"Maltese Falcon" Shoot

Last week's shoot was frickin' awesome!
The day ran really smoothly, all the crew performed really well and we got all the footage we needed. I was well pleased because it was the first time for me on a shoot in which I had the dual role of Production Manager/ 1st AD.

Here's a few still frames from the 16mm film stock.
Unfortunately, the first three of these pictures have foggy, white lines running horizontally across the image. This was probably caused by light leaking onto the film during the recording process. I'm not sure how it happened exactly but the entire crew was acutely aware of the camera being unusually loud during these shots. This noise from the camera mechanism was screwing with our sound during these takes so we had to re-record the dialogue 'wild' and pray that we can sync it up during the edit. After the first couple of shots, I asked the Camera Assistant, Farnaz, to reload the camera magazine and the image was fine after that (see fourth picture.) except the camera was still fairly loud but no one on the crew could do anything about it that.

Yun, one of our highly skilled editors has tweaked this images a bit - raising the contrast to make all the shadows pure black, heightening the bold colours and adding a soft-focus 'vaseline' effect. Also, all images will be masked into a 16x9 screen ratio in the final edit.

The first one features our actors Greg Atkin (Spade) & Hélène Tardif (Effie).



This second one shows Arabella MacPherson (Miss Wanderly).



A close up of Greg.



A 2-shot of Arabella & Greg.



I'm incredibly happy with the results, especially when you consider that for about 4 days while we were waiting for the negatives to be developed and the telecine to be completed I was thinking that the light-leaked shots were going to be completely unusable and we would need to re-shoot half the production.
I'm so glad it didn't come to that!

I have to say that even though it was a long shoot (8am-7pm!) all the cast and crew were really committed, focused and professional. My lovely Maryann helped out by supplying catering for the everyone (couscous and two types of salad) and Kelly did an excellent job with make-up. Regardless of the results, I was really pleased by everyone's performance on the day.

Now I've just got to finish writing my script for my writing class and so it can be read-through on Wednesday.

I also had a chat with Jason on Thursday to get him to help with the design for Cherry Blossoms. I think he's got a damn fine sense of graphic composition so I'd like him to help with the overall style of the piece.