production blog

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.

Pre-production write up:

Clay and I are big fans of stylized photography, mixed light sources, and heavy compositions. To that second constituent, we’re looking to play with the locations existing lighting of fluorescents. ↓ ← Below, left is a photo we took with a digital SLR under the existing lighting: 1/50th shutter, EI200, ƒ/3.5, tungsten balance on the camera. While we like the green, we thinking we might want a colder look. We had planned on replacing the bulbs with ones that have an approximate correlated color temperature of 6500 but the light output wasn’t enough to accommodate the couple of shots that’ll be shot at 60fps or 35° shutter. So instead we changed them to a similar type to what’s at the location and then we’ll color correct the shot in post. ↓ → Below, right is the result from the color shift. It’s a shift to blue-cyan using Final Cut Pro’s 3-way Color Corrector with a limiter so as to not effect the skin tones too much. It all sounds great on paper - we’ll see how it unfolds when it comes time to do the final color correction.

(Clay’s blotted-out because I thought it was funny.)