Off My Pivot

Short film update: (02/25/26)

Over the weekend, I finally got in the groove to go in full editing mode. Top of the morning til late in the night type shit. I got towards the middle of the film and all of the files we have from day two of filming has NO AUDIO! 🤬 Fucked up my whole mood, my whole energy was off this past Sunday. To go into further detail, this is what happened with the audio:

I’m shooting this film with a Sony ZV-E10. Using the SIRUI Night Walker 24mm S35 Manual Focus Cine Lens. I ordered these wireless microphones (Hollyland Lark A1 Wireless Microphone) because it was listed as compatible with my camera at the time of purchase. Best believe I left a review once I realized it wasn’t compatible at all so now the description on Amazon now says it’s only compatible for iPhone 15 and up. Yeah iight. Anyway, since filming began in less than a day, my homeboy GG who’s the lead actor has a newer iPhone so we used his phone to record audio with the mics. Two things that fucked us up that we didn’t know or paid attention to at the time:

1. I had a Rode microphone plugged into the camera and that didn’t get any audio. On day one, we wore wired headphones so we can watch and listen to the playback after every other take. We didn’t do this on day two. As the director, I’ll take full responsibility and accountability for this mistake. Won’t happen again.

2. Halfway into filming on day two, the wireless microphones died. We didn’t know it died to the point it wasn’t recording because the light on the mics were green and towards the end as we were wrapping up, it went red. But the app we were recording audio was still rolling but it didn’t save for whatever reason. So I only have audio from half of the day.

Thank God for the team that I have because all it took was a DM and a couple of texts and now we’ll be reshooting the scenes the first weekend of March. Good news that I did find compatible wireless microphones and it also give me time to figure out if I want to change up the look of the scenes. Different angles, different lighting, etc . I also bought an action camera from the TikTok shop (Xtra Edge Action Camera, 1/1.3" Sensor & 4K Cinematic Video, Hyper Stabilization, Waterproof) and it’s only right that I put that to use this second go around.

I’m using this time to continue editing what we have so by next week, I’ll have the first few minutes put together and also studying other short films, cinematography and relearning how to color grade. I’ll be checking back in with another blog post after we complete filming. I’ll make sure I won’t waste anymore time on editing. I’m talking about as soon as I touch dine at the crib, I’m in editing mode, phone on DND.

If you’ve made it to this point of the blog, I hope it means you care about me and this process. Or you just like reading about these kinds of things. Either way, thank you for reading and I’ll check in with y’all soon! God bless!