First scene in the can
We had a blast shooting the final third of scene 10 or as we have come to call it, scene 10 sex. It was a fun little shoot. We had a couple of shots that were a challenge due to the AnC crew being composed of only Trisha and Charlie. Barnaby was being tapped for his outstanding acting abilities so managing the boom, doing dolly shots and pulling focus were all in T and C's hands. We managed. We learned a few things and like always some of our fears were unfounded and some other things were a little harder to realize than we thought. It really is pretty impossible to pull a dolly and pan at the same time, but we were able to do a few things to make it easier on us. We had Jeremy walk a pretty straight line keeping the distance from camera to him pretty even and we closed down to open up our depth of field. It worked out. We thought booming might be a little difficult with just us two, but we were able to set our levels and go. It worked out very well.
Jake Fritz stopped by to help out on the set. He was only able to stay for a few hours because he got called in to work. But he helped unload and set up the first shot. It would have been nice to have him to help Dolly later on but I'm sure we'll have another chance.
Rosalind, our hairdresser, really stepped up to help us out. She covered make up and she operated the scissor lift to bring Barnaby in and out of the shot. She slated and started and stopped the audio recorder. She basically did all the little things that we would have slowed us down to a crawl if Trisha and Charlie had been covering it themselves.
This is Barnaby chilling on the scissor lift between shots. He's cutting a good figure here.
Here's Jeremy Grimmer, Curtis Cole, and Lisa Smith taking a little direction from Trisha. Barnaby would be just to their right about 4 feet off the ground in the scissor lift. We lit the whole shot with tons of light from the top and we blew out the white background. We were running so much light we started to blow fuses so we're gonna have to be a little more economical in our light setups in the future, but for this shot having all that light was really great.
Here's Lisa and Curtis. Rosalind did a fantastic job on Lisa's hair. She was on all day making sure it had the proper frizz for each shot. We're weren't able to focus on Curtis and Lisa as much as we would have liked because of our small crew but they really sold their parts well. After looking through the shots we're finding a lot of little gems these two were doing. Good little looks and some real fun subtle things.
Here's a close up of those two just chillin. They worked really well together, and even though it was an eight hour day they always had great energy when the camera was rolling.
This is our man Jake Fritz. He knows what he's doing and he's always fun to have around.
We set up a couple of hardhats but ended up only using one. It just didn't look right on Jeremy. Trisha seems very satisfied here but I'm not sure why. Jake knew how to put the hats together which we couldn't figure out.
Here's Barnaby and Jake working as a team. We took the Control box off the scissors lift so that it could be operated off screen. It worked better than having Barnaby lean over and do it on camera. Wearing the hard hats really makes us look like we know what were doing and we like that. In the background you can see our Lantern Lock Paper lantern. It works great. I would highly recommend them to any other shooters. They work as advertised and make setting up a "china ball" a real breeze.
Barnaby didn't slate all day but somehow he gets his picture taken with the slate? We have to thank Rosalind again for taking a bunch of shots of us in action. Being a two man team it was hard to get still shots. In the background you can see our 1k which Charlie just got working. It was great to have a powerful light that still has a lot of kick after being diffused.
Now on to this week. Charlie and Barnaby have been building our set for the "Porn Conference" Scene. We know what you're thinking but sorry there's no porn in the scene. It's a fictitious conference debating porn standards. Its gonna be more interesting than it sounds. We're hanging Paper Lanterns to get a nice overall light with subtle shadows, and we are really digging the effect. We're gonna be using more and more paper lanterns as this production goes on.
Here's a before and after (f2.8 1/60th) to see what the Paper Lanterns are doing. I thought they would be hard to hang but it turned out to be pretty easy. They're also easier to manipulate once they're hanging than other lights, because they're already soft and they're so light.
That's all for now. We'll have more shots next week!-Charlie