Short: "Cheat Day"

___In the middle of November I worked as a Gaffer on a short called "Cheat Day." Friend and fellow D.P Jess Dunlap was shooting and asked me to come on board as Gaffer. We were shooting on the RED MX and working with a small G&E package but it was enough to get the job done. For the interiors we keyed through a big window with a 1.2 HMI through a 8x8 light grid with a 4x4 250 in between the fixture and the big frame to soften the light even more. We filled with either 44 kinos or 24 kinos through 4x4 frames of 250 or opal. We also used a joleko bounced into a small bounce card a lot to create subtle back edges or even provide fill in small hallway areas where it was impossible to squeeze a fixture in.

We had one pretty big exterior setup that consisted of a model walking down a red carpet up to the front steps of the house. We bounced a 1.2 HMI into a big bounce board off camera left for general ambiance/key. We then set up four Lekos. Two played in frame as part of the red carpet scene while two others were just off camera creating two edge lights, one on each side of the models hair. We then positioned the Joleko off camera right and had an electric pan the light back and forth to flare the lens during the shot. We shot it at 120 FPS while dollying through the doorway towards the model and red carpet outside. Playback looked pretty awesome with the flares and smoke.

One SFX shot included mounting the RED to a remote head so that a motion controlled 360 degree pan of a bedroom could be captured. We lit the room by placing two frames of 250 tight to the two windows outside the room and shot an 800w Joker through one and two 44 kinos through another. We couldn't really put any other fixtures inside the room because everything was seen in the 360 degree pan. I didn't get a chance to see playback on this shot but I'm interested to see how it came out. Overall it was a good shoot with good people. Jess was one of the only people I knew on set but it was cool to work with some new faces. Hopefully we will continue to work together in the future.