Pre-Production - Steady-cam Test (10/02/17)

Today we took the steady-cam to the location where will be using it within the production to get in some valuable practice. The house party scene in the middle of the film is to be shot in one large tracking shot which will probably end up being around 2-3 minutes long. We have over a month of pre-production so we thought it would be best to start practicing as soon as possible. Over numerous discussions with my D.O.P we agreed this shot would be very hard to pull off due to the immensity of effort that would have to go in to character movement, camera movement, sound etc. I recently completed floor plans which enabled me to see the scene in full how it was to play out from a birds eye view of the location, which I am very familiar with. I went over this with my D.O.P and we estimated that the amount of extras within the scene would be around 20-30 if we wanted to give the impression that this house party was packed, which is exactly what I want. 

We visited the location at around 3 o'clock as we'd scheduled to use the steady-cam until 5 o'clock. We had a two hour practice session which we used to plan out the scene and then practice it a few times over. As there was only four of us we had to use our imagination to picture a drunken crowd of young people there, along with the lighting that will set the tone of the scene. 

Below are two images I took of the main areas of the flat which will be used in the scene. The first image is of the living area. The table will be moved to the centre where characters will be playing beer pong etc. The crowds will gather in this area, and this is where Alice will come into contact with Millie and Sam, thus seeing Nathan and Lucas in the background, where she photographs them. The second picture below that is where Alice heads to when she realises she's being followed. 

We found that the test was very successful for the first one we had done. We are yet to do a second and third test but we all agreed that it would be needed. The main issue we found is that with it being shot at night, the opening 10-20 seconds were very dark. The shot start down an alleyway which has very little light meaning the limited visibility stops us from seeing Alice as much as I'd like. 

Below is an embedded video of all our tests shots compiled into one. Evidently a few of these shots were monopod and a few were glide-cam. 

From watching this video and from being on location for test shoots in general, myself and the crew learned a lot of things. Everything we learned from trial and error we can take on to other tests and continue to make progress. One of the most important things we learned from watching this back as a crew was how dark the interior and exterior parts of the shot were, and this is considering it is still slightly light outside. We found the way to change this will be to take more redheads on the next test to figure out placements with them. We also found that it would make a lot of sense to change lenses. For this entire test shoot we were using a Canon 40mm pancake lens which draws everything further into the foreground and makes it harder for the cinematographer to maintain a safe distance from the subject and to frame them in a wide shot/2 shot. As Alice comes in through the front door (I was playing the role of Alice in the test footage) she is greeted by two young women. At this point the camera turns with her to face them and frames them in a wide shot in conversation. Getting back to the topic of the lens, when we do another test shoot we're going to do it with a standard 18-50mm DSLR lens to see the difference between the two. I imagine from experience that shooting on a standard lens instead of a pancake 40mm gives us the ability to change the lens perspective, but also shooting on 18mm will allow the cinematographer more freedom and more ability to work people into the frame in such a short space that is the flat. All we can do for now is to continue practicing until we're confident with the camera movement, character movement and lighting. Until all of those things work synonymously then we simply aren't ready. In the following weeks we'll continue to document our progress and what worked opposed to what didn't and why etc. 

Last night myself and Jack returned to his flat when it was dark to continue with the tests. Over the course of the night we went about our lives as normal but I couldn't get the thought of 'what will it look like at night?' off of my mind. I contacted Jack and we decided to do a few more tests with his own camera to find out the results. I also wanted to see what the outside sensor light would look like with a red gel over it. Unfortunately this didn't work how I wanted it to and instead it just cancelled out most of the original light which was essential to the scene. We need the opening area infront of the flat to be as lit as much as possible. Below are some shots which can be used as a reference as to how much the lights illuminate what is around them (not that much) so now we're going to look on to using more light sources at our second test on Tuesday night.