LADIES AND GENTLEMEN: WEEK 3, MERLINS, MOISTURE AND MASTER SHOTS (OH AND WE SAY A GOODBYE TOO)
Exactly halfway through the shoot for Ladies and Gentlemen now and you can tell the novelty’s starting to wear off. We are on the skinniest of budgets and little things like a hot meal for the crew suddenly become a moaning point. Minor niggles we put up with initially are starting to grate now. This weekend was easily the most trying of the lot so far and though we’re hardly cracking it’s going to be important for us all to keep pushing on, enjoying the work as much as possible. We spent both days shooting in a legal office, a brilliant place with frosted glass walls, great depth, lines, wood panelling and space, sweet, sweet space. Filming in cramped flats becomes very wearing very quickly.
I think I just underestimated how essential a strong working knowledge of the 5D would need to be
We had three new cast members to work with and easily the most intense scenes we’ve had to date, as well as some of the most comic. We’d had a good day on the previous sunday and I wanted to continue that energy through to this weekend and crank through our setups neatly… saturday was a disaster. I’m a stickler for timekeeping on shoots and for me an 8 o clock call time is an 8 o clock call time. Our director of photography has been late for every single shoot day so far and, when we’re a slow slow slow slow slow slow unit anyway that just kills me.
First shot of the day is a simple 35mm wide shot of a young woman walking into an office. An hour and a half to light. Why? Normally you’d blame the 1st AD for allowing the DOP to get away with that but in this instance he is just inexperienced and very very slow. Every lighting setup requires innumerable fiddles, tweaks, relights, wrong turns, huffs and puffs and mistakes. That was the pattern of the day, and it just got worse when shooting inside a glass-walled office. Redheads get hot, bodies get hot, it’s summer, it’s hot, and we began to sweat like pigs. Now double the set up time for every lighting setup and suddenly that room is a hellhole. It sounds like I’m having a massive go at my DOP, but I’m really not. We’re an indie crew, working weekends and your options are incredibly limited, as DOPs don’t need to do those kind of jobs. Ultimately it was my call to hire him and I just got it wrong. His experience has been mainly of film cameras and not DSLRs and I think I just underestimated how essential a strong working knowledge of the 5D would need to be.
Our normal focus puller Matt Choules is very savvy with the 5D and doubles up as a camera assistant, prepping the camera in the best way to retain sharpness and limit the ISO but he was away all weekend leaving us shorthanded and requiring our AC Khanseig to step in as focus puller. I love Khanseig to bits and he actually did really well as FP but he’s still learning about cameras and couldn’t give our DOP the same level of support as Matt. I’m pretty patient normally but there’s nothing I hate more than sluggish shoots. Ultimately you’re the one who pays for it when you’re sitting in the edit tearing your hair out. I’ve been there too many times and the quicker your team can get through setups the better covered you’re going to be. When you’re dealing with proper budgets then slow shoots are of course costing you money. Lots and lots and lots of it. You just can’t do that.
Low budget filmmaking can be incredibly rewarding when you’re repeatedly pull off minor miracles, but when you hit obstacles it can really kill you
Now, spare a thought for our actors, unable to move while we light them, sweating in their full wardrobe while we’re all in shorts, with the lights focussed squarely on them. The scenes required a lot of intensity and modulations in performance as an older woman gradually seduces a younger one and it was pretty awful working under those conditions. They’re troopers though and delivered brilliantly under pressure so I’m confident that the hard work will pay off in the final product. Oh, that room smelled really really bad as well. Nice. Low budget filmmaking can be incredibly rewarding when you’re repeatedly pull off minor miracles, but when you hit obstacles it can really kill you and you need to pick yourselves up and keep positive otherwise you can quickly lose the crew. Fortunately we have a brilliant crew, from Pedro, our first, to Tim our Production Manager, Owen our gaffer, Robert, Linda and Jo the production team, Manuel the art director (and soundman) and an army of volunteers for running, catering, driving, we’ve been really lucky to find a group that really get along. So, Sunday was a much better day.
I’ve rigged a bigger camera like a Canon XHA1 to the Merlin and it is so so so much easier to balance and keep control of than DSLRs which suffer from having a very short base and the centre of gravity in a very awkward place
I earned my first steadicam credit breaking out the Merlin for the first time and doing a relatively straightforward shot for sure, but one where I had to absolutely hit my marks as we had no way of focussing the camera. Fun! The Merlin is fantastic but when you have to hit every single mark every time, stopping and starting and panning it becomes incredibly sweaty work. I’ve rigged a bigger camera like a Canon XHA1 to the Merlin and it is so so so much easier to balance and keep control of than DSLRs which suffer from having a very short base and the centre of gravity in a very awkward place. Twitchy at best. You can see the results in the dailies which will be available to view soon.
One of the bonuses (hah) of having such a slow unit is that I’ve had to become much more mercenary with my shotlist, combining shots into single takes, designing better staging and thinking much harder about master shots. I love master shots but without a track and dolly it’s hard to really design long ones. Still, we had some good ones this weekend, swinging a single lens, and staging action so that we tell a huge chunk of story in a single take. There’s something very satisfying about that. For about two hours on sunday we started to crack through setups, shooting at the kind of pace I like, and I think we knocked off 12 setups in two hours which isn’t terrible going. Then the world cup game between England and Germany started. The first and I had agreed that we’d break for the whole game to allow everyone to watch it which made a big difference to morale as we’d not had a break at all the previous day. We even managed to squeeze in two extra scenes, the writer Rob Lucas just pulling them out of his backside during the match to accommodate a last minute change of location and logistics. They worked beautifully. And we only finished an hour late, a major achievement for us!
We’re using sliders a lot and it’s all helping make the production look that little bit slicker
One other word about gear, which has been different from weekend to weekend. My Marshall came back from being fixed and boy did we need it. For some reason the image was ghosting but I suspect that was just the cable we were using (hint: buy lots and lots of HDMI-Mini HDMI cables – they always break, ALWAYS. ALWAYS. ALWAYS.) Yes it cost £235 to get it fixed, which is pretty much the same price you can pick up the Lilliput for… (ugh) but hell, it’s just a necessity. Our regular focus puller has a big strong slider for the DSLRs whereas mine is the 1m Shooter slider from Glidetrack and it just isn’t strong enough or dependable enough for us to do any really creative moves, but for adding a bit of Tony Scott to phone conversations (if you don’t know what I’m talking about then I suggest you surrender a few uncared for hours of your soul to the monstrosity that is The Taking of Pelham 123 – awful unnecessary tracking shots on Denzel….) then it’s fine. You have to weight it down and support it because it’s just too lightweight for a proper DSLR rig. I’d suggest getting the HD version. Still, we’re using sliders a lot and it’s all helping make the production look that little bit slicker.
. . . . the pace is killing us and we’re constantly in danger of having to bump scenes which seriously jeopardises the budget.
So, as you’ve probably already guessed, we’ve now said goodbye to our DOP and we’ll be joined by a new one for the final three weekends. It’s always tough when you find yourself in that situation but ultimately you have to do what’s best for the production and getting the job done. When people give up their time for free it feels like an act of pretty rancid ingratitude to dump them halfway through a shoot. Hopefully the dailies show that we’re getting decent stuff, the work isn’t bad, but the pace is killing us and we’re constantly in danger of having to bump scenes which seriously jeopardises the budget. Worse really for me is the fact that I have to suppress the creative instincts and little touches that make my work uniquely mine. My ideas inevitably require a bit more time to set up and nearly always have to be canned because there just isn’t time. That’s probably the most annoying part of this for me, knowing that I can’t put my stamp on the work as strongly as I’d like, when this whole production is one of those rare opportunities when I ought to have the freedom to do just that. Apologies for the moany blog but everything’s putting so much time and effort into this shoot I feel responsible to deliver something great for them to justify that!
