In The Reel World

Tonight we had our third day of filming.

It… was a little hectic.

We first had some issues with the lighting.  I borrowed a blue gel from the local stage theater for the purposes of getting my moonlight.  I figured we could do the blue gel and then the softbox.
That didn’t work, because the white lite bouncing around in the softbox was too hot and overpowered the blue gell completely.  It was my lead actor who figured out the problem.  Way to go, David, you rock!
So, we got out a smaller dome and it worked wonderfully!

Then, I had what I thought was a continuity problem.  Having the lead actor NOT wearing his coat (that he wears through the rest of the movie) and it not look like we just forgot to have him wear it.  Couldn’t figure out if he should have it draped over the table… or change the blocking I had in my head from him already sitting to show him sitting down….
We finally got it worked out… and with what I think was some very cool framing!

Then one of the extras.  This extra wasn’t planned… but the waitress in the movie happened to bring her boyfriend with her, so I made use of him!  But, he didn’t really want to do it.
His part was to take a final sip of coffee as the lead sat down, and then get up, throw a tip down and leave.
He was SO nervous to be in front of the camera that he looked like a robot… very rigid.
David showed his greatness again when he talked to the guy.  He went over some tricks with him, and told him a joke about a priest…..
After that, the guy was very fluid, and it worked well!

As per the rest of this film so far, all my shots took a BUNCH of takes to get the way I wanted it.  We did a lot of coverage… keeping up with our usual timing, we finished in just under 3 hours.  If this happens again on day 4, I’ll essensially have filmed for 12 hours for a 6 minute movie!!!!!  Crazy.

Day 4 is Sunday.  It’s gonna be a long one, I think.  It’s the biggest scene with all the dialogue, and KIDS!

I asked David how I’m doing.   After all, I’m accustomed to doing almost everythng myself and just having a couple of friends or family members as actors.  He gave me some tips that he thinks I should improve on in the future.  Such as pre-planning (apparently, a) We need more than 30 minutes before actors arrive to figure out shots and lighting and blocking. b) I shouldn’t have ALL actors involved show up at the same time if some of them will be sitting around with nothing to do for a while), story-boarding (which… kinda goes with storyboarding), And working out how to verbalize what I want better…

So we’re 3 days down, 1 to go.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 19th, 2007 at 12:37 am and is filed under updates. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.