Gun For Hire

This was truly an incredible project to work on. An amazing group of filmmakers came together to make this passion project possible, and without the efforts of everyone involved, it wouldn't have been possible. This was, by far, the most productive one-day shoot I've been a part of.

This short film had only one actor, Dylan Thomas, wearing a suit of armor and swinging a sword around. This created some challenges for capturing usable and consistent sound. The armor was incredibly loud, which made for beautiful ear candy anytime he moved around, but rendered his quietly uttered lines almost impossible to hear over anything but the smallest of movements. It became an exercise in aim for my Boom Operator, Grant Armantrout, because in order to minimize the clanking of the armor, he had to be aimed clearly and directly at the mouth of the knight. In the end, he was up to the challenge and did a great job. The lavalier microphone changed over the course of the day, so I will go into more detail on that below.

By the end of the day we had accomplished almost everything we had set out to shoot and began racing the sun to the edge of the mountains. We had about an hour of sunlight left and five shots to finish. It was awesome to watch all of the crew lock in and hammer out the last of the shots for the day. Everyone, myself included, gelled together, so it took as little time as possible to set up and rehearse the shots. In the end, we wrapped the last shot less than 5 minutes before we lost the sun, and we all celebrated our successful shoot in the last rays of the day.