production blog

Well it’s done. We shot the last of the footage this weekend for the short film, “TomThumb”, directed by my friend and colleague Clay Delauney. I’m crawling out of my skin like a heroin addict in anticipation of showing this project. I’m very proud of this little movie and can’t wait to share it with all of you. I consider it the embodiment of the very best Clay and I have to offer and it might just be some of the best stuff my friend and I have done thus far together. The reactions we’ve gotten when to a short edited snippet have been wonderful. There should be something to look at in the next couple of weeks. Till then.

↑ ↑ Frame grabs for the beginning and ending of the film.

↑ ↑ Clay finishes dressing Michael’s gauss compacted hand. It looks disturbingly authentic as someone who’s lost his digits.

↓ ↓ As part of the story, a computer chat room was need. Clay asked if I could design an animated one using After Effects. After some back and forth, here’s what we came up with. It looks fairly legit. (This is a compressed version.)

: : click here to see movie.

With Hollywood is still quiet from the strike (even though it’s over) and the fear of investing in films still persists, my wife and I bugged out of town and traveled back to New York to visit her parents while they stay there. If you’re interested, visit the “more…” section below.

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Friend and director Clay Delauney talked to me about shooting this short film with him late last year. Schedules and the holidays all conspired to make that an impossibility. That is until this month. The project is “Tom Thumb” - a story about a internet predator that finds himself prayed upon.

I can’t wait to write about this shoot but I’m packing for another trip to the Big Apple. I’ll do as much writing on the plane as I can and upload my thoughts tomorrow. Till then, I couldn’t wait to post some pictures. To my friend Clay, great job buddy. To the cast and crew, thank you for a wonderful job and for all your hard work - I think it shows on every frame.

↓ ↓ Jeff (Producer) show’s off Clay’s creation (silicone prosthetic). I’m not gonna lie, it’s a bit disturbing.

↓ ↓ And speaking of disturbing… the aftermath. The photo on the left is taken at the end of the shoot and has a bunch of Clay’s make-up voodoo. ↓ → The photo on the right has two rubber tubes attached to syringes that ejected Clay’s special batch of blood.

↓ ↓ Frame grab of the hand… Nice! During the shot the prosthetic stretched out three centimeters but looked more than real. Again, disturbingly real.

↓ ← Clay preps the blood gag. ↓ → Frame grab from the final shot.

↓ ↓ We shot the fights scenes with a 1/120th shutter speed (film equivalent of 72° shutter angle). In this shot, the dripping blood from the knife is a little more staccato.

↑ ↑ Clay directing Brian. Is Brian really listening?

↑ ↑ Clay making movie magic.

↑ ↑ This shot of Clay I really would rather wait to explain.

I will give you a clue though… “You’re ‘n trouble!”

This was a very cool series of 60 fps dolly shots down a dark and creepy hallway. We lit it with a some 650w tweenies with the ones backlighting the actor having opal gel.

These are some of my two favorite shots. ↓← There’s something about the handcuffs that’s compelling, sinister, captivating (pardon the pun) and graphic. In this shot we placed a reflector left of camera and to the right of camera, a Kino Diva 200 shooting through a 2×3 silk. The levels were about two to three stops below the key of ƒ/2.8. They were angled to maximize the highlights from the chrome. ↓ → The use of these fluorescent fixtures was originally a practical one. We hoped to shoot with a degree of freedom from motion pictures lights, so the lights were placed to fill the center of the scene space. Because of the need to have enough light to shoot at either slow motion (maximum of 60 fps) or with a reduced shutter (1/250th or 35° film equivalent), I asked if four units could be purchased. The happy accident of that is that the lights placed in pairs created a very graphic composition especially in this shot.

↓← For this close-up of actor Michael Garbe, we used the Lensbaby 3G with the ƒ/4.0 iris ring which produced a wider “sweet spot” that’s in focus.

↓ ← Actor Michael Garbe ↓ → Actor Brian Lloyd

↓ ↓ The previous images were pulled straight from the raw footage. The following two images have been color corrected only slightly - although not necessarily what the final images will look like. ↓← This is a four meter long dolly shot with a two meter jib arm and with the camera underslung and about five centimeters off the ground. It was shot with both a 24mm and 50mm lens. We tried a couple of variations but the one I like best is one where Clay set the focus to about two meters in front of the camera and what you get is a foreground that’s soft and the back ground that’s soft. ↓ → It’s great when you find a director whose visual aesthetic complements your own. In this shot we used a 50mm lens at ƒ/1.8 at about 30 cm. The depth of field is nothing. We kept focus on the plane where the key is inserted. As the actor walks up to the door he’s radically out of focus. Then all you see is the key and hand in focus for a brief moment until he’s dragged off which is seen in the reflection of the door handle. It’s an incredibly beautiful shot.

Vendors:

Lenses : Samy’s Camera
Nikkor lenses: 14mm (ƒ/2.8) / 24mm (ƒ/2.0) / 35mm (ƒ/1.4) / 50mm (ƒ/1.8) / 85mm (ƒ1.4) / 300mm (ƒ2.8)

Camera & G&E: Jeff Cole Productions

A moment of Zen with the best shot of me.

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What a glorious weekend - shooting a music video for singer/songwriter Sara Mann. It’s for a song from her upcoming album. You can listen to the song, “The End of You”, on her mySpace page: http://www.myspace.com/mannsara The video should be available for viewing by Valentines day. Keep a look out for it.

From a home in North Hollywood, the video includes both a performance and a narrative story element. The project is directed by Guy Julian - a name you’ll see often in the music video section of my resume. We shot the project using the Panasonic HVX200. As you may have read in a previous entry, I recently purchased a Lensbaby 3G and have been mostly using it for still photography. The Lensbaby is a selective focus lens. But after having seen it used on the feature film, “The Butterfly and the Diving Bell”, this seemed like a good device for what we were doing and a fine, real world test for an upcoming short film I’ll be shooting where the Lensbaby will get some use. To get the Lensbaby to work with the HVX, we used a Letus35 Extreme lens adaptor (↓ see photo). The Letus35 is an adaptor for using 35mm lenses on video cameras. Both worked extremely well in this application. The frame below was shot with the Lensbaby without any iris rings (ƒ/2.0). As expected from some testing my friend Clay and I did with the camera a few weeks back, the camera performed as expected. In this configurations, the camera is performing with an EI of 200.

↓ ↓ The following two photos are from shots that we did in hallway were we zoomed out on the camera enough to see the edges of the ground glass and partially see the mirrors on the Letus35. Personally, I love this stuff. It’s reminiscent of things I’ve gotten during telecine. Here we used a Nikkor 50mm (ƒ/1.8) lens.

↓ ↓ Below is the final lighting plan for the performance footage. In this room, hundreds of cards were hung buy fishing line - it’s an element of the song. The Lekos on the fireplace have Alice Blue (incidentally, the color is named after Alice Roosevelt Longworth - her favorite color and who happens to be Theodore Roosevelt’s eldest daughter). These lights flickered by using a Magic Gadget flicker box. They had been meant to wash the room with blue but they ended up being a blue wash for the background. Still good and perhaps better this way. The band is mostly backlit by Dedo lights and 420 Pepper lights which are also on the flicker box. They’re kept low to hit the lens from time to time as they pass through the hanging cards as we dolly back and forth. By and large, we shot wide open on the camera (ƒ/1.7) and with a 1/250 shutter (35°)

↑ ↑ From L > R: Phil Hurley (guitar) / Miles Crawford (drums) / Michael Eisenstein (bass) - Phil is in a band call “Stoneyhoney” -n- Miles has played in “Stomp” for years -n- Michael with his wife Kay Hanley were part of “Letters to Cleo” and is currently producing. If you look at the photo on the left toward the bottom right you see she show’s mascot, Maya.

↓ ↓ For the verses, we dolly in to one set of for two lines in the lyrics, then the set is changed and we then dolly out from the new set. We shot some balloons against a greenscreen and that’ll be composited between the shots. Many thanks to my wife for doing the set design and make-up.

↑ ↑ Guy directing Sara on our New Year’s set.

We had one set that needed to look like a dinner scene. Steaks for the shot where browned using a propane blow torch. Since my wife is a chef and she’s done food styling before, the trick not only worked it was fun too. I know because I got to brown one of the steaks - boys do love fire . The only thing that went on the steaks is a sprinkle of course salt. As I browned the one steak, I was struck by how like painting it was. I would darken an area and them move to the edges and fry the fat and blacken the bone and then darken another area until I felt it was done.

Vendors:

Camera : Indie Rentals
Grip & Electric : Wooden Nickel
Drum set sound dampeners : SIR

Ah yes… your moment of Zen. (Toby, our IT guy, our playback guy and all-round good guy.)