Post Mortem with Joe
I've been pulling aside some of the crew of The New Face of Security and chatting with them about filming now that we've wrapped. I'm talking with our camera operator and DP, Joe Szilvagyi, here.
The noise in the background is the epic Bomberman series in progress in the basement below us.
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The New Face of Security…
... has wrapped. We finished shooting last night at 10:30, half an hour over the schedule.
We were working in three hour days, which is difficult enough to begin with. By the time everyone has settled in and you find a groove you have to call it a night and start over again the next day.
It was also ridiculously, remarkably hot and humid the entire time. Add seven bodies and two lights (500w and 750w) in a small, enclosed space and the issue is compounded further. We were taking hourly breaks almost the entire way through.
Finally, when we originally shot this, with more people, more equipment, and more space it took us 20 hours to get through.
All things considered a half an hour over isn't all that bad.
Last night had the extra challenge of containing a good number of our dolly shots and the necessity of flipping the set half way through. The set itself is essentially intended to be a large curtained area. Logistics essentially meant that we were working with three of the four curtained sections. For a small number of shots that meant flipping the entire set and lighting so we could pretend we were filming on the opposite end of the set, where there were no curtains.
We had an extra camera last night. Joe was able to track down another Nikon D90. It helped to be able to swap out the camera once it got too hot and shut down. Oddly enough, over three days we really only lost one take to the 30 second count down. I'm pretty happy with that.
Altogether it looks like I've got about 20 GB of data to sort through now that I need to dive in to so I can start editing. Around 15 GB of video and 5 GB of audio. We did the audio in 96k/24-bit. Probably unnecessary but when you've got 8GB SD card and are recording in mono you might as pretend you need the space.
Hoping for picture lock by the middle of August. From there we'll bring in the actors again and have them record their parts again for ADR. There's going to be a significant amount of soundtracking and foley work to do as well.
Four days of work, followed by four nights of shooting, and I am spent. Editing soon. Sleep first.
The New Face of Security – Day Two
Day two has been a whole lot of more of the same.
The audio was, perhaps, a little bit worse today. I don't know who lets their kids run around on the street at ten at night but there they were... Well, that's a lie. Clearly, I know who. My neighbours. A lot of the audio from tonight is likely a write off. Again, I knew we were going to need to loop some stuff so it's low on my list of concerns.
We got the monitor hooked up tonight. We were missing the appropriate cable last night. It was nice being able to hang back and see what was happening rather than being over Joe's, the camera operator's, shoulder the entire shoot. I'm going to miss it come day four when it's required to be part of the set. I may need to find an alternative to be able to keep the monitor. I'm not sure if I'll be able to find a replacement to stand in for the set or if I'll need to pick up a small LCD TV as a more permanent monitor.
We continue on through the heat. Pretty much on schedule and about half way through the shot list.
The New Face of Security – Day One
First day of shooting down. Overall it's going really well.
Shooting is taking place in my garage. It's the only space we have that close, big enough to support the set, and that we have unfettered access to. As I live in residential neighbourhood it's meant competing with the neighbourhood kids for clean audio. It's not too bad. We're getting mostly silence. Add to that the idea that I've known I was going to need to do some ADR anyway and I'm not particularly worried about it.
It's also ridiculously hot as well. 27C (around 80F) plus humidity as a baseline. Then we've got six people plus lighting in a two car garage. We're taking a lot of breaks in between, funneling air from the air conditioned house in to the garage with a floor fan, and stepping out once an hour. Still easy to get a little off course in that kind of heat really quickly. By the end of a three hour shoot we're all pretty drenched in our own sweat.
I'm terrified to see how the next three days go as it's expected to continue getting hotter.
The real technical issue came from equipment. My camera operators camera shut down on us and it took a bit to figure out why. I don't know the model number off the top of my head but it's a Nikon DSLR that shoots HD video. Apparently, a common problem with this model is it shutting down from overheating. Extended shooting of HD causes it to get a little warm. Add the ambient temperature and close physical distance to a 750w light. It gets very warm very quickly.
Luckily, now that we've identified it that means we'll be able to account for it tonight and won't lose the twenty or so minutes we lost last night.
Otherwise we're doing really well. My schedule is by no means ambitious but that's good as we're right on where I wanted to be. That's including throwing an extra shot in. More to come tonight.
Built A Dolly
I should really be getting on the last minute details as we start shooting tomorrow. Instead I'm going to talk about the new dolly we built today. There are some tracking and push shots that I wanted to do on the reshoot for The New Face of Security. The last dolly that we used was flat out awful. It couldn't even move in a straight line and made so much noise that it was only useful if you didn't need audio from the take. Rather than rent something that wasn't going to work anyway or buy something expensive we went the other way.
$4 pair of rollerblades from the local thrift shop.
Tore those suckers apart and harvested the still well functioning wheels.
$6 in hardware - L brackets, nuts and bolts
Bent the L brackets from 90 degrees to about 120. Bolted the wheels on.
Free chunk of wood
I had a piece of MDF sitting around that was mostly square, sturdy, and flat. It's not technically free since I pair for it at some point but it didn't come out of this film's budget and therefore is free. Drilled some holes and using some machine screws and wings nuts fixed the wheels to the wood.
$12 ten foot lengths of pvc piping.
Since the tripod, camera, and wood with wheels is pretty light it actually just sits on top of the pvc. The piping doesn't need any support. It basically adjusts itself.
Ran some tests with and it's smooth as can be. There's still quite a bit that could be done to make it a bit more rugged and reliable but as is it's quite good and will get us through this shoot. And at $22 it's a damn fine price too.
Paradise Island
Cassie Padfield, who is joining us for our reshooting of The New Face of Security, is also smack in the middle of a stage production with K-W Little Theater.
Paradise Island opens this Thursday and runs for three weeks. If you are in the area and have the opportunity go see Cassie and support community theatre.
New Face Rehearsals
Cast and critical crew have been confirmed. We are very much rolling on toward actually shooting something again.
Last week our new camera operator / DP came by as we did some lighting and shot tests with the new lights on the new set. We have a basic lighting setup that looks pretty solid and is going to give us really good results with the new camera we'll be using. It's a flexible set up with nice contrast.
We have a rehearsal scheduled for next Tuesday. I have no doubt they're going to be fantastic for me.
With any luck we should have this shot in the next three weeks.
On a side note, I've been playing with Blender a lot lately. It's a 3D modeling/animation/game development program that is completely cross platform and free. I've been noodling with it to get my head around basic modeling and animation. While some silly thing in the back of my brain says, 'Wouldn't it be awesome to do an animation CG short?' the rest of my brain and is being a bit more pragmatic.
I have a really hard time doing storyboards. It's not that I can't see the shots that I want it's that I can't draw well enough to get the perspective and proportion I'm looking for and eeking out what I can takes forever. Modeling, on the other hand, I'm alright with. It's a whole lot easier to push vertices around to get an approximate equivalent to what I want, stage a scene, and then put a camera in to place.
Currently my modeling skills are still very raw. It takes me quite a bit to get anything worthwhile done. I watched a tutorial of someone model and rig an entire character in an hour. I've been working on a basic human character for almost a week now and there's still lots to do before I get to rigging. But that's okay. Once I have a library I can start pulling existing resources in to new storyboard projects.
I think it'll work out to be a very nice storyboarding tool once I suck a whole lot less.
New Face Set
The set design has been essentially completed for The New Face of Security reshoot. There is some paint that needs to dry and some details that need to be looked after but it is done. My new DP/camera operator wants to come in and do some lighting and equipment tests before we get to shooting. When we get together to do that I'll make sure I get some stills of the new design.
It's a much better design than the last time around. We had too much white and it was, and looked, slapped together hastily to get it together. This time it's slightly warmer and looks a bit more refined.
Hopefully we'll get to shooting in the next few weeks.
New Actor and Camera Operator
It's been a productive week or so in The New Face of Security land. We've secured a new DP/camera operator for the reshoot, who comes with 20+ years of film and photography experience, and a replacement actor for Nicole, who is currently in Saudi Arabia for at least several more months.
Pieces are falling in to place and we're getting much closer to being able to shoot. So camera and lighting tests, a rehearsal or two, and we're off.
Visuals and Storyboarding
Despite the pain of needing to reshoot The New Face of Security some good things have come out of it. The largest one being that I've had time to go back and focus on the visuals. I've spent considerably longer working through my visual treatment, blocking, and storyboarding this time around with good results.
The first of which is that I have a much better plan for lighting on the reshoot. It matches the thematic elements I'm going for in the story a bit more. The previous lighting, while solid, was more around getting decent overall light then lighting for effect.
The second is that I've paid more attention to blocking and action. This has made some minor but strong edits to the script itself. I've been able to shave off a few things that were largely unnecessary while sharpening the points I am hitting.
The last is that by taking a style, theme, and content approach to the storyboarding, by considering the cut film in my head, I've cut down the number of set ups. Originally I was more worried about ensuring that I had enough footage to get the project. While there is good material in those original storyboards there were also unnecessary coverage set ups that likely wouldn't have even been used in the final cut. They were there as insurance.
We went in to shooting with 40 set ups over two days and a lot of overlap. If we'd gone in with the 29 that I have now we'd have had more time to work through the individual shots and had a tighter over all film. I'll be sitting down with a potential new DP/camera operator to talk about the visuals shortly. If things go smoothly we should be pulling everything together to shoot very shortly.
It pays to do visualization work in advance. It will save you time and frustration on the set.