Marbles - Independent Short Film

[RyanT]

Hey guys,

I figured it'd be fun to have a little production diary type thing of this new film I'm shooting.

Here's a little logline about the story:
After his arm is broken by a bully, a love struck kid decides to beat him and impress his schoolyard crush all with one big game of marbles.

We're shooting in Danville, CA at this nice school we've found called Montair Elementary. The reason we picked it was because it had some nice big blacktop areas, the play structures actually had tanbark under them (something that's difficult to find these days), and they had these things called "gaga ball" courts, which we plan on staging all of the marble games in. Here a few location photos so you can get the idea...

We're planning on shooting on the RED with a small set of superspeeds. There are certain montage sequences where we've opted to ditch the red and run 2 or 3 7d's to increase the amount of coverage we can get. With only 2 days to shoot and having a cast of all kids, it's really the only way we can get done on time.

As far as lighting goes, we're planning to keep things pretty simple, using mostly natural light, supplementing it with 6x6 bounces and 4x4 shiney boards through frames of diffusion. We'll also probably have 1 1200 HMI fresnel on hand to put a little fill on the actors here and there. We've spent a good deal of time scheduling everything out so that we'll always be shooting at the optimal times and all the kids will always look their best.

Another fun aspect of this project is that it's being produced along with a local community college, so we have a lot of students coming on and helping out as 2nd AC's, camera pa's, grips, 2nd AD's...you get the idea. They get to learn something, we get a little bit of extra help, so everyone sorta wins.

The other day we went out and shot some very very crude picture storyboards. I'll see if I can't get that up here a little later, as it's basically the movie all shot and cut together.

Anyways, I'm sure I'll have more for you guys soon.

 

[RyanT]

Well the shoot is over. Things were quite more than I expected as we ended up having somewhere over 100 people on set. From 30 Crew Members, 30 Little kids, and then all of their parents and a few other folks popping in and out.

The second day rained on us a little bit, but we managed to get the kids in and out pretty much at 8 hours and wrapped the crew in under 10 for both. That's the one thing that kept me happy at the end of the day.

Funny, but fun. The school that we produced the film along with wrote a small piece for their newspaper.

Few things I'll be posting soon..
-Some photos from the production
-Freeze Frames from the film
-A making of documentary.

 

[RyanT]

Here's a few shots of the kids on set:

The main gang. Our lead, Clinton, is in the front in the blue sweater. Not to be missed is the kid in the green flight suit and a broken arm. While just an extra, the kid was quite hilarious.

Some of the kids playin' around. Notice the eye patch on the kid on the top...

This is probably close to all of the kids. Definitely the main group of principles/extras. The bullies of the film can be seen in their sweet jean jackets.

I wish I could go into more detail about how we shot the film, but I'll keep that until I have some stills or short clips to post.

What you can look at now is just the detail that went into costuming all of these kids. We managed to purchase a large majority of the clothing through thrift stores and other second hand places, and I think we bought costumes for all 30 kids for under 100 bucks. All the extras clothing was also just brightly colored shirts that were bought, and then we silk screened them with custom designs made for the production. Just goes to show you what a little bit of cash and some know how can get ya.

Anyways, that's all for now...More soon!

 

[andreww]

We want grabs, we want grabs, we want grabs!

 

[RyanT]

Well, here's a few grabs for you guys.

There's a few shots in this film where we shoot slow motion with some sort of camera movement and this kid just looks right into camera. I feel bad posting up these grabs, because all these shots have so much movement in them that the grabs just can't show you. This shot for example pushes in from something wider with kids playing all around him in slow motion. In the end there will be some sort of voice over with it.

For both of these shots we just had a shiney board camera right through a 4x4 frame of 251 to just fill in his face.

These shots were pretty tough, as they were in full shade and right behind them was full sun. I tried to do my best to stage things so this would rarely happen, but this is one of the only shots I couldn't help it with. We flew in a 12x single net behind them and then bounced a 1200 off of a piece of beadboard to help bring up the shade.

Kids makin' secret deals.

Just some nice overcast light...

The bully getting ready to break Clinton's arm. Shortly after he breaks his arm, the cronie in the background throws up everywhere. It was just too much I guess.

It's hard to get a good grab of so many people at once. Anyways, for this shot we just built a wall of white around the marble circle with a 6x griff and 4x4 bounce cards. This one was tough too because the sun kept going in and out of clouds. We'll see how it all matches together.

For this one we just staged it in the shade and put up a few 4x4 floppies as negative fill on the left side of their faces. As the guy in the middle says his line, there's also a nice push in in there.

I really like shooting wides like this on long lenses. I think this one was an 85 or a 135.

This shot is hilarious though, as Clinton challenges the bully to the game of marbles, you watch the cronie in the background beat up little kids left and right for a good minute straight.

This one was just a 4x4 show card right next to camera....Pretty simple. We also pull back in this shot to reveal Clinton and the bully facing off on either side.

Anyways, hope you enjoyed. I sort of had to mangle these a bit as I first exported them on an uncalibrated monitor, and as soon as I posted them on my machine I decided they needed a once over in photoshop...so...they've gone through being a jpeg multiple times.

There's still more stuff I can show you though. If you have any questions, feel free to ask.