Wednesday, 13 March 2013

Take Out Shoot Day 1

Today was a very good day. I am watching the rushes now. Well, as soon as Avid finishes transcoding, so I have a few minutes to gush about my good day. We've all worked together now on several projects and so we know each other's strengths and weaknesses and know where to trust each other.


Lai was my DP* for the day (Jorge will be tomorrow) and he knew what I was looking for and set me up with good shots. Just going by the back of the camera I think it's all looking great. Scully, who is our TA, did sound and apart from the unavoidable refrigerators in the cafe I am confident it will sound good. Aaron was my AD**, which is often about keeping everyone moving and keeping us on schedule, but we never fell behind schedule, so it was as much about sanity and support as anything else. He's very good at that. And Ehsan was quite willing to be an extra, which was very helpful. Also he speaks Turkish, which is what the cafe owners speak, so that was an unexpected and helpful surprise.

The cast was easy going, and on the ball, and fun to work with. My biggest sort of concern was whether Chase was going to be able to overcome his clean cut, good boy, default look. He was great. We did the most difficult scene first. The fulcrum point of the movie where he changes his mind and decides not to take anything from the purse. We didn't get a chance to sort of ramp up to that moment at all, though I did leave room in my schedule to shoot pick ups of it tomorrow if necessary. I haven't really looked at those shots yet beyond verifying the takes, but as he was performing it I really liked what he was doing. I doubt we'll need to re-do anything.

So I've only got the last two scenes to shoot tomorrow, which really isn't much at all. We probably could have started earlier and shot the last alley scene today, but we wouldn't have been able to shoot the cop scene today because of time limits in the cafe. So I'm happier doing the tough guy tomorrow. One of my lessons learned from Killer was don't rush. If you ask for 2 half days people will give you 2 half days and there's no need to try to cram it into 1. And then you can give the fellas time to figure out the lighting in the cafe, and I'll be able to work with Chase and Adam on the final confrontation tomorrow.

I think this has a chance to turn out really well. Onward to tomorrow.


* DP = Director of Photography - in charge of the image
** AD = Assistant Director, often seen as 1st AD, 2nd AD, 2nd 2nd AD, etc.

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