due to the story or where the story extends beyond a piece of music. In these areas, I’d really like to see Mr. McGee create some custom music to bridge the different pieces of music so that the music truly becomes a fully connected score as opposed to disconnected pieces of music.
