Sunday, February 8, 2009
Shooting Days 6-8
So we all survived the weekend... barely. We stayed in a shitty hotel thursday night, woke up at 5 A.M. to shoot at sunrise and continued to shoot late into friday night. Fridays shoots went relatively smooth considering we were down crew members. We had a few issues with missing wardrobe pieces that were vital to the scene but we ran to Walmart and carried on. I had to take over for Josh (The Engineer) as well as worrying about each and every shot. It was tough doing Josh's job, he knows the equipment so well and I think it slowed us down that it took me longer to prepare the camera etc. I was happy with the shots on friday and the dedication everyone showed. Late friday night we found out that the diner scene that we planned to shoot on saturday was no longer happening because the owners refused to let us film. They said the weekend was too busy for them even though that had agreed on the date months prior. It sucked that we couldn't shoot in the diner but after seeing how long saturday turned out to be without the diner scene, I don't think we would have survived if it had not been canceled. Saturday we woke up at 5:00 A.M. once again for sunrise and didn't wrap up shooting until 1:30 in the morning. We shot everything we had planned but I wouldn't exactly consider that "making our day." We had a break in the mid afternoon but we can't consider a 21 hour shooting day a complete success. We can't expect the crew and the actors to perform at their best if they are getting 4-5 hours of sleep for 3 nights in a row. We need to work on faster setup times. Everyone, including myself, was really struggling this weekend and it made me nervous. However, we got through it with a bunch of really great shots, and I respect everyone in cast and crew for sticking it out. No one gave up and thats what is important. Kelly and I had a long talk on the way home about improving set up time and I think Cody will be onboard when he hears what we discussed. Kelly and I also went over the shooting schedule for next weekend on the way home. It will be another long weekend with some tough lighting set ups but I am confident that we can pull it off. Thats all for now, looking forward to getting a good nights sleep.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
These two days clearly had more than the usual amount of "opportunities." You're handling them amazingly well though, and the challenges help you to figure out how to work faster. Cody mentioned in his blog that you started working with a "blueprint" approach, and I said this: Doing a floor plan ("blueprint") is a really great way to plan shots, and it's pretty standard part of the process for directors and DPs (see Nicholas Proferes's "Film Directing Fundamentals," among other resources. When you combine the storyboard with the floor plan, you have a much clearer view of where your setups are going to be, and that helps you order your shot list with the greatest efficiency. It's like suddenly seeing your production set in 3-D.
ReplyDeleteRAbbott