Without/Within: Day Two

(moved from LiveJournal to Blooger.com December 8, 2007.)

Today SpoogE picked myself and Kristin up around two thirty and we went over to Sweetbay for "Craft Service." I'm not the healthiest eater, but I made sure to get some good stuff. We had sliced green apples (caramel provided by Kristin), a veg plate (I put it in the fridge and promptly forgot about it, but it'll be good for today), mah birfday cake (which we also forgot about), a fruit cup (we ate all of the grapes and left the melon bits...), tortilla chips and salsa (all gone by the end of the day), Barq's root beer, bottled water, and diet Sunkist.

We then headed over to SpoogE's house and set up for the first scene of the day: Kristin's character waking up at the crack of dawn. It was a simple scene, but it was really hard to light so SpoogE and I work on how to diffuse the light and bounce it into the room. We've been using parchment paper (the baking kind) clothespinned to the lights for diffusion (works very, very well), used the dimmer to bring down the intensity a little, then we set up my reflector and bounced the light into the room. It looked fantastic. Don't pay attention to the time on the clock -- it's not correct at ALL, not even to the time of day.

That shot didn't take very long, though, and we were left with a lot of time on our hands until Jon and Janine were due to show up (both got out of work around sixish) so I decided that since we had a really complicated Glidecam shot later on that we would go ahead and get SpoogE rigged up for it and practice.

He'd never used the Glidecam before and though he had a spring-arm Steadycam-style rig a few years ago, my rig's a little more difficult to use, IMO.

Basically, Kristin's character wakes up when she hears something strange, goes to her door, then retreats to her closet. Once she feels that the coast is clear, she sneaks out of the closet, goes through the bathroom and then makes a run for the front door where upon she gets thrown into the wall by the Intruder. I wanted to get most of it in one take, though I was going to cut within the scene. Since I don't have a wireless monitor, either, I had to just trust SpoogE that it was all coming out well. In fact, I couldn't be in the room for most of the shoot last night and I couldn't see about 98% of what was shot. I probably should have watched the footage last night, but I was just too tired to pay adequate attention. I think I'll watch it before I'm picked up today.

Anyway, we practiced that for the next hour and a half -- pacing and blocking that scene so SpoogE got as few reflections and equipment bits as possible and they both felt comfortable, then started to set up the lighting for that scene as Kristin went back and practiced her lines for tonight.

Other than some general chatter as TrAilz and Jon came in, we got right into it, deciding to not film one scene last night and add it to the list tonight and just get right into the really complicated stuff.

Once that particular angle was captured, we moved in for a static low-angle shot of the same action, then a low angle close-up of Jon, then, the last and most complicated shot of the night, the David Fincher-esque closet shot. Don't get me wrong, the first shot of Kristin waking up was Fincher-esque, too, but this one REALLY was, and it was a dream of SpoogE's, then mine once he told me about it, from the day he moved into that house. We did it like six times and SpoogE was extremely happy with it so we moved on to the easiest shots of the night: the darkroom and the close-up of the doorknob.

The darkroom looked fantastic. We just strung up some twine in SpoogE's bathroom and TrAilz decorated the set (she did an absolutely fantastic job), then we screwed in the red lights and it really, really looked like a darkroom and not a bathroom, something SpoogE wasn't so sure about at first. My photos in the darkroom set are from the reverse angle, not the angle from which we shot.

I'm already thinking about how to reshoot the door knob close up to get the shot I want. Since I own the camera and I happen to have some doors in my house, I'm thinking about shooting it myself here because, like the initial bedroom scene, I have some specific shots that I don't feel we could have gotten at SpoogE's. We'll see how the angles taken last night look when I'm editing and reviewing footage.

On the docket tonight: the hardest scenes for the actor and actress. Lots of dialogue and lots of tension. We're really going to have to stay on the ball tonight...

Overall, still incredibly happy! I should take photos of my fireant bites. Man, they started to really hurt last night toward the end of the night. Just imagine an almost paper white surface (my legs as I don't wear shorts or skirts) with eleven really angry looking red splotches (the bites.) Ouchies.