'A Good One' Goes to War

It has been the last shooting day for 'A Good One' and - you might not believe it after Monday's post - even the most difficult so far! It felt like being at war with the elements, most prominently: light.

While the past two days have been rather overcast and thus did not shed too much light into the sound stage, today happened to be one of the brightest days since I moved to Britain...

But first things first: Let's talk about another difficult issue for a minute first: The so-called 'Hand-Over Shot'.

For our director Has has envisioned a scene in which our characters leave one room to enter another, simply by moving through the wall (or so it is supposed to look like if we are successful). This posed to be an extremely difficult shot as we not only had to cover a rather large distance of about four meters in total, but also an elevation of about 70 cm to make this shot work.

We already contemplated long and hard about a solution to this issue when we did our test shoot before the Easter break. Since we have different levels of height to cover (from ground to elevated bridge), it was obvious that we could not use the tracking dolly to cover the entire distance, so we had to strike that from our list of options.

We then thought about using the slider and mounting it on two tripods with adjusted heights in order to make this shot work. And while this would have solved the issue of covering two levels, we had to refrain from this idea as well as the distance of about four meters in total was far too long for a slider with only about the length of one meter. So we had to ditch that idea as well.

Looking onto the options that our stores currently has as well, it did not really offer any alternatives that would solve our problem, only add to that. For even though we do have spider rigs, these did not offer any help at all. If anything, they would have made the handover even more awkward and unhandy. Back then, we decided that we would collectively look up possibilities of making that work, but that we - as a fallback - would train a hand-over-shot between me and Hannah, screwing the AVC onto a monopod to allow for a smoother hand-over.

Which is what we attempted today as well. I started out filming with the camera handheld on the monopod and I passed it off to Hannah, just about when the camera was filming the wall itself. We both tried to adjust our pace and elevation level with the actors' timing as well. We tried that shot a couple of times (and unless the LCD-display betrayed us again in glossing over the footage on camera), it seems that we actually succeeded in that.

Here is the actual footage of our hand-over, as taken and published on Youtube by our sound operator Lynley:

As you can see in the footage, the most difficult part in that entire endeavour was the moment in which we actually passed on the camera, as this is, naturally, most prone to get shaky. However, we will only definitely know in the edit how the shot turned out. This, if not workable in any shape or form, could at least be replaced other shots we took from that day, so I am not too worried, even though I would love if we actually managed to pull that stunt successfully.

In addition, we reshot the opening scene of our film using the tracking dolly again. This time, while rigging up the tracks, we made sure to use connectors that were not bent in any way to avoid bumps in our track (and thus in our footage). As filming with the track on Monday posed to be a rather noisy and bumpy endeavour where increased weight on the dolly and being pushed or pulled did not help ease the sound (or the jitters), I decided that this time, I would activate the OIS and walk next to the dolly to test whether this changed any of the annoying factors:

It still proved to be a rather noisy shot (apart from the actual background noise in that stage), but I felt that I had a better grip of the equipment and could control the shakiness better than before. The OIS seemed to balance the remaining jitters quite well, judging from the playback. With this method, we managed to get a whole of seven attempts down until we had to move on to our next - and final - shots.

Now back to the initial statement of this blog entry: With most of the prior scenes in our production, lighting turned out to be an easy task. Really easy. I just did not appreciate it enough.

When I lit my eagerly planned 'early morning/hour of the wolf'-scene, I immediately realised what I had not anticipated enough when making my lighting plans for this part of the set:

We had excellent weather.

Strong, direct sunlight came falling in and destroyed most of the lighting scenario I imagined. Because I had hitherto planned and used strong light that was based on reddish and orange hues, I was able to counterbalance a lot of the interfering light that came from the sky lights next to our set and was actually washed out by my own lighting schemes.

But since blue light does not travel as far as red light does, it is naturally not strong enough to counterbalance daylight, and thus easily looks artificial. My 'hour of the wolf'-setting was now truly jeopardised, as I had underestimated the power of the sun entirely and time was running out. To fix that, I had to trick around using a lot of LED lights and gels (I ended up using four lights on that tiny set alone) and had to wait for every cloud to come cover the sun in order to shoot.

Whenever it was overcast, the lighting just looked gorgeous. Trouble was, that we nearly spend 90 minutes in total getting the last shot done and finally ended up splitting that last one into 5 smaller ones in order to avoid a wide shot that would need massive amounts of light to lit the scene properly and to focus on closer shots that were easier to lit for me and the equipment we had at hand. However, we managed by slight underexposing the cameras and waiting our turn with the clouds to make things work. Not every shot will be perfect, but I hope that the slightly odd shots could possibly be colour-coded in the edit.

Regarding that fact, I am not precisely looking forward to lighting the scenes for Broken Planets, as the set for that production is located directly underneath one of these damned skylights.

However, we finally wrapped up our production and were highly satisfied with the overall result. We have been considering doing ADR after all, but that mostly depends on how badly the sound is, how quickly the edit can be done and whether our actors are available to do that as well.

Furthermore, in the course of our three-day-production, we have even been offered to get a score done for our production by a composer who read our casting call. While that might come at a cost (we still need to hear back on the intended prices), and not be able to be done in time for hand-in, depending on the editing and the sound issues in general, this would be a splendid opportunity to upgrade that film even after the deadline and make it festival worthy - if the rest pans out.

However, at the end, we took cute funny pictures with our actors before taking hearty goodbyes. At least for now.