Finally done with shooting!

Today was the last day of shooting. We arrived at the Omni Hotel at 8:00 am exactly and unloaded all our gear. By the time all the actors showed up at 9:35 or so, we were just about ready to roll. I finally got my new Follow Focus from Redrock Micro, so I was very excited to get to use it. (I would have liked to have used it for the whole trip, but whatever). This follow focus is much better than my previous FF. As opposed to being a friction-based wheel that turns the lens, this FF uses gears that ensure there is no slippage. It also had an expansion port for me to connect an 18" flexible whip to it. This made the crane move a lot easier for Geoff to pull focus on.

Matt (Jarbo) had a pretty easy job. Being Key Grip means that he was in charge of pulling the dolly when the move started. But, he did have the harder job of slowing the dolly to a stop before it ran off the tracks. I lit the scene 2 ways. One side of the room (where Charley was) was lit by window light alone. The other side of the room (where the crane ended up) was lit with 2 1K DP lights, shining through a diffuser with CTB taped to it. This gave me a nice even white balance, while at the same time, made sure my exposure level was constant.


My actors were all great. The main actor (besides Rebecca and Jarrod) is named Charley Miller. Being a theatrically trained actor, he came prepared with several suits to show me. I picked the most "colorful" one and he put it on. The basis of the scene was The Boss (Charley) giving a lecture to a bunch of listless employees of some generic company. The shot starts on Charley, pedestals down and pans over to the table everyone is sitting at and tracks latterly across it untill finally arriving at Jarrod and Rebecca who are passing drawings of the boss to eachother.

I had a brief paragraph of dialog prepared for Charley, but I asked him if he could improv it. He must have done about 20 takes. Each one was different and each one was hilarious. I did one shot where I just hold on him for about a minute because it was such great stuff. After the crane move was done, I did an overhead shot of Rebecca passing the note to Jarrod. Then I shot coverage of the notes close-up in case I need to cut to show it closer.
After we were done shooting, (which took much less time than I budgeted for), we headed down the block to a restraunt called Dick's Last Resort. Everybody had food and got to talk. It was a fun time. I thanked everyone for helping me with the movie, and was sure to sign Non-Compensated Release forms for everybody who appeared on camera. (I will post a template of that in a future post). As I said before, it was a good day. I'm excited that principal photography is done and I can start editing the footage. I will be updating again tomorrow, so stick around!