August 6th, 2008 Rich
Today, I watched a commercial offering financial services.
A young woman was sitting at her computer taking care of finances. She gets up and walks toward the camera. Now it is obvious that she is pregnant. As she steps outside through the doorway, we see the bare framing of a roof line for a room that is being added to the house. Nearest the camera is a worker on a ladder holding a nail gun.
This would have been fine if this was a still photo. But the guy with the nail gun is shooting the middle of the board over and over again. He must have put 6 or 8 nails into the same place.
Come on, guys! If you are going to have an actor in the shot, give him something to do. Filling a board full of nails looks stupid.
– Rich Pulham
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August 6th, 2008 Rich
While watching part of “Dead Men Tell Tales” on the Dead Zone TV series tonight, I saw a great technique for creating one-wall sets.
By purchasing textured plastic, the kind that fits over office fluorescent lights, you can reproduce great windows that add life to your sets. Here are two examples.
The first one was a hospital room. There were only two angles used. One was on the hospital bed. The shot was tight enough that all you saw was a high tech background on the wall. The bed was low enough you could only see the lower portion of it.
And there was the “across the room” shot. The top half of the wall was the frosted plastic. But it was covered with a lattice that divided it up to the size of glass blocks. It looked expensive. And best of all, you couldn’t see anything clearly through it except a pattern of light.
The second shot was of an office. The men entered through a doorway but you never saw clearly into the room. Next, one of the men sat down at a desk. You never saw any other part of the room. The back wall was divided by a vertical window that looked like frosted plastic with two-inch wide frosted tape on it in a wide grid pattern. A couple of sheets of wall paneling and the plastic “window” was all there was. There were men standing in front of the desk to give the room depth. Add closeups of the men and you’ve got the shot.
Now there could have been more to it than that. I was seeing the shots how an independent filmmaker would have done it.
– Rich Pulham
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August 5th, 2008 Rich
I watched part of “Dead Men Tell Tales” on the Dead Zone TV series tonight. And I learned a great way to film a car scene.
Shots in moving cars can be difficult, especially when shooting through the windshield. You have problems with sky, etc., reflections. You interfere with the vision on the driver increasing the risk of an accident. And their is a problem with anchoring the camera and the cameraman.
Normal procedure by the big boys is to shoot the car on a trailer. The camera is mounted to the back of the tow vehicle. The bed of a truck gives a place for the crew (though in some states, riding in the back of a pickup is against the law — like Utah). You also have the opportunity to put a shade over the windshield to cut reflections.
In the episode I watched, all this trouble was avoided by shooting the car while parked.
A character was driving someone in a fancy car that had venetian blind in the back window. When you can’t see out the back window, it’s hard to see the car isn’t moving.
It was supposed to be at night so it was fairly dark inside the car. The lights for the characters had someone waving their hands in front of them so they flickered as if passing other cars and street lights.
To add to the effect, the camera moved slightly up and down and side to side. It wasn’t much. My guess is that camera was on a tripod with a fluid head. It was just enough movement to look like the car was moving. But it wasn’t.
The next time you want to shoot someone in a car, maybe the car doesn’t have to be moving at all. It’s a lot simpler.
– Rich Pulham
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August 2nd, 2008 Rich
I watched a piece of the action in the movie Iron Eagle. They climb into the cockpit of an F-16, taxi down the runway and the blast off into the sky.
I was impressed with the simplicity of the scene, especially the part where they taxied down the runway. All you really saw was Louis Gossett sitting in a aircraft seat with the roof line of some hanger-type building out of focus in the background. Then a plane took off at the end of the runway.
Most viewers would assume he really taxied down the runway and was in the plane when it took off. Well, yes, we saw them climb into the plane. But that was it. Taxiing down the runway could have been done by putting the flight seat in the back of my pickup and driving down the road in front of some non-commercial hanger buildings. It would take longer to drive to the location than it would to make the shot. And then some stock footage or some air show footage would have covered the take off.
I mention this because looking at a film from an audience POV is much different than looking at a film from a filmmaker perspective. The next time you watch a movie, notice how little is shown in many of the shots and how easy it would be to reproduce it yourself.
– Rich Pulham
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August 2nd, 2008 Rich
Got my blog set up today. Not sure if everything is working. And I probably have a few more plugins to install. But it’s time to get this thing fired up and running.
I spent most of the day working on the exterior of my studio. I had taken out an 18-foot wide, 11-foot high roll-up door and replaced it with walls on either side of 10-foot swinging doors. That was covered with a layer of OSB (oriented strand board or “wafer” board), a layer of sheetrock and another layer of OSB. Every layer had to be caulked to make it air tight.
This is where building a studio requires perseverance. Much more time was spent on the details like caulking than was done on the big stuff. Even though you are steadily working on it, a casual glance doesn’t show that anything has been done. Putting exterior siding on today changed that. There was a big change.
Of course, I’m not done yet. There is more caulking to do. Then painting. Then weatherstripping (which doesn’t show at all). And dozens of other things. But I’m excited. In a few weeks I’m hoping to put the studio to work.
– Rich Pulham
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