The idea for the film came after reading a story in my local newspaper about Tywyn cinema and the owners Bob and Avril Garrod retiring. I initially contacted Bob by phone and he cautiously agreed to the film. I proposed that the film could be a nice memento of the years he and Avril have spent running the cinema and capture the end of an era.
I met Bob and Avril for the first time on Friday 30th April in the evening at the cinema. This gave me the opportunity to get to know them, observe their daily routine at the cinema and recce the location. I talked to both of them at length and took stills and test mood shots for storyboarding the film. A key consideration was assessing the lighting conditions, especially in the main theatre which was extremely dark. I’d begged and borrowed a Canon 5D Mark II DSLR for the shoot for image quality and the ability to shoot in low light. However, sound quality on the built-in mic is poor, so I decided to record sound separately. I phoned a sound recordist friend/colleague to see if he was available and could help out. Next I arranged a shoot with Bob for the Sunday Matinee screening of How to Train Your Dragon. They agreed to open up an hour early, so I could get an interview. The rush before the film would have to be shot verité style, so I made another phonecall/trip to borrow a monopod.
On the Saturday, I wrote the shooting script and schedule, interview questions and made up storyboards. I spent some time researching software for Final Cut Pro for transferring the footage and syncing up the sound. I also printed off release forms. There was one major challenge for the shoot – there was only one battery for the camera! A spare was £79 and Jessops didn’t have one in stock anyway. This meant I was going to have to be careful to conserve battery power.
The Shoot. We arrived an hour or so before Bob and Avril to get the exterior shots. The spot lighting in the theatre meant they were top-lit during the interview, but I had no lighting, so it would have to suffice. Ten minutes into the interview, the fan on the theatre’s heating system kicked in; Bob informed us it would take 20minutes to wind down. So rather than relocate, we recorded wildtrack of the fan, with the intention of backphasing the sound in post. Apart from these hitches the shoot went smoothly. I filmed on both the tripod and monopod and sound was recorded on the mixer, split between boom mic and radio mics. I managed to eek the battery out by switching off Live View mode (on the LCD) when not shooting.
Post-production. The footage was recorded onto 4GB CF memory cards as H.264 Quicktimes (1920×1080 25p). I installed Canon’s EOS plugin for Final Cut Pro. Using the Log & Transfer window I archived all the memory cards as disk images (.dmg files). I mounted the disk images and using Log & Transfer transcoded the files to Apple Pro Res 422 for editing. This allowed me to add a reel no. and only ingest the bits I wanted, saving disk space. Sound was recorded on a 4GB SD card as WAV files – I copied these to a folder on my scratch disk. In FCP I made my usual directory hierarchy with bins for rushes, audio, graphics etc. The biggest job was syncing up the independent sound to the guide sound on the camera. For this I used Singular Software’s Pluraleyes plugin for Final Cut Pro, which analyses the waveforms and automatically syncs clips in the timelime. Pluraleyes did a great job syncing up the rushes. I relinked the video to the better quality audio, dragging the clips to a new bin, ‘Synced Clips’. The title and endboard were created in Motion 4 and ident in FCP. For Vimeo upload the finished edit was sent to Compressor where I made a custom Quicktime H.264 setting, video quality set to High, audio to 44.1 KHz and data rate limited to 5000 kilobytes. I kept the full 1920×1080 frame size.
Equipment List: Canon 5D Mark II HD-DSLR, Sachtler Fluid Head Tripod, Tiffen Steady Stick, SQN 4S Series IVe Mixer, Sennheiser MKH60 directional microphone and boompole,
2 x Micron Explorer diversity radio mics.
