Laundry room shoot

Yesterday we shot the bird scene in the laundry room. We used the haze-in-a-can to get the shafts of light coming through the window. It's real sun so we couldn't control the fact that the light is shining toward Ben's butt. But the Ed Wood school of directing says that it adds realism. I didn't like scrambling around trying to finish before we lost the light. I felt like one of those plate spinners from the Ed Sullivan show running from angle to angle (cue "The Sabre Dance").

I cracked plexiglass to create the broken window effect. You don't get pretty spider web cracks, but with a few whacks of the hammer you get a surprisingly nice looking effect. Ben "Mr. Rack Focus" Davis wanted to get some rack focus shots going from the trees outside to the cracks in the glass so we did that. Somehow during breakfast we came up with the name "Solitary Davis." I like that for the name of his character. I tried putting food coloring blood on the cracks but that didn't look good. I'm finding that it's really hard to use blood. Every time I try it, it just looks stupid. It was windy so the plexiglass kept on flexing which didn't help with the glass illusion. We had to shoot around the wind. Shooting through glass creates all sorts of reflection and lighting problems. Fortunately we had those figured out from our tech rehearsal session the other week but there's still some awkward lighting here and there.

Ben and Erik thought the clues were too slick looking because they were photographs. Why are these computer printouts Erik asked. I was trying to convince him that they were supposed to be photographs of actual objects. The detail in these is really important and I couldn't think of another way to make it work. Plus I wanted to show them in color because it's prettier. Erik had the idea that Ben should break his pencil while writing so we shot that.

After we lost light we put the 500 watt Omni outside pointing through the window. When you take off the barn doors it looks kind of like the sun if you expose it right. We sprayed a bunch of haze and did some shots of Ben looking into the window just to see what it looked like. The backlit haze looked so "Friday the 13th." We also shot the shrine interiors trying to match outdoors. Not sure how that will work.

It took about four hours to do six setups. Kudos to Ben for shooting while sick and a purple heart to Erik for getting burned by the haze-in-a-can.