"Annie" Production complete!

After a rough 12 hour day the production of "Annie" is complete. I'm surprised we got through so much in 3 days. We shot two days a couple weeks ago and one day this weekend. Yesterday we shot 5 pages of pretty much all action. I think its going to come out looking pretty good.


The look: For this section of the film I was going for a dark look. Lots of contrast. The scene is in a bathroom as two people are about to be executed. One breaks free and starts a fight ending in a bloodbath. The location we shot at was a long hallway of stalls with sinks at one end. Our main protagonist was huddled in the corner under the sinks while her husband fights the Russian mob. The main source of light is coming from the doorway. All the lights are off so I had to find a way to light this scene and make it look like the only source is the sun outside. To do this I brought a couple of 2K's in. By refracting the light I was able to brighten up the entire room while making the doorway seem brighter. I still did not have enough light though. I wish I had access to some brighter lights. I brought in a Rifa for closeups creating a greater contrast on their face. The biggest issue was lighting down the long hall. I wanted to have it fall to dark however there are a few sections where action plays out down there and there is one short scene of dialog. It ended up being really dark and in turn really noisy since we were using a digital camera.



Overall production wasn't the best. A director needs to be clear, he needs to be direct, and he needs to instill a type of trust from his crew. I did not see this on the set. I think if he had a few more shoot days things would have gotten better. We crammed 12 pages into 3 days of shooting.


Visually the biggest issue I was having on set was minimizing grain. Even with the 2k's pumping in light I could not get my image light enough to get rid of the grain. This is why I like to shoot in the daylight and outdoors. With the HVX200 you can get some amazing colors and contrast on a image if there is enough light. My goal is to figure out the best way to keep my clean image while shooting night scenes. The beauty of the HVX (like the DVX) is the ability to control most of the image settings in camera. This allows you to reduce your grain contrast, over saturation, etc in camera while shooting. While some functions are not as good as others you options are completely open to what you can do. Right now I am reading Barry W Green's book on the HVX and it takes you through every little piece of the camera. I'm hoping I can find some good techniques that will help me with my grain issue while filming in the dark.