Production Diary: After the Cut - an Epilogue.

This post's been a long time coming, but it's been a 'wee' bit busy.

With Reckless Zen all wrapped up, and a couple months down, it's been a good time to watch it again and get a perspective on what went right, and what went wrong. The greatest challenge on this project was definitely working with the lacklustre equipment and the very squashy time frame. People have taken on animation projects and had months, if not a year to complete them, so trying to finish a short short in 8 weeks AND teach myself the basics of animation was very tight!

The push of time shows in some places of the film - and if I had extra time, I would have cleaned up a few areas, maybe reshot some scenes, but overall I'm pretty happy with my first animation attempt. There was a lot to learn aside from frames-per-second and lighting on a small scale. Eliminating flicker with still images was the first major hurdle (and probably still shows in one part thanks to having to band-aid a fix and not being able to clean it up in post) and after fiddling around with the white balance and exposure settings on the camera, I think it worked well in getting rid of obvious flicker.

As for the camera - you have to work with what you have, and working with what I had meant I had to get over the lack of HD and certain sparkles fairly quickly. During shooting I had severe doubts on how everything would turn out, but watching scenes in dailies would usually clear that doubt up quickly. That's definitely something I recommend to any indie filmmaker - no matter how small your production values, always watch a patch of what you've shot. It helps with perspective, keeps the adrenalin going, and lets you fine tune as you're going. Most importantly, it clears up that niggling doubt you may have about how things are turning out.

If I was to do Reckless Zen over, I would probably still keep my low production values, but have given myself two extra weeks at the very least to fix certain places. Maybe have started earlier so I could have added a couple of scenes that ended up being taken out. Still, it was a major learning curve, and I'm satisfied with how I tackled it.

Now on to the next curve...