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Akeelah and the Bee


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Nearing the end finally -- next week we only work 3 1/2 days and the movie is done.

 

This was a week of scenes at the house of Dr. Larabee, played by Lawrence Fishburn, who is the main character's coach for the spelling bees. Lots of long dialogue scenes and training montages. Unlike the spelling bees, even though these scenes are all storyboarded, we are blocking each scene with the two actors in the morning in order to determine the actual coverage, only roughly following the boards.

 

Outside of the house, the director had some elaborate Steadicam shots planned. One was a four-minute master that moves from the front to the side to tha backyard, and then crosses back and forth in the backyard. Later we had two 360 degree Steadicam shots for two different scenes.

 

Even though the weather was mostly flat and overcast, this sort of was a godsend in terms of pulling off these long Steadicam shots, since I didn't have sun and shade to deal with. On the non-Steadicam scenes, I used HMI's to add some backlight as if from the sun. Luckily our last day of exteriors was sunny, but ironically then I had to fly an overhead silk for some of it to keep the actors from looking up into the sun.

 

I wanted all of these scenes to look somewhat warm and golden; rather than use warming filters, I've been shooting the gray scale with a 1/4 Blue gel over the lens (a 1/2 stop compensation) and then pulling it for the scene. The dailies have come back nice and warm, as if I were using a 1/4 Coral on the lens.

 

Most of the exteriors have been on 5212 (Vision-2 100T, rated at 80 ASA) and the interiors on 5205 (Vision-2 250D, rated at 160 ASA.) Tiffen GlimmerGlass #1 on wider shots and #2 on the close-ups. A few night interiors shot on 5218 (Vision-2 500T, rated at 320 ASA.)

 

Today we got the bad news that the lab somehow ruined four rolls of film; they said that they hit a torn perf in our roll that caused a screw-up. We have chemical stains and droplets over a lot of the image in some rolls.

 

One shot was so majorly screwed-up that if I could recreate it, I could patent the look because it was kinda cool; it was a Steadicam shot of the main character walking through a house and she's almost black-and-white but the shadows are warm red and glowing, with a slight amount of solarization overall. Pretty psychedelic.

 

We're checking to see if we're covered by alternate takes or else we'll have to reshoot some shots.

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Ouch! Hate to hear that. On bigger budget (to me) films like this do they have re-shoot or pick-up days scheduled for sometime later if they need them anyway? Like a week later or something? Or is it a scramble to to pull it all together with peoples schedules etc?

 

One thing about this film though, is it sounds so darned interesting. I would buy a ticket already if I could.

Edited by J. Lamar King
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No, the budget is always tight. Spending another day at a location to reshoot a scene is a major budget & scheduling problem, as is working a longer day with a child actress, which simply is not an option either. Often the problem is that you are locked into the days at each location, so going one day over causes problems for the next location and then the next.

 

However, I doubt the extent of the damage qualifies for an insurance claim since we have alternate takes and other coverage that allows us to cut the scene, so it's more of an issue with the director in terms of performace -- i.e. the takes ruined have the moments he really wanted. I'm hoping it comes down to simply reshooting one or two shots, which is not a big deal since we have one more day left in that house.

 

Honestly there really isn't much difference between a 1/2 million dollar film and a 6 million dollar film except that the crew and equipment package is a little bigger and everyone gets paid more, and maybe you only have to shoot four pages a day instead of five to six pages a day.

 

But we are budgeted to work 31 days on an average of 10 hours per day. That was the deal in order to make our budget -- we got two extra days added to our schedule to accomodate dealing with a lead actress who is a minor, but on the restriction that we not go over 10 hours on most days. The other schedule was something like 28 or 29 days with 12 hours per day, but since we lose our actress everyday at 7 hours (of which I think 5 are on the set, the rest in school) it seemed better to add days rather than work longer days.

 

It's been weird -- we've only had second meal twice and we've had an 8AM call time for nearly the entire six weeks, and I'm home by 7 to 7:30 most days. If it weren't for the horrendous pressure to shoot, shoot, shoot before the actress gets pulled (yesterday I literally did three 360 degree dolly moves for three scenes in a fifteen minute period, and on the last one I got two OK takes and asked for a third but the actress was gone by then) well, I could get to like working only 10-hour days, five days a week. Not looking forward to going back to the 14 to 16-hour day, 6-days a week, low-budget feature grind...

 

This has been the week of the production pressuring me to return equipment early -- everyday it's like "do you need all that straight track? Can we send any camera equipment back? Do you still need that telephoto lens? Do you still need the geared head? etc." Every department is being pressured to find equipment that can be let go. It's hard for me to think out all the remaining days and make sure we don't still need these things.

 

And it's even worse dealing with the film stock orders because we are still shooting big dialogue scenes and burning 7,000' to 10,000' a day, yet they question every film order I place, so I have no leeway when a four page scene runs five minutes and my estimates are off, plus I'm down to shooting as many of the short ends that I have without running into the ire of Lawrence Fishburn, who has all of his important dialogue scenes here at the end of the schedule (most of his early scenes involved sitting among the audience at the spelling bees and reacting.)

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Good luck dealing with everything, David, hopefully the producers will ease up a bit and just let you shoot. Thanks also for taking the time to keep posting, it's extremely informative.

 

I'm curious if you've gotten anymore comments about the dailies. You said previously that there were some whispers about the fill light being too low in the early scenes, have there been any more questions? How have you been feeling about making the progression through the different looks that you'd planned? Are they working out pretty much according to plan or have you made changes?

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Everyone seems happy with dailies. I've seen things here and there I wish I had done differently of course. There were a few dark low-key scenes where perhaps I should have used more fill light but I haven't heard anyone complain -- it was a 270 degree dolly move around someone at a desk. The only place to light from was overhead with a Chinese Lantern, but the dark panelled wood walls fell off into black more than I wanted, but because of the move in a tiny office (literally I had to ask the actor to motivate a lean forward at some point so as to not get wacked as the camera passed behind his back as I squeezed a 35mm Panaflex with a 50mm Primo anamorphic lens between him and the wall...) well, there was almost nowhere to add fill that wouldn't have created a camera shadow. So it looks nice and moody -- a guy late at night working at his desk as the camera circles him -- but I hope they don't think it is TOO moody.

 

If I have one weakness, it's a tendency to use as little fill as possible so it barely plays on the scene -- I don't like the impression of "fill" because it's usually the one totally unmotivated light, just there for technical reasons. So sometimes I knock down the fill TOO much.

 

I had my Storaro lighting moment the other day. There was a scene where the girl is asked to read a quotation by Nelson Mandela on the wall of the office, and the director wanted a dramatic but unrealistic lighting cue to happen where the room darkened and a spot light comes on the girl -- but he wan't sure if it would work or not and whether we should do a "normal" version too. Well, since we don't have time to shoot two versons of things, I suggested something almost motivated in that the "sun" should break out as she was reading the quote. So I positioned a 20K tungsten on a dimmer outside of the windows that faded up slowly as a strong, warm backlight on her head as she read the quote. It was gelled with 1/2 Blue so as to not get too orange compared to the HMI lighting.

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"(literally I had to ask the actor to motivate a lean forward at some point so as to not get wacked as the camera passed behind his back as I squeezed a 35mm Panaflex with a 50mm Primo anamorphic lens between him and the wall...)"

 

David,

It sounds like you are doing the operating. Is that something that you choose to do or is that a budget issue? Also, do you find that operating might make your job more difficult (splitting time between two demanding tasks instead of one), or does operating aid your decision making as a DP?

 

"So I positioned a 20K tungsten on a dimmer outside of the windows that faded up slowly as a strong, warm backlight on her head as she read the quote."

 

Sounds wonderful! I will look for that moment when I see the movie...

 

Raffi

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David, how are you finding the difference between 5218 and 5229?

 

The 5229 is a slightly softer look with smokier blacks & softer colors than 5218 but pretty otherwise -- not as grainy as the old 5284 or even perhaps 5277, and probably sharper than 5277. I probably wouldn't use 5277 anymore if one wanted that look and use 5229 instead. I'm rating it at 320 ASA though.

 

We finally finished the movie on Monday with a two-hour shoot using a limited crew at the Oval Office set of "The West Wing" for a shot in a montage where the spelling bee kids get a tour of Washington D.C. I had two electrics from the show (their best boy and dimmer board person) plus two of my grips and electrics. I wasn't allowed to bring anything but the camera onto the Warner Bros. lot and was told to use their equipment, but then found when I arrived that there was no grip equipment there either. So I had a few lights on rolling stands plus what was in the grid. Luckily we found some c-stands and some white bounce cards behind the translite to borrow.

 

I turned on everything first, since this was a day scene. Trouble was that they light everything to an f/2.8 at 500 ASA apparently, while I'm trying to work at f/4 at 320 ASA. I managed to raise everything to an f/2.8-4.0 split and shot at that. They have a big frame of muslin over the set with 1K nook lights as a sort of ambient top light, but I don't think they ever key with that because it was under an f/2.0. The translite was lit with 5K skypans and there's some space lights with just the duvetine skirts, no diffusion, used to top light any bushes outside of the window. I used 10K's on stands bounced into foamcore to bring up the ambience coming through the windows.

 

And I asked about the hallways scenes there -- they use 250w MR-16 bulbs to create those pools of light.

 

Before that last day, we had three days left on the shoot. The first was spent finishing the scenes at the old house of Dr. Larabee (Lawrence Fishburn). I had been playing most of these day scenes in the office lit with a soft light effect from the one big window, but for the last scene, which is somewhat more confrontational, I went with hard lighting coming through the wooden blinds to create that pattern of stripes. Otherwise, there wasn't anything unusual other than the fact that it started raining outside the windows after I had established hard sunlight in the room.

 

The next day was split between a place called Aero Mock-Ups -- the first time I have ever shot a scene on an airliner set. Not easy even when you can pull out seats. It's a day scene but the character has his window closed because he's afraid of flying; the overhead bulkhead reading lamps were not bright enough so I lit him by backlighting from the next open window and bouncing the light back into his face by putting a white card on the seat in front of him.

 

Then we moved to a diner for scenes where people are watching the National Spelling Bee on a TV set, ala the bar scene in "Rocky"... I had a big backlight from an 18K coming through the window since this was at the end of the movie in our "sunny" look, plus overhead fluorescents were swapped to daylight tubes plus I rigged some more 4-bank Kinos to augment that. So it looked pretty realistic. I had thought of smoking the set but since I hadn't smoked any other scene in the movie, and this scene intercut with three other locations of people watching their TV's, I decided to nix that idea.

 

The final day was spent at the expensive middle school in Encino that the main character Akeelah visits and sees the difference between that and her inner city school. Again, pretty basic stuff other than dealing with partial sun/shade as clouds rolled by all day. Being rushed for time, I had to shoot two cameras on kids talking outside in harsh overhead sunlight with no way to rig anything overhead to soften it because of the wind and the fact that the wider camera would probably see the stands. Then my 18K HMI started acting up so I had to use reflectors for fill.

 

I haven't gotten any dailies for the last few days since we were shooting over the weekends.

 

Did find out that the lab managed to rewash (several times I think) the negative of the rolls spotted when the processor jammed --- they saved everything from that day but two shots, one an insert that we easily reshot, and the other an alternate Steadicam take where we had other takes on other rolls. So disaster was averted.

 

Again, I want to thank my crew for making this movie a good experience for me, particularly my camera crew (John Radzick, Theo Pingarelli, Dave Mun, Steve Whitcomb, Keith Eisberg, Marcus Lopez, my intern Sudhanshu, plus some day players) and my second unit DP Chris Mosio. Also my key grip Brad Heiner and his crew and my gaffer Rick Paisley and his crew.

 

Now I get to fly over to Philly in two weeks to color-correct "Shadowboxer" in what turns out to be a last-minute decision to do a fast digital intermediate using 4:4:4 HDCAM-SR. I won't go into the details as to why other than I'm somewhat the victem of certain "creative" editing decisions (like reframing the image in post or altering some things in the frame, etc.) that have made it necessary to color-correct this digitally, plus now there's a deadline. I'm trying to remain positive about this but generally it's never a good idea to do things in a hurry, especially a D.I. Plus considering I shot in 35mm anamorphic, using 1920 x 1080 HD as an intermediate step is not the best solution but it's the only affordable one. I might go see "Hotel Rwanda" because I read that they also did a last minute HD D.I. even though it was shot in Super-35.

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Congratulations on wrapping, sounds like it's going to be a great film! Good luck with the upcoming D.I., I'm sure it was a frustrating phone call to get. You seem to have a knack for perserverance, though, so perhaps you can take advantage of some of the digital tools it will make available, I'm sure it will look amazing in the end.

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Congrats on wrapping David.

 

I look forward to seeing it. Do you have any films in the works yet, or are you just planning to take some time off after you time these next few films?

 

 

Kevin Zanit

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Congrats on wrapping David.

 

I look forward to seeing it.  Do you have any films in the works yet, or are you just planning to take some time off after you time these next few films?

Kevin Zanit

 

I avoided some jobs that required me to work back-to-back so currently I am not working. I also plan on taking a vacation with my wife to NYC in mid April and then maybe go to NAB for a day. Hopefully THEN some work will show up. Ideal case would be a feature project that prepped in May and shot in June/July.

 

Lawrence Fishburn is a great guy, very professional, low-key, serious about his craft. He did ask me, the director, and the AD to try and keep a quiet working set during his scenes, which were all dramatic dialogue moments between him and our adolescent lead actress -- so we tried to honor his request despite the chaos of working so fast every day. It was a reasonable request and he made it politely. He was always pleasant and polite on the set, a real gentleman.

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It's very cool that you get to work with such a great actor as Laurence Fishburne(correct spelling). It's also cool to see Angela Bassett and Mr. Fishburne working together again after each gave such great performances in 'What's Love Got to Do with It'. I'm really looking forward to seeing this picture.

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Thank you David for posting your experiences from Akeelah and the Bee on this site. This is the only place where I can read about the happenings on set. I am a big fan of Angela Bassett's and I am estactic about Angela and Laurence Fishburne finally reuniting. How was it working with her? Congratulations on the wrap of your movie. Do you know when it will be released in theaters? Thanks again!

Edited by Simonique Barbas
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this is a cool idea re: journals. i have not read all of it but i will in my spare time. thanks dave for taking the time to do this... some of us arnt able to have fun like this on a daily basis so its cool to see what goes on in a DPs mind.. :)

 

i met "fish" here at CNN. he's not as tall as i thought he was.. low key guy.. nice...

 

by the by, dave, would you mind telling who did steadicam?

Edited by Marc_Abernathy
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this is a cool idea  re: journals. i have not read all of it but i will in my spare time. thanks dave for taking the time to do this... some of us arnt able to have fun like this on a daily basis so its cool to see what goes on in a DPs mind.. :)

 

i met "fish" here at CNN. he's not as tall as i thought he was..  low key guy.. nice...

 

by the by, dave, would you mind telling who did steadicam?

 

The A-camera operator, John Radzick, also did Steadicam. That was the deal that the line producer told me, that the A-camera operator and Steadicam operator had to be the same person. John was recommended to me by one of the producers.

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If I have one weakness, it's a tendency to use as little fill as possible so it barely plays on the scene -- I don't like the impression of "fill" because it's usually the one totally unmotivated light, just there for technical reasons. So sometimes I knock down the fill TOO much.

 

I don't like obvious fill either.

 

That's what's great about the new lower contrast film stocks.

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Guest fstop

That's one of the things I absolutely ADORE about Darius Khondji, as explained by himself on his Se7en commentary: Khondji makes the key brighter as oppose to adding fill- couldn't agree more with him, something subconciously "cheating" about the impression of fill, in my mind too. Shame not all of us have access to a 20K when lighting for our slower stocks. ;)

 

From my limited experience and from reading/hearing about many other cinematographers', the only examples where the impression of fill is really a neccessity to sell the images is when lighting prosthetics and black actors (and even those "rules" have been successfully broken in the past). Any prosthetics in Akeelah?

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Well, when shooting into heavy backlight, you may only have underexposed fill on the face as the "key"...

 

Don't get me wrong, I use fill light all the time, when I think that dark shadows will be unnaturally black for the scene. It's just my preference to use the minimal amount necessary, so I'm always trying to work on the edge of "visible" fill versus a no-fill look. However, I have done more high-key projects where the contrast ratios are more conventional.

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A few years ago, when I was a 2nd AC, I worked with a DP named Giles Nuttgens (Swimfan, Battlefield Earth) on a British TV series. He would very rarely use fill on interiors, his rationale being (I think) that there would be enough bounce from the keylight off the interior walls to fill in. Whether he was right, I don't know, as I never saw the program, but even with the film stocks then, which were 7293 & 7298 or possibly 7296, that was his way of working.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Wow... Never been in that section before...

Weekly reports from the set.. thats totally wicked!!

 

It's crazy how the internet has democratized the knowledge of.. the filmmaking process!! I never miss the video diaries on Kongisking.net...

:)

 

THats all I've got to say

:D

 

OH and by the way David, I tested your method for recreating moonlight...the one you told me about...guess what.... IT WORKS Reaally good!!! Thanks ... lol

Cept I didnt use camera filters, its mainly exposure and digital color grading.

 

Cheerios

Ben

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  • 1 month later...

This sounded like a really intense shoot but rewarding. Thank you for keeping a journal on line. It's very encouraging to know that all productions have it's ups and downs. We're not around a lot of production crews here in Vegas so there aren't many people to share the day's trials with. This isolation out here makes you start to believe that you're the only one having troubles and then there's no one around to share your triumphs with. Thanks again.

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