F35: The old girl does Bollywood

trafficn said:
Oh dear lord. I would be sweating bullets every roll. This would be me in that hot, claustrophobic, loud set. Seriously- once you get this one under your belt other gigs should be breezy.
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You laugh, but you'd be surprised how close to truth that unfortunately is...

Imagine having, literally, every square inch of fabric on your body soaked through with sweat. I've been drinking 4-5 litres of water a day (that's about 135-170 ounces for my American friends) and still finishing my days dehydrated. The heat and humidity are so intense that the water in your body just seeps out non-stop. It's like nothing I've ever experienced before.

And actually, here's a fun fact for you guys - we've got a Charles/Key & Peele connection on this film :) Jennifer, the Emmy-winning MUA who's coming out from LA to do our Special Effects Makeup, worked with Charles on Key & Peele.
 
Grug said:
Now, now, there's no need to exaggerate. It's an unpadded suitcase with 24 5TB seagate drives...

No, seriously - it's an unpadded suitcase with 24 5TB seagate drives. :grin::):huh::cry:
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I can just imagine some PA dropping the suitcase, and the director saying, "Okay, let's go through each hard drive to see which ones survived and then we'll figure out which days we need to reshoot."

So, is that 12 hard drives for backup and 12 hard drives for primary? They are creating at least one or more back ups of everything, right?
 
haha I'd just like to re-iterate everyone's sentiments - this thread is A+++ in every way! keep us updated Grug! definitely fascinating hearing all of this.
 
Grug said:
So there you have it. That’s how you end up shooting a feature film on an F35 and F3 in 2016!
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Wow, I'm impressed with your composure. I feel like I would have a nervous breakdown before even getting on the plane. I'm surprised by the crew though, I'd imagine with bollywood productions that they would be working light & quick with compressed production schedules...but I guess it's the complete opposite.

Too bad you don't have a doc crew following you, I'd love to see that movie!

Happy shooting, and please keep posting in this thread.
 
Just remember that other than our man Grug and perhaps that make-up woman, their production costs are probably about $50/day. Things work a little differently in India.

I was offered a film in India years ago but it would have overlapped with my wife giving birth to our first child. No way was I going to be away for that. But I did work some Indian productions that shot here in New York. Fascinating the way they chose to do stuff. The sound guy had an ancient Nagra-4 (that's a reel-to-reel tape recorder for you youngsters) and a classic Electrovoice hand mike. These things were known for being tough as nails but this was pretty beat up. I soon discovered why as at the beginning of each take the guy would speak into the mike to ID the shot and then fling it in the general direction of the set. Mind you we were shooting on the street in New York and these guys were stunned that we needed such things as insurance, permits or crowd control. A couple of times the guy almost cracked some innocent bystanders in the head with that mike.

I simply would not be able to deal with the heat and humidity you describe. I was in Singapore a while back and thought I was going to die.
 
Grug said:
And actually, here's a fun fact for you guys - we've got a Charles/Key & Peele connection on this film :) Jennifer, the Emmy-winning MUA who's coming out from LA to do our Special Effects Makeup, worked with Charles on Key & Peele.
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Hmmm...name isn't ringing a bell, she must have dayplayed with us.
 
What a great experience! Maybe you could get some 25' HDSDI BNC's and use the Odyssey 7Q as a monitor for the jib? Shame to waist that bit of kit.

Broatch Berry

Venice CA

Screaming dime.
 
Eric Coughlin said:
I can just imagine some PA dropping the suitcase, and the director saying, "Okay, let's go through each hard drive to see which ones survived and then we'll figure out which days we need to reshoot."

So, is that 12 hard drives for backup and 12 hard drives for primary? They are creating at least one or more back ups of everything, right?
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Yep, 12 primaries, 12 backup. Though now that we've been forced down to shooting ProRes XQ, I've switched to making three copies of everything instead (I don't trust these drives even half as far as I can throw them).

And there won't be any PAs or camera people whatsoever handling the data from now on. We already lost three quarters of a scene from our first day (that was covered on the b-camera on steadicam) because my data wrangler managed to get the whole 'red tape = stop, don't touch' 'green tape = go, reformat' thing wrong, and a card got reformatted before it was transferred :crybaby:

We had an editor on-site for the first week, who I'd hoped I'd be able to entrust the footage to (because I've been more than a little busy). But when I discovered that his idea of making a 'backup' was to copy a file twice to the same harddrive... well, from this point forward, no one's touching the data except me.

robmneilson said:
Wow, I'm impressed with your composure. I feel like I would have a nervous breakdown before even getting on the plane. I'm surprised by the crew though, I'd imagine with bollywood productions that they would be working light & quick with compressed production schedules...but I guess it's the complete opposite.

Too bad you don't have a doc crew following you, I'd love to see that movie!

Happy shooting, and please keep posting in this thread.
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Haha, I've come up through the hellish depths of the completely unsustainable and virtually non-existent Australian independent film industry Rob, so I'm perhaps a little more hardened to... limitations, than the average American cameraman :p

I'm trying to write everything down as it happens, because I've only been here three weeks so far, and I could probably write a book already! There's so much craziness that I fear if I don't write it down, some golden stories will get lost amongst the sheer volume!

The making-of would certainly be an interesting watch. I'm already contemplating putting together a presentation for the Australian Cinematographers Society when I get back home. I've seen some of the BTS footage, which is sadly mostly out of focus and shakes like the camera person has some kind of palsy, but there's some pretty delightful footage of me nearing the brink of madness and despair :p

Mitch Gross said:
Just remember that other than our man Grug and perhaps that make-up woman, their production costs are probably about $50/day. Things work a little differently in India.

I was offered a film in India years ago but it would have overlapped with my wife giving birth to our first child. No way was I going to be away for that. But I did work some Indian productions that shot here in New York. Fascinating the way they chose to do stuff. The sound guy had an ancient Nagra-4 (that's a reel-to-reel tape recorder for you youngsters) and a classic Electrovoice hand mike. These things were known for being tough as nails but this was pretty beat up. I soon discovered why as at the beginning of each take the guy would speak into the mike to ID the shot and then fling it in the general direction of the set. Mind you we were shooting on the street in New York and these guys were stunned that we needed such things as insurance, permits or crowd control. A couple of times the guy almost cracked some innocent bystanders in the head with that mike.

I simply would not be able to deal with the heat and humidity you describe. I was in Singapore a while back and thought I was going to die.
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Economies of scale certainly work VERY differently here, labour is very cheap, but expertise is expensive and hard to come by. To be fair though, we're near Delhi, which isn't a film hub at all. Mumbai (or Bombay as the locals still call it) is the real heart of Bollywood, and experienced technicians and modern equipment are MUCH easier to come by there.

When I visited the lighting company we used for our first block of shooting here, it was a fair shock. Every single piece of kit they had was beaten to hell - rusty, dusty, and cracked fresnels everywhere. The lighting companies here won't source expendables for you here (and then simply charge for them as I'm used to back home), here you have to buy your own - but even finding places to buy gels and diffusion rolls is a bit of a nightmare here. And bulbs? If they expire or blow up, you're paying for them. Doesn't matter if they were at the end of their usable life and you've just rented them for the day (back home, you're covered so long as you return the busted bulbs, or break them through mishandling). It's a very different world here.

And I thought New York summers were supposed to be pretty stinking hot and humid, Mitch? Melbourne is a very temperate climate, and although we get our Australian Summer heat waves, I think it's the humidity here in India that's the real killer. It's 10pm at the moment, and still about 32 degrees celcius and muggy as hell.

CharlesPapert said:
Hmmm...name isn't ringing a bell, she must have dayplayed with us.
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Hmm... must have. I know she did a tonne of work with Keegan and Jordan on MadTV, so when I saw Key & Peele on her resume and just assumed they'd brought her onboard as a regular from that.
 
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Oh! Jennifer Aspinall, of course. Yes, she dayplayed a bit on K&P and I just worked with her on the reboot of MadTV. Good for you, she is excellent.
 
Keep the posts coming Grug! This is a fascinating read.
I'll share my favorite "craft services" story from a shoot many years ago here in the US...perhaps this will make you feel better.
Local tv kind of spot through a very, um, "frugal" agency...for different flavors of chicken wings being sold at a grocery. For whatever reason, product had to be shot on location in the back of store. So, for half day, the wings were put on turntable and lit and handled (bare hands, no food gloves, etc.) by several agency folks, store marketing person, myself and the director. 2nd half of day called for a short drive to a different location. Agency was "picking up lunch"... and guess what they brought?
Yup. Nice cold wings... with fingerprints all over em. :eek:

Enjoy the rest of your experience.
 
New York can get a few intense days here and there, but we know that it's only temporary. There it is inescapable. A friend shot a doc in Borneo and lost nearly 50 pounds.
 
The humidity can get pretty bad here in Little Rock but nothing like India. It took a wee bit getting used to coming from LA. What's worse here is the bad weather. We had tornado warnings all last night, and flatline winds knocked down hundreds of trees. I had to pull my genny package from my Sprinter this morning to get some power to the house. Now my Presa Canario is guarding the generators, and I am strapped. May sound silly, but major power outages seems to bring out the worst in very bad people. Just the reality of living in one of America's most dangerous cities. Sorry for the sidetrack!

Keep up the posts Mark.

All the best!

Dave
 
Well I learnt another interesting lesson the other day - We've all been advertising our particular set of skill the wrong way. It's actually billboards we should have been using this whole time!

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I've literally seen at least 30 billboards over here advertising Cinematography services. It's rather delightful :)
 
Well it's been a minute, but I just realised I never updated this thread with anything to show of the actual film. So here are few screengrabs:

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Nice! Talented as always Mark. Don't want to sound fanboy. But besides alexa I never see shots like this from other cameras. This is why I'm not running to buy these new cameras. None have this mojo. And you been shooting Eric Roberts? Cool!
 
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