Tinkering with light placement & Shinobi

The other day I mostly finished dressing the set and getting the main lighting setup done for the red room shoot. Ben HATES being down in the red room. It was bad enough last year with the flea infestation. Now his cats live in there so the chair is covered with fur. There are dead bugs on the floor and you can usually find a black widow or two if you look around. If you stay down there long enough your throat starts to constrict. The shot we set up is called the "ET" shot generically after something Spielberg would do. Ben is backlit and the room is filled with spray haze so there are beams of light shooting out from Ben as he works on his tape assembly. Sort of.

I found that I like getting 80 or 90% of the way there in terms of the set and lighting. As I keep mentioning, I think the shot is a kind of performance. If you get it all figured out beforehand you don't have the energy to make it work when you shoot. Everything is like that—the "how can we recapture the energy of the demo" problem. When you're actually shooting there needs to be a sense of discovery there. It does come across on screen. I think that's why DPs like to tinker around with lights. They're not necessary trying to make the lighting better. They may just be trying to make the moment new, bringing freshness to the shot.

Watched Shinobi the other night. I've heard it called a ninja film, but it's reallly more like medieval Japanese superheros. I'm talking X-men type powers here. The most Japanese character to me was the guy who could shoot strings of hair from his fingers. One of those films from the emerging "cheap Asian CGI fantasy film" category. What's interesting about the film is that there aren't any plot points in it. There's no "Luke, I'm your father!" moments or anything like that. The film just starts at point A and ends at point B which is pretty unusual for a feature length film.