"Violette"

Cole Webley · May 12, 2007

I just shot a short film where we were lucky enough to recieve the Panavision Student Grant. I shot the project using Fuji 8572, and 8582 - a few scenes I had to shoot on 5293 (which is the stock I would have rather shot the film on but I couldn't turn down 5 cents a foot for the Fuji stocks). We shot on the Gold II with a set of their Panavision Primes (sorry don't remember the specifics about them) we had a pretty extensive set, 14mm, 17mm, 20mm, 24mm, 35mm, 40mm, 50mm 75mm, 100mm, 150mm macro and a 10 to 1 zoom 25mm-250mm...I think that's all we had. I stayed almost exclusively on the 24, 35, 50, 75 and 150 for the macro stuff. I wore a 1/4 Black Pro Mist on all of the young girl's close-ups.

The first picture is of Violette sitting at the table doing homework. My gaffer, Ephraim Smith and I, hit her from the side with a hard 750w Source Four shooting through a glass door. Her key inside the room can be seen in the next photo. It is a 650w bounced off of a 4x4 foam core with the floppy to keep it off the walls. The walls proved to be very challanging. The wall paper that was applied for the show ended up having several wrinkles throughout so we had to keep it off of the walls to hide them. This ended up taking more time to light and limiting our creativity - another instance that re-iterated the importance of great production design.

The dinner scene was lit with a 1000w Jem Ball light draped with duvatine to keep it off the walls. Violette's backlight was a small mini mole with some opal and dimmed down around 50 percent. We had a T.V. light gag which I used a 650w Arri tungsten unit with 1/2 CTB and dimmed up so that the max was 1 stop over and min. was 3 stop under.

It was great having such a nice camera. A big thanks to Ric at Panavision for helping us out. We had a technical issue with the first body we were using so I took it back to Panavision and they gave us another body for another week of production - no questions asked. I have been very impressed with their professionalism and willingness to help our project be a success.

This was the last film I shot as a undergraduate at Brigham Young University. It was a pretty great film school, I was lucky enough to shoot a lot of film. In all I ended up shooting 8 short films,4 spec ads, and 4 music videos. Five of those projects were on S16mm, four projects on 35mm, and five on HD.

I am headed to Germany on Sunday, May 13 to shoot a doc for a week on the HVX with the M2 adapter. Should be a lot of fun. I will post more about that trip.

P.S. If anybody can tell me how to get the darn file size down to a minimum w/out making the picture look awful I woul appreciate it. These files were originaly 2.4 MB so I had to resize them and down res them to approx. 20 KB each and now they look awful. I have noticed others have posted photos that look great and I am wondering how you keep them looking so great with such little information.

Thanks.

Stuart Brereton · May 12, 2007

I have noticed others have posted photos that look great and I am wondering how you keep them looking so great with such little information.

Upload to webspace and then link to them.

Well done on the Panavision Grant.

Zamir Merali · May 12, 2007

How did you get the fuji stock for 5 cents a foot? Is that because of the panavision grant?

Thanks.

Chris Keth · May 13, 2007

Looks good. I'd love to see the finished film.

Cole Webley · May 13, 2007

I got the film at the DR Group for five cents a foot because it was what they had a lot of and wanted to get rid of it, I had only previously gotten at best 9 cents a foot. Plus, they were 220-290ft. loads.

But, I am anxious to see the film b/c this is the first Fuji project I've shot. Like I said, I also shot some 5293, so I am excited to compare stocks.

Jarin Blaschke · May 14, 2007

Hasn't 5293 been discontinued for some years now? Wouldn't all '93 out in the world beofficially outdated?

Cole Webley · May 21, 2007

They stopped making 93 in 2004, right? Anyways, I had all the 5293 for sometime and wasn't going to shoot it unless I had too...I sent a test to Deluxe and they said it was border line good/bad...so I called Fotokem with the numbers and they said the same..."it's probably ok, but it could be bad..." We only ended up having to shoot three set-ups with it, so hopefully it turns out ok - if not, we can pick up those shots later. I am a bit nervous as you could imagine.

Greg Johnson · May 21, 2007

Looks great Cole! Next time you should hit me up if you need help moving stuff or whatever.

To get the photos for the web use photoshop, open your file then resize it to anything under 800 pixels. Then FILE>SAVE FOR WEB, there you can choose your level of compression with a live view, and the estimated file size. Then upload to your server or photobucket whatever!

By the way,.. is the girl playing Violet real name Lauren? She looks familiar, if so she's an awesome little actress.

Hope to see how it turns out!

Have fun in Germany.

- Greg