Sabrina Dridje, who produced The Ash Can, sent me the script for this lovely little short and I couldn’t wait to get involved. ¬†First time writer/director Tarquin Glass has an assured pen and knew exactly what he wanted to achieve on set – full marks. ¬†The short follows our hero Jetson whose satchel spectacularly falls apart in high winds. ¬†He finds a replacement on eBay but when it arrives there’s some forgotten passport photos from the Most Beautiful Girl He’s Ever Seen. ¬†His only method of pursuing her is by bidding on more of her items, and communicating through eBay’s feedback system. ¬†It’s dead cute.
We shot on Phil Wood’s RED camera and he came along to focus pull with girlfriend Michelle as data wrangler. ¬†The budget was extremely tight to say the least so we stuck with the RED 18-50mm zoom on the lens front. ¬†Lighting came from Panalux and consisted of either a 1.2 or 2.5kW HMI (can’t remember now), a couple of tungsten fresnels and a dedolight kit.
Shooting the windy section was fun, with Enterprises Unlimited providing the kit. ¬†Obviously we all had to have a go at the ‘leaning into the wind’ trick…
We shot Jetson’s bag falling apart, with all his papers dropping out and blowing away stuff at 120fps to get the papers gliding around through the air. ¬†Tried a speedramp on the RED as well – not sure if it’ll make the edit, but good to know it works.
Rest of the shot took place in what was doubling for Jetson’s flat, and the majority of that in his bedroom where we cheated the layout a bit in camera to make it seem smaller. ¬†Without room for large diffusion frames and so on I keyed with the HMI through two layers of Lee 250 rolls just slid onto C-stand arms and unrolled to make a quick and easy 4′x4′ soft light. ¬†This works great inside, and is much easier to work with with limited crew than lots of Hi-rollers and butterfly frames. ¬†Used the tungstens gelled 1/2 CTB bounced off the ceiling for fill. ¬†Not terribly exciting but we had so much to get through and with limited equipment and crew it seemed sensible to stick to ‘broad strokes’ lighting.
There were about three cameras doing production stills type stuff on set so theoretically once I get hold of some of those I’ll be able to show you a bit more, but until then you’ll have to make do with another¬†lackadaisical¬†episode of the DoP Diaries above! (although I spectacularly failed to bring the damn little camera on set the day we had the wind machine on – doh!)