Wednesday, September 13, 2006

Sans Vie - Weekend 1 Friday and Saturday

L-R Scripty Rianon, Cameraman Stephan and volunteer Matt.  Oh yeah if you look really close in the back ground you can see Dixi Lee as Paige

We were scheduled to shoot Friday evening, Saturday and Sunday down in George Town. And By golly that is what we did. We arrived on Friday evening about 5:00 and I got notes from Matt for the first setup. Basically we were going to shoot all the hallway stuff first. Once Mark and I got our bearings straight we were able to light in pretty short order. At this point I would like to mention that we got almost an exactly perfect package for the show at least lights wise. We have 3 Baby Baby which are 1 K Fresnel by Mole Richardson, 1 Baby Junior which is a 2 K Fresnel and a Tweenie which is a 650 watt Fresnel. I also have my open face tungsten par photo lamps for extra stuff as needed. Mark wanted to use gel for light color so we put some ¼ orange on all the heads and it was off to the races.
Director of Photography, Mark Schapiro This is in Jolie's Apt.  The light is a baby Junior 2K
The hallway is a sort of L where the short leg has a stairwell to the inside and the characters apartment doors are toward the top of the long leg to the outside. There is an intersecting hall about halfway up the long leg. So we are doing both day and night here and it is of course an interior. Hallway looking down towards the stairs at around Jolies Apt Door.  The eye poker is a Baby Baby 1K
I put my 2K down at the top of the stairwell aimed at the hallway wall to fill in the back ground as we were shooting at or around Jolie’s doorway. Mostly stuff or her coming out and scampering back in her jammies. We also got some great stuff of Paige coming in and smoking a cigarette sitting on the floor. So I put a 1 K on the intersecting hallway to light the middle of the hall and a 1 k at the end of the hall behind the camera (whichever direction we were shooting) to act as a key. One of the things I love about Mark is he despises a world without shadow. So we used solid flags to create slashes of light wherever we were shooting and sculpted with scrims to make it all lovely.
That was the basic lighting for the halls. Once we got it, it was pretty easy to recreate and we simply had to dial it in for each shot. For the stuff with Paige smoking we had to play the Tweenie off a bounce cared cut way down to fill her in but hey that’s why we got the light to begin with. And the open face tungsten lights that I own worked great with full orange as a room light for when the doors open and we needed the splash of light.
Reverse angle of the hall looking towards Jolies door
We then moved the crew down to the stairs to shoot a hall scene at the top of the stairs where a man with a prosthetic device that gets jammed at the top of the stairs drops his groceries. Jolie refuses to help. We wrapped out about 11 PM which was right when Matt said he was going to wrap and we had every thing we needed except the reverse of Jolie at the top of the stairs.
Saturday was more hallway stuff with lots of movement and a cool scene of Paige and two of her hipster friends going out for the evening. Paige stops to get Jolie to come out with her but Jolie again refuses.
They leave and come across a dead guy being tended to by paramedics in another apartment. Dead guy showed up two hours late but it all worked out in the end. We put some minus green on the Tweenie and just gave his face a sort of greenish tone.
We also used a jib that Stephan had brought to pretty good effect. We wrapped at 11:15 and lunch was provided by some Costco people. It was delicious, Fajitas and beans. Home made.
Mellissa Roberts as Jolie refusing to come out
Mark and Matt and I sat up drinking beer and yakking till late and I got home about 2:30 AM but Sundays call was not till 11 so there we go.
I’ll stop here and Post about Sunday tomorrow.

3 Comments:

At 12:49 PM, Blogger Lorraine said...

"Mark despises a world without shadow"...good line.

 
At 9:14 PM, Blogger Morris said...

Lot of love on the 1st weekend. I'm going to keep it coming. Thanks for all the mentoring and input. I am learning volumns.

 
At 3:22 AM, Blogger Grish said...

HMM, Fajitas and beans...

Sounds like a good time indeed...

 

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