Saturday night's shoot went well. The spinner works great now. You just turn it on, let it "equalize' (spin smoothly) and it's good. I'm getting a better handle on the lighting. This is where I thought we'd be a few weeks ago--actually shooting and getting some footage we can use. Here's some footage I edited to see how everything cuts together [VIEW]. (Levels in AE, deinterlaced, 80% speed).
Ben sent a note wondering if the set should change to show a progression:
I thought while looking at the images that every film that has a sequence similar to this one has even the "work station", develop in a significant way. For instance when the guy first discovers the formula or the magic or what ever, his work station looks one way, and then as his under standing develops it changes. Elements are replace or removed as his understanding of the phenomenon take shape
Usually this sort of progression is good. But in this case, it may not be needed. This perpetual motion thing is like building a circuit-bent instrument. If it works, don't touch it! You don't know what you might be screwing with. Of course, there's that other question--how do you know if you actually invented a perpetual motion? Scientifically speaking, the only way to tell is if you can verify that the output energy is greater than the energy consumed. But in a home inventor scenario, all you may have is a 'virtual' perpetual motion machine... a machine that runs seemingly forever, but who knows if it does and why? So I like the idea of little changes we had talked about--things on the table move slightly and change--as if there's activity going on, Ben's facial hair changing. That may be all that's necessary.
One thing I'm always interested in is the psychological aspects of working. Shooting at 10 pm as we've done a few times makes a difference. We went from 10 to 12:30-- 2.5 hours--almost nothing. And yet it seems like we were working a long time. Seriously if you look at all the time we've spent fixing the spinner, shooting, etc., it probably doesn't even add up to three or four 8-hour days. So part of the project is playing with the psychology--dealing with the feeling that we're far behind, dealing with the feeling that we've been shooting on the same set for SOOO long. It really hasn't been that long.
Another thing I'm warding off is the feeling of perfectionism. There's a part of me that is concerned we're being overly perfectionistic in trying to get "the perfect shot." But in reality, I think, we're still in the "listening" stage. That is, we're shooting not to get it perfect. We're shooting to figure out what we want to shoot. There's still a searching going on. That's productive I think. It seems like we're settling on getting four or so modes of activity from this set--
1. The iconic, dark, ritualistic, Ben as priest shot.
2. The smoking, it's been doing this forever shot.
3. The top lit more-staring at the spinner shot.
4. The finding the stars shot.
I'm liking the improvisations that are going on. I'm also liking the "edges" of the footage. That has always been the favorite kind of footage for me--the places where both the camera and the performer are improvising, searching and then come together for a brief moment. You'll find an example of that in the sample edit--the close up in which Ben is smoking. BTW, I was reading a book that said the only way to see smoke is to backlight it which is what we did. Somewhere there is a class that teaches these things and apparently I missed it.
Another note: the framing on some of these shots is odd, almost like I'm composing for 4:3 in a 16:9 frame. My original idea was to shoot everything either really wide or really close. Medium shots were only for normal, real-time. Still thinking through that one.
No comments:
Post a Comment