The Resistance: additional screen grabs

Here are a few other screen grabs from the action short, The Resistance, I recently completed.

The nameless "men in black".

Letting the shot go Daredevil dark.

Since we only had one side to our "alley", we flipped our set and lighting to reuse the one wall we did have, playing it as the other side.

A little water is always nice.

Since we didn't have a real alleyway, I let the background go black and added in some haze to help hide what was really back there. Also, the atmospheric haze picks up some of that back light and helps pop the actress off the dark background.

A7S shot. It's a little mushy, but for the quick edit it'll do. I really like the color difference between the two practical lighting sources.

The Resistance

I just finished up action short for an actress looking for some additional material for her demo reel, as well as getting a story concept developed. While I had tons of gear at my disposal, the time we had to shoot was short and the crew extremely small, so I tried to keep it as simple as possible.

Keeping in mind that we'd be shooting night scenes, I opted to use the Sony FS7 for it's clean image at higher ISOs, though I ended up running it at 800 the whole time, with only a single shot at 1600. The other reason I shot FS7 was due to us also using a DSLR on a Ronin. Knowing that the A7S offers great low light capability and matches well with the color science of the FS7 (this shoot isn't getting a color grade, so matching in camera was fairly critical), it made sense.

Since I knew that we'd be a small crew (myself plus two others), I wanted to avoid swapping lenses, so elected to use the Zeiss 28-80 T2.9 Compact Zoom. That would cover the full range of what was needed and would also match nicely with the Zeiss 18mm ZE lens on the Ronin/A7S setup.

This shoot was made possible by local rental house EVS: http://www.evsonline.com/

This is what we used for the alleyway scene.

Our alleyway created in the area pictured in the previous photo.

Top lit with a 650W fresnel through 4x4 opal, with another 650W top lighting the far background and a Source4 dimmed down and shot through 1/2 CTB for a back edge and to bring out the boxes on the shelving. A 1x1 LED lightpanel bounced off a 2x2 foamcore provides some front fill and an eye light.

Don't mess with a girl and her knife.

A7S on Ronin, utilizing practical lighting.

Same lighting setup as the third picture, just flipped.

The Untimely End of Ms. Xiang: a few additional images

Here are a couple more screen grabs from the short film I shot up in Truckee, CA, just north of Lake Tahoe. For the outdoor scenes, I was inspired by Fargo (the television series), which I just finished watching the second season shortly before shooting this project.

The schedule was incredibly aggressive, so I unfortunately didn't get time to shoot a couple drone shots that would have been great to have. Oh well, maybe next time.

Even though the director had some very specific input on the majority of the shots, this is one that they let me have that I really wanted. Probably the most "Fargo" of all the shots in the short.

Overcast skies provide a very nice soft light.

Found the perfect location, Sunshine Organic Herbs, for the scene where our character procures some, errr..."herbs".

This was a tough one to knock out. Dark clouds came in and we were quickly running out of daylight. I wish we could have rolled this one about 15 minutes earlier, when the light was perfect and there was a tiny bit of snowfall.

Probably my second most "Fargo" shot of the film.

It isn't easy to make a flat, unadorned background look appealing, so I flagged it off to try to get it to fall a bit darker and less conspicuous. Key light provided by a Mole Junior daylight LED bounced into the ceiling, with a 4x4 Ultrabounce returning some of that key as a fill.

The Untimely End of Ms. Xiang short film

I just got back from shooting a short film the past 3 days up north of Lake Tahoe. We shot on location, in the snow, which is quite a change from my usual warm Los Angeles weather. While it's always more challenging to shoot in colder weather, the shoot went surprisingly smooth, which is a good thing, as the script was ambitious in both content and page count (27 pages), and the director liked to come up with technically complex camera moves that I tried to accommodate as much as possible, which requires creative solutions with crews as small and budgets as tight as we were dealing with.

We ended up shooting on the Canon 7D Mark II with Canon L-series zoom lenses. I opted for a 16-35mm and 24-70mm, keeping in mind that the sensor crop would give me enough zoom without needing to add on a 70-200mm. Having conducted some tests with the 7D, I was aware of the tendency to get the dreaded "jello" frame if the movement was too erratic, so made sure that the handheld shots, even when the director wanted more energy, were somewhat subdued. Using any of the pre-installed looks, the camera tends to crush the blacks and clip the whites, while saturating colors way too much. After doing some testing, I ended up installing Technicolor's Cinestyle profile on the camera, which gave me a much flatter image with better dynamic range and more realistic colors. It wasn't my favorite camera to shoot with, but fit within our budget and, when lit properly, gives a decently cinematic image.

Although the director and I had prepared a fairly comprehensive shot list in pre-production, a lot of the shots got tossed out the window and changed on set, so a lot of flexibility was required. While I think we managed to get a decent rendition of the director's vision, I'll keep in mind for our next project together to make certain to get a stabilized gimbal or hire on a Steadicam operator, as those tools would have made my job a whole lot easier, though probably neither were within the camera budget for this film.

Mixing up that daylight key with the warm incandescent fill of the "house" lights.

It was challenging to balance our actress's dark skin inside a car with the bright white snow outside, but I let the brightest clouds clip just a little and went with it.

Probably my second or third favorite shot of the movie.

Mole Studio Junior (x2) daylight LED with full CTB doubled up for the background, and the key light provided by the house's walkway lights plus a 650W Tweenie Fresnel panned slightly off from about 30 feet away.

Another Fargo-esque moment.

China ball wrapped with bleached muslin on the lamp side (black duvatene draped on the back side to keep the light off the wall), and two Mole 1K Baby Baby fresnels bounced into the ceiling to provide ambient and fill.