Recently Colin suggested I talk my wife Katie into making some sandbags to weigh down lighting stands on set. One of us also had the idea of making them out of canvas shopping bags. Like me, I think Colin envisaged Katie simply filling a canvas bag with sand and sewing up the top.
As you can see, she went to a lot more trouble than that…
Some of my new sandbag collection
Considering that you’ll pay the best part of £20 on eBay for one of those, I think £3.55 is a pretty good deal.
Once Katie had started making them, she couldn’t stop. I ended up with five of the one stone saddle bag kind shown in the video, and three smaller ones for counterweighting arms. Thanks Katie!
And once again, if you’ve enjoyed this post or found it useful, please do consider clicking the Donate button in the righthand column. All the money goes into making Stop/Eject and you’ll get a credit on the film, an invite to the premiere and access to my super-useful indie film budget exposé How to Make a Fantasy Action Movie for £28,000. (UPDATE: PLEASE NOTE THIS OFFER IS NO LONGER AVAILABLE.)
Last time I tried to help build something for one of my films, I ended up supergluing my fingers together. (A couple of hours later, after the rest of the construction crew had laughed themselves silly and placed bets on how long it would take me to separate my fingers, I finally parted the digits by sawing through the join with a disposable plastic knife.)
Which is why you may be suspicious to see that in this new Stop/Eject podcast I apparently display perfect competence in woodworking and associated arts, and manage to produce a decent-looking item at the end of it. Is something fishy going on? I couldn’t possibly say.
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A few posts back I wrote about See Saw, the thriller directed by Tom Muschamp which I DPed in the summer of 2007. Today I’m going to share some of the tribulations experienced in the making of this sequence:
The sequence was filmed in the Hamptons, a popular holiday destination at the east end of Long Island, near New York City. The boat was filmed in a harbour, with the camera and an HMI lamp on the dock. I wish we could have put either the camera or the HMI in another boat, because it’s never a good idea to have your camera and your only light source close together; you end up with flat lighting that looks like flash from a stills camera. Unfortunately we didn’t have much choice. Putting the HMI on a boat was too dangerous, and putting the camera on a boat would have rendered the footage too shaky for successful compositing with the other element of the sequence: Katherine.
Aimee Denaro as Katherine
Katherine, played by producer Aimee Denaro, was filmed in an outdoor swimming pool – again, of course, at night. We had been able to get hold of a single black drape, which we rigged half in and half out of the water, to hide the stand for the backlight and to cover the blue-painted pool interior. We originally planned to frame all our shots tightly enough that this drape would fill the entire background, but we ended up shooting off it quite a lot. Fortunately the surroundings were dark enough that we got away with it.
Aside from the backlight there was one other lamp – a key light coming in from the side. Both were 800W tungsten pars if memory serves. As I often do on night sequences, I white-balanced on a red-gelled lamp, fooling the camera into turning everything blue for that classic James Cameron/Michael Mann look.
Director Tom Muschamp
After shooting all the set-ups from the poolside, it was time to dive in – quite literally – and shoot the underwater material. That’s when the fun began.
We had spent the last couple of weeks trying to find an underwater housing we could hire, but nowhere had one that would fit our camera (a JVC GY-HD110). In the end we had to settle for a splash bag designed for ENG (i.e. proper broadcast) cameras. A splash bag is simply a rubber bag with a waterproof zip and a porthole of optical glass at one end. They’re not designed to be used at any depth, but will keep the water out down to a metre or two. So far, so good – this restriction fitted in with Tom’s shot requirements just fine.
But because our camera was too small, we could not screw the filter thread into the porthole inside the bag. This meant there was no way of keeping the camera in a fixed position within the bag. This was, not to beat about the bush, annoying. Oh, and did I mention that the battery adapter on the camera had a loose connection which caused the camera to shut itself off sometimes?
The black drape and backlight set-up
Anyone who knows me knows that I am very quiet. I doubt most of the cast and crew were accustomed to hearing me say much of anything. They were certainly all pretty shocked when, within a few minutes of starting to work with the splash bag, I was cursing and swearing like a trooper. The difficulties of trying to swim, keep the bag underwater (it had plenty of empty space in it so it wanted to float), keep the camera lens lined up with the porthole, prevent the focus ring from rubbing against the inside of the bag and throwing the image out of focus, all at the same time, almost drove me insane. Add to that the battery coming loose from time to time and you can see how I might have been a tad frustrated.
But after a while I learnt to contort my body and the bag into a stable configuration and we got some great shots. By the time we wrapped, thanks to the pool’s automatic overnight chlorination system, we all had red, stinging eyes and Aimee’s top had been completely bleached.
The next time I shot underwater – which I may blog about in the future – rather than trying to hire a housing to fit our camera, we hired a housing that came with its own camera. In hindsight I wish we’d done this on See Saw. If you’re going to try it yourself, I’d recommend getting hold of some diving weights because you’re always fighting the natural buoyancy of the housing. Remember that tiled walls and painted lane divisions are dead giveaways that you shot in a swimming pool; don’t rely on the distorting effect of water to hide these – it doesn’t work that way. Bring drapes or tarpaulins to fill your background.
Okay, that’s all for now folks, but if you enjoy reading this blog then please consider contributing a little cash towards my new short film Stop/Eject.
Katherine clings onto the "boowee" as our American friends like to say
Col recently put me on to this fascinating blog by DP Shane Hurlbut. His most recent post looks at how he lit eight city blocks in Puerto Rico using minimal equipment. This was possible due to the low-light capabilities of modern DSLRs and high-end HD cameras. Apart from a couple of rented HMIs lighting background buildings, his gear mostly came from Home Depot (America’s equivalent of B&Q).
Lighting courtesy of Homebase
I remember arriving in upstate New York in 2002 to begin shooting Tom Muschamp’s first feature Beyond Recognition and being horrified by the suggestion from someone on the production team that I could get all the lighting kit I needed from Home Depot. That was a Mini-DV shoot and I did eventually get provided with some Arri lamps, but it just goes to show how times have changed.
Crucially what Shane’s blog illustrates is that even if you’re going with existing light sources, your job as DP is not over. You still have to mould them using flags, gels, black wrap or whatever. Just because you can physically expose a picture, that doesn’t mean it’s “lit” in the artistic sense of the word.
Aimee Denaro in the stairwell of The Supreme Court of New York
Today I saw “See Saw” again. This is the feature-length thriller I DPed in Manhattan back in 2007, where I met my wife Katie. Amazingly the film is still in post-production after more than four years – enough time for Katie and I to get married and for director Tom Muschamp and producer/actress Aimee Denaro to sadly get divorced. We saw a rough cut a couple of years ago and recently Tom sent me a newer version with some significant changes.
One of my favourite things about the filmmaking process is the power you can wield over the narrative in post-production. Think outside the box a little, perhaps add a little ADR, and you can completely repurpose a scene or change the entire meaning of a film. The changes to See Saw haven’t been quite that extreme, but Tom has still taken the pretty major step of cutting the entire first act. Carl was forever telling me trim down the first act of The Dark Side of the Earth‘s script, and I’m sure it’s a battle many writers and filmmakers face: to set up the world and the characters with the utmost economy in order to get to that end-of-act-one plot point as fast as possible. So why not cut the first act all together?
See Saw actually seemed to get away with it for the most part. The lead character has amnesia, so the lack of set-up enables the viewer to share in her disorientation. There are one or two little bits of plot that probably do need to be re-inserted in order to give the climax its fullest impact, but overall I think this brave decision has worked for this particular film.
Watching it again brought back lots of memories of the shoot, a crazy three weeks in the punishing heat of a Manhattan August, with only two days off. Tom and Aimee secured some amazing locations, including a boat circling Liberty Island, Tavern on the Green (the exclusive restaurant used in the Ghostbusters scene where the terror dog finally catches up with Louis), Central Park and The Supreme Court of New York. I still can’t believe how lax security was at the latter. Seeing the crew approaching with large cases and assorted metal poles and stands, the security guard simply moved aside a barrier and directed us around the metal detector. The actors even managed to smuggle in their prop guns with great ease.
But my main reaction on seeing See Saw again is to cringe at my lighting. Back then I was all about hard-lighting everything with clearly-defined and very black shadows. While this looks great in the nighttime scenes, nowadays I would be much more subtle in the daylight scenes, using kinos and hard sources bounced off reflectors to give a more naturalistic look. This is the problem with feature films, no matter in what position you work on them: they take so long to make that by the time they’re finished they no longer represent your best work.
Well, that’s enough disjointed rambling for now. I’ll be sure to let you know when See Saw’s finally released.
When you’re lighting without a budget, sometimes you have to press some very random objects into service. Yesterday I used a towel, a t-shirt and a hot tub cover to light a scene.
LED light in action
I was working on Patrick Coyle’s hilarious comedy feature Field Trip, which he was bravely attempting to shoot in just four days. (Sadly he didn’t succeed in that timeframe and another couple of days will be needed.) The style was documentary-esque, a la The Office, with everything to be shot using available light. But occasionally we were forced to add more light in order to expose an image; such was the case when shooting around a hot tub in a garden at night. Of course the light had to be soft and flat to match with other scenes that weren’t artificially lit.
The slate
The problem was that we only had one redhead. No reflectors, no flags, no polecats, no c-stands, not even any gels or diffuser. I noticed that the cover for the hot tub was cream on the underside, and could see its potential for bouncing light, but couldn’t see a way of rigging it up. After much head-scratching, at the suggestion of lead actor Tony Streeter we propped up the cover against one corner of the hot tub’s shelter and I aimed the redhead at it, throwing a large amount of soft light back towards the tub.
Hot tub cover = bounce board
Then we needed to flag off some of this light to prevent it from blowing out one side of a character’s face when she was standing at the entrance. Being a hoopy kind of frood, the hot tub’s owner knew where his towel was, and had lent it to us along with an old t-shirt when we were experimenting earlier with makeshift diffusers. I now realised both these unlikely fabrics could be used as flags. With an LED camping light gaffered to the ceiling to add an extra spot of brightness, some Christmas lights for a bit of sparkle and some fast lenses on the cameras, the set-up was complete.
I’d advise any filmmaker to take as much kit as they possibly can wherever they go, but if you can’t, be prepared to use anything that comes to hand in the service of cinema.
Director Patrick Coyle and... don't ask
More from the Field Trip shoot next time, when I’ll talk about what I learnt from four intense days of working with my new Canon 600D HDSLR and the Pro Aim shoulder rig.
The backlight above the set (photo: Chrissa Maund)
Yesterday I DPed the trailer for Light Films‘ upcoming zombie feature, Wasteland, and I thought I’d share some of the lighting process with you. The main scene featured actor Shameer Seepersand in a boarded-up old house he’s hiding out in; this was a nice little two-sided set designed by Sophie Black and built in director Tom Wadlow’s garage. The script and direction called for minimal daylight to be seeping through gaps in the window boards and the main light sources to be candles dotted around the set.
Candlelit scenes are tricky because, as with any practical light source, the Director of Photography needs to set up movie lamps to enhance the light shed by them without these movie lamps getting into frame, while ensuring that the pool of light and any shadows cast by it look as if they’re coming from the practical source. The available lighting equipment was very minimal: just three redheads, a reflector and bunch of clip-on domestic light fittings.
Most of the candles were behind Sham, so I started by having my gaffer Col rig one of the redheads to the rafters in the rear corner, to serve as backlight. A layer of full CTO (orange colour correcting gel) and one of spun (diffuser) helped to dim and soften the light and create a candle-like colour. Of course the angle was a massive cheat, coming from above rather than low down, but there was no other way to keep it out of shot.
A domestic light fitting hidden behind a candle
Next I needed to create pools of light around the candles. If I’d had a Dedo kit (small spotlights) I would have been tempted to position them near camera and focus each one’s little circle of light on a candle or group of candles. But I didn’t, so instead I used the domestic light fittings with 100W bulbs and hid them behind the set dressing. These shed pools of light on the walls behind the candles, though of course not on the surfaces on which the candles were stood. Fortunately the scene contained no camera angles high enough for this giveaway to be noticeable. The set and dressing immediately surrounding the bulbs were coated with fire retardant paint for safety.
Col wiggles the reflector cover
Finally I wanted to add some dynamics to create the impression of the candelight flickering. At first we tried bouncing a second orange-gelled redhead off a reflector which Col would wobble during the takes. A better solution occurred to me when I remembered that the reflector had a zip-off fabric cover that was golden on one side. We took the orange gel off the lamp and got rid of the reflector itself, instead bouncing the light off the golden cover as Col rippled it.
The third redhead was placed behind the window as “daylight”, and with a generous helping of smoke the effect was complete.
The trailer will be available to view online soon (when I get around to editing it) and there’s also some info coming on Stop/Eject, the short I’m developing for the same company, which had its first pre-production meeting on Sunday.
The final lighting as seen in the master shot (copyright 2011 Light Films)
