On the particular Red One camera that we are renting, there is a knob on the back that keeps falling off. About every other day, it unloosens itself and decides to play hide-and-go-seek with us like an ejected hard contact lens of old. “Where’s that knob now?” is the scene as one, two or even three of us at times crawl on the ground looking for the blasted knob. We usually find it pretty quickly, and thankfully. This time, I didn’t know it was missing until our key grip, Evan, called and told me he happened upon it while cleaning out the bed of his truck. It was amazing that he even noticed it drop as he shook out a furniture pad. Saturday was Evan’s last day on the shoot but he graciously volunteered to bring us the knob to tonight’s shoot. The awesome part is that we needed to rent some last-minute grip equipment anyway and he was able to bring it to us because he was already coming down to drop off the knob. It couldn’t have happened a better way! Thanks, Evan!
“Nobody EVER Comes Out Here”
Saturday, we were shooting on a road out in the boonies that the producer found where we could shoot a scene that was a bit more complicated than any other scene in the movie. He told us that “nobody EVER comes out here.” Well, maybe on any day except this one. Hahaha. It still makes me laugh as I’m writing this. To his defense, there’s no way he could’ve known—at least in the timetable we had to find a location and shoot. So after finally finding the location, we did a quick scout of the road. Three or four trucks drove by in our two minutes out on the road. As the rest of the crew showed up, we figured all would be well—a couple of passers by we could deal with. While we’re setting up the camera rig on the pickup truck, a couple of random cars came by into the parking lot we had setup as base camp (it was an old military camp cemetery). Okay, no big deal. We think, “Nobody ever comes out here, huh?”  Little chuckles.
Shooting Robots in Sub-Freezing Temperatures, Part II
Well, I didn’t have to bear the -8ºF temperatures after all. We were able to get the shots we needed in the “cooler” rather than the freezer. Someone is watching over me, for sure. In my last post, I mentioned a sequence of the project that I referred to as the “life of a pallet” and had wished that I could show you some video. Here it is below. I’m at the Chicago Midway Airport right now writing this post and have a few hours to wait for my flight home so I quickly cut together something for you to look at. I have not color corrected this and I don’t have headphones so the sound is just what it is. Most of the footage you will see was shot at 6400 ISO with existing lighting—which wasn’t much at all. It was pretty dark in the cooler. The shots in the loading dock were shot at either 800 or 1600 ISO. The 6400 ISO footage is pretty noisy, but I can’t complain too much because other cameras would’ve probably been a lot noisier.
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