KevinZanit
Active member
Hello all,
On another forum I started a production journal for a feature I am shooting starting July 5th. I am just copying and pasting what I wrote on the other forum, but people seem to be interested in this type of thing (I know I always am), so hopefully someone can get something from it/ is interested in it. So here was the first post I made:
The film is shooting for 30 days (I am the cinematographer); starting July 5th. The project is called “These Days”, and will be directed by Chad McQuay.
The project is an extremely low budget feature with a shooting schedule that is a little too short for the material and all the locations (there are many).
The story is fairly complex, so I will let the summery that the writer/ director created speak for itself:
“Set in Los Angeles during the opening days of the War in Iraq, "These Days" examines the lives of ordinary young Americans struggling to cope with the world around them. The film is told through a series of vignettes, from which four central stories emerge, each of the character's lives distinctly linked to the next. By overlapping the narratives, deftly moving back and forth across a timeline a la "Amores Perros", "Pulp Fiction", etc, these chance encounters build to a crescendo.
There's Tara, a young black woman plagued with a gripping fear of death after being attacked outside her apartment complex. Darrin, her neighbor, is torn between his girlfriend and an old flame who's returned from overseas. Anne, Darrin's filmmaker girlfriend, distracts herself from the love triangle by attempting to help her documentary subject Travis deal with his anger towards the world. Finally, Shawn, a scraggly-haired musician, struggles with feelings of guilt over a fatal car accident.”
The cast is a nice mix of talented new comers, as well as several very seasoned performers such as Kurtwood Smith and Beth Grant. All very understated, all very well cast. This project is so character driven that the casting was unusually critical (in my opinion).
The script is also quite good, and is able to take the above structure which has been done many times before in very interesting directions. The point of this film is not to reinvent the genre, but to do it justice.
The director and I had discussions about how to differentiate the various stories visually from one and other, and what to do when they intertwine. We decided not to take extreme measures in the look for each character. The differences will be subtle ones, mostly in the art direction. The color pallet will not be particularly extreme for any character, just a slight bias towards warmer, cooler, or neutral colors depending on whose story we are in.
As I said, this project is extremely low budget so generally things are tight in all departments. This project was set to shoot last year. We got very close to shooting, but due to last minute changes in actor availability, the producers decided that we would not be well enough prepared to continue forward (which was probably the right choice). At the same time “Lost” got picked up, so off Chad went to Hawaii for this last year, revising the script and raising more money.
Over the course of the previous prep the question of what format we were going to shoot was up in the air some. It went from DVX100 to HDCam, slight murmurs about S16, to SDX900, back to DVX. I am actually okay with this choice. I like the camera, and have gotten results that I was very happy with in the past. We will be shooting in a lot of practical apartments, with several characters in some scenes moving around a lot. The camera’s small size will help facilitate that. Plus, the fact that the format we are shooting will have little impact on the budget helps everyone else’s department. All around everyone got some more money for equipment, etc.
There are quite a few locations. As I said, small apartments are major locations in the film. It is still up in the air as to if we can build at least two of the apartments (the main ones) on a stage to give us more flexibility all around.
We also have several driving scenes, a car crash, some bar scenes, a large war protest (which a 2nd unit had shot already when there was an actual war protest going on), several night exteriors, and more small apartments . . . with a lot of dialogue we will have to move extremely fast to meet our 30 day schedule.
My lighting style for this project will be as un-intrusive as possible. Mostly lighting from outside of the windows in such a way that gives the actor and camera freedom of movement without a lot of relighting. To facilitate lighting from outside the windows of these practical apartments, my gaffer, Chris Hughes, designed a rig which is a “menace arm” that arms a small HMI (usually a 1.2k PAR) out about 6 feet from the window with a pulley system to allow for easy panning of the light.
It is very hard to come up with a lighting and grip package that is flexible enough for our various locations, yet cheap enough to work for us. The issue is not only money for gear, but money for crew as well. Based on that, we decided not to get any large (heavy) fresnel units. Originally we were going with 12ks for our “big guns”, but decided that because it really takes 3 guys to head up the unit, they would slow us down way too much, and be too big for most of our locations. Thus we are going with a very small package (consisting of units that take up less space). If you are curious about the details of our grip and electric package, you can view the full list here:
http://www.kevinzanit.com/thesedays/G_E_V5w.pdf
That’s it for now. I will do my best to keep this thing updated if anyone is interested.
Kevin Zanit
On another forum I started a production journal for a feature I am shooting starting July 5th. I am just copying and pasting what I wrote on the other forum, but people seem to be interested in this type of thing (I know I always am), so hopefully someone can get something from it/ is interested in it. So here was the first post I made:
The film is shooting for 30 days (I am the cinematographer); starting July 5th. The project is called “These Days”, and will be directed by Chad McQuay.
The project is an extremely low budget feature with a shooting schedule that is a little too short for the material and all the locations (there are many).
The story is fairly complex, so I will let the summery that the writer/ director created speak for itself:
“Set in Los Angeles during the opening days of the War in Iraq, "These Days" examines the lives of ordinary young Americans struggling to cope with the world around them. The film is told through a series of vignettes, from which four central stories emerge, each of the character's lives distinctly linked to the next. By overlapping the narratives, deftly moving back and forth across a timeline a la "Amores Perros", "Pulp Fiction", etc, these chance encounters build to a crescendo.
There's Tara, a young black woman plagued with a gripping fear of death after being attacked outside her apartment complex. Darrin, her neighbor, is torn between his girlfriend and an old flame who's returned from overseas. Anne, Darrin's filmmaker girlfriend, distracts herself from the love triangle by attempting to help her documentary subject Travis deal with his anger towards the world. Finally, Shawn, a scraggly-haired musician, struggles with feelings of guilt over a fatal car accident.”
The cast is a nice mix of talented new comers, as well as several very seasoned performers such as Kurtwood Smith and Beth Grant. All very understated, all very well cast. This project is so character driven that the casting was unusually critical (in my opinion).
The script is also quite good, and is able to take the above structure which has been done many times before in very interesting directions. The point of this film is not to reinvent the genre, but to do it justice.
The director and I had discussions about how to differentiate the various stories visually from one and other, and what to do when they intertwine. We decided not to take extreme measures in the look for each character. The differences will be subtle ones, mostly in the art direction. The color pallet will not be particularly extreme for any character, just a slight bias towards warmer, cooler, or neutral colors depending on whose story we are in.
As I said, this project is extremely low budget so generally things are tight in all departments. This project was set to shoot last year. We got very close to shooting, but due to last minute changes in actor availability, the producers decided that we would not be well enough prepared to continue forward (which was probably the right choice). At the same time “Lost” got picked up, so off Chad went to Hawaii for this last year, revising the script and raising more money.
Over the course of the previous prep the question of what format we were going to shoot was up in the air some. It went from DVX100 to HDCam, slight murmurs about S16, to SDX900, back to DVX. I am actually okay with this choice. I like the camera, and have gotten results that I was very happy with in the past. We will be shooting in a lot of practical apartments, with several characters in some scenes moving around a lot. The camera’s small size will help facilitate that. Plus, the fact that the format we are shooting will have little impact on the budget helps everyone else’s department. All around everyone got some more money for equipment, etc.
There are quite a few locations. As I said, small apartments are major locations in the film. It is still up in the air as to if we can build at least two of the apartments (the main ones) on a stage to give us more flexibility all around.
We also have several driving scenes, a car crash, some bar scenes, a large war protest (which a 2nd unit had shot already when there was an actual war protest going on), several night exteriors, and more small apartments . . . with a lot of dialogue we will have to move extremely fast to meet our 30 day schedule.
My lighting style for this project will be as un-intrusive as possible. Mostly lighting from outside of the windows in such a way that gives the actor and camera freedom of movement without a lot of relighting. To facilitate lighting from outside the windows of these practical apartments, my gaffer, Chris Hughes, designed a rig which is a “menace arm” that arms a small HMI (usually a 1.2k PAR) out about 6 feet from the window with a pulley system to allow for easy panning of the light.
It is very hard to come up with a lighting and grip package that is flexible enough for our various locations, yet cheap enough to work for us. The issue is not only money for gear, but money for crew as well. Based on that, we decided not to get any large (heavy) fresnel units. Originally we were going with 12ks for our “big guns”, but decided that because it really takes 3 guys to head up the unit, they would slow us down way too much, and be too big for most of our locations. Thus we are going with a very small package (consisting of units that take up less space). If you are curious about the details of our grip and electric package, you can view the full list here:
http://www.kevinzanit.com/thesedays/G_E_V5w.pdf
That’s it for now. I will do my best to keep this thing updated if anyone is interested.
Kevin Zanit