Description: An inmate gets a visit from one of his associates from the outside so they can talk "business." A corrupt guard sets up the meeting in a secret room. The guard has only one rule, no swearing!
This is a little project I threw together in a week or two. I had an idea for a scene involving a prison inmate and someone who hits him for attempting to swear. I wrote a script and showed it to my writing partner. He completely rewrote it and gave it back. Then I merged the two using about 80% of his script and 20% of mine. My friends Brett and Roy were nice enough to volunteer their time. Unfortunately since I was in the scene and also the camera operator there are some closeup shots of me that are blurry. It was just a bit of fun so it's not worth reshooting. For what it's worth I hope you get some enjoyment out of it. We had fun making it.
I am a subscriber to shootingpeople.org New York filmmaker bulletins and I’ve seen the Light and Shadow workshop advertised on there many times over the last couple years. Since it is a two day workshop the planets have to align so that I don’t have anything planned for either day. Luckily those planets did their thing and I was able to take the workshop on 16-17 April 2011.
Eric Lau is the instructor. For some reason I was expecting someone mid-30s to mid-40s. Someone hungry and looking for another source of income to augment a meager videographer’s wages. Not so. Eric made his first film in 1971. He has had a successful career career for decades and is partially doing these workshops to give back to the community. The workshop is not free by any means, but it is very affordable especially if you have a student ID or take advantage of the early bird special.
Eric Lau has a mouth on him. If you are opposed to occasional strong language or are easily offended maybe this workshop isn’t for you. But if you can tough it out it’s worth it. The great aspect to this workshop as opposed to a class is that after the theories and concepts are discussed and examples are shown we are broken into groups and told to do it ourselves. I will be the first to admit that all of those good ideas I had written down and attempted to commit to memory went out the window when it was my turn. I failed and I failed badly. I didn’t knock hot lights into actors faces or anything, but my three point lighting broke most of his rules. Put the back light diagonally opposite of the key light. Fail. I put them 90 degrees apart. Don’t scoff. It really made a difference. Light the side of the face farthest away from the camera. Don’t scoff there, either. With an over the shoulder interview setup where the interviewee is facing diagonally toward the interviewer Eric placed the light so that it illuminated the side of the face that was “smallest” from the viewpoint of the camera. This made very interesting shadows on the interviewee’s face. Very compelling images.
Like any attempt at an explanation of what was learned in a workshop this pales in comparison to the hands-on ability to fail and receive constructive criticism. I am very happy with the workshop and I am seriously considering taking it again in a few months. I need a chance to use these techniques in a few of my own productions, first. I won’t know what my follow up questions will be until I get into a lighting situation that, once the footage is watched… could have been better.
I would gladly recommend this workshop to anyone I know who wants to understand how to light a compelling shot.
I was having breakfast with my friends Brett and Rachel at the Rutherford Pancake House a couple weeks ago and Rachel pitched an idea to me that she had mentioned before. Two people standing at a refrigerator arguing over who ate the sandwich. She even posed the name, "The Sandwich Series," which stuck. This is the premise for a fledgling series of scenes based on a simple scenario. Hey! Who took my sandwich?
There is a very good post by filmmaker Christopher J. Boghosian titled, "I Am A Nobody Filmmaker." With a title like that it could really go two ways. It could have been a rant by a guy who thinks that his work is being overlooked and is shaking his fist at the sky, but it's not. The article is a realistic assessment of the plight of the independent filmmaker without a breakout film and without loads of press. Here is a quote from the article.
The baker bakes, the architect designs, and the filmmaker must continually make films. What baker bakes one loaf of bread and asks for thousands of dollars to open a bakery? What architect designs one home and expects to have thousands of fans on Facebook? None. It's ludicrous. As a nobody filmmaker, I have come to realize that I need to earn my right to ask people for their time and money. And the way to do that is by consistently making films, plain-and-simple.
A sentiment also shared by the well known book that I read as a child, A Wrinkle In Time. "Das Werk lobt den Meister" or in English, "the works proves the craftsman." All of this says to me that I need to step up my productions. I'm averaging one short film a year and that is getting me nowhere quickly. Keep shooting. Keep editing. Keep growing.
It has been a long time coming, but there is finally an HDMI field recorder available for less than a thousand dollars. It's called the Atomos Ninja. A couple years ago I tried to build a computer with a Black Magic Intensity HDMI capture card. I say "try" because the computer never came together the way I wanted. At first there was a slim form factor case that was a flimsy piece of junk so I moved to a chunkier case which somewhat defeated the purpose of a portable video capture system. Then I realized that the 2.4GHz Core 2 Quad was actually slower at rendering video than my 2.6GHz Core 2 Duo. Really? What a disappointment. Add to that the fact that the data rate from the Intensity card is such that a normal SATA2 drive can't handle the throughput. So a RAID0 is necessary to deal with real-time recording.
Why would I want to record the HDMI signal from my Canon 7D instead of just recording to the Compact Flash card? That's a long and boring (to most) story about highly compressed video files that throw away part of the color information for the images. HDMI is uncompressed with more color information. It sounds like an obvious choice, right? Unfortunately there is more to the story. When the Canon 7D is recording the HDMI output isn't full 1920×1080 (1620×910) and over the image is the red "recording" dot. The other image information, timers, and focus point indicators can be turned off, but not that red dot. HDMI is also interlaced instead of the progressive images that anyone in their right minds would want. There is a Swedish company called Syndicate which makes a software tool for capturing the 7D HDMI output, removing the red dot, stripping the 24p frames out of the 60i HDMI stream, and upscaling the less than full HD image to full HD. They want 200 Euros for it, too. For now I'm sticking with the native files from the 7D. Even with all of the shortcomings of the h.264 codec and 4:2:0 color sampling I still like images it produces for the price. I look forward to the day when the new cameras get rid of the rolling shutter problem.
