We shot “Mr. One-Note” on Friday. This was the second film to be produced by the Austin Filmmakers Meetup group. (I was not involved in the first). It was written and directed by Reagan Peterson and produced by Mike Rembis. It’s a short, one-location comedy about two females fighting over an uninteresting guy.
Since all of the action takes place in one apartment, it was easy to create several different setups without too much effort. I shot the film with daylight-balanced lighting since we had a mix of tungsten and powerful daylight florescent lighting.
I shot the film with my Canon HV30. I did not use a DOF adapter, which probably would have complicated things anyway. I used a shoulder mount about two-thirds of the time, which made movement a lot easier. I admit that I used the auto-focus a few times. The HV30 focus control is so difficult to dial-in and it’s hard to see on that tiny flip out LCD monitor. I was careful to only use it on wide-angle shots with tricky movement. For those kind of shots, I trusted the auto-focus more than myself.
The shoot went pretty smoothly. We could have benefited from a stricter schedule and better planning, but the simplicity of the shoot covered most problems. It might have been nice to have a grip or two more to work lights since some people (including myself) were working double-duty. But it was a cramped location, so a few more people may have actually created more problems. Either way, I was pretty happy with the way it went.