Wieldy 2014 -II Pro Stabilizer
First of all, "Hot Mustard" was never intended to be a short sketch. In fact it’s an equipment test. A buddy of mine loaned us his Weildy stabilizer Harness. And what this equipment does is smooth out moving shots by using a dual arm attached to a chest harness and a stabilizer and balance weights. Once the stabilizer is properly balanced the rig can move around and the camera will stay put. The harness and dual arm help smooth the shot even more by removing bumpiness of walking. All this is useful if you want a flexible moving shot and can’t or don’t want to lay out tons of dolly track.
So the idea was to shoot some test footage and then send it over to my business partner Frank for review. So I hijack my buddy who is visiting for the weekend and we go outside to shoot some tests. They’re pretty bad, but I forgive myself since this is the first time I’ve ever tired using a rig like this.
Since we were going to shoot outside, I decided to use the R0DE Link wireless mic system.
Rode RodeLink FM Wireless Filmmaker System
Which, by the way, sounds great and has never failed us in the field. We hide the microphone under his shirt using a Rode invisiLav Discreet Mounting system. These things are awesome. Not only do they hide the lav, but the housing eliminates any scratching/rustling noises. I record the audio directly into our external recorder.
I bring it into Premiere and start to have a little fun. First, fixing the ending. There isn’t a real resolution to the scene because we never intended it to be one. So we found a good stopping point in the audio and decided to do a little ADR. That stands for Automated Dialogue Replacement and it’s simply the process of re-recording the dialogue of the original actor in a scene to improve audio quality or simply make dialogue changes. In this specific case, we don’t have to worry about matching the actors lip synch since our actor has his back to the camera. We only have to worry about timing.
Next up, of course we need some music. So I’m off to my favorite place to do initial music searches; The YouTube Audio Library. For quick little bits and sketches, I always start here as most of the songs are completely free to use in your projects. There aren’t a TON of songs, but it’s a great start. Some of them require a mention in your video description with the artist name and website. It’s a small price to pay for a great library of free goodness.
After choosing my song I lay down the boogie.
We need to fill that gap of the one-sided conversation. Let’s break out the Zoom H5 Digital recorder and add the voice of the guy who our hero is talking to.
Making this up mostly as I go along and riffing off the cues given from our actor I construct the other side of the conversation in a couple of takes.
Splitting up the audio track for correct timing.
I split the audio into chunks so that the timing of the conversation makes sense.
Since I want this to sound like the other side of a telephone conversation, I want to add an effect to the audio I just recorded. I could add an effect to every clip I just created, but instead I keep it simple and add the effect to the entire track. That way if I change, remove or add any individual clip I won’t have to add the telephone effect again.
This is a cool tip for beginner Premiere users. Open the Audio Track Mixer window to see your tracks and click the little arrow in the upper left corner of the panel. This will let you add effects and route audio of complete tracks. I added the Multiband Compressor Effect to my new audio track and used the preset called Walkie Talkie. If this kind of audio manipulation is new to you in Premiere, do a YouTube search for the Audio Track Mixer to find out all the good stuff.
Audio Track Mixer panels in Adobe Premiere
So now just to add polish, I add a title. I called it "Hot Mustard". And then finally, I used one of my favorite Third Party effects plugins by Red Giant called Magic Bullet Looks to throw on a cool look. Added some film grain for effect and voila!
Now it’s ready for review!
So in the end, this went from throw away testing footage to a full sketch with not a ton of production or effort.
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