4 AM in Las Vegas

This morning, we shot the second half of the scene where Aldo and Jennifer get married at a strip-mall wedding chapel. It's right down the street from the "Welcome To Fabulous Las Vegas" sign. The scene itself involves the characters stopping to take a break from their drunken wandering, and Jennifer turns around to discover that there is a wedding chapel. She suggests that She and Aldo get married, then annulled, so that way their second marriage (to other people) will work better. Aldo, still drunk, sees some logic to that and agrees.
Since we don't really have the cooperation of any businesses in Las Vegas, I was sure to scout the most generic looking "WEDDINGS" sign I could find. It was just a happy accident that it's so close to the famous Las Vegas sign. We arrived right around 5:00 AM. I learned from this site, that the sunrise would occur right around 5:28 AM. That gave us about 45 minutes of good lighting to work with.

As it turns out, the wedding chapel stays open until around 5 AM, then they close for a few hours. We lucked out in that sense, so we were able to pretend to come out of the building. In the scene, Jarrod is carrying a Polaroid of himself and Rebecca at the altar (taken at my house earlier in the week) and a small container of bubbles. Rebecca clutches her marriage certificate to her chest. They walk out of the chapel and towards the street, then she suggests that they go back to the room.


For the scene I used the FigRig again, this time, with a 28mm lens. This let me get right up to the actors while still keeping most of them in frame. Since there was quite a bit of light outside, I was able to shoot at an aperture of around 5.6 which gave me a little more DoP to work with. I had them walk to me, stop, turn left and walk down the street. Once we got that shot, I switched to the 50mm lens. This is great for close ups of the individual actors because it makes the background really defocused. I got some close ups of both of the actors, then I got some insert shots of the bubbles and Polaroid. I realize as I am typing this that I forgot to get an insert shot of the marriage certificate. I'll just get that when we get back home. It'll be a tight enough shot that you wont be able to see the BG.


Once we were done with that, we headed back to the hotel. Casinos are really nice and peaceful in the early morning. The only people playing the machines are angry loners and people waiting to go to the airport. We went back up to the room. Everyone is asleep now, except me. I plan on sleeping soon as well. We'll get up around 1:00 PM and then it's lunch time. We have a big scene to shoot today. It's a 6 page scene that takes place in the room. We are shooting about half of it today (hopefully.) I'll write all about it soon. Bye guys!