Reshoots

I started re-editing bits of Cormorant Close yesterday. There's one weak bit early in the scene which just has too much waffle. So I cut out a few lines, but now the conversation doesn't flow right. For the first time, I've hit one of the limitations of RealFilm, and it's come as quite a shock after being used to the luxury of machinima and endless reshoots. I need to re-record one line of dialogue. Just one. But David, the actor, is away for the rest of the summer, so I'm stuck with what I've got.

I can rebuild and reshoot every other damn thing in the movie: I've already replaced the original characters, redesigned the set, reblocked the whole scene (twice), added in whole new shots and tried several different edit patterns to give different emphasis to the scene. I've switched lines around, I've cut lines, and I've experimented with various different takes of each line. But the one thing I absolutely cannot do is change "I grabbed a pie and chips on the way home" to "I have." It's a tiny change, but the new line neatly segues into the next sequence and hides the fact that there's about half minute of dialogue missing. (Incidentally, the original dialogue worked fine when we did the piece in the style of a stage play, and when we did it as a radio play, just doesn't work on film. It's too much of a digression, and we need to get to the meat of the scene quicker.)

Hmm. Some creative editing will be needed.

Callgraph

I've just finished recording an interview with Hugh Hancock about his latest movie, When We Two Parted, which will shortly appear somewhere on the Moviestorm site. (The interview, not the movie. The movie's already out, and even hit the front page of YouTube!) Previously, I've used various free tools for recording Skype conversations, but they all time out after 15 minutes, which gets to be a real pain, as you have to keep restarting, retaking, and then you have to stitch everything together, and I've never quite got around to buying a Skype recorder.

Tari put me onto CallGraph, from Sedna Wireless in India, which seemed to work really well. You can record unlimited duration calls, it has a nice history function, and it's dead simple to use. It records you and the other person on separate stereo channels, so editing with something like Audacity is really easy too. And so on. And it's free - though the Web site doesn't make it clear whether that will continue when they come out of beta in a few weeks, so I'd advise grabbing it now. [EDIT: the developers say that the basic version will always be free.]

It's Windows only atm, though the FAQ says that Linux & Mac versions are imminent (and you can get a preview version if you contact them).

Well recommended if you record podcasts over Skype.