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We finish in the early evening, after stopping by the Emeryville Apple Store to snag three 500GB Western Digital MyBook FireWire800 drives.
I leave Tim at his place to charge-cycle the batteries on the LitePanel Minis and study up on the Lectros, and I hurry home to put Videofax’s
EX1 batteries on charge, assemble our EX1 kit, and round up all the spare sound, monitoring, camera support, and battery bits I have laying about.
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Day 1 - Call time is 2pm. On the way north, I stop at Frys and pick up stingers, power strips for the data wrangling setup,
and twenty more AA rechargeables for the Sony mikes and Sound Devices mixer. We arrive at the private residence that will serve as our primary location,
and unload; half the cars are then taken back down the single-lane road and parked teetering on the edge of the hillside, to make room for the rest.
Our crew consists of Tim Blackmore (data wrangling, lighting, sound), Alan Hereford (B camera, sound, lighting, mad save-the-day skillz),
Aaron Brown (sound, alternate B camera, general assistance), and myself (main camera). Both Alan and Aaron were press-ganged into service with
something like 48 hour’s notice; all the normal soundies we contacted were booked, so we were winging it on sound and B cam (which Rob didn’t call for,
but Tim thought would be a Good Idea).
SCENE 1- Taxi Ride; Alex and Manuel- singing Fado
This is Direct Action Cinema: a short description, rather than a fully-blocked (and fully-written) scene. Alex and Manuel are in
the back seat of an SUV behind the driver; I’m in the front passenger’s seat to shoot them. Aaron on sound is behind me,
feeding three wireless lavs into my Sound Devices 302 mixer, and giving me the mix on dual XLRs.
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 Adam gets wired in for the film’s first shot. |
Rob Nilsson directs from the floor behind the rear seat: he monitors using an old Sony Glasstron video headset.
It’s like Coppola’s Silverfish in that (a) it is shiny, (b) it lets the director see what the camera sees, and (c) it removes the
director from direct experience of the shooting area. The Glasstron takes a Y/C feed, so I plug the VMC15FS A/V cable into the side
of the EX1. While it’s the rearmost of the three side-mounted connectors, it still presses against the back of my thumb when my hand
is on the EX1’s handgrip. I can’t rotate the handgrip, either, because the cable gets in the way.
Fortunately, the DvRig Junior takes the bulk of the weight (the EX1, with wide-angle lens and BP-U60 battery, weights 8 pounds),
so rotating the handgrip is not essential. I quickly realize that without the DvRig, this shot would be impossible; with it, the load
is tolerable. The DvRig’s spring-loaded center column carries the weight, while its dual-axis fluid head (tilt and dutch-tilt axes)
allows full freedom to aim the camera as needed. The Rig will remain on the camera for all but a fraction of the shooting, and I now
consider it an essential accessory for EX1 handheld work.
(Alan brought his own homebuilt DvRig Junior: the springy column from a DvRig ENG, to which he had added a ball head and a Manfrotto
video quick-release plate. Since the EX1 really requires hands-on operation to exploit its features (the "expanded focus" button on
the grip isn’t remoteable, nor is focus, practically speaking), a shoulder mount with its own handgrips isn’t suitable, but the
DvRig Junior, or Alan’s reasonable facsimile thereof, carries the weight and lets the camera work in a handheld mode.)
We set off driving, through sun and deep shade. The EX1’s exposure display ("BRT DISP": percentage readout of brightness in the
central area of the screen) is invaluable in determining what’s really happening with levels, while the EX1’s excellent latitude
holds detail in the shadows while keeping sunlit skin from blasting out completely.
We return after 45 minutes of driving through Mill Valley, and I set up one of the few tripod shots in the show, of the van arriving
at the house. We follow it up with a low-angle walking shot, with the sun coming through the trees, past our actors, into the camera lens.
This is fun: I’m following three actors up a stepped, stone path, with the camera handheld low-mode at ground level. We start off in
a carport sandwiched in the two feet of free space between two cars; I’m shooting full wide angle (about 4.6mm on a 1/2" camcorder);
I have a soundman with a boom behind me, and behind him is a blind man on a leash: Rob Nilsson with his Glasstron. Amazingly, Rob
stays right in step with us, neither stumbling on the steps nor running into us when I stop suddenly and freeze the camera on a tableau.
Years of practice!
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