The scene is part of the opening of the film, where two film school rejects beg an administrator to let them in the school.  It’s quite a funny scene and most of us had a hard time keeping composed while the scene played.

It was a simple, 2.5-pages so shooting went very smoothly over three and a half hours.  We shot the scene in a small conference room in the offices of Arts + Labor, thanks to Kat Candler.  The room had a large wall of windows that would have been difficult to control, but luckily it rained outside and gave me a nice, diffused, low-intensity key.  The rest of the lighting was super-easy after that.  (I can’t say the sound recordist was so lucky to have the rain).

In the pre-production meeting we had trouble deciding how to make this scene look.  Since the two main characters are terrible filmmakers, we wanted to contrast their amateur filmmaking with a more cinematic quality in the scene.  At the same time, we wanted to contrast these two characters with the administrator, who needed to look more classy.  The best compromise we imagined was to shoot the amateur filmmakers handheld and shoot the administrator on a tripod.  Just in case these two styles don’t cut together well, we shot a safety shot of each angle on a tripod.

This was only the second time I shot a scene composing for a 2.35:1 or “scope” aspect ratio.  The three-character dynamic of the scene made me eager to try this format again.  I shot the scene with a Panasonic HMC-150 and unfortunately, the camera lacks an on-screen guide help with composing for different aspect ratios.  This a much welcomed-feature in all of Canon’s pro cameras.  I ended up putting tape over the top and bottom of my external monitor to help me compose the shot.

We had planned specific actions in general areas, but most every shot was improvisational location shooting. Shortly after we began shooting, I threw out any attempt to have a consistent look throughout the video and only tried to match certain parts.  Because the video in intended for compressed web distribution and because of limited lighting resources, I pushed the gain much more than I normally would.

The downtown shots was mostly ambient light, with a few quick supplements here and there.  The pool scene was the most orchestrated, shot mostly with florescent lighting and china balls, and hard tungsten for an edge light.  It worked well for such little lighting power.

The work lights used to illuminate the field scene had a ~60 hz flicker, so I had to adjust the shutter speed of the camera to match.  The lights also had a significant green/magenta shift that could I could only correct in post-production.  Those lights were also very difficult to control in shape.  So needless to say, working with them was a pain.  On the other hand, the rented HMI worked like a charm and looked great.

We had planned to shoot the sparklers in the same field, but it’s not really safe to mix pyrotechnics and dry grass, so we moved to a nearby parking lot.

You can watch the entire video on YouTube or Althea’s website.

I shoot digital for pretty much the standard reasons: it’s cheap, instant, convenient, and accessible.

While in college, my graduate-level classmates would call me the “digital native.”  I grew up in a world where computers ruled, and I always turned to digital technology as the first option.  (It also helped that my mom was a computer programmer and exposed me to computers basically since the day I was born).  As other students would try to describe a scene from a film, I would pull it up on YouTube.  If a fact in class was disputed, I would quickly verify it on Wikipedia and expound.  Digital film editing was just reaching mainstream when I began filmmaking, so naturally when it comes to film and photography, digital was the first option.

When I first started seriously studying photography, I shot with my mother’s 35mm film Minolta X-700.  It is still my favorite camera.  American University’s photography program was smart in teaching film first, then digital.  I loved the previsualization, the anticipation of seeing your work develop, the beautiful characteristics of 35mm, and of course the smell of chemicals.  Oh, the chemicals.  Unfortunately by the time I graduated, they were transitioning to a film/digital hybrid instruction.

But lately I have stopped shooting film altogether.  I almost always bring along my film camera and a few rolls of various stock, but I almost never use them.  I always intend to, but never actually do.

Cost is the main limitation right now.  When doing paid photography work, I always give customers the option of shooting film and explain the benefits.  But once I explain the associated costs, they turn to digital.  I would like to shoot film for my personal work, but I don’t have a darkroom here in Austin, don’t have enough money to build a darkroom, and don’t have enough money to pay for the processing.  It’s just less of a hassle to shoot digital.

I would love to shoot all my films on 16mm.  Knowing what it can do and how fun it is to shoot film, it’s hard to resist.  But I wouldn’t even know where to get a quality 16mm camera around here, buy film stock, or get telecine.  Plus the whole process is prohibitively expensive.  Meanwhile, there are several places around town where I can get a RED ONE or any HD camera with a DOF adapter.  I can buy flash-based memory cards at my local electronics store.  While on set, we can make copies of the footage for me, the editor, the director, and the producer.  At the end of the shooting day, we can take the footage home with us.  Just a few hours later, we can watch a quick edit of the dailies.  It’s almost too convenient.

I hope that one day I’ll be able to return to film.  But I fear that by the time I am in a position to make that choice, it will no longer be an option.  Digital is here to stay.

Bobby had talked about shooting the film with a Canon XL2 or a Canon GL2.  I persuaded him to let me try out the Canon HV30, an HDV consumer-based camcorder that is a favorite amoung the Indy Mogul crowd.  Despite better manual controls and a more versatile lens on the XL2 and GL2, I knew that the HV30 would produce a sharper, cleaner image.  We were working on a short schedule with an absolutely minimal crew and underpowered equipment, but pulled it off nicely.

The HV30 does have some serious limitations though.  Our sound engineer, Scott Huggins of JackedIn Entertainment, scoffed at using a minijack connection instead of XLR.  In addition to the potential loss of sound quality, we had problems keeping the darn thing connected.  We mounted a wireless mic on the camera and used it for a wireless headphone monitor, and Scott was able to watch the levels on the video monitor.

It is almost impossible to determine exact exposure with the HV30.  A waveform monitor would have been ideal, but alas there are always financial limitations.  This would have been one of the few times on a digital shoot that I would have liked a light meter.  There are a few hacks and math tricks to fiddle with the exposure settings, but I didn’t really have time so I just went with my gut, which worked okay most of the time.

The HDV format also does not hold up well with color correction.  I guess that’s to be expected.

For the conference room scene, my key light was a low-hanging china ball with 400w-equivalent daylight CFLs.  I had two 250w peppers with CTB gels shining into the room from the outside.  The house blinds on the windows gave those pepper lights a nice texture.  And of course there was a practical projector to add a little flair.  That setup was the main lighting for the scene, with small tweaks and supplemental lighting for individual shots.

In the restaurant scene I used a 250w pepper with an umbrella as my key light and moved it around for each shot.  The backlights were a few 2800˚K CFLs in clamp-light fixtures.  The rest was filled in by the house lights on a dimmer.

I was really surprised with low amount of noise when shooting in dim lighting.  The image from the HV30 is shockingly clean when shooting with a daylight color temperature.  When shooting under Tungsten, the characteristic blue noise starts to come out.  If we were able to shoot with HMIs the entire time, I think it would have compared nicely with a more expensive camera.

The adjective we used througout development of the project was “epic.”  We wanted this video to seem huge.

I shot this on HDV at 1080p30 with my Canon HV30.  I used my JAG35 DOF adapter, but this is probably the last time I will ever use it seriously.  It’s just too much of a toy to work in a professional environment.   This video is primary intended for web distribution, so I wasn’t worried about the soft image and ground glass artifacts from the JAG35.  The problem was the operation of the adapter.  It regularly didn’t turn on, fell out of alignment, and ran out of batteries.  It only looked pretty clean when the stars aligned just right. Overall, it gave the look I wanted but some shots are just not as good as they should be.

I ran into a little bit of trouble when I forgot a microphone during one day’s shoot.  Almost all of the audio is unuable, but I salvaged two short bits for the final video and still used most of the images.

This will be a good show piece for S-Collective and helpful for the overall initiative.

We signed up for the competition about a month ago.  We’re all friends and had worked together before in some way, so we all trusted each other.  Our story is very cliche for this kind of filmmaking: we had massive problems but persevered and in the end it’s all kind of okay.

Actors

We started casting the film a while ago.  While we didn’t know what the story would be about, we wanted to include a child and a senior.  We found some great talent and basically told them “keep your Saturday open.  We may or may not need you.”

The Script

The easiest part of the process was actually the concept and the writing of the film.  We all got together on Friday night over a few beers before we were given the assignment by email.  Once we got the requirements, we started throwing out ideas and pretty quickly came up with one we liked.  By 11pm, we were ready to write.  Richie and Billy worked out the specific dialogue while Randy and I ran errands.  Once they had a draft script, we continued revising until about 3:30am.  Once we had a solid script, we were ready to shoot.

Crew

While planning, we lined up and confirmed a crew. Or so we thought.  On Friday we got the call that three of our essential crew members did not want to participate, and those who had said “maybe” told us they were out too.  Basically, we were screwed.  Most essential was a sound mixer, since none of us had the equipment or experience to handle it ourselves.  Of course we could have lined up additional crew and equipment, but not on half a day’s notice.  The majority of my Friday afternoon and evening was spent frantically calling every single person I know in Austin, asking if they were able to help out.  When they all said “no,” I asked if they could recommend someone.  I repeated that about fourty times.  I still didn’t find anybody.  We were all alone.

Sound

Because we had lost our sound person, a C stand had to take his place.  We didn’t own any microphones, hadn’t planned to rent or borrow any microphones, and everyone we knew with equipment wasn’t available.  Eventually Billy found a condenser microphone.  It wasn’t even close to what we needed, but it would have to work.

To complicate sound even more, it was raining that morning.  After it stopped raining, birds started chirping. Loudly.  Since there was nothing we could do about it, we just accepted it.

Workflow

We had initially planned to shoot on HDV so that we could shoot with one camera and capture with another at the same time.  We scrapped that idea around 6am and decided instead to shoot with a Panasonic HMC-150, which records on SDHC memory cards.

As soon as we were done shooting the first setup, we swapped memory cards.  Billy took the full card, launched Final Cut Pro, and started transcoding the footage.  I started shooting on the next card, but quickly found that the other card could only shoot about 2 minutes before the camera started complaining.  So we stopped the transfer on the first card, deleted the files that had already been transferred, and kept shooting.

Halfway through the day Billy realized that some footage was missing.  We searched memory cards and hard drive files and found nothing.  Somewhere in this process, Final Cut Pro had gotten confused with deleting files and we just didn’t have the footage.  Since our child actor had left for the day, we re-shot what we could and called it a day.

We continued to have problems with Final Cut Pro losing files.  We had planned for a leisurely edit, but it turned into a frantic search for files.  We ended up with only about half of the footage we shot.  We had enough takes to get through the story, but not a lot of options.  We did what we could to make it look clean, but the edit is not what we had envisioned.  Lessons learned.

In the end, we actually came up with a decent film.  We were generally happy with what we accomplished in such a short period of time.  Come support us tonight at the screening!