Testing, preparing
- March 9th, 2009
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About a week ago Co, Alex, Luke, Jason and myself headed up to our Brightwood Oregon location to do a quick screen test. This test was beneficial in a variety of ways, not only for the actors and for Jason, but also for myself. This screen test allowed us to begin to see how this scene will look in the final film, and provided a platform to try out lighting, framing, color correction, and a variety of other things that will eventually help us to formulate a cohesive film. Our shoot schedule will be tight so it helps to make decisions about the film prior to the “day of”. From here on out expect to see more tests like these as well as storyboards, animatics, and pre-visualization animations. The goal of all these tests and up-front work is to make our production run efficiently, and minimize complicated decision-making on-set, which is especially important when working on a tight schedule.
A few tech specs…
Camera: HVX200, 720P, 24FPS
Letus Extreme, Nikkor: 50mm 1.4, 105mm 2.5, 135mm 2.8
1.2k HMI, bounce cards for fill.
In previous experience, I’ve found that working with the Letus adapter effectively gives me a camera with a sensitivity below 200 ISO. It takes a lot of light to expose properly using the adapter. By necessity, we usually end up keeping the aperture pretty wide open which isn’t ideal for a variety of reasons. A wide aperture creates a very shallow depth of field. In essence, the area that’s “in focus” on the image plane isn’t very deep. This becomes a problem when you consider that while shooting we must manually keep our shot in focus. Moreover, a very wide aperture is usually not the ideal for any lens, which leads to the overall picture having a soft feel despite everything being dead on. Part of the testing process for this shoot will involve figuring out the best way to light so that I don’t have to shoot “wide open”. So far, the plan is to use strong one-directional lighting sources that will allow me to put all my eggs in one basket, and therefore allowing me to stop down
As you can see from the footage, our setup here is pretty simple. No fancy dollies, no jib moves, no elaborate lighting rigs. This “lean and mean” approach allows for fast setups and minimal lighting changes between shots.
Until next time!
-Patrick