Sunday, 16 July 2006
3:43pm
I
  am now right in the thick of thesis production at school. This is what we've all been waiting for. In total, I'm working on the set of 6 different people's thesis projects along with editing another one which I will not be on set for. Last week I worked as camera operator on Beth McMillan's project "Romance Me" a romantic comedy that shot on the Sony F900 HD camera along with the Fujinon 10-100mm T1.8 zoom lens which proved to be a joy to work with.
I suppose my favorite moment on that shoot was when Beth said she wanted a shot where the camera spun around 360 degrees looking around a room. This posed a challenge as we needed lighting to supplement the ambient light in order to get good exposure but we were shooting in an actual house... since we were going to be looking around the entire room we couldn't have any visible lighting equipment in the room!
We put the Fisher dolly in "round" mode and using an extention plate and a rotating offset we positioned the focal plane of the camera over the center of the dolly's rotation so the camera would spin around itself, and then we mounted a 2K lamp to one of the dolly's handles, bouncing the light off the ceiling providing a soft, non-directional light and enough exposure to shoot. The process of dealing with these kinds of problems are one of the things I enjoy most about filmmaking.
This week I have been working on "The Butcher" a horror film which is being directed by Joseph Garcia and being shot on Super 16mm film. I'm working as the gaffer with Leigh Vega as the Director of Photography. The production design by Elexis Delair was absolutely amazing. The sets and the props looked so great, no one will ever believe we shot this on the soundstages at the Los Angeles Film School. I'm really excited about how this one is coming out and I'm really glad that Joe is down with doing interesting lighting. I've been having a lot of fun lighting these shots. We are shooting one more day (actually night) starting later tonight and going into the early morning on location at a real deli, and then we'll be wrapped!
I am having a freakin' great time working on these thesis projects so far. Next I will be gaffing on a stoner comedy, then a WWII period film, and a comedy, and then finally I will be the DP on Mike Carreņo's "Children's Story" (working title, I think the final title will be "Sanctuary"). I love doing film lighting. I've never had more fun and worked so hard while doing anything else in my entire life, seriously. Welp, I'm going to try and take a nap so I will have some energy later tonight, so I am going to end this update now. By the way, pictures from these two projects are available at my Giant Repository of Pics.