The "Wince" Factor

A looping session.

Our goal is always to minimize the wince factor; those annoying glitches, usually technical, that somehow slip into movies. (Causing you to wince every time you see them.) Continuity errors, booms dropping into frame, scenes where the color doesn’t match from shot to shot or “cheesy” special effects stand out like a sore thumb. Even if 98% of your microbudget movie is pristine and flawless, it’s the flawed 2% that some people will jump on and criticize. (And sadly, the thing you’ll probably remember most from the movie. Moviemakers who are passionate about their work tend to recall the mistakes more than the triumphs.)

One way to control the wince factor is to be as uncompromising as possible. Another is to try to have someone on the set watching for details. When in doubt go to the playback and make sure you got what you wanted. Many times this isn’t possible because it takes too much time to watch every inch of footage you’ve just shot but on occasion it pays to check both the picture and sound before moving on.

Re-shoot if you have to or leave the bad parts on the cutting room floor. Bring the actors in to “loop” (or Additional Dialogue Recording as it’s also known) their lines if the location audio is really unsalvageable. Another handy trick is to record the scene you’ve just shot, or are about to shoot in an audio-friendly environment with the microphone fairly close to your actors. The odds are pretty good that they will deliver a performance very close to the one they give (or gave) on screen and you’ll have some quality audio as a “safety” which may sync up pretty well with your picture.

In some ways you’ll often be held to a higher standard than your big budget brethren. If people know how little your movie cost to make they will often assume the worst and actually be looking for every little thing that didn’t go quite right. When they’re watching a Hollywood movie they just assume everything will be perfect and often don’t notice the surprisingly high amount of mistakes that slip through on even the largest and most prestigious of films. But most importantly you’ll notice the mistakes you made years after making them so try to save yourself some anguish by putting everything under a microscope now and never uttering the dreaded words “it’s good enough” if you know in your heart it really isn’t.