Having just completed two long nights working as a boom operator on a film, I am astonished to discover that my calves, rather than my arms, are complaining. I guess I haven’t been hiking enough. I do need to build up the endurance in my arms, though. There was one long scene for which I eventually used a stand.
I need to practice wiring up actors for sound using lavalier mics. I either forgot something important in what I read, or I did it wrong, because I kept getting significant clothing noise. I did manage to get great results in one actor’s hair, but her hair happened to be well-suited to it. I never did get perfect results with the other actor, and I feel like I failed. I’ve just acquired a second mic and radio set, so I won’t be held back by having only one, but expensive equipment is useless if I don’t know how to use it correctly.
I have watched all of GLOW and The End of the F***ing World. Both were pretty good in their own ways. I mainly watched GLOW for Alison Brie, who happens to look fantastic in an eighties leotard, but the story and the humor were good too. The End of the F***ing world was hilarious. I wonder how much direction Jessica Barden received to make kissing look ridiculous. I’m back to watching nothing but ST:DIS.
Speaking of ST:DIS (no spoilers), last week they actually managed to reveal a plot twist that impressed me. Up to now, the writing has seemed haphazard and reaching, but now it’s starting to look like they may have had a master plan baked in from the beginning. It’s difficult to be sure, but I can say I’m more interested than I have been for a while.
I have fairly well decided to spend my bonus money on a digital cinema camera, the Canon EOS C200. Currently, my best camera for filmmaking is still my 5Dmk2, which was the first DSLR to enable video, and which I’ve had for more than seven years. I was going to get a Panasonic AF100, and then I didn’t. Later, I was going to get a Blackmagic URSA 4K, and then I didn’t. The timing of Canon’s offerings, my finances, and my renewed activity in filmmaking appear to have converged. The C200 will bring my game up to where I want it to be, and I hope I will be happy with it for a while.
My YouTube channel, which hasn’t had a new public video posted to it in two years, is blowing up for no reason I know. Views have been on the climb since the beginning of the year. I don’t know how far it will go. I had more than twenty-five thousand views on Monday. Tuesday, I had more than thirty-thousand. It seems to be mainly one video, spilling over to views of other videos, but it wasn’t that video when the trend began. I don’t know what’s going on. I’ve had brief spikes of a thousand or two thousand views when a video of mine was linked on some high traffic site, but this is something different.
