Sunday, 11 December 2005
11:15pm

H

oly crap. Well it's been a while since I've been able to update. I've been so crazy busy at school. Every update seems to mention that, haha. So last week was the first time we got to select our own groups for our shooting projects. The group I was in decided that we shouldn't look at this as just another assignment but actually try to make something we would want to show people. So we basically decided to put ourselves in way over our heads, sink or swim. If we failed... who cares, we're in school, nobody is going to fire us. If we succeeded, we'd gain a lot of great experience in a variety of situations.
And so we set out to shoot a story that takes place in like 8 different locations. I was the director of photography, so all the lighting and camera choices would be mine to make. I was pretty nervous about this being such an ambitious project. I would be in many different lighting situations. We turned a downtown loft into a dance club. Then later shot a high stakes poker scene in the same room. How would I light the two scenes in a way that would conceal this fact? Also there was a scene where we needed to make it look like the house was on fire... I only had one idea for how to accomplish this, if it didn't work, I don't know what we would have done... but it came out just fine.
I've come to find that I really enjoy working with the lights. There's great satisfaction in adjusting the position of that last little light and looking through the viewfinder thinking "FUCK that looks AWESOME!!". It makes me so happy that sometimes when I'm driving home from school, I'm laughing in my car.
The crew ended up working pretty damned efficiently for a student film set, and we got a crapload of work done in a really short time. But actually we ended up spending all of Friday night, Saturday morning and afternoon before and after class, and all day sunday shooting this thing. I think most of the other groups did theirs all in one night. We didn't have enough time to get the whole thing edited even into just a rough cut like what was due, so they ended up just editing a trailer instead of a rough cut. I think it came out looking pretty darned good, and I'm really happy with how things turned out and I can't wait for them to finish the final product!
Oh, here's the trailer if you want to see it. Quicktime 6 or better will be required, and it's about 10 megs. Click the pic below to download the video:

If you're interested, we shot this on a Canon XL2 mainly with the standard 20X power zoom lens, though we did a couple of shots with the 14x manual lens. All the lighting was done with just the LA Film School basic lighting kit and some color correction gels... well and the club lights. You can do a lot with just three lights! Anyway, I'm having the time of my life right now, and I'm excited about the stuff I will be working on in the future. Let me know what you think about the trailer, by the way.