New Face Post Mortem
It's been over three weeks since we wrapped shooting on The New Face of Security. I figured it might be time to say a few things about shooting.
We were shooting within a large garage that was previously used to service diesel trucks. Needless to say it wasn't the most pleasant smelling place. Before filming I swept the entire garage on three different occasions. Each time I came up with piles of dust.
If you looked toward the ceiling you'd see black covering the length of it. This, of itself, isn't so bad, until you realize it's supposed to be the silver of corrugated metal. Those black fans on the ceiling? Yup, those are supposed to be white. Guess where all that dust I was sweeping up kept coming from?
The real fun was in how cold the place was. It somehow managed to be a good ten degrees colder inside than it was out. I kept expecting the lights to warm the location up but they didn't really perform as much as I was hoping. At one point it was around 12 or 13 degrees Celsius outside. Inside we could see our breath.
Despite the cold, the smell, and the near certainty we were surrounded by carcinogenic dust, the cast and crew were fantastic. The girls helping out with hair and makeup spent the large majority of their time out in the car to keep warm when they weren't needed. Nicole, fighting off a pretty nasty cold, slept in between takes where she could. The heaters came on when we could and having a hot lunch on one of the days helped.
We managed to stick to the schedule fairly well. I booked out two days each at ten hours including our lunch breaks and we really didn't go beyond that. It's nice when the schedule is maintained, though I'm a little shocked with how our last half a day went that we managed to make it through.
Our first day of shooting was as smooth as can be. We moved through shots pretty quickly and got everything that we had planned for, a good two thirds of the footage. I put a lot of time in to planning in advance and the planning paid off. Of course, we left the difficult shots for the second day. The morning on day two went smoothly as well. We moved in to the equipment dependent shots in the afternoon and things started to unravel.
We were largely using rental equipment and some of it was not in it's prime. The tripod that we were using had the arm completely stripped and the head was not nearly as fluid as it should have been. This meant that Amanda, our camera operator, needed to essentially hug the redrock assembly and the tripod to do any tilt or pan movements. Not the greatest way of doing things.
From there we moved on to the tripod dolly. It liked to move in elliptical curves quite well. Straight lines, you ask? Not so much. Which brings us to the crane.
The crane wasn't meant to hold a lot of weight which forced us to do all those shots with the stock lens on the camera, removing the redrock kit. For very basic shots it was fine, especially the simple overheads. Anything that required wider movements was torture.
We had a few audio snags. Chances are we'll be going back and doing ADR for the entire short. Came down to some equipment issues. Truthfully though, if it wasn't for being able to blame the equipment I would blame it on the natural echo in the room. Getting the audio to feel natural across an entire edit would have been murder. Either way we'd be redoing all the audio, regardless of the excuse.
I know it sounds like a rough shoot but it went really well. My cast was awesome, though I fully expected them to be. They'd rehearsed well and they knew their characters. They delivered what I was hoping I'd get out of them. The crew was pretty much on it as well and we had a chance to expose a few new people to a film set. The majority of the problems we encountered were largely technical. Those that we couldn't fix we worked around. It was a good experience and I took away a lot from it.
Editing should be starting on THE NEW FACE OF SECURITY in the next week or so. I'm just finishing out the last few details of PLAN Z and then it's moving forward.