The third day of filming had us seeing 4 scenes, which is kind of a lot of set-ups for one day...
The first scene of the day was the second-to-last in the film, a quickie of Terry leaving Hannah's place. While there were only 3 or so shots, the scene was still a feat of lighting ingenuity, because any silks or bounce cards had to be kept out of the reflection on the car. We have once bounce card that we covered in aluminum foil, for certain lighting effects, but at one point during the morning, Josh asked for another. I'm pretty proud to say, I quickly took action and grabbed another one of our many bounce cards, the aluminum foil, and a handful of C47s, and MacGeiver-ed up a new one.
After that, we moved into one of the dorm hallways, and shot the first scene in the film, of Terry getting dumped. This scene was tricky to light in the more traditional sense, as we just had to try to cram all of our equipment into a narrow hallway, and try to find enough outlets to avoid blowing out any fuses. We had the actress who played Liza come in, who was great. It was a real shame she was only here for the one scene, because she was a real joy to work with.
The third scene of the day was the final scene of the film. Since Terry is an art teacher, we shot the scene in our own art teacher's on-campus studio. This scene was also a challenge to light, but in the opposite respect from the one before. This one was just, how do we get light into the room in creative ways. Obviously, we had half the studio to shine lights from, but we also ended up tossing a light in through a window, which wouldn't be extraordinary, if not for just how high up the window actually was.
The scene itself was a big kissing scene, and we wanted the actors to feel as comfortable as possible, so we ended up going with sort of a 'closed set' approach. As soon as the lights were up, anyone who didn't need to be in the room during the scene was relegated to one of the other rooms. A couple of crew members ended up dozing off in there.
This scene was our first with Elliot, who plays Terry's roommate James.
The last scene of the day was the second scene in the film. Astute observers will notice this day took care of the 2 scenes on either end of the film, which is kind of weird and cool (except when you think about that pretty much all the other scenes in the film are either flashbacks or just Terry and Hannah in her apartment). For this set, we were in a severly cramped dorm room, but, if you look in the picture, everything in it, all the books, the bike, and the tacky decorations, all of that was set dressing. Our incredible production designer Karli was responsible for all of that, and while it might look haphazard, she actually picked books for a reason, and about 3/4ths of them are books on art or teaching, books that someone like Terry would definitely have.
This scene was our last with Elliot, and was a good scene to end with. The cast gave us a couple of cool improvs in this scene. Maybe not usable material, but certainly good for keeping the crew in good spirits after a long day of work.
Once the scene was done, we thanked Elliot for his hard work, and the rest of us coordinated on our plans for the next weekend's work.
No comments:
Post a Comment