Saturday, 27 May 2006
1:00pm
T
hesis filming time is fast approaching us, and things are getting pretty frantic now. I'm working on six different thesis films, one per week for six weeks starting in July. As it stands I'm the director of photography on one which is going to be a drama type thing. I'm also going to be the camera operator on one that is going to be some sort of romance. And I'm the gaffer on 4 others: a stoner comedy, a WWII period piece, another comedy, and one that I believe is going to be a horror film, but I haven't seen the script yet. So I've been off doing things like going on location scouts.
My class load at school is quite a bit lighter than it was at the beginning. I'm using some of the free time to plan some things I want to shoot outside of school to put on to my cinematography reel. I've actually written a 1-page script that is basically a "guy walks into a bar" joke, just to have some kind of structure and goal to go for when I'm shooting this stuff. I'm planning on spending about $500 (not counting film, processing and related costs) on producing it (the total running time of this short film should be a minute or less, including the credits, haha)... if I'm going to be spending the money to shoot it on film, I figure I should spend a bit of money to get what I put in front of the camera to look good to really get my money's worth out of the cost of the film stock.
If you know anyone that runs a bar in the L.A. area (or a restaurant that has a bar) that would be willing to let me film in there for 3 or 4 hours during a day when they are closed, please let me know!
I've also started checking out the school's standard-issue "Basic Lighting Kit" and bringing it home on weekends to do some lighting exercises. Here's what I did last weekend (click on the thumbnails to get the larger versions:

Mixed Lighting Test
Daylight is considerably bluer than incandescent (tungsten) lights. I shot this using different levels of color correction gels on the light I used inside to balance with the bluer daylight coming in from outside (and hitting the blinds). I kept the intensity and position of the light constant, changing only the color of the gel (and compensating using scrims on the light to maintain the same intensity).

Self Portrait
Just a little self portrait I set up in the living room. I originally wanted to do a test using a dimmer to see how bright (or dim) to make the lamp in the background to make it look nice in the frame, but as it turned out, it had one of those engergy saving flourescent bulbs in it that are not dimmable. You can see how green the light is coming off of the flourescent bulb though! It's amazing how much nicer the exposure comes out using manual settings from my light meter as opposed to the camera trying to do it by itself. Of course, my light meter cost more than my digital camera, so I guess that should say something about it, haha.

This week I brought home the light kit again and I started setting up a scene in my bedroom. I wanted to play with some of the wacky colored gels I bought earlier this week:

Bryan at the Computer
Again, just the school's basic light kit (3 lights) plus the blue light back there in the closet is actually this old 2 foot flourescent tube thing that I bought like 8 years ago for $5, wrapped up in a double layer of CTB gel.

This little shot from last night inspired me to do a whole little exercise -- shoot this same scene (me sitting at that computer) from the same camera angle but changing the lighting to match different genres of films and tv shows. The rules will be that I can only use the lights from the LAFS basic light kit (that's all I have anyway) plus whatever practicals I want to bring in (lights that you actually see used in the shot), and of course, whatever grip/electrical equipment I happen to own (like gels and diffusion). So I will probably do this tomorrow night, but here are the looks that are tentatively on the schedule:

  1. The Forensics Drama: Same as what I did last night but with the colors changed a bit.
  2. The Romantic Comedy: Typically a soft, bright, low contrast look.
  3. The Teen Drama: Similar to what I did last night. A Veronica Mars type look.
  4. The Film Noir: Typically a hard, dark, high contrast look.
  5. The Horror Film: I guess high contrast and top lit? I dunno really.
  6. The Korean Drama: I'd like to practice some bad lighting, too.
  7. The News/Interview Show: What if this was a segment on 20/20 or Nightline?
And maybe I'll think of some other thigns to do as well. But yeah, it should be pretty fun and challenging to try and pull these all off with the same three lights. I really love doing this stuff, haha. By the way since some people ask when I post things like this, I took these pictures with just my little Canon S70 digital camera, which is really nothing particularly special. I guess I just want to point out that you don't need a fancy or expensive camera to have fun experimenting with photography. Ability to have full manual control of the settings is a must, though!
Oh and by the way, I did end up posting up some of my midterm projects. In case you haven't seen them already, you can check them out on my LAFS Projects Page.