Results: inconclusive!

Both Ben and Erik have been quite dedicated to this project but last night Ben didn't show up for our night time bird lighting test 2. So Erik and I did the best we could. Here's what I found out—

1. When shooting a car interior just moving a big light back and forth outside the car looks great and helps a lot with the illusion of movement. I suspect a lot of film people do it this way because the look is very familiar.

2. It looks a lot better to have someone rock the car while shooting rather than applying the bumps in post. You can actually see the person adjusting to the bumps. This means we need to get a person to do this when we shoot.

3. The bird stuff itself doesn't look bad, but the results are inconclusive. I shot from outside the car looking in at the driver. Because there's light coming from the front of the car, the shot looks OK but weak. I'm wondering how this will look from the driver's POV--a backlit bird flying right at the screen. It didn't occur to me to shoot that last night.

4. The moment of impact: still not sure what to do about it.

5. The bad TV look. I now realize what a lot of TV shows do (or used to do). You just zoom in or push in to the driver from the front view. It's supposed to look like the car crashing or whatever. It's a really cheap and bad way to shoot this. We have to do better.