“Can You Love Me Most?” (POV Sound)
10th-11th Oct 2020
pictures-videos courtesy of the cast and crew
3 big challenges
Shot through the perspective of the baby.
Cutting baby vocalisations to react with his/her surroundings.
Car scenes (my favourite/s)
This short revolves around an interracial couple (Mia and Daniel) who can’t conceive a child. Mia (the girl) suggests to buy a baby off the black market. Daniel is hesitant but agrees in hopes of satisfying Mia’s motherly urges. The couple arranged a meet with the syndicates at an abandoned place for the trade and managed to buy a baby. However it seems that the syndicate had other plans..
Initially when I read the script, as it was going to be shot in POV of the baby, the first thing that came into my mind was. How am I supposed to hide my boom in a wide shot? This came as a problem too as Feisal loves not faking his car scenes. That means there isn’t necessarily space for a crew to be onboard - most of the time we set up the scene hit record for the actors to freely go off.
Me trying to figure out how do I do this without getting seen.
As usual, I tried to get as close as I could by testing the frame boundaries, checking with David (DP) if i’m in frame or not before pulling back. The first few scenes were subpar but thankfully most of the main dialog scenes scheduled towards the middle of the shoot.
However as the shoot progresses. I noticed I didn’t need to do much since dialog happens either right in front of the camera or off screen with minimal camera movement. Only where there are situations where I can’t keep a consistent track without breaking frame, I leave it up to the body mic for coverage.
There was also a scene where the conversation happens entirely within the car and all the seats are filled up - front passenger (David), front driver (Man syndicate), back passenger (Mia), back driver (Woman syndicate)
How the shot looks.
How the shot looks from the outside
Feisal likes his car scenes to be raw. So most of them tend to be recorded in a moving car with all the talents in it. In some cases we had to set and forget as the crew would be in the shot.
Spoilers ahead!
This is almost at the end of the story where Mia follows a policeman, thinking that he is a good guy and thus bringing her to the station. However it turns out to be the syndicate attempting to get the baby back and the baby grab happens within the car itself.
David and Yang setting up the camera for Sara to hold.
For this scene, I pretty much set the levels by using the screams as the starting point. You can set it for normal speech levels but you would clip when it comes to the screams and you don’t want that. I ran a radio wire for Enez (which plays the woman syndicate) and for Syaz (the fake policeman) as they will be carrying the conversation until the end.
In post this pretty much works until a certain point because we will always be fighting with the engine noise + cloth rustle during the grab, it would be impossible to get a clean performance without compromising the shot. I believe we still went with a slight ADR for Enez.
The whole scene was recorded in a 3-4 takes as it takes quite a bit for the scene to take it’s course and the need to review too. Once that’s done, it’s a wrap!
Thanks to all the cast and crew for creating such a pleasing environment to work in!
Watch the trailer!