LADIES AND GENTLEMEN 2ND WEEKEND – HANDHELD, NIGHTSHOOTS, MONITORS

After the struggles of the first weekend I was hoping that the second weekend would kick on and be a smoother affair and it actually turned out to be a fairly successful couple of days shooting. We had a number of new challenges this weekend involving night exteriors, handheld work, new actors and a new location. We also had some old challenges that we had to get right this time round. Foremost amongst these was the day-for-night conundrum. This isn’t a new problem. Even when it’s supposed to be dark you still need to be able to see what’s going on. There’s a fairly common view that DSLRs are somehow miracle workers in low light but that’s utter rubbish. They break up horribly in low light situations exhibiting chromatic aberration, noise (if you pump up the ISO) and a dramatic loss in sharpness, particularly if you start shooting wide open. I’m not sure we entirely conquered any of these problems particularly well this weekend in any of the situations we had to deal with.
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Ladies & Gentlemen – Dailies from First Week

A quick look at our dailies from the first weekend shooting on Ladies and Gentlemen. Shot on the 5d with a glidetrack and a full complement of L series primes from 14mm to 100mm (though that one isn’t an L!) and the 24-70L as a viewfinder.
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Ladies And Gentlemen

I think there comes a time in everyone’s life when they start to question whether they’ve missed the boat, whether there was something they should have been doing by now, but that, for whatever reason, kept being put off for another day. That’s where I find myself this year. I set up a production company at 23 with no experience and a pretty pitiful set of skills, but I did have two great friends who took the plunge with me and together we worked like fiends, never sleeping, taking any and every job we could lay our hands on till we had established the company and given ourselves a huge platform to build careers on. During that time I worked on everything from commercials to big tv shows, gaining invaluable experience along the way, and sleeping very little, learning just how hard you can work when you care about something.

Ladies & Gentleman follows the lives of a number of same sex relationships in various stages of disrepair and was written by Robert Lucas.

When I set up the company I wanted to be a feature film director. We wrote endless strategy documents naively … Continue Reading