MalcolmOng
Veteran
Well work has just about finished with pre production, and I'll be shooting tomorrow(19/11/2006) in my high school. Special thanks goes out to the awesome DVXusers Zul(luzer) and David liu(hobbes)
The Equipment:
3 Arri 300 watt fresnals
3 Arri 650 watt fresnals
Obligatory Gels
Senheisser 416 mic with boom, rycote and softie
Hugeass foamcore board
Canon XH-G1
The Story:
Centered on a group of friends who are 16 going on 17, and move from an all boys school to a mixed school. Having been in an all boys school all their lives, there are some...problems...fitting in. They also think they're cool - but they're not.
The Backstory:
This is mostly an orientation video for my year as we move to year 5(the school system in Singapore is different), and its the first one I'll be shooting with real lighting equipment. Had to jump through hoops of fire to get the school to agree to fund it. Thanks to DVXuser I met Zul, who'll be the DoP and will also be in charge of sound, and David Liu who's going to be the camera op. We managed to snag a canon XH-G1 as David borrowed it from Canon on the pretext of 'trying it before he buys it'.
The Crew:
Zul - Director of Photography, Sound
David Liu - Camera Op, co-director
Asher Tan - Co-director
Malcolm Ong - Writer, Director
Andrew Wang - Writer, Producer, Sugar Daddy
Emily Bong - Teacher in Charge, Sugar Mama
With luck I'll have grabs up tomorrow, and hopefully I won't kill my computer by editing Hi-Def Footage... Its an AMD 3200+ 64 bit with 1 gb of RAM. God bless(my computer). I'll post up everything including BTS shots, etc
UPDATE:
The Grabs(cc'd):
The Rant:
Murphy's law does exist. I got a guy to watch the lights but for some reason a smallass kid ran, tripped over the cable and i watched in horror as the rented 650 watt fresnal fell to the ground. Now it can't be turned on, and i gotta return it tomorrow. Damn. Hope its just the bulb that got dislodged. Other than that the footage IMO looks pretty good, and I'm hoping everything'll turn out fine. Will post some BTS shots tomorrow maybe.
The Film Journal:
I must say I'm pretty darn impressed with the hidef images from the XH-G1. If anyone's interested in the settings, we shot it at mostly default settings, but with a -3 gain and we reduced some color gain because we decided to bring out the colors in post. Today I'll be shooting the rest of the trailer, but I don't have the XH-G1 anymore, so I'll be covering it with my good ol' DVX. I hope the SD and HD footage will gel nicely together, and I'll probably try to use InstantHD or something to match em. I must say that my computer is handling the HD footage really well - didnt expect it to handle it lag free(mostly).
This is the first time I've ever worked with lights, and I must say that the 650 watters are alot more useful than the 300 watt lights. They're pretty compact, and can be ND'd or diffused down to as little as you need, and they are bright enough to use in the daytime(although probably not as effective as a 1.2kw light). Unfortunately today we have to return the lights, but there's still more to be shot so the rest of it will be shot run and gun with my DVX like the rest of my stuff.
We shot about 4 minutes of footage that made it to the final cut over a span of 4 hours, although we could have moved alot faster had we had less trouble with blocking and coordinating the actors - I was using actors from the Drama Club who were more used to stage acting than they were video acting, thus their emotions tended to be a bit more absurd and animated as opposed to the generally more subtle gamut that video requires. Nonetheless I think we pulled some pretty good performances out of the leads, however we didn't spend as much time for the supporting cast. I'll be reshooting some of the scenes today too as well because I'm not satisfied with how they play out. Will update later on once I'm done shooting.
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