___At the end of November I wrapped principle photography on a 7 day shoot in which I shot 2 short films back to back. I was working along side gaffer/grip extraordinaire Jeff Marlowe who played an integral role in the success of both projects. We were working with a 1 ton grip package as well as a small Arri Fresnel Kit. We also had a few small additional lights at our disposal. The biggest challenge with these shoots was the fact that they were comprised mainly of night exterior scenes. Ir was a challenge to light these scenes correctly with only a small light package. I also shot most of these night scenes at a 1/125 sec shutter (about 70 degree shutter) to give it more of a strobey/frantic look. This meant we had to up the light level even more to compensate for the shutter angle. It was worth it though because I think action shots look so much better at a high shutter speed. In the end I think the night exteriors were some of the best looking scenes in both films.
Having the 1 ton grip package to play with was really helpful. I'm pretty sure Jeff's favorite item in the package (soon to be my favorite item as well) was the baby offset arm. It allowed us to get a back/edge light on the subjects for closeups without getting the light stand in the shot. It's such a simple piece of equipment, but it makes a world of difference. I think we used it on 90% of the lighting set ups. It was also really great to have single and double nets to use in addition to scrims. They really allowed us to be precise in controlling light levels. It seems that it is the simple pieces of equipment that really make the difference.
For the interrogation scene (See still top left) Jeff and I built a menace arm using two combo stands connected by 4 c stand arms. We hung a 650w right above the interrogation table that shot straight down so that the actors had a hard top light but were also lit from below because of the bounce off of the table. The funny thing was that the barn doors didn't fit on the light correctly when it hung upside-down so we had to shape the light with black-wrap and Jeff had to stuff a scrim inside it so it was held up only by the wrap. I was waiting for the scrim to fall down onto the table in the middle of the scene, but it stayed up there the whole time.
Looking back on it now, it was a challenging shoot but I think we got some really great shots and I definitely learned a lot.
