Monday, September 29, 2008

Video Diary #2 - Barf Attack


Sunday night we shot our first semi action scene. The set up is as follows: Our hero, Jack, is attacked by a waitress outside of a diner. She's under some sort of mind control and ends up struggling with him in the cab of his work van. Eventually, she barfs on him. Plain and simple.

There were a few challenges with this one...mainly the fact that we were shooting all of the close up shots of interior action in Roman's drive way. The exterior van shots will be done on location at a local truck stop. (On top of that, the interior of the diner which the waitress works in will be a completely different location as well.) I just wanted to avoid shooting as much of the action on location due to a lack of lighting control and time. Also, I didn't want to deal with the owner of the truck stop complaining about us staging a struggle between a man and a woman in a van in his parking lot. Might be bad for business.

So I managed to set up some lights to generally match the light emitting from the exterior of the location. I'll also place those lights when we shoot there, just to maintain that continuity. One challenge was the geography of it all. Blocking the scene required some thought in terms of how these two actually end up inside the cab of the van. Luckily, this scene will be inter-cut with a phone conversation in which Jack is relaying the event to another character; so we'll have a bit of a chance to cheat the cuts.

Anyways, the scene went amazingly and the actors were great. Deanna Jones and Dave Tompa were troopers in dealing with the 'barfing', selling it right to the last drop. I'm quite happy with the lighting as well. Anyways, here's another short video diary to accompany this scene. I don't want to spoil too much, so I'm making these things somewhat ambiguous. Enjoy!

4 comments:

Ryan Marlow said...

Awesome Shot, Great job! @ getting such a good image from the HVX. I chose the Canon XH-A1 because the guys at the shop showed me some juxtaposed shots they did: the HVX had more noise (and P2 is a cream dream supreme but brutally expensive.) I am fantasizing about getting a Firestore eventually though...

You are going to have some brilliant DVD extras at the very least.

Jay C. said...

Thanks Ryan!

Yeah, I've found that in low light, the HVX can produce a fair amount of noise. Otherwise, I'm really happy with it. If the lighting is just right, it can produce some great images.

Also, I'm really getting attached to the whole 'bleach bypass' look that I've been using lately. Really helps dull the occasionally overly bright colours.

Unknown said...

nice green splat, haha

Ian said...

mmmm no green jello for me tonight. Looks great. Did you end up getting a 35mm adapter? I'm thinking of getting the Letus Extreme to use with my co-worker's HVX.