Acetate, String and Gaffer Tape

July 7, 2012August 2, 2016 neilosemanfx, Magic Lantern, miniatures, Virgin Media Shorts

Last weekend I recorded the model shots for Ghost-trainspotting. The script was written with the train miniature from my 2005 feature film Soul Searcher in mind.

This model was built by Jonathan Hayes, with the wheels and linkages by my uncle and my late grandfather, and even some detailing by Yours Truly. If you’ve seen Going to Hell: The Making of Soul Searcher you’ll know what an absolute pain in the arse this train was to shoot back in the autumn of ’04. You can also check out the key blog entries here, here and here to experience the pain.

I’m pleased to report that filming the train this time around was considerably easier. The model has been sitting in my parents’ loft conversion for the last eight years, and that’s where I filmed it. All I had to do was rig some black drapes and line up the camera angles to the live action plates.

In the past, whenever I’ve needed to shoot a VFX element that had to match another, pre-existing element, I’ve used acetate. I would play back the existing element, typically a live action plate from principal photography, on a TV or monitor. I’d tape a sheet of acetate – the stuff teachers used to use on overhead projectors – over the screen and draw around the important landmarks with a felt-tip. Then I’d plug the camera into the same TV and adjust the camera angle until it matched the lines on the acetate. Low-tech, but effective.

Thanks to Magic Lantern – a firmware hack for the Canon HD-DSLRs – there’s now a more elegant solution. Magic Lantern provides a large number of handy features that Canon themselves were too tight or too lazy to include, but there are only two I regularly use: manual white balance, which lets you dial in the colour temperature in degrees kelvin, rather than relying on presets or holding up a white sheet of paper, and crop marks.

On Stop/Eject I used the crop marks to show us the 2:35:1 widescreen aspect ratio we were framing to, but you can actually overlay any monochrome image on the viewfinder by simply creating a .BMP image of the correct specifications on your computer and saving it to your SDHC card. So for Ghost-trainspotting, I loaded still frames from the two live action plates into Photoshop, and outlined them with the paint tool. After saving these outlines to the memory card as bitmaps, I could superimpose them on the Live View image on my Canon 600D’s flip-out screen. This made it a doddle to line up the shots.

Left: live action plate. Right: overlay for Magic Lantern

So, the model shots are now in the can and yesterday I incorporated them into the film. I also tightened up the edit – finally getting it down to 2’20 exactly, including credits – mixed the audio and graded the images. The film is very nearly finished now; I’m just trying to decide whether to change the ending….

If you’re lucky, there may be a little VFX breakdown of the train shots coming in the next week or so. Meanwhile, here’s a nickel’s worth of free advice about shooting miniatures:

Moulding Natural Light

July 5, 2012March 27, 2017 neilosemancinematography, lighting, production

Today I’m going to take a brief look at what you can do to shape natural light when you’re filming outside and you don’t have the budget for big HMIs or massive silks hanging from cranes.

Firstly, choose the right direction to shoot in. Work out where the sun is going to be at the time you need to film the scene and decide whether you want to shoot into the light, with your back to it or at an angle. There are iPhone apps that will tell you where the sun’s going to be if you’re too lazy to figure it out for yourself. Remember the sun moves left to right across the sky in the northern hemisphere.

Amateur photographers are often told not to shoot towards the sun. This is simply because amateurs will be using auto-exposure, which will close the iris right up as soon as the sun flares into the lens and leave you with a silhouette. As a professional, you’ll be setting your camera manually, so you can expose for the shadows and let the backlight from the sun blow out beautifully.

Here’s a shot from Stop/Eject where we made the most of this effect, and really lucked out with the reflections in the water:

All the evidence you need that shooting towards the sun is good.

Using a reflector on the banks of the Derwent. Photo: Paul Bednall

Out the bottom of frame is a reflector, bouncing some of the sunlight back at the actors – and it’s being wiggled by a crew member to suggest it’s a watery reflection.

If you don’t have a reflector you should drop what you’re doing and order one now off Amazon. They’re less than £10 and have a reversible zip-off cover giving the options of white, silver or gold surfaces to reflect off, or black to block light. If you remove the cover entirely you’re left with a translucent white disc which can be used to diffuse light, as we’ll see shortly.

If you choose to shoot with your back to the sun, you won’t be able to affect the light in your wide shots without big-budget gear, but you can transform your close-ups.

Let’s look at another example from Stop/Eject, before we did anything to the light:

Georgina Sherrington (“Kate”) is facing directly towards the sun, which is behind and above camera. As you can see, the light is incredibly harsh and the shadows are so dark that you can’t see her eyes; an effect that would only have got worse had I stopped down to prevent the highlights blowing out.

Two reflectors were required to sort this out. The first, with cover removed, was held over her head so that the sunlight hitting her face would have to pass through the translucent material and be diffused. (The diffusion is actually less significant than the amount of light the material blocks.) A second reflector was held out of the bottom of frame, bouncing sunlight back into the shadows on her face and putting a sparkle in her eyes.

A much nicer image.

If it’s a cloudy day – and let’s face it, this is the overwhelming likelihood here in the UK – the above techniques will still work, but much more subtly. If you have access to a power supply, try to set up a lamp to get some eye-sparkle and fill in your actors’ faces.

In 2008 I DPed a short set entirely in a forest: Into the Woods, directed by Matt Taabu. I knew that getting light into people’s eye sockets was going to be a major challenge, so I insisted on hiring a battery-powered 200W daylight par. We put a layer of tough-spun diffuser on this and the gaffer hand-held it for most shots, aiming it into the talent’s face. You can see the eye-sparkle it produced in this production still:

Branko Tomovic in Into the Woods (2008, dir. Matt Taabu). Photo: Alex Bender

So if you’re DPing a daylight exterior, don’t think that means you can rest on your laurels. It’s still up to you to create the right mood and make the talent look their best.

Poster Design Competition

June 29, 2012August 2, 2016 neilosemanpublicity, video

One of the key things this week’s Stop/Eject publicity surge has done for us is to enlarge our online community of fans and followers. I’m sure there are loads of creative and talented people in this community, and now I want you to prove me right. To that end, we’re launching a competition to design the film’s poster.

To tell you all about it, here is some bloke we dragged in off the street.

Download the photos here: stopejectmovie.com/poster.zip

Upload your design to facebook.com/stopejectmovie by noon on 28/7/12.

P.S. I can now announce the name of the £500 Mystery Reward: Science with Georgina Sherrington and Oliver Park.

Stop/Eject: Shoot Day 1 Podcast

June 27, 2012August 2, 2016 neilosemanproduction, production design, shooting, video

Here’s a look at the first day of shooting on my short film Stop/Eject, featuring the debut of the alcove set.

Publicity Bonanza

June 27, 2012August 2, 2016 neilosemanpress, publicity, shooting, video

Like three buses coming at once, this week has been a manic one for Stop/Eject publicity.

On Monday afternoon I was interviewed and photographed for the The Hereford Times. (I’m not sure when this will be published. Probably not this week.)

A few hours later and 100 miles away, Sophie was interviewed by BBC East Midlands Today. The report was broadcast that same evening (just after a piece about The Dark Knight Rises filming in Nottingham), featuring huge swathes of the trailer, the web address on screen for ages and of course Sophie brilliantly talking the whole thing up. If you missed it, a friend filmed it off his TV screen…

On Tuesday, the Herefordshire Media Network held their regular meeting, at which they kindly allowed me to screen the trailer and pitch video for Stop/Eject and to say a few words about my experiences of crowd-funding. It went down very well, with many people saying complimentary things afterwards.

After the meeting I arrived home to find my inbox stuffed with YouTube notifications of new subscribers to my channel. I soon realised this was due to Indy Mogul – a fantastic YT channel for low budget filmmakers – featuring one of the Stop/Eject podcasts (Katie’s tutorial on how to make a lighting sandbag) on their weekly Moguler Made playlist.

Huge thanks to Indy Mogul for this exposure, which has almost doubled my number of subscribers. If any IM viewers have found their way to this blog – welcome! I hope you enjoy the heady mix of filmmaking trials and tribulations, breakdowns, evaluations, “how to”s and occasional self-indulgent rants.

As a result of all this exposure, the post-production fundraising total now stands at £430. That means the £400 public reward has been released: a podcast about the first day of shooting.

Very shortly we’ll be announcing the title of the £500 public reward – our first mystery reward.

We’ve also topped 100 likes on Stop/Eject’s Facebook page, as a result of which we’ll be launching something special in the next few days…

Ghost-trainspotting in the Can

June 25, 2012April 10, 2017 neilosemanshooting, Virgin Media Shorts

In what must rank as one of the smoothest-running and most enjoyable shoots I’ve ever helmed, my Virgin Media Shorts entry Ghost-trainspotting was filmed yesterday.

With an entirely exterior script, weather was the biggest concern, but it rained for less than five minutes all day and was generally quite lovely. The camera started rolling earlier than planned, we moved at a good pace all day and we wrapped early. What’s not to like?

Actors Rob Ashman and George McCluskey got on like a house on fire. Rob in particular looked brilliant in his trainspotter outfit, as you can see from this photo which Katie took:

I’ve already started editing the film, and like last year it’s going to be challenging to get it down to the required length of 140 seconds. Unlike last year, there are model shots to film, which I hope to do this weekend. Stay tuned.

The Value of a Full Crew

June 23, 2012August 2, 2016 neilosemanassistant director, crewing, directing, editing

A rare moment to consult the script. Photo: Sophie Black

Col constantly ribs me about the lack of a first assistant director on Stop/Eject, and the consequent lack of adherence to the schedule. But as I edit the film, I’m appreciating more and more the other duties of a first AD and the consequences of those duties going undischarged.

Because part of the first’s job is to literally assist the director – to help them keep track of things which can easily get forgotten amidst the chaos of filming. Things like crossing the line, getting enough coverage and not missing out bits of the script. (Two other crew members that a big budget production will have who will also be looking out for those things are the script supervisor and the editor – because the editor will be cutting the material the day after you shoot it, and may be able to tell you before you leave a location that you need an extra shot.)

So here are some examples of the moronic cock-ups I made, which might well have been avoided if I’d had a first and/or a script supervisor looking out for me:

Tommy Draper wrote a great stage direction in one scene: “She opens the fridge. It’s as empty as her life.” Unfortunately I chose to shoot it in a way that made it impossible to tell the fridge was empty, because I didn’t pay close enough attention to the script during filming.
In another scene, I wrote that the cellophane is torn off an object before it is used. I included that detail in the script because, as a writer, I knew that otherwise the audience would not necessarily understand the important point that the object was brand new and unused. Somehow this got dropped from the scene during rehearsals, and it wasn’t until I saw the film edited together that I realised how crucial the cellophane was.
In scene seven, the most complex of the film, we decided during rehearsals to alter the timing of an incident. One side effect of this – which again I didn’t notice until I saw the edit – was that the shots I had storyboarded (and thus the shots that I filmed) no longer established satisfactorily the whereabouts of one of the characters at a critical moment.
In scene 24 I crossed the line. You can see this at the very end of the trailer.

The Dark Side of the Earth's 1st AD Andrew McEwan (right) on set — The Dark Side of the Earth’s first AD Andrew McEwan (right) on set. Photo: Richard Unger

The omission of things in the script are particularly annoying (a) because I co-wrote the bloody thing and should have noticed, and (b) because any good writer takes care to be economical with words and only put in things which are important.

Some of these things can be fixed with pick-ups. For example, I filmed a close-up of my wife’s hands unwrapping the cellophane in our flat recently. But others have no solution beyond a major reshoot, which would be very hard to justify. So what you end up with is a subtle erosion of the quality of the film, and this is one of the reasons that a more expensive film looks more expensive. A bigger crew does mean more attention to detail and thus higher production values in every respect.

I share these thoughts with you not because I’m any less proud of Stop/Eject or feel like I need to make excuses for it, but simply to pass on a lesson the project has taught me. It’s very easy to think of a first assistant director as merely a time-keeper, but if you work without one you should appreciate that there are other strings to their bow, and your project may suffer more lasting effects than just a tired cast and crew.

Ghost-trainspotting

June 21, 2012August 2, 2016 neilosemanVirgin Media Shorts

As part of my effort to actually make more films, and thereby make up for the six years I wasted trying to get The Dark Side of the Earth financed, in 2011 I started entering Virgin Media’s annual short film competition. Last year’s entry, The Picnic, didn’t get anywhere in the competition but did get randomly bought by an exam board.

This year I’ve written a script called Ghost-trainspotting, after wracking my brains to think of a location as convenient as the ruins over the road we shot The Picnic in, and finally hitting on the disused railway line a couple of blocks away. We’re shooting this Sunday with actors Rob Ashman (last seen in a Neil Oseman film as the prime minister in The Beacon) and George McCluskey, Colin Smith as DP, Sophie Black as designer, Ian Preece on sound and Katie Lake ADing and catering.

We fully expect to get rained on all day.

Microwave Shot

June 19, 2012April 10, 2017 neilosemanproduction design, shooting

Shot 104 on my Stop/Eject storyboards has been loitering for a long time. Originally slated for the last day of principal photography, it got dropped and has been bothering the back of my mind ever since. It’s a bird’s eye view of a ready meal turning slowly in a microwave… if the hypothetical bird flew into the microwave before Kate shut it, and survived long enough to look down on anything. (The shot is part of the circles theme that runs throughout the film, which I blogged about earlier in the year.)

Back in the autumn we bought an old microwave, my intention being to rip the top off for the shot. Even though I was clearly not planning to turn the thing on after dismembering it so, safety concerns were voiced and thoughts turned to mocking up a microwave interior.

I finally filmed the shot this morning, and I don’t think anyone – including me – expected it to be achieved in the incredibly low-tech fashion it was. I folded up a piece of old foam board and punched a hole in the middle of it, and gaffer-taped an allen key to the bottom of the circular plate so I could rotate it through the hole from underneath.

So that’s another shot ticked off the list.

If you’re in Hereford, come along to the test screening tomorrow (Wednesday June 20th) at 3pm. It’s in the downstairs lecture theatre at Hereford College of Art’s Media Centre on Bath Street. Non-students are welcome; just sign is as visiting Christabel Gingell. I need all the feedback I can get to finesse the edit.

Things That Slowed Us Down

June 17, 2012August 2, 2016 neilosemanscheduling, shooting

Several weeks ago I evaluated Stop/Eject’s shooting schedule. As noted in that post, we got behind schedule more than once during production. Today I want to look at the reasons why, so I can remind myself next time I draw up a schedule, and so that you lovely readers can perhaps pre-empt similar problems on your own projects.

Self shooter. Photo: Paul Bednall

Lack of a First Assistant Director. The key role of this crew member is to keep things running to schedule, and we didn’t have one. Two people were lined up and then dropped out due to paying work, and no other applicants were forthcoming. Difficult to see what could have been done to avoid this, other than raising more money to pay everyone.
Lack of a separate Director of Photography and Camera Operator. I chose to act as my own DP on Stop/Eject and, when operator Rick Goldsmith was only able to do half of the shoot, chose not to find a replacement for the remainder and fill that role myself as well. This is something I’ve done on many of my previous productions, so I knew full well that it wasn’t a good idea; it slows things down and it reduces the time I can spend working with the actors. But I did it anyway because I figured any DP worth their salt would balk at the pathetic equipment we had available.
Steve Giller assembles the alcove. Photo: Paul Bednall

Lack of other skilled crew. There were only two people on the crew who were really handy with power tools, Col and Steve Giller, and Steve was only around for a couple of days. So when we arrived at a new location and had to assemble the alcove set and rig lights from the ceiling, there were only one or two people doing these two most time-consuming tasks. Solution: ask around in pre-production for DIYers who fancy helping out on a film.
Large number of costume changes. With eleven story days and a lead actress playing two different versions of her character, there was a lot of costume swapping, each one accompanied by a hair and make-up change too. I’d advise you to always try to minimise the number of story days in your script, and to carefully schedule your shoot to reduce the number of switches.
Hair and make-up changes take time. Photo: Katie Lake

Large number of locations. Even though we found several locations in one building, there was still a lot of moving around, which wastes huge amounts of time. Ideally you should shoot in only one location each day.
Fatigue. As mentioned in my earlier post, scheduling long days and/or wrapping late gets you into a destructive cycle because your cast and crew work slower the next day due to lack of sleep.
Composition issues. This is an odd one which nobody foresaw. We shot in the Cinemascope aspect ratio, 2:35:1, which is a very wide frame, but we had many scenes set in the alcove, which was a tall, narrow set. Think about how wide a 2.35:1 shot has to be to see the head of a standing actress and a tape recorder on a two foot high table at the same time, and how much will be revealed at the sides of frame. Combine this with the fact that some alcove scenes were shot in a corridor at the back of the shop location that was only half the width the alcove was meant to be, so one wall always had to be out of frame. And then factor in that you can’t compress the vertical space by going for a high angle shot because then you won’t see the face of the actress as she looks down at the recorder, and you can’t compress it with a low angle shot because you’ll reveal the lights hanging from the ceiling. Yes, it was a nightmare shooting in that little alcove. There was a lot of time wasted in scratching my head over how to cover the scenes effectively while framing out the wall and the lights. This might seem like a very esoteric problem, but I can derive three points of good general advice from it:
1. Alcove headaches. Photo: Paul Bednall
  
  Think carefully when choosing the aspect ratio for your film. Consider the shape and size of your key locations and props. When making The Dark Side of the Earth‘s pilot, DP Oliver Downey pointed out that the tall, spindly Swordsman puppet and the tall training room set were not well suited to the 2.35:1 anamorphic ratio we were shooting.
2. Think twice before rigging lights to the ceiling. This is very much a double-edged sword. Although it takes a long time to hang lamps from the ceiling, once they’re up there you will find it relatively quick to light each of your set-ups. But if you then realise that the ceiling’s going to be in shot, taking those lamps down or altering your composition to frame them out could be a big time-waster.
3. Small locations will slow you down. Working in a confined space with lots of lamps, grip and mics is slow, hot and unpleasant. Avoid it wherever possible. More space means lights can be quickly set up on stands further away, rather than having to be rigged time-consumingly to walls or furniture.

So those are the main things that slowed down Stop/Eject, and of course there are many, many other things that can hold you up when shooting. And although many of these are impossible to foresee or prevent, a little thinking time in pre-production can identify a lot of these issues and help you plan accordingly.