"Take Out" A DVX/Redrock Short Film - Production Diary

[Justin Aguirre]

Take Out - A Short Film Production Diary​

Synopsis / Overview
"Take Out" is a 5 minute drama about a man who wants his girlfriend back.

This film is for the Youtube Project: Direct competition but I want to use this to document the makings of and I am not doing this to gather votes if it's chosen in the top 10 films.

Crew
I am wearing many hats; producer, writer, director, cinematographer, and editor. My right hand girl in this production wears; writer, AD, graphics, director, and producer.

Locations
Restaurant Kitchen
Restaurant Office
Restaurant Dining Room
House Living Room For A Party Scene

Timeline​

12/04/08 - Finished writing the script with my partner and my car battery dies from using the laptops plugged into the cigarette lighter. Got home from the beach at 4 in the morning.
12/05/08 - Shot the beginning scene in the back of the restaurant.
12/07/08 - Shooting some B-roll in the dinning room as well as the ending with a restaurant "open" and "closed" lighting plan.
12/08/08 - Shot the party scene from 11PM-4AM. We completed 4 different lighting setups.
12/10/08 - Shooting the rest of the restaurant scenes and we will be done with principal photography. Also all the footage from the party scene has been uploaded and organized into Final Cut.

Since this competition is over on the 14th I will be updating this thread regularly with photos and updates as things progress. :dankk2:

 

[Justin Aguirre]

Behind The Scenes Photos​

 

[Justin Aguirre]

Production Grabs​

 

[yeahfilms]

why so serious on the white board ha! nice bts.

 

[Justin Aguirre]

Updated the timeline and should be able to post some more screen grabs tomorrow night. The party scene came out really well!

yeahfilms - Haha half the guys that work there really, really love that film.

 

[Justin Aguirre]

12-08-08​

We arrived to one of my friend's house to shoot the party scene for the film around 10PM. We had 4 setups to do and our lighting kit consisted of 2 Smith Vector 650 lights with barndoors and 2 work clamp lights with 100 watt bulbs. We also had some tuff spun for diffusion.

We began to set up and was talking about some of the props we could of chosen and mentioned that one of them was a bunny suit. Out of nowhere my friend Jen walks into another room and comes out with a complete bunny suit including a head. The first thing I thought was that how quickly we could change the script to include the costume into the scene.

Unfortunately, we couldn't and just had to enjoy my friend wearing the head and playing our other prop a guitar while we set up the lighting.

For lighting the slap scene we used the two clamp lights setup overhead on a backdrop stand. I like using the backdrop stand as holder for the clamp lights because I can slide the lights back and fourth to adjust if needed very fast. For the clamp light we used as the key I put the tuff spun on to just help smooth out the light.

We had Nathan our actor stand under the middle of the pole going front to back of him. I really liked how this lighting setup came out and will be using again for my productions.

Another lighting setup we had was with my actress Jen. I used the same backdrop/clamp light combo for her as well only using the lights as her key placed close together with no fill on her right.

You can see one of the clamp lights on the left but I don't think it interferes with the image too much.

The only time I used the 650 light was when I placed it outside and far away from the window to help outline the drapes a little as a porch light. We ended the scene at 4AM with everyone still holding it together pretty well especially since everyone had work in the morning around 10-11AM.

12-10-08​

We shot the last of the restaurant scenes starting after the restaurant closed at 10PM. This night went very smoothly until 1AM when the local security guys came knocking on the door wondering what was going on. They were pretty cool about it, we thought it was kinda funny there were 4 of them... most be pretty boring at that time.

For lighting I again used the clamp lights as out key. I placed them pretty far back and used them as a broad light source.

We really only used one 650 light as an unseen light source for our only EXT scene when Nathan enters the restaurant. We ended around 3AM.

Notes:​

From concept to compleation our little film took only 2 weeks and for the amount of time spent on it I think it came out pretty well. Having watched it many times over I see a few things I would like to change but couldn't because of the deadline for the contest. Many audio cleanup and mix.

If you would like to view the final video head on over to Youtube here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCF4xNorhH8

My writing partner and 1st AD though all of this are now thinking of joining Lossfest because we worked so well together but I'll start that thread when a script is more or less formed.