I Won’t Do Any Dolly Shots Today… Okay, Maybe Just One

In Notes From the Set by Rod SantianoLeave a Comment

Today we had over 13 pages to shoot but didn’t quite make it in our 12-hour time frame.  I think we could’ve gotten our day if we were able to go a little longer.  It just means we have to shoot on Saturday, which is what I was planning on anyway.  No biggie.  We finally got our video village situation sorted out.  By mid-morning, we had a 20-some inch monitor for the director to watch.  It was so much nicer and easier, I’m sure, for her.

On the Day 1 post, I mentioned how there were no f-stops on the Nikon lenses so you have to jimmy-rig a system to “know” what f-stop you’re at.  On the YouTube video tutorial of the Nikon mount (starting at about 3:30), they go through a process of how to mark one-stop intervals on the Red’s histogram chart on the monitor.  It consists of a piece of tape and some pen markings.  Here’s a photo of mine, although I think I could’ve done a more thorough version, but it suffices.  It really is a pain, but at least it’s something.

Nathan Petty has been taking some great photos on set.  He happens to also be one of the lead actors in the film. Here are some of the photos he took from yesterday’s shoot.

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Because we had so many shots to do, I decided to not use any dolly shots all day.  But, I did manage to sneak one in as our first shot and then abandoned the dolly.  We also did a couple of one-shot scenes with no coverage for time’s sake.  On the last feature I shot with this production company, Stand Strong, we had a much longer script and 12 days to do it so a very large portion of our scenes were one-shots.  We aimed to do much more coverage on this film and, so far, we’ve been doing pretty good.  I’m very glad about that.

Here are some frame grabs of the day that I nabbed before I left the set:

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