'A Good One' Comes Around

After yesterday's manifold equipment issues, today went by rather smoothly.

This was mostly due to the fact that the lighting setup behind the set did not need fixing anymore and that I pretty much memorised my lighting plans so I did not need to constantly check them.

However, lighting still somewhat posed to be a problem for us for I encountered issues with two of the V-Locks which I had used for our LED lights. As it seems, they have not charged properly overnight and thus were completely empty after half a minute or so. I quickly went to the stores to switch the V-Locks for charged ones and returned without much of a hassle.

We managed to get a lot of the shots done and filmed most of the dialogue that takes place within act 1 and act 2. For one of the shots, we even employed the slider mounting it on its babylegs in order to shoot the passing of time by pacing of feet.

Has had envisioned the shot which required me to smoothly follow Death's tracks until the narration hits a point where Hayden decides to take action (and matters) into his own hands by simply leaving. I was then to follow Hayden's feet until the moment when he hits his cane into the ground, being frustrated that nothing works out as he would want it to.

This was a quite difficult shot to manage, since it took - firstly - quite a while to set the slider head's tension to a point where it would run smoothly enough to be able to follow properly but not too smooth for me to lose control of my handling. Doing practice runs in advance proved to be fine for the duration of them but as soon as our actors did their part, I was not able to follow quickly and smoothly enough to make this shot work. I spend quite a lot of time adjusting the tension of the slider to the point where I would neither be hindered by it nor be too quick and sudden in my movements.

Secondly, since I not only had to slide the camera but also turn it towards the actors to create an inviting, moving shot with a bit of depth as well, I repeatedly created jitters that proved to be disruptive to the suspension of disbelief. So we had to take this shot a couple of times until the LCD-display displayed nice footage when playing it back.

When our lecturer came in to check up on us during the afternoon, we watched the footage back that was shot on the tracking dolly yesterday. On the bigger screen of Hannah's Mac, we finally realised how shaky the footage really was, as compared to the image on the AVC’s LCD. I have stated this repeatedly in the course of my blog, but I regularly struggle with the playback quality on the AVC’s.

For anything looks nice and clean as long as you watch it back on camera, but as soon as footage leaves the camera (and thus its internal playback software) and end up on a bigger screen, it often looks complete and utter shite. The framing is slightly off, the footage isn’t as bright, and jitters are suddenly visible where there have been none before.

This being said, we decided to take the tracking dolly out tomorrow as well and re-shoot the opening scene to the best of our abilities.

In the end, we managed to film a nice variety of moving shots and close ups. Most of them were handheld, as both Has and I were aiming for a cinematic feeling with subtle movements but did not have enough space in the set to e.g. rig the slider on two tripods. With the necessary cast and crew in there, we did not even have enough place for one tripod. I thus mostly used the monopod and filmed handheld with the OIS turned on to create the best image possible and to smooth out some of the jitters or camera movements that were not perfect.

This also proved to be the most feasible way to create these shots, for most of the close up shots of Hayden and Death had a lot of movement which I could not have covered appropriately by just putting the camera onto a tripod. Especially the close up dialogue scenes and reaction shots required me to be able to walk a few steps to follow the actor properly.

In the course of our shoot today, we moved to the center stage aka bridge of the set where the most intense scene was to be shot: The realisation of Hayden that he has wasted his life and is now about to die. I was pretty lucky that the set designers had already incorporated lighting on that stage. It was really just a matter of exchanging plugs. And suddenly, the bridge was beautifully lit in intense, primary colours. The only light I needed to add was the light that was emanating from the room Hayden has just left to give the scene a bit more desperation to work with on a base of colour and colour contrast (in this case: rose and dark green against dark grey).

We shot that particular scene from two angles. The first angle that shows Hayden breaking down, I rigged twice - once on a tripod and once on a monopod - to see how each shot would turn out. The second shot, which I call the 'Devilish Over-the-Shoulder-Shot', I shot completely handheld as it required me to keep the camera at a certain height and angle so that I would not film beyond the set’s ceiling. Having finally found that sweet spot, I realised that it did not match height-wise with either the monopod or the tripod, so I decided to hold it there myself and let the scene play out.

And boy!, were these shots beautiful! Not to toot my own horn, but I was a bit proud of how I managed to capture our actor’s tremendous performance without any shakes, especially with the handheld shots. I was happy that I managed to follow the actor during the most of his performance and that my camera movements ended up to be smooth. At one occasion, I actually lost our actor for just a second as he was falling quicker than I could catch up to him. And even though it might be regarded as a fault, I felt that this added a lot of personal quality to the footage. It feels as if he dropped out of the frame, unexpectedly, suddenly being burdened by his fate, and made it more authentic for me. I furthermore liked how the lighting emphasised the terror Hayden was in.

After that scene, our production was done for the day and we started wrapping up again, as it was already time for us to return our kit to college. Having said this, I really need to state how awesome it is to work in the ‚camera department’ together with Hannah. For whenever I filmed, needed to change the light setting, or subsequently observed it for any unlit or unevenly lit scenes, OR had to swap V-Locks and gels on the LED’s, she helped me setting up and taking down equipment, taking cutaways, preparing cameras, and keeping track of the production log. We worked together, hand in hand, and I was able to completely focus on my creative task as a cinematographer in tandem with Has’ vision, because I could completely trust her to be on the same page and prepare in advance.

To make it short: The world’s camera departments need more Hannahs. Definitely.