Test Lab: Shooting in the dark woods and the new shotgun microphone

So last night I headed up to my Dad’s place in the outskirts of Palmerton, Pennsylvania with my trusted friend John Cronk. I was planning on shooting the very last scene of the movie here, using my Dad’s woods and front porch. Once I broke out the camera, I realized just how dark it was out there. Here’s a quick video of John jogging to the front porch, so you can see for yourself…

So this is exactly why I do test runs…just to make sure everything is going to work when it comes to the real shoot. And I think I’ve decided that I’ll need to slightly modify that last scene. I don’t think it matters where I shoot it…if it’s at night, my camera (Canon XL1s) is going to have a hard time picking up anything in the dark. So I think what I’ll do is ax the scenes of Hunter running through the woods, and replace it with a shot of him running into the woods behind Andrew Farms, followed by a shot of him emerging from the woods near someone’s lit front porch. My time and budget does not allow for such mobile shots…I’m much better at the static shot 🙂

I suppose I could still shoot this scene on my Dad’s front porch, but if I can find someone’s house that’s closer to mine to shoot it at, I think I will. In the next couple of weeks I’d like to head down to Andre Farms and shoot some test footage there, to make sure all the scenes I had in mind will actually work.

I also finally received my 7″ HDTV in the mail that I’m planning on mounting to my camera as an external monitor. I have a guy at work who specializes in making things work the way they weren’t designed to, so I’m going to ask him for some help to build me a makeshift mount that can go on the camera’s hotshoe.

I also got my $25 Chinese shotgun microphone, which I just got done testing. My initial attempt gave me very disappointing results in that the volume of my voice was way too low. Then after fiddling with the menus on the camera, I figured out I had the Audio 1 input set to “Line” instead of “Mic”, and after switching it to “Mic”, the microphone worked fantastically! This is going to be such a cost saver as renting the mic, cables, mixer and XLR adapter would have cost me $65 a weekend. Now for about $34 ($25 for the mic and $9 for a 1/4 headphone to 2 RCA adapter), I’ve got a fairly comparable setup.  Sweet!