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All You Need Is… Money!

In Notes From the Set by Rod SantianoLeave a Comment

Earlier in the year, I wrote two posts about my experience shooting the latest installment of Liken—the children’s live-action musical series—titled, Jonah and the Great Fish (see Challenge on Stage and Challenge on Stage: Afterthoughts).  In a nutshell, if you don’t feel like reading those posts, it was an extremely limiting production—from budget, to resources, to space, to time, to crew, to… well, everything.  We did our absolute best given all the circumstances & resources and I think we did a really good job, all things considered.  Sometimes scenes/shots turned out really nice and other times, well… we did what we could. One of the biggest challenges was the fact that our backdrop only consisted of a white screen directly behind the actors along with sparse props.  It worked well for the stage show (that was being performed in the evenings of the days we were shooting), but it was a HUGE challenge for the filmed version we were doing.  The plan was to do our best because any visual effects was not in the budget.  So that’s what we did, knowing that what we saw on our monitors was pretty much what the home viewer would be seeing.  We accepted …