Last night we shot masters of the spinner scene. The spinner is operating fairly reliably now so we were able to get everything done. Still some problems--Ben's looking slightly out of focus, and a piece of wood that he used to create the spinner rig is visible, nailed into the wall. However, I think there's some usable stuff in there.
I'm a fan of moving quickly and shooting fast. It prevents you from thinking too much. And indeed, that's the way a lot of low/no budget films are shot--you know Brian Foy's adage "you can't see the teeth on a buzzsaw." But in this case, when the shot and lighting are so much of the performance, we can't do that. With our slow-moving, still-like shots, there is no strong narrative or action to pull a viewer into the story. So I think a lot of my production strategies have come from an intuitive recognition that we're doing a certain kind of visual arts-influenced cinema within significant budgetary restraints. Two of these intuitive strategies:
>Buy not rent.
Typically filmmakers rent their equipment. But in general, my tendency has been to buy something less expensive, learn it inside/out, and have it available for shoots and reshoots. The hypothesis is that when the technology is decent, familiarity and availability trump superior technology. There's no way we could have run this many tests using a rental unit (remember the VX100 problems?) That's also why I bought the Lowel lighting kit.
>Shoot on a long-term set
Our major sets are all designed to be available for extended periods of time (the garage has been up for over a year). This enables us to fine-tune the imagery. That wouldn't have been possible with a standard production schedule and locations.
So this is the tension. On the one hand, as I've written earlier, I don't want to create an overly-controlled production design that suffocates any sense of performance. And yet, I seem to be treating the sets as "Photoshop documents" that I can go back to and tweak over long periods of time.
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