Problems and Solutions in making The Human Exchange

In my initial idea I intended to have a handover scene of the girls from one gang of human traffickers to another on waste ground at night. It was the realisation of trying to get the right lighting, allowance from the land owners and the logistics of cast, crew and equipment meant that I had to reconsider the location and also the script.

The location was now going to feature purely in or around my home and to enable this changes in the script and the story had to be changed. The female characters were not going to be ‘exchanged’ but were going to be held captive. With this the story had to have some element of the conditions they were in and the treatment they were getting. For me, this made the story more interesting visually and more dramatic.

After I had finalised the script I sought cast and crew members and soon enough I had assembled the people I wanted in the roles I wanted them to play or work in. After I had done this I was then informed that my lead actress was unable to play the role of ‘Hannah’ due to work commitments. I decided that to replace her with someone who was going to play a smaller role at the end of the movie. This meant that I had to find another actress to fill this role, but after failing to do so, I dropped the additional scene and made amendments to the script to accommodate this change.

As the production date got closer one of my mail actors emailed me to request that he wanted to go home by 2:00pm on the days of the shoot due to work reasons. When I offered him the role I had informed him that he, along with all the other cast and crew members, where required, had to be available Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday from 8:00am to 10:00pm to which, at the time, they all agreed. I made the decision to drop this actor and I was short on time to find someone to replace him. I did manage to do this but at a cost of creating another problem.

Because of the time spent on trying to find a replacement actor I was unable to utilise the time in filling the role of the Masked Man. Because of this time constraint I had to cast myself to fulfil the role, a person who considers himself as a poor actor. This now, in turn, had increased my workload, as I was the producer, director and an actor!

After ironing out these problems I was then informed that the person who I had arranged to do the sound recording for my film was unable to do so because of family commitments. I decided to move the person who was going to be my runner into the sound recorder role, but this clearly left a void in the team that had to be filled. There was only one solution. It was another role that had to be filled by myself.

No sooner did it feel that I had solved a problem another one arose and this was the case when 1 week before the shoot one of my actors had informed me that they maybe unable to participate due to be taken ill with tonsillitis.  To accommodate this problem I rescheduled the day I intended to shoot his parts from the Tuesday to the Friday. This meant I had to make sure that all of his parts of the film were shot on that day. Bearing in mind that all his parts were to be shot in one location I felt that this wasn’t too much of an issue.

Apart from a few minor issues along the way while shooting most things went to plan according to the schedule on the first two days. The next major snag was the on the Friday morning one of my actors was unable to attend due to the illness of a family member and had to go to the hospital. I had to replace this person with my sound person, who as well as capturing the sound also had to fill the role of the Well Dressed Woman who is the leader of the human trafficking gang.

At the start of filming on the last day, the most important day for the narrative of the story, my “lead” actor was hinting that he wanted to leave by 7:00pm so that he could attend a party later that evening. This put pressure on me as I rushed to get shots done quickly, especially his parts, due to the unnecessary time constraint that had been enforced upon me.

During the shoot on the last day my “lead” actress fell ill and had to take a ‘time-out’ for a few hours to enable her to recover from her sudden and short illness. To ensure that this didn’t interrupt too much of the shoot numerous shots had to be taken out that were planned, others had to be shot out of sequence and many had to be improvised. This caused problems when it came to time as I had to think on my feet and reschedule elements of the shoot instantly, where some shots and sequences were shot off-the-hip.

It was also during this time when members of the cast and crew started to ask what time we were going to finish and there started to be a little discontent. I informed my cast and crew that I had previously arranged with them all that we would be shooting for three days between 8am to 10pm. Because people were getting restless I rushed the shooting and because of this some shots didn’t get filmed.

After the shoot I had the task of editing the footage, but to do so I had to capture the footage into the software programme Final Cut Pro 7. After I set up the camera and synchronised it with the computer so the software could recognise the device I endeavoured to capture the footage. However, I made a schoolboy error and forgot to click the ‘now’ button in the capture window. This resulting in me wasting an hour, as I had just watched the footage, and not captured anything.

Because of this I decided to capture the footage at home, however this meant using a PC and Adobe Premier Pro CS3. I also knew that I would have to manually record the footage in Excel so that I could log the shots. This was extremely time consuming, but the job needed to be done.

I took the camera home and attempted to capture on my software and PC, but was given a camera with only one battery and no battery charger. I was given the wrong Firewire leads which meant I had to go to PC World at Southend Airport and then realised that they were no longer there. I then went to the right location and they were out of stock of the leads I wanted and was advised to try Maplin. When I went there they were closed so I went back home and contacted a college friend and borrowed a lead from him. I had to pick the lead up which meant nearly an hour round trip to get to his house and back. After trying numerous attempts to capture the footage, the software programme was unable to recognise the camera, the battery life expired and I had to wait four days – due to a bank holiday weekend. I decided that I would go back to college and try again and after getting another battery I still had trouble transferring the footage due to the software not recognising the camera. The problem was that the Firewire connector socket on the camera was broken and so I had to get another camera.

Luck should have it that another college friend had finished transferring her footage and no longer needed the use of the camera, which I was then able to borrow. I went back home to capture the footage and was successful until I attempted to play the footage back.

When I played a clip, I could see video but was unable to playback any audio. After doing an internet search for possible causes I found a solution. The problem had been caused by Windows update disabling a setting to which I then reconfigured. This solved the problem of not playing the audio but I was left with a problem that the audio was not in sync with the video. I was unable to ‘unlink’ the audio and then sync the video and audio before being able to ‘link’ because when the video played the audio was approximately 20 minutes behind resulting in clips not having audio at all.

As a result of most of the edited clips I wanted to use not having sound due to the software unable to keep the audio and the video synchronised, and due to the ever decreasing amount of time available to me I had to make the decision to scrap the idea of editing the movie and to create a Teaser Trailer, but this wasn’t without problems either.

Due to the memory on my PC the computer was unable to add transitions, titles, colour correcting or credits without crashing. To combat this I had to edit one thing at a time and save it, before closing the programme and re-opening it. One Title Card had to be created in Microsoft Publisher, because it was quick and easy to do so, then converted into a JPEG and imported into Premier Pro CS3. 

Despite the problems, stress and annoyances, overall I am fairly happy with the Teaser Trailer I have produced. Sure, I would have liked to have a final edited version of the film I intended make but for all the reasons stated above, on this occasion it was not possible. Are there things I would change in the Teaser Trailer? Of course, but that will have to wait for another day. I still have the tapes and the RAW footage and soon I’ll have a new system and software package. The Human Exchange is not a finished project, it has not been binned, it has been put on the shelf to be edited in full, hopefully, in the near future.