LADIES AND GENTLEMEN: WEEK 6 – SWEAT, SOHO and GOING LIVE
The insane rollercoaster that is Ladies and Gentlemen is coming to a close and man it has been a crazy ass ride. It looks great, then it looks ass, then half the crew don’t show up, then there’s no food and we can’t get to set because London’s transport system devolves to the dark ages at weekend. Sometimes you just have to hold your hands up and say ‘We’re just going to get $%&ed and there’s nothing we can do about it, then suddenly you’re shooting something astonishing and it all makes sense again.
This weekend, more than any other, we were under hideous time pressure, which meant seriously compromising the quality of what we were shooting in order to just get it in the can
When we’re good we’re very good and when we’re bad we’re awful. Awful in terms of the whole production, things just not going the way we expect them to and being helpless to stop it. This weekend, more than any other, we were under hideous time pressure, which meant seriously compromising the quality of what we were shooting in order to just get it in the can. I’ve shot thirty odd music videos and that’s a pretty familiar situation but it never becomes any less annoying. Time is always against you but we’ve been lucky on L+G up to this point that we’ve not had to hurry too much. This time, however, we were definitely guilty of shooting Hollywood in the morning and Hollyoaks (rancid British drama) in the afternoon. Locations tend not to like you running late, and yet, there we were, proper late, both Saturday and Sunday night which stressed out the young producers something rotten. Hah, they’ll learn!
The Merlin looks daft, and you feel like a proper bell using it, but I defy anyone to tell me the results aren’t decent
Our first sequence of shots was done on the Merlin again and giving me another opportunity to earn a credit as steadicam operator (right… does it even count?). The Merlin looks daft, and you feel like a proper bell using it, but I defy anyone to tell me the results aren’t decent. We had a sniff of wind on saturday and that poor Merlin just gets smashed around like you wouldn’t believe, but thankfully we were only doing short sections so I think we got away with it.
Page after page of the script involves people talking on the phone or sitting down in conversation so any chance I get to move the camera or move the actors has to be grabbed with both hands. We then moved into the ‘sweatbox’, a grubby student house in East London which was supposed to be a drug squat – no set dressing required! Funnily enough it was probably our most interesting looking set of the whole shoot. Our DOP, Yuri, created a beautiful moody atmosphere, very film noir, and it was gorgeous, despite the hideous nature of the subject matter. There was however one small problem. Food has been a bit of a sticky point on this shoot. Normally you’d expect one hot meal a day on shoots like this, as a bare minimum,
but that hasn’t always happened. There’s been a bit of grumbling amongst the crew, not heavy, but audible anyway. Unfortunately, our set was the kitchen… somewhat by way of overcompensating I expect we were treated to pizza after pizza after pizza, boiling water for coffee, gently steaming on the stove… high summer… nice. It was hot hot hot and we were not very pretty, at all. We were also running late. And, as I’ve already mentioned, this was a problem.
Our opening sequence takes place in Soho and involved some nifty choreographed steadicam work, but we only had a window of a couple of hours to shoot it. We had secured a unit base in a local coffee shop but they shut at midnight and now we were running late. We actually got to set at 11:15pm, giving us 45 minutes to knock off the sequence. Impossible. Show must go on though and our steadicam op Andy Walker had got his Vincent Laforet freak on with adaptors, rails, wireless transmitters, wireless follow focus, and hdmi convertors. Yes boss Mr. Vinnie, sir, if you read this, we were thinking of you! The steadicam isn’t really designed to take cameras like the 5D so you have to weight it up to get the balance right.
I did get a little moist when I saw the whole rig up and running.
Zacuto rails provided the platform with the Redrock DSLR baseplate to attach the 5D. An Aja HDMI-SDI converter took the signal and made it SDI so we could pass it to two monitors. One feed went to the Marshall 651ST on the bottom of the sled, the other went to a wireless transmitter, firing the signal to the monitor strapped round my neck. Various brick batteries completed the setup and it was a proper frankenstein looking beast. Nice. Lens wise we had to deviate from our usual Canon selection (sorry Canon) because we needed a lens with stops on the focus ring in order to calibrate the Bartek remote follow focus. So I borrowed a set of ZF primes from a friend who’s had them modified by Duclos with lens gears, declicked iris rings and damped focus rings, just beautiful lenses for moving image work. The 35mm is the go-to lens for this kind of work and we shot the whole sequence on it. I know Vincent Laforet gets a lot of shit for being so obsessed with his toys but steadicam is one of my absolute favourite tools to shoot with and I did get a little moist when I saw the whole rig up and running.
Our stock response when we’re asked what we’re filming is to say ‘Songs of Praise’, a lame religious programme in England, and that normally gets people off our backs
As you’d expect, shooting last thing on a saturday night in the centre of London was an absolute nightmare. Drunks are drawn to a steadicam like catnip and we just got harassed horribly by people asking why we didn’t put them in it because they were Welsh (I kid you not). Our stock response when we’re asked what we’re filming is to say ‘Songs of Praise’, a lame religious programme in England, and that normally gets people off our backs. Not this time. We also suffered some jobsworth Canadian editor who insisted on standing next to us and demanding to know who we were and what we were filming because he’d accidentally strayed into shot and wasn’t happy about it. We had full permission to shoot and the rules are that if people are in the shot for more than 3 seconds then you have to get a release form, if not then you can film with impunity. Eventually we had to delete the shot he was in, but the guy wouldn’t leave it alone. Some people just don’t get it. The whole thing was a massive rush, we didn’t have enough light and our unit base kicked us out so we were in trouble. But we shot something, that’s the main thing. My grand vision for the opening probably won’t be satisfied, but it’ll be decent and that’s probably the best we could hope for under the circumstances.
There’s some really interesting opportunities with Ustream and it’s technology that can only improve from where we are now
Sunday was a whole different ballgame, reshooting all our bar scenes in a new location and with a massive number of setups to get through. We were also broadcasting live from the set via UStream, the first time that’s been done I believe. It was actually something of a success with around 200 people tuning in throughout the day and some good interaction on the chat forum. I’d definitely do it again but with a bit more planning, as the opportunity to give people a proper glimpse into what we’re doing is really exciting. It’s all well and good me blogging about it and posting photos but if you can see the actual shoot and how we’re doing everything, then that’s way more interesting. I think there’s some really interesting opportunities with Ustream and it’s technology that can only improve from where we are now. Sadly, we ran out of time on Sunday as well and had to hugely compress our shotlist to get it all covered. We just about had enough extras to make the place look busy and I’m hoping it’s all going to look beautiful in the final piece.
The 85mm has a character completely unlike all the other lenses with the most unbelievable bokeh you’ve ever seen and it is exquisite
One last thing to note is how our shooting has evolved over the course of the last six weeks. We have a full complement of lenses from 14mm to 100mm but on Sunday we shot nearly the entire on the 85mmL. The DOP, Yuri, has a very particular vision for things and actually he was right in this instance as the 85mm creates intimacy in a way that the 50mm can’t. I’m a big fan of using unexpected lens choices, i.e. shooting closeups on wide angle lenses and shooting wide shots on long lenses. So, most of our shots were on the 85mm, getting right back for the wides and coming in on the same lens for the closeups. The 85mm has a character completely unlike all the other lenses with the most unbelievable bokeh you’ve ever seen and it is exquisite. We may not have any money but we do have fantastic picture quality at our disposal and a massive thanks has to go to Anna Ghosh and Alison Mitchell at Canon for their support throughout the project. It makes such a difference. One day left to shoot but that won’t be for a couple of weeks. Now we have some time to get some distance from the project and come back fighting for the last day of production. Then into the edit for some serious caffeine and chair-warming.
