Last night i headed out to do some driving shoots on the HVX. i needed to get some “out the window” shots. This proved to be somewhat tough since i couldnt light the buildings i was driving by. Instead i had to try and find areas with a lot of light. This also proved to be a bit tough. I tried a few differnet frame rates and shutter speeds. I found the higher frame rates didnt work to well since i was already low on light. I ended up shooting a few shoots at 1/24 sec shutter and 6 db gain. I hate to use gain, but it was the only way to get some of the shoots.

I was fairly happy with a few of the shoots and i may use a few of them in the final cut. here are a few screen grabes. They are fairly blurry for a few reason. 1) they are shoot while moving at 1/24 sec 2) the 6 db gain. Altough they are grainy as hell on here, they dont look so bad in motion. Honestly, if you were to go out and try to shoot this on 500t with a t1.3 i dont know much better they be. Probably be just as grainy, if not more.

This past weekend we began production on my thesis film entitled “Three AM.” Last Thursday we picked up all the equipment. (HVX, Aaton XTR Prod Super 16mm, Super-Speed Lenses, 2ks, 1ks, 4 ft kino flows, 2 ft kino flows, arri kits, c stand etc). Its a lot of gear, but its nice to have everything we need. After testing all the equipment and doing another camera test Thursday night, i relaxed and got ready for the shoot saturday.

IT poured rain all friday night, but lucky for us, saturday cleared up. Crew call was at 4:30 at a parking lot on Temple Universities campus. Everyone was there, and everything was good. We started to set up lights, and waited for the sun to go down. I tried to shoot a few still frames of the set up, but my canon 10d kept freezing up on me. So there are only a few.

After our actor got there and the sun went down, we began to shoot. Cole, the young actor, is a very nice and talented young kid. He was great to work with, and very cooperative. His dad Pat was also super cool. They were very nice to work with.

We shot this scene on the HVX. We had two generators (equaling around 5000 watts) to power the lights. We had one kino flow and a small 200 watt clamp light lighting the back seat. We also had a 150 watt arri that we used at times to highlight areas. We then had a moving 600 watt arri (ND at times, and diffused at times) behind the car. To the right hand side we had another 600watt arri, which was also diffused. In front of the car we had a moving omi with a full blue (i think) gel on it. The cleaner blue light, gave a nice contrast with the other lights. By timing all the moving lights property, we were able to get a realistic, yet surreal look of the young boy riding in the back seat of a moving car. We did multiple takes, shooting most set ups at 24fps and 48 fps. I wish we also shoot a few at 32, or 36 fps. For the most part, we were shooting wide open the whole time. Or at f2, or f2.8. Focus was a little bit of an issue at times, but for the most part we were okay.

We shot from 6:30 to 8, then take a short dinner break. During the break, i transfered the P2 cards onto my laptop and got a chance to check out the footage. IT LOOKED SO GOOD! HD baby. After dinner we went back it and got the last few shots i wanted. We were able to call it a rap at 10:15pm, which is considerable good, since i was hoping to finish at 10pm. Hey, if you can come within 30 minutes of your schedule, thats pretty damn good.

Overall the shoot went extreme well. The HD workflow wasn’t a problem at all. In fact I’m backing all the footage up onto DVDs at the moment, and getting ready for next weekends shoot. I’m also going to go out and try to shoot some city “b roll” tonight. The shoot next weekend, is on super16mm on the Aaton XTR prod. Its the only two days on film of the whole production. Things are moving along quite nicely, but i cant wait to be done shooting so i can start piecing it all together.

Frame Grab: Our young actor Cole starring out the window. This image is not full res, nor has any color correction. Click to enlarge.

Frame Grab: a nice close up, once again, no CC and not full rez. Click to enlarge.

sooo, over the summer i was a beta tester for a site called Travelistic.com. I got to play around with the site before it luached and also uploaded some stuff to test out. Last week the site luached. You should go check it out. Its a pretty rad site, i want to upload some more stuff to it. Below is the one piece i did for them as a test. www.travelistic.com - GO CHECK IT OUT!!!

I really need to find a job that pays for me to travel. I’m starting to get the travel bug real bad.