11.13 : production, day one

I’ve been all kinds of nervous regarding my dramatic practices shoot lately.  It’s taken a lot of planning — shot lists, storyboarding, location diagrams … stuff that I’ve in the past been incredibly reticent about doing.  I think that’s stemmed from a love of the accident, the random, the unplanned .. I shot terribly haphazardly for my final project last year, but it still turned out exactly the way I wanted.  I know that it’s possible.

The thing that I’ve come to love about the process of preproduction (and it was a process that I began to have a deep affection for, after a while) was the depth and level of understanding I’ve come to about my set.  I mean, granted, I am shooting in my house, so I have a lot of freedom to explore different configurations of furniture & etc., but even just exploring the qualities of light at different points in the day in order to determine when was the best time of the day to shoot & figuring out the camera angles before ensured that the shoot moved along really quickly.  We shot 3 scenes in just under three hours, which, if any of you are familiar with production times, is pretty damn good.

The only annoying thing (which was actually an awesome thing) was that the incredibly effin’ heavy lights I hauled on the bus from school were totally unnecessary … natural light was more than sufficient and made the quality of the footage really tender.

And I cooked breakfast for everyone, which was pretty fun.  I think it’s a lot easier to be enthusiastic about being awake at 7:30 to shoot if you’re full of food and coffee.

I’m excited about the potential of this little short.  One production day down, one to go.

(on a personal note : room’s still a mess, but now it’s a post-production mess. slightly more acceptable?)

~ by snarled on 11.13.07.