Corners Shoot Day 10-12: New Actress + New Camera = New Movie

I apologize to the three people that regularly read the blog that I haven't updated you on what's going on.  Rest assured that the time not spent on the blog has been used to reground, recover, and as of tomorrow--reshoot.

Firstly--as a follow up to the actress's condition, she will not be filming the rest of this project as concern for her health has the producers quite nervous.  The past few days have been spent reaching out to other actresses.  We did find one--which happens to be Bailey's sister.

Who's Bailey you may ask?

Bailey is Jack's new girlie-friend which means she's now an employee of Down Poor (being paid the company average.)  She has taken on a few different roles including AD and Director-Wrangler.  Her sister is a Sociology Major in NY but has a passion for acting.  Thanks to a generous donation from the Bailey's Parent's Fund, Chelsea will be arriving this evening at the Charlotte Airport.  (I should probably go with them to pick her up then sneak onto a plane to see my sister Wales.)

Also, I proposed to Sam and Jack that we invest in a new camera--notably the Canon 5D.  I've been very wary about going the 5D route as it does have several limitations (especially audio) and I'm always expecting a better option to reveal itself.  But while doing a little research, I saw that several short films, feature films, and popular TV shows have relied solely on the 5D. 

The other thing holding me back is that I would have to invest the $3500 into the camera myself while my fee for the month would definitely not cover that.  Here's to hoping this movie sells big or my new Canon brings in booming business!

So I got my camera in and played around with it quite a bit.  Since it's targeted toward photographers and not cinematographers there has been a learning curve.  Maybe someone out there knows better than I, but the video shutter speed is in increments of 10.  As a standard for film, I understood that your shutter speed should be twice that of your frame-rate.  We're shooting at 24p so our shutter speed should be 1/48th.  Though this was easy to set with the 150 and EX3, I'm stuck between 40 and 50 on the 5D.  I may need to look into this a bit more.

It also took me some time to figure how to manually adjust the ISO setting.  I'm still not sure I'm using it appropriately.  The Zoom Lens that came with the camera can only open to a 4.0 stop.  Which concerned me since we were shooting many interiors at 1.6.  (Sometimes I wish I read my cinematography text a bit more...hopefully on the next production we'll hire a real cinematographer.)

Well despite all my confusions we decided to shoot a scene last night.  A certain character is dragged out of a certain car by a certain creature/person/ghost/thing.  It was our first time using the 5D and it was also our first night shoot.  So if I wasn't already concerned about the 4.0 f-stop, I was dealing with minimal lighting. 

So I had to boost the ISO pretty high which made me nervous.  The general rule being that high ISO means lots of noise (or grain as some call it).  But when looking on the very small screen--it didn't look too bad.  Blacks where black and light was really dull.  I hope it comes out ok.  (I'm going to check the footage today and hope for the best.) 

I did have fun setting up some patterns and lighting for night.  Since one isn't battling sunlight, you essentially have full control over light and dark.  Only we didn't have a ton of lights and nothing over a 1k.  I'm mostly happy with what we could accomplish. 

We shot until about 12:30 and I was very sleepy--barely able to comprehend what was going on but I think we put together an interesting death scene.  I had to move the death car afterward because I'm one of three people in Asheville that can drive a stick, apparently.  Though they claimed to have washed the car out of fake blood--the red stain on my pants from the steering wheel says otherwise.

At least we have a very shallow depth a field and that makes any filmmaker happy!

-Mr. Zach