Day 4 - Principle Photography

originally posted by Craig on May 20, 2007

Got all the interior truck shots last night. My lighting job was horrible. It’s clear I am clueless about lighting. While I thought the driving effect was pretty convincing, I underexposed and under-lit the scene. I also didn’t have the proper colored gel to get the look I wanted, and my HD camera picked up way too much of the green. I knew this would happen while I was shooting. I also knew that I should have just lit it normal and added the color in post, but I didn’t. I’m such a moron.

We were shooting in a neighborhood, and the streetlights were lighting up the neighbor’s white shutters too much. Since we’re just simulating the driving (all exterior shots will be done later), I wanted to make sure that nothing was visible outside the windows. If I was smart, I would have brought some black sheets with me to cover the windows. But I was afraid the interior lighting would catch the material. So, I just used a stronger light and stopped the iris down to make sure the BG went dark. Unfortunately, this caused me to lose most of the detail. Oh well, live and learn.

So far, everything is cutting together pretty well. It’s gonna be a long process of doing the sound mix and foley, but I think I pulled off the look I was going for. Once I added the sound effects of car noise (my wife recorded my truck sounds on our drive back home), it actually made it look like he was really driving. We also had a handheld light with a red gel on it that my wife moved across the scene to simulate passing brake lights or stop lights. It gave it just enough motion to sell the shot (I think). Gotta love the trickery of filmmaking!

I’ll spend the next week editing. Then, next Saturday, we’ll have an extremely long day of shooting. I hope we have time to film everything, but I’m not holding my breath. It always takes longer than you anticipate!