Two Brothers

Travis Cline · August 6, 2007

Yesterday we finished up a fairly successful first week of shooting. We shot a lot of page count this week, but only had one location move all week. The first five days we were shooting at a large house and then we moved to a flower shop for the sixth day. Most of the week was day int or nite int. with blacked windows. We shot a couple of day ext and finished up that location with one nite ext scene which worked out well. I'll attach a photo from that scene. It took awhile to get the lighting up and running, but once the condor was up the scene went rather quickly. We had a 60' condor at the end of the street with an 18K and a 12K both gelled with 1/2 CTO and pointed toward camera. We also had a 2500 HMI in the bucket pointed toward the house behind the bucket in the far background of the shot. The foreground was lit with couple of blondes through a 12 x 12 Muslin and a 6x6 1/2 grid. We plugged the blondes into house power so we could move the geni to the end of the street and not have to cable all the way down. My crew is working out quite well. My gaffer is very helpful and excited about making things go smoothly and look good. He's always suggesting different ideas about lighting which I find to be a great quality in a gaffer. My grip crew is on the ball. They have alot of experience and are very pleasant to work with. The 1st AD, who is also the line producer, is the best friend on set you could ask for. He fights to get me time to do what I need to get things right and also is the calmest yet efficient AD I've worked with. Its quite amazing. The art crew was fired after a couple of days though. That was tough, but they were getting behind and nothing was ready when we wanted to shoot it. That was rough, we even had to go back and relight things we had already shot so we could add different important art elements. Things should go much smoother now though.

The director is also the lead actor which is proving to be somewhat difficult which we all expected, but its not nearly as bad as it could be. The director/actor is quite prepared and quite the proffessional for such a young guy. Also, he trusts my opinion as well as that of the producer and the AD. We've had to cut a few shots as the day winds down to an end and he totally trusts us to make sure we've covered the scenes well. I expected that he would want to watch a lot more playback than he has which is great. There is a very light yet excited atmosphere on set which is rare. Its refreshing.

This film has two leading ladies which I am finding interesting to light. One girl has extremely blonde hair while the other has a dark auburn hair color. The light one just needs the slightest amount of backlight to look great while the dark haired girl could take a 12K from ten feet away and be fine. I like lighting women and making them look great. While we were shooting our night exterior scene someone commented on how great it looked and the make-up artist told her they were talking about her. She says, no they're talking about the lighting and my first AC said, lighting is never sexy by itself. I find that more and more to be true. You need something great to light, whether it be a great looking set or an actress, they make me look good.

Lighting each girl is much different as well I think the blonde girl takes a nice wrapping sidelight well while the dark girl responds better to a higher frontal light. The darker girl has a stronger bone complexion that creates more natural shape to her face while the blonde has a flatter more neutral face. Both beautiful girls, just different.

Deluxe is working well for us. They did a daylight bath for us the first three days to give us a quicker turn around on dailies so we could see something early on. They are going to do some print dailies for us next week will be terriffic to watch. I have an early call tomorrow morning so I should go.

Travis