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.

Heirloom short film: a few more screengrabs

And here are a few more screengrabs from Heirloom. These are ungraded, so may not totally represent the final look of the film. This is with the DragonColor2 and RED Gamma4 profiles. I feel like the RG4 profile is much too aggressive in the darker parts of the image, crushing the blacks too quickly and mushing up the darker mid-tones, but for the sake of quick screengrabs, I suppose it's okay. I would have exported using RED Gamma 3, but for some reason couldn't get the new build of REDCine I was using to let me select RG3.

Heirloom short film wrapped

As I mentioned recently, I'm shooting the short film Heirloom. We finished out the last two days this past weekend. It was directed by Scottish director Marianna Palka and we had a very similar sense of taste in shots, often coming to the same conclusions independently. While it was a lot of coverage and a small crew, the shots were well planned out and we managed to finish early almost every day, so that made life easier.

There was a lot of use of mirrors, which always makes things a bit more complicated, but it was a lot of fun coming up with interesting compositions that utilized them. The film also featured some period elements at night, so all our lighting had to be motivated by pre-electricity sources, which I enjoyed. We shot on RED Epic MX with Sony CineAlta lenses. I'm quite pleased with the lenses, as they offer fine detail while smoothing out the digital edge to the sensor.

Heirloom short film day 1

Yesterday we shot day 1 of 3 for a short film entitled Heirloom. I teamed up once again with actress and producer Laura Monaco (Mystic Cosmic Patrol) to shoot this. Our first day consisted mainly of a single location at a cool little vintage store, with some additional photography in a car and an establishing exterior shot at another location. This next weekend we'll shoot the two remaining days of principle photography.

We shot on the RED Epic MX with Sony CineAlta primes. I brought on my trusty AC, Nick Forte, who always does a great job nailing the focus and is an all around good guy. Here are a few BTS pictures from the crew.