Funny enough, just the fact that I graduated with a film degree makes people think I'm great at all aspects of production, and recently a friend of mine, Matt - with whom I used to work with at San Francisco's favorite video rental store, Le Video (Check out the commercial I made for them: Click Here)- thought of me when his friend Rory, was shooting a short and desperately needed someone to do some lighting. He asked, "you know how to do lighting?"And not having much experience with being an actual DP on any shoot before (I mean yes, I had taken a class on cinematography, but I used that experience as an excuse to have access to San Francisco State's soundstage and write and direct my own short STOP THE BLEEDING [check it out by clicking on the title] rather than taking on the role of a gaffer or DP) I decided now would be a good time to try. So I replied with, "sure." And that was that. I suddenly became not only DP, but Camera operator as well. It was awesome.
The short is called "the Atheist" and it actually is a concept of Rory's he's going to make into a web series and post on the website he's developing called slimcinema. (check out by clicking - the trailer looks pretty sweet.) What he wanted from me was to light a dream like sequence in very, VERY low light. here are some shots from the footage. you be the judge. How was my first gig as DP?
click on picture to enlarge
Now here is the trip. and I think you can see it is pretty prevalent from seeing comparing both camera angles. On the first day of the shoot we didn't actually get all the coverage we needed. some how we missed a few very necessary shots... so we actually spent some time mimicking the original lighting we had from the first day to hopefully match! Well, as you can see the color is a bit off (one is much more blue) but that is something that is easily fixed in post. As far as the actual amount of light... I think it's pretty passable.
Basically what we did was use a couple of 600watt lights and a 300watt, and wrapped the hell out of them with Black wrap (trying to eliminate any spill from the holey backs of those damn lights - black wrap always burns off some smelly dust when you first put it on a hot light). Then we simply cut small small holes in the black wrap to let the least amount of light though. And aimed the beams of light where they needed to go, and surprisingly, more often than not, we had to close the holes up because the smallest hole can really be quite illuminating on such a dark set when you're really striving for complete blackness. Then we threw a color temperature blue gel in front of each beam of light to give it that "moonlight" effect - how beautiful.
It was a lot of fun and went very late into the early morning, having to start the shoot after the sun went down and these days that could be as late as 8:30pm...
