(Note – see the post below for some photos from today)

Lots of progress today in the studio as set carpenter Lee, set dresser Richard and runners Matthew, Fraser and Nixon arrived to throw in their weight.

The set itself is relatively complex, with three rooms, a connecting corridor, a kitchen, three windows and three doors. That might not sound like a lot, but when you have to construct a small flat completely from scratch in two days, it becomes pretty challenging! We’re lucky in that the studio had a load of 8′ x 4′ stage flats available, but unlike a stage set where the audience is in a fixed position some distance away, we’re going to have a camera with a resolution of 4520 x 2540 tracking inches from the scenery. So making sure it all looks great close up requires a lot of love and attention, which means very carefully applied paint finishes and lots of fine touches.

Whilst the available 8′ x 4′ flats are great for the basic walls, carpenter Lee has had to construct any sections with windows or doors from scratch. Unfortunately the building merchant managed to cut all the 2 x 4s he ordered slightly too short, so he’s valiantly had to trim every other piece of wood to fit. Director Steven’s dad has taken on the task of building window frames to fit.

So the flattage is now about halfway up, and with weekend access at the university proving almost impossible to source, tomorrow is going to be a epic day. On top of that, I’m going to start the day queuing for the new 3G iPhone at an embarassingly early hour…

Lighting

Steven gave me a moment every DP craves, and handed over a series of stills from Chris Doyle‘s work as references for the look.

The set itself is going to carry a lot of colour, so I wanted to provide an elegant, sculptural light that changed dramatically as each day in the script went from morning to night. Despite the temptation of the overhead lighting bars in the studio, I want to keep all my key lights outside of the set, and try and back them off as much as possible to benefit from a more even light level inside set thanks to our friend, the inverse square rule.

Originally I wanted three 6KW HMI PARs for my key for the three windows, but this proved impossible given the budget. Also, the studio doesn’t have any power outlets greater than 2KW and we don’t have the money to get an electrician to do a tie-in to fit a temporary 63A outlet. This pretty much limits me to using lots of smaller sources to get a bigger punch. So, instead of the HMIs I’ll be knocking five 1000W parcans through a 6′ x 6′ frame of half soft frost diffusion into each window. I’m hoping this will get me a shooting stop of T2.8/4 inside the set, but I have loads of spare 650W theatrical lamps I can bang into the diffusion if not.

The kitchen and bedroom windows ‘face’ East, whereas the kitchen window will be where we bring in some lovely warm late afternoon sun. For scenes set later in the day, the five parcans on that window will be gelled full CTO and I’ll probably use a couple of them directly, avoiding the diffusion to get an extremely hard light. We have a shot with our evil father smoking backlit by this window which will hopefully look great. The ‘afternoon’ lights will also be rigged lower than the ‘morning/midday’ lights to reflect the position of the ‘sun’.

The whole set will be slightly hazed with a theatrical haze machine to soften the image slightly, hopefully hide some of the cracks in the set, and give the light a bit of a volumetric, stifling effect – as if the atmosphere itself in the flat conspires to keep Emily trapped.

For the back corridor I’m going to zig-zag plain fairy lights between the tops of the two walls of flats comprising it, to give a very soft, low toppy source. We’ll also drop down a couple of naked 20W light bulbs, into the top of frame, and dimmed right down to give an extremely warm and grotty look.

The only other key light will be a spotted down 400W Dedolight HMI through a small aperture at the top of the ‘utility’ area as if there’s a tiny little window or vent at the top of the room.

I’ll be filling and prettifying where necessary as we go along with a Kino Flo DIVA 400, some Dedos and a couple of LED LitePanels for eyelights.

There’s a couple of important shots looking in through the window as Emily stares mournfully out where we want the effect of rain shadows projected onto her face. I’ll do this by projecting a hard light source – probably just a couple of 800W redheads – through a 3′ x 3′ sheet of glass onto which the art department will be squirting water mixed with coffee to darken the shadows. I’ve also heard that spraying the glass first with a bit of WD-40 makes the rivulets a bit more defined, so we’ll try that. The whole rig will be backed off so it’s out of the shot, obviously.

Enough blogging for the moment! And I haven’t even told you about the awesomely exciting motion control rig around the corner which we may be using for a few effects shots…