Finishing the Movie
We spent the last weekend taking some extra B-Roll for the film… I know what you’re thinking it’s been over a year and we still aren’t done with it. Well we just want it to be as good as it can be when you guys actually do get to see it.
Friday we picked up all the gear including the camera checkout from Panavision, which took the majority of the day.
We drove to Palo Alto from LA on Saturday morning with my car jammed with gear. For such a simple shoot we didn’t think it would be necessary to get a grip truck… turns out it would have been nice but we made do without.
We mostly needed static shots of empty hallways/classroom/lockers/etc so we spent most of our time at a local high school shooting late into the night. It was pretty cool because we got to really focus on setting things up simply for pretty shots without having to deal with actors, sound, or coverage. As the director I didn’t really have to do much. Mostly I just sat around and assisted Rachel (our DP) with whatever she needed.
Saturday during the day we took some more daytime B-Roll all around Palo Alto. The Law family was kind enough to let me fly in their little Cesna plane to try for aerial shots of Palo Alto. A BIG thanks to Mr. Law and Uncle Ron!
I’ve heard that aerial photography out of a little plane doesn’t work so well because of vibration and poor angles of view. But once we got up in the air everything seemed to work perfectly. I was jammed in the backseat with the camera handheld looking out the passenger side window. We were able to get the window fully open so that it wouldn’t obscure our shots. I could lean out the window a little and tilt the camera down to get about 45 degrees and then Ron (the expert pilot) could tilt the plane a little more and we could get around 60-70 degrees which is pretty close to 90 degrees (ie looking straight down).
Rachel didn’t really want to start shooting day B-Roll till the sun got low enough so that the lighting didn’t look toppy - so we sat around until 5ish and then drove around PA until dark, picking up random pretty shots here and there.
All and all a pretty cool weekend.
We’ve got one final re-shoot to do and then, I promise we’ll be done and releasing. Things are in the works… thanks for staying interested!
-Brad
Friday we picked up all the gear including the camera checkout from Panavision, which took the majority of the day.
We drove to Palo Alto from LA on Saturday morning with my car jammed with gear. For such a simple shoot we didn’t think it would be necessary to get a grip truck… turns out it would have been nice but we made do without.
We mostly needed static shots of empty hallways/classroom/lockers/etc so we spent most of our time at a local high school shooting late into the night. It was pretty cool because we got to really focus on setting things up simply for pretty shots without having to deal with actors, sound, or coverage. As the director I didn’t really have to do much. Mostly I just sat around and assisted Rachel (our DP) with whatever she needed.
Saturday during the day we took some more daytime B-Roll all around Palo Alto. The Law family was kind enough to let me fly in their little Cesna plane to try for aerial shots of Palo Alto. A BIG thanks to Mr. Law and Uncle Ron!
I’ve heard that aerial photography out of a little plane doesn’t work so well because of vibration and poor angles of view. But once we got up in the air everything seemed to work perfectly. I was jammed in the backseat with the camera handheld looking out the passenger side window. We were able to get the window fully open so that it wouldn’t obscure our shots. I could lean out the window a little and tilt the camera down to get about 45 degrees and then Ron (the expert pilot) could tilt the plane a little more and we could get around 60-70 degrees which is pretty close to 90 degrees (ie looking straight down).
Rachel didn’t really want to start shooting day B-Roll till the sun got low enough so that the lighting didn’t look toppy - so we sat around until 5ish and then drove around PA until dark, picking up random pretty shots here and there.
All and all a pretty cool weekend.
We’ve got one final re-shoot to do and then, I promise we’ll be done and releasing. Things are in the works… thanks for staying interested!
-Brad
Labels: Pick-Ups
posted by Tony Vallone at
11:05 AM
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