The Morning After

After working on The Morning After for 4 years including audio for a year and a half and Director for the past year and a half, I am back... working on a new title called The Morning After, doing audio once again. On top of that, most of this film was shot about 5 minutes from where I was a part of about 240 episodes of the Q30 show, The Morning After. Although the stories were completely different.

I'm not here to talk about the film itself, rather mention some of the things I learned and struggled with while doing sound for this short film. I was boom operator under the same sound mixer as The Slaughter House. I learned a ton of Slaughter House and that learning curve definitely did not even start to flatten. We used the mixer's equipment on this film, so it was a slightly different experience and confidence level with some of it. Although, on my hand, as the boom op, my job is the same and no one can really stress how hard you got to try to ride the frame line and be out of the shot... completely out of the shot at all times.

One day was just flat out tough for everyone in so many ways. I'll certainly speak for myself and say it was tough for me to stay out of the shot and get good audio from the shotgun. Night scene outdoors with extremely reflective convertible and giant lights from above and all around. Not to mention almost every shot was wide, and some on a slider. The lavs didn't always work perfectly so I kept trying to ride that frame line as much as I could but it seemed like every shot either my reflection was in the shot somewhere, my shadow was in the shot from 1 light, or my boom shadow was in the shot from another light or my foot was in the shot. Needless to say it got extremely frustrating and discouraging but a positive attitude form then on out helped me rock 'n roll and get plenty of sound bites I'm very proud of, giving the editor good options for each shot.

A few weeks ago we were wearing t-shirts and complaining how hot it was. The first weekend of this film, we almost get snowed into our location. Huge snow storm, took power from most of the state for over a week including our shooting location for 3 days. Our generator died a few times on top of that and finding detours around fallen trees and power lines to set was one of my main difficulties... maybe. The film wrapped and I had to help clean the unowned house we shot in, which included cleaning fake blood stains off the carpet at 5am... and this is what I got a Bachelors in. But this film was a blast to shoot and hope to continue this soon.

Also, here's an article on the film.