FORGE: A Feature Film by 500 Cuts

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Try it.  Everyone is doing it.  You’re not cool if you don’t do it.

One thing I learned very early in my filmmaking experience is that whether people are voluteering or being paid top dollar to work on your project, you gotta feed them right. People rarely seem to complain about working on a movie when the food is good.

I’d like to introduce our readers to Clara Ard (I need a photo!). Walker suggested I contact her for food because she has experience catering. So I did. I knew it would go well when our first meeting lasted a mere 20 minutes. And 18 of that was me explaining the project. Walker isn’t the kind of person who would vouch for a slouch, but Clara killed it! The food was always ready on time, it was always enough for everybody, and it was always exceptional. Ask anyone about their experience on Forge, then ask them about the food. It was truly great.

It’s expensive to find a good food person, but so much more costly when the crew is unhappy.

She caters events of all kinds. Call her!
clara.ard[at]gmail.com

We techincally have 1/66th of the movie left to shoot, but I’m feeling VERY good about what we accomplished in 11 eight hour days.  Even though our schedule was set for 9am to 7pm everyday, we often finished our scenes before 5pm.  I realize it’s a risk mentioning this because many filmy-type people (by that I mean, people who watch a lot of movies… not people who never shower) will look at the finished product and say, “They should have taken more time.”

Yes, we could have pushed the actors harder.  Yes, we could have set up more complicated camera moves.  Yes and yes and yes.  We are aware of all the things we could have done to make the movie better with more time, but the point was to finish this project in a very short time frame.  And we succeeded.  I’m not saying this in a boastful way like, “We’re the best of all times!”  I’m saying that we had a great cast and crew who knew the score and made it happen.  It was a great experience for me.  I’m proud to know everyone involved and even though the sentiment is always idly tossed around at the end of a show, I truly hope we can all work together again.

- Co.

Today was a very important day in the shoot, not only were we able to wrap on a couple of characters for the shoot (Robert Blanche, Tom Roback), we were also able to shoot the entirety of the longest scene in the film. Even though the scene was pretty long, it went really well and we kept the pace up and got everyone out of there at around 5:30.

One of the good things about being on this set has been the consistent lighting. Luckily the plan that we put into place is working out really well, and we haven’t needed to make any changes which helps us move very quickly from setup to setup. In fact, other than out overhead fluorescent rig, the only other light that I’ve put to use is a small LED panel manufactured by Rosco. The unit was lent to us by John Ashlee. He’s an amazing cinematographer, and a really great person! He’s contributed a lot to this project both in terms of gear and knowledge.

The LED panel makes an excellent fill light, and in this case it’s seen a lot of play to simulate light emitted by LCD screens onto faces. It’s the first time I’ve ever really used LED lighting before, and I’m sold! I can’t wait to shoot a night time driving scene so I can plaster an entire car interior with these things!

Since the lighting is relatively constant in the lab, one of the main variables for me becomes camera operation. Throughout the shoot there has been a mixture of handheld and fluid head operation. One of my favorite parts of shooting anything is actually operating the camera. Cameron did a great job pulling focus today- there were some really great shots in there that he pulled off extremely well. By the way, for those that don’t know, “pulling focus” is essentially the act of adjusting a manual focus lens to keep the subject sharp as that subject moves closer or farther from the camera.

It was a great day! Tomorrow will be a little lighter, but still just as fun! Stay tuned for more.

Today was our first day shooting on the lab set that Jack Shay built. We spend most of yesterday evening prepping it to shoot, which included rigging lights, dressing, and arranging various props. It doesn’t sound like much work, but some of us were there until midnight making final tweaks.

As you may know, the set is designed to be a clean-room lab. After discussing the look we wanted to go for, Jason and I settled on an overhead lighting scheme. A combination of clean-room reference photos and the ease of practical motivation for the light sources convinced us that overhead lighting was the best approach- not to mention the dilemma of where else to put your lights when designing your secret underground nano tech lab! The lighting in the set is provided from a rig we built containing 11 4-foot flourescent shop lights with high color-rendering tubes. The result of this rig is a soft even overhead light. It plays really well off of the white interior walls, and the monochromatic design of the set creates an interesting juxtoposition to the warm earthy tones of the cabin and exterior locations.

Anyhow, on to some photos!

These are from day 1 and 3.  All photos by Tomas Soderberg.

We spent last Sunday to Friday at the cabin location which represents the first week of principle photography on the movie. Jason and Myself actually stayed at the cabin the entire time which was really nice, and other people stayed a few nights here and there. Staying at the cabin throughout the week gave us a lot of time to talk about the next days shooting plan after wrap and before we started each day, and also to get the place organized and even pre-lit in some cases before the rest of the crew showed up. The week went really well, and we kept the pace up with an average of 17 setups per-day, with our largest day being 24 setups on Wednesday. 17 setups is really good considering our days have been fairly short, usually around 10am until 6 or 7pm. The short days are a lot easier on everyone, especially when you factor in that it takes almost 2 hours to get to and from set each day. Shorter working days also means that it’s essential to keep the pace up and to work quickly. On this shoot, the name of the game has been simple lighting setups. I usually try to make my setups as simple as possible anyways, so it’s been pretty natural to work that way.

Our lighting kit for the cabin consisted of a 575 watt PAR HMI, a 1200 watt PAR HMI, a Mole-Richardson 1k fresnel, a 4 foot 4 bank Kino fixture, and various practical globes/fixtures along with two 4 foot open frames with LEE 251 diffusion, and a selection of white/silver bead board reflectors. The HMI fixtures were by far the workhorses of the shoot, and I often found myself shooting them through 251 diffusion outside of windows, or aimed at white bounce cards inside a room. We were limited on power at the cabin, with our circuits being only 15 amps, so the 1200 and 575 HMI’s allowed us to get a tremendous amount of light output while still keeping a safe overhead on our circuits. There were a fair amount of living room scenes that I wanted to motivate very naturally, so I brought in the 1200 through a large sliding glass door/window as a soft backlight which I would then augment with fill from a silver board, or the 575 bounced off of a white card. Coincidentally, our 1200 also played outside of the window in essentially the same place, the only difference being that we would limit the amount of fill on faces and walls and instead let the light take on a harder more back lit “moon” feel.

The kitchen scenes took place both during the day and at night. For the daytime scenes, I brought in both the 575 and 1200 HMI’s through a bank of windows approximately 6 feet wide and 3 feet tall. We diffused them using our 4×4 frames of 251 outside the windows, and then taped 6mil clear visqueen to the inside of the window to diffuse the light even more. The end result was a very bright, but soft key light that lent a feel of overcast ambiance coming in from outside the window.We would tape additional diffusion in key places on the window depending on how close the actors got, this helped us keep people from becoming overexposed as they got closer to the windows.

For the night-time kitchen scenes Jeffree, Luke and Alex were sitting around a kitchen counter eating dinner. Our sole source of light in the scene was provided by a large (approximately 12-14” in diameter) smith-victor “bowl” light with a 500 watt 3200k medium base globe inside of it. We rigged it to a ceiling beam via furniture clamps, rubber gripping pads, and a short piece of 2×4 with a nail-on plate attached. We used a cardellini clamp and a gobo head to position the light where we wanted, and then clipped a single layer of opal diffusion to the light to further soften the source. The cabling was routed along the ceiling and out of the room, which allowed us to move the camera and actors througout the space without having to move stands or other lights. It was really essential to keep the space relatively open, as the kitchen was fairly small. To top it off, we added a very small amount of atmosphere to the room with some fog-in-a-can. The spill and reflection from this overhead source was enough to light up Paul (played by Luke Clements) as he stood to eat dinner. The way that his closeup was set up, the spill and reflection created a soft beautiful back/side light.

Another interior location was a bedroom where John (played by Jeffree Newman) sleeps. We lit the scene using a 1k fresnel gelled to half-blue and bounced into a white card. We had also considered lighting the room with a small practical lamp, but decided that a naturalistic moonlit feel was more appropriate. I used the tungsten pre-set on the camera so that the scene went slightly blue, and kept the light more or less perpendicular to the camera to create contrast and shadows. For a reversal on Paul we simply used the same setup and moved it in or out depending on the amount of light that was needed.

After the first day or two, everyone became pretty tuned into the various lighting setups that we used. Kyle Glenn was the only official grip on the shoot (everyone helped out when they could) and he worked very hard and very quickly to make these lighting setups happen. This week went extremely well and the footage is looking really great. I’ll try to get some interior scree grabs up soon to help illustrate the setups that I just mentioned.

Stay tuned for more info about our on-set data and dailies workflow, as well as notes about camera operation, framing choice, and exterior shooting!

-Patrick LaValley

We’ve got less than 10 hours until we roll our first shot of Forge! Weather permitting, we’ll be shooting all our cabin exterior scenes with our supporting actors (Robert, Brian, Tom, Nick, Danny and Austin). Jana Hamblin is coming out on Tuesday for her scenes, and the rest of the week will be the remaining cabin scenes with Luke, Jeffree and Alex. Personally, I’m really excited to be working with the monolith of talent that is our cast on this project. And our crew is an awesome group of super creative and talented individuals. Can’t wait to go to work tomorrow!

And it seems that the final pieces of the production are in place. Yesterday Pat and Co drove the bulk of our gear up to the cabin location, and in a few hours Pat, Eli and myself will be heading up to get ourselves organized and talk about our shots for tomorrow. Also, this week Jack Shay will be at our downtown Portland space constructing the Lab set, where we’ll be shooting next week.

Exciting things are afoot! Check back for more edge-of-your-seat updates during production!

Jason Windsor, Eli Shell and myself are heading up to our cabin location tonight to stay the night and discuss our first day of shooting tomorrow. We’ve ferried almost all of the gear up there already which is a big load off the shoulders. Often time is seems that gearing up to get out of town is half the battle. Even though the drive is only about 45 minutes, it’s great to know that we only have to load up all the people to complete the equation instead of trying to pack everyone in with the lights and grip gear. It will be great to actually wake up on-set tomorrow, rested and ready for the shoot! I’ll be staying up at the cabin all week with no internet connection, so look for updates from the rest of the FORGE crew as the production progresses!

A good number of the cast and crew showed up tonight at the Tanker.  I’ve always thought little face-to-face events like this go a long way toward making things more comfortable on set.  Or maybe I just like to see how/if everybody gets along.

Either way, I feel really good about the team we’ve assembled.  Some very talented people and some sort of talented people.  But no untalented people! (yuk, yuk)  It sounds weird because I’m the instigator, but I’m proud to be a part of this group.

List of Names.  (stay tuned for actual credits)

Luke Clements, Alex Mendeluk, Jeffree Newman, Jana Lee Hamblin, Robert Blanche, Thomas P. Roback, Brian Reis, Austin Healey, Nick Childs, James Sweet, Colin O’Neill, Danny Bruno, Jason Windsor, Eli Shell, Walker Williamson, Patrick LaValley, Cameron Carey, Shawn Willis, Selena Persiani, Kyle Glenn, Jack Shay, Andy Best, and Alex Olavarria.

Thanks for being a part of FORGE.  Everybody get some sleep because there’s no stopping it now!