Lights, Camera, ACTION!

First of all, I apologize for the cheesy title. I chose it because I feel it captures my sentiment about our first day of filming. We finally got to the action part of filming!

Overall, the first day of filming went really well. I was surprised to see something like 5 people there about a half an hour early, and everyone else showed up on time. Timeliness has been somewhat of an issue for our group, so it was great that we started filming off on the right foot.

For me specifically, the first day was great! Shawn and I had gone over lighting plots on Tuesday. So I had a good idea what I would be doing before the shoot. I think that the two of us are really working well together. He knows more about lighting than I do, but he honestly wants to know my opinion on things and will let me take the lead. I am learning a lot from Shawn.

I especially thought we did a good job of working together on the lighting for our kitchen scene. This was the scene I was most worried about getting the lighting just right. I figured it would be a pain. We had the lighting plot all worked out. The majority of our light would be natural light from the 4 windows in the room. We were just going to use a couple of Lowel lights. Eric and I had put ND on 3 of the windows earlier in the day to prep the room, and Rich and Jerry had "installed" mini blinds on all 4 of them.

As we got closer to shooting that scene, I realized the sun was still going to be almost directly over the house. There wouldn't be enough light shining through the windows to light up the room. When Shawn came in, I told him what was going on. He wanted to set up some reflectors outside to direct the sunlight, but those blew a lot in the wind and it looked really bad on the monitor. I suggested we setup an HMI outside, and it worked perfectly. Not only did it provide the light we needed, it also added the mini blind lines onto the talent and walls. The shot was gorgeous! We ended up putting both HMI's outside and added one more Lowel and some different gels, but that was basically it. A lighting setup that I was afraid might take 1 hour took 20-30 minutes!

I would also like to say that Eric and I are working really well together. I worry sometimes that I'm getting a little too bossy, but we seem to be getting along. So, I'm evidently not bossy, or he's just putting up with me. Which is it, Eric?

To try and wrap up this long post (sorry), I am really happy with how the first day went. There were some things that went wrong or that could have gone wrong (I'll let someone else talk about those things), but in the grand scheme of things it was amazing how smooth the day went.

Until next time!