Planets Colliding
After six exhausting days of filming, today's blog entry is going down as quickly as our wrap up.
Yes, you did not misread: We wrapped up our second film!
Apart from that, today's filming day was nothing really special. Broadly speaking, I encountered the same lighting issues, even though they were not as intense today as on the other two days as it was, firstly, way more overcast when we started filming and, secondly, we mostly concentrated on smaller shot sizes. And thirdly, we finished the shoot off with the romantic lighting at the darker set, which, by now, is no problem for me to light anymore.
However, I still encountered a new problem that I did not really face on the first five shooting days before:
I kept blinding our main actor by accident.
This is not a joke. I, by no means, meant to blind our actor, nor did I carry out a deeply-rooted vendetta against him. It had not been an issue during the course of all the other days before, but somehow, today, he kept looking into the LED's whenever I turned them on or adjusted them.
And I really did not know how to possibly break the habit.
Initially, I had started out warning people with 'Lights on!' and waiting for three seconds before I actually turned the lights on. As I was sometimes standing behind set or set elements and could thus not see cast or crew, I trusted that a pause of three seconds should be enough. However, this had quite the opposite effect: For, much like with the cry 'Fire!', our cast looked into my direction as soon as I called 'Lights on!'...
After the first time, I would then call 'Lights on! Please don't look up.' and wait for five seconds to let the information sink in. However, I reaped the same results. The time after that I alternated and said 'Please don't look at me, but lights on.' Same same.
Regardless of how much I warned him beforehand, he would look straight into the light. Writing this down, it kind of has a comical effect to it, although it was extremely unpleasant for our actor and extremely frustrating for me who did not really know how to resolve this gordian knot.
As our actor was surely beginning to see stars, I decided that I would always manually dial down the intensity of the LED's and turn the lights towards any wall first, before turning them off. This way, whenever I turned them on, I would not blind him directly, but would be able to turn them towards him and then, slowly, increase the intensity of the LED's until I reached the necessary levels.
This, finally, ended his streak of blindings and while it added quite some time to every rig and de-rig and was especially time-consuming whenever I had to (re-)adjust my lighting slightly, BUT it turned out to be the only way of keeping this actor from constantly looking at me while I was turning on lights.
Amidst this streak of Monty Python'esque proportions, our production struggled to get the last shots finished before the college closed for the day and thus I spend a lot of time running around and rigging or preparing lights to make sure that production would not be delayed any more than necessary. Here, once again, my lighting plans kept me sane and functioning, as I was quickly able to look up the numbers.
Amidst all the stress of our production's last hour, I furthermore had to keep an eye on one of the LED's as Katie and Nathan had at one point reported seeing smoke coming out of it last week. As we could neither see nor smell anything upon closer inspection of either the LED or its V-Lock, I was advised to never let it run in between shots and thus to even detach the V-Lock, just to be on the safe side.
However, this issue had not come up again and we managed to get the film done in time, even though we also had to properly clean up afterwards.
Six days of filming and two short films are done now. And while we are all happy about our common accomplishment, we are also looking forward to nice warm showers and baths!