Dusk for Dawn
By Tony Vallone story, screenplay, associate producer
The film takes place all through the night and into the morning where the final scenes occur. Lately we’ve been filming until sunrise each night and have even had to pull some American Graffiti action on a couple shots. Anyone who has seen American Graffiti will know what I’m talking about. So for scheduling reasons we always thought that our morning scenes could be filmed directly after sunrise while we still had all our equipment out from the night before. Makes perfect sense right?
It turns out that in Northern California the sun doesn’t manage to clear the overcast until about 10 or 11 am. I guess living in LA for a couple years has made me forget. This meant that if we were going to film until sunrise at 5:30am, we’d have to stay an extra 5 hours at location just to start filming the morning stuff we wanted. That means two things: the crew would be working at 19 hour day, and the sun would be too high in the sky to suggest early morning shadows. So we decided to use a little movie magic and shoot dusk for dawn. We wrapped at 5am like usual and called everyone back at around 5pm to shoot the “morning” scene. Anyone who lives at location will tell you the sunlight is facing the wrong direction but we figured we could take that risk. We started filming at around 6pm and at that point the sun was casting nice long shadows. This made everyone very happy.
This was the first day we took out the crane aswell:
The crew also got a taste of what it is like to shoot with daylight. We fired off about 4 hours of nighttime filming in one hour because we didn’t need dozens of lights set up. The DP could shoot 360 degrees without worrying about hitting one of her lights. Everything went very smoothly and made me question why we set the story at night.
It’s too bad that the next script I am working on is set at the summit of Mount Everest in a hovering helicopter. In the middle of the night. During an Earthquake. That will be fun.
The film takes place all through the night and into the morning where the final scenes occur. Lately we’ve been filming until sunrise each night and have even had to pull some American Graffiti action on a couple shots. Anyone who has seen American Graffiti will know what I’m talking about. So for scheduling reasons we always thought that our morning scenes could be filmed directly after sunrise while we still had all our equipment out from the night before. Makes perfect sense right?
It turns out that in Northern California the sun doesn’t manage to clear the overcast until about 10 or 11 am. I guess living in LA for a couple years has made me forget. This meant that if we were going to film until sunrise at 5:30am, we’d have to stay an extra 5 hours at location just to start filming the morning stuff we wanted. That means two things: the crew would be working at 19 hour day, and the sun would be too high in the sky to suggest early morning shadows. So we decided to use a little movie magic and shoot dusk for dawn. We wrapped at 5am like usual and called everyone back at around 5pm to shoot the “morning” scene. Anyone who lives at location will tell you the sunlight is facing the wrong direction but we figured we could take that risk. We started filming at around 6pm and at that point the sun was casting nice long shadows. This made everyone very happy.
This was the first day we took out the crane aswell:
The crew also got a taste of what it is like to shoot with daylight. We fired off about 4 hours of nighttime filming in one hour because we didn’t need dozens of lights set up. The DP could shoot 360 degrees without worrying about hitting one of her lights. Everything went very smoothly and made me question why we set the story at night.
It’s too bad that the next script I am working on is set at the summit of Mount Everest in a hovering helicopter. In the middle of the night. During an Earthquake. That will be fun.
Labels: Week_1
posted by Tony Vallone at
3:10 PM
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