CharlesPapert
Director of Photography
We are in the midst of screening this year's Messhall Film Festival in Los Angeles, thought I'd post my film. This festival was schemed up by a server and a bartender at Messhall Kitchen, a gastropub in Los Feliz (my local spot for the past 10 years). Knowing that the majority of the staff there were also actors/writers/directors at various stages of their journey, as is the case with so many restaurants in LA, and also knowing how many industry folks like myself are regulars, these guys thought it would be great to bring them all together into teams to make a series of short films shot at the restaurant. We did this last year and it was a great success, so repeated again this year. Each team had from 10 pm to 7 am on a given night to shoot the films then a couple of months to edit. Then we have a series of screenings of all the films at the venue and a great time is had by all. David Fincher is a regular at the restaurant and he came to our premiere screening--let's just say it was a tad surreal watching him watch my film...?!
Last year I was given a pretty somber drama so I decided to lighten things up with a bit of a romp. I wrote with these actors in mind, all playing versions of themselves and their actual jobs at the restaurant. Executing it as a Steadicam one'r allowed us to roam around the building and grounds. It's a historic building, continuously operating as a restaurant for 93 years, and was one of the legendary Brown Derby's in the 40's. The space was divided in two in the 90's and the other half became the Derby swing club, memorialized in the movie "Swingers". A nod in that movie to the Goodfellas Copa sequence had Favreau, Vince Vaughn and co. enter through the back stairs and kitchen, most of which is intact and is the same kitchen seen in this film.
Anyway, shot on my Varicam LT and a Sigma Cine Prime 20mm. I enlisted my good friend and legendary operator Dave Chameides to do Steadicam duties. I have plenty of one'rs under my belt from my Steadicam and later DP days, but had never written or directed one prior to this and it was an interesting exercise. It's much closer to theatre when you can't affect pacing and pick selects on a line by line basis!
I thought the edit was going to be lightning fast due to the limited amount of cuts, but ran aground with the transition from kitchen back to dining room. The kitchen was a good 4 stops hotter than the deep background and we did a remote stop pull on the way through, but due to distance and transmission errors there were a series of exposure jumps within the stop pull. I painstakingly keyframed those into a smoother transition, then isolated the background from foreground and pulled it up in level, then isolated the actresses walking in front of it to keep them from being affected by that lift. It was a ton of work to get it seamless (I am OK with Resolve but don't have any VFX skills to speak of) but it did push my system to the brink, especially once I added noise reduction to help with the pushed background element, and I had several days of constant crashes before I finally rendered clips out in stages to reduce the load.
vimeo.com/papert/tenth
Last year I was given a pretty somber drama so I decided to lighten things up with a bit of a romp. I wrote with these actors in mind, all playing versions of themselves and their actual jobs at the restaurant. Executing it as a Steadicam one'r allowed us to roam around the building and grounds. It's a historic building, continuously operating as a restaurant for 93 years, and was one of the legendary Brown Derby's in the 40's. The space was divided in two in the 90's and the other half became the Derby swing club, memorialized in the movie "Swingers". A nod in that movie to the Goodfellas Copa sequence had Favreau, Vince Vaughn and co. enter through the back stairs and kitchen, most of which is intact and is the same kitchen seen in this film.
Anyway, shot on my Varicam LT and a Sigma Cine Prime 20mm. I enlisted my good friend and legendary operator Dave Chameides to do Steadicam duties. I have plenty of one'rs under my belt from my Steadicam and later DP days, but had never written or directed one prior to this and it was an interesting exercise. It's much closer to theatre when you can't affect pacing and pick selects on a line by line basis!
I thought the edit was going to be lightning fast due to the limited amount of cuts, but ran aground with the transition from kitchen back to dining room. The kitchen was a good 4 stops hotter than the deep background and we did a remote stop pull on the way through, but due to distance and transmission errors there were a series of exposure jumps within the stop pull. I painstakingly keyframed those into a smoother transition, then isolated the background from foreground and pulled it up in level, then isolated the actresses walking in front of it to keep them from being affected by that lift. It was a ton of work to get it seamless (I am OK with Resolve but don't have any VFX skills to speak of) but it did push my system to the brink, especially once I added noise reduction to help with the pushed background element, and I had several days of constant crashes before I finally rendered clips out in stages to reduce the load.
vimeo.com/papert/tenth
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