By now my morning routine is established. Before leaving the cottage I spend 5 or 10 minutes reading some of the DOP Documents, a collection of inspirational PDFs elegantly presenting frame grabs from the work of some great cinematographers alongside informative quotes from them. Today I’m reading the Jordan Cronenweth one. Above some frames from Blade Runner a quote reads: “Naturally to create shafts of light one must have some medium. Smoke is wonderful photographically but it’s not without its problems. The only practical way to judge smoke density is by eye. I find that a good density is achieved just before I lose consciousness.” A man after my own heart.
When we get to the unit base I sit and read the day’s scenes over breakfast, reminding myself of what I highlighted and scribbled in the margins during prep. Javi, the DIT and assistant editor, arrives with some cut scenes on a tablet. Watching these without the baggage of being on set shooting them, I can see what’s working and what isn’t, from a photographic standpoint. I’ve used a lot of bounce light from underneath, and I can see that it looks fantastic on Hannah, our heroine, if it’s poly bounce, whereas the villainess looks most suitably scary with matt silver (Celotex) bounce.
Then it’s down to set to figure out the first scene’s shots with Paul. We start once more in the infirmary, and then move for one last time to the great hall. It’s incredibly windy. The sparks are outside wrestling with gels, trying to get them to stay on the lamps as the wind howls down the valley and across the back of our location. In the end we have to give up. Even with a plethora of croc clips, the wind simply rips the gels in half. I ask the script supervisor to make a note that tonight’s material will need to be graded to match the gelled scenes we shot on previous nights.
The nasty weather does not bode well for our first exterior scenes tomorrow.