Two Brothers

Travis Cline · July 20, 2007

Hello lads

I thought I would share a little bit about a feature film I am currently prepping. I am shooting an independent feature film currently titled Two Brothers, but I am sure that will change before it is released. We are scheduled to shoot for 18 days with an additional day for second unit/pick-up shots. The schedule is not too grueling considering such a short schedule. We will hardly ever change location during a day and we have a few locations we will be at for 5 days in a row. Also, the director is quite good about being lean with his coverage, so hopefully we will move quickly. One thing that could be a challenge is that the director is also the lead in this film. Fortunately, I have had ample prep-time and we have gone to the locations multiple times to discuss coverage and things of that nature. Plus, the director trusts me and the 1st AD quite a bit and that's good, but I'll let you know how that works out.

This will be the fourth feature film I have shot on 35mm and it gets easier each time. Its never easy, but I can see potential problems coming from much further away and they are much simpler to solve now rather than during production. I learn so much every time I shoot. Its terriffic. Our first day of principle photography will be July 30. We are shooting Kodak fortunately. There was talk today of going with Fuji, which also makes a fine stock, but the director was really into the idea of Kodak, so who am I to complain? About 60 percent of the script is day interior, another 20 percent is day exterior and the other 20 percent is night work. Luckily, there is only one night exterior, which helps us keep the budget down. The rest of the night work is interior and we are going to black the windows. I decided on 5212 for most of the day exterior scenes, 5205 for day interiors, and 5218 for night scenes.

The film is an high school comedy about two brothers fighting over a girl. I want to go for a fine grained look, but I am not planning on be to glossy or flat with the lighting. I want to get as fine grained an image as possible, but I also need to work with our budget for lighting and be able to move quickly. The larger lights in our elec. package our an 18K Fresnel, 12K Par, and a 6K Par. We have some smaller HMI's as well and then some Kinos and a few small tungsten lights.

Our lab work is being done by Deluxe and this will be the first time I have done dailies through Deluxe since they recently aquired their digital post facility. Has anyone done dailies through them before? Seems like a quality way to go. Also, since we are shooting out of town I am excited to be able to hopefully get a quick turn around. We are laying our dailies down to HDCam SR to most likely come back and do a tape to tape for a video finish.

We are getting our camera package through Panavision. We are using a Gold II package with a set of Ultra Speeds. I tend not to use a zoom too much, but any suggetstions for a panavision zoom that matches the Ultra primes fairly well?

Well, I'm excited to shoot this film and I'll let you know how it goes.

Travis

Edited July 20, 2007 by Travis Cline