I finally shot the last bits of film this week!
It’s really nice to finally have all of the film in the can, but I’m bummed that I can’t send it in to get processed right away. I need about $600 that I don’t have right now. I’m still figuring out my income situation, so I’m trying to decide how to proceed. I can wait until I have more income and do it then, or I can take the irresponsible option and just send it in right away and charge it to my credit card… I’m also thinking about doing some kind of crowd funding. I’ve never tried it for any project. I’m not totally sure why – I guess I don’t want to start calling in favors until I REALLY need them, like for some future project. But I need to think about it some more… $600 isn’t a huge sum, and I could probably raise that.
In the meantime, there are a lot of things to work on:
- Learning color grading
Ideally I would hire a pro to do this, but since I can’t even afford to process the film, you know I can’t hire a pro at this point. I have done lots of color grading on my previous projects, but I’m definitely still an amateur. I’m starting to learn DaVinci Resolve, and I might even end up using that to do the editing. I have the test reel to practice on, and I also got a couple of my student films scanned, so I’m going to get those graded and finished up in nice HD versions.
- Recording/designing sound
I didn’t record very much sound during film production, so there’s going to be a lot to do here! It’s weird to do it when I don’t have footage to look at, but there’s still quite a bit that I can do.
- Composing music
Likewise with music, it’s odd to not have some sort of edit to look at. When I wrote the movie, I was thinking it might have NO MUSIC at all, but now I think I’m going to have something, but something pretty subtle. There’s also a scene with diegetic music, which I’ll probably make myself.
- Title design
I’ve already started working on this, and I’m really excited with how it’s turning out! Title design is pretty important to me, and I’ll probably make a separate post about that.