'einer stirbt' a crappy title for a crappy story

[Alex Haspel]

hi.

 

im new here.

 

 

i hope not to get flamed for posting this here at "in production", since shooting is long over... but i wasnt a member when shooting happened..

 

 

this is a little report of a short movie i was DoP for last summer.

we had a very limited budget of about 3000euro...

 

unfortunately all i have got by now is a making of-quicktime movie, with some bits and pieces from the actual film in it...

so the screenshots are rather yucky and i cant show everything id like to...

 

this is from the opening scene.

it was shot on vienna airport, which was only possible by begging, begging, and connections. (a former school buddy from someones dad knew someone working on the airport, or something like that.. you might know how this goes...)

this part of the film was shot on an old sony bvp70 betaSP camera we got for free (it had a defect pixel right in the middle of the screen, but someone in post corrected that) and a pro35 digitalfilm adapter with zeiss highspeed lenses. the scene was supposed to have clean, sterile, a bit of a high-key look...

due to a lack of time on that location (and a lack of lightning budget on the whole show) we worked with mainly available light here...

theres basically only a battery powered 125w hmi coming thru a 1/4 or 1/2 lee diffusion as a fill.. mounted on the dolly.

 

 

the check-in lady had a lot of available light on her too, the rim (if its called like that in english?) comes from a kinoflo fourbank, and theres a little overall fill of a 600w photolamp (yes the flash-ones, but hey.. we got it for free for a week) on her too. the light of the photolamp actually looked very nice in color... it seemed a bit warmer than 3200K (if flashed of course it has 5200K, but we didnt really need that feature) and gave it a bit of a 'golden' look...

 

 

 

the main part was shot in the cellar of an sausage factory closed decades ago.

the whole part was supposed to look, darker, grittier, dirtier...

we shot on kodak vision2 500 and an old 16bl...

we've only had energy in form of 3x16A at 220V ... and of course no money for anything generator-like.

so basically i had to light that rather big cellar with 3x 2,5kw hmi's ,

that photolamp mentioned before, a fourbank, and some building-site lamps......

oh and a piece of styro!

 

 

 

 

here's one the first scenes

here we have two 2,5's pointing in the cellar, in whose light the 3 stewardesses are standing in, one 2,5 flat at the wall behind them, and some fill styro bounced back at the girls darker side.

 

unfortunately i have no shot of the guy to offer.. he was lit more even... with way more fill on him and even a tiny bit of a rim.

the stewardesses were supposed to look dangerous, mystical(correct word?), two faced...since they are about to kill him. (yeah, the story was crap.)

 

the master shot here.... with fourbank fill on the girls, and photolamp fill on the guy. we had to switch off the hmi pointed at the wall one saw in the previous shot

because the fuses flew when 3 2,5kw hmis, the fourbank and photolamp were switched on the same time.

it was rather terrible.

 

 

the hero was already beaten down already here.. he knows the stewardesses are somewhere here with his money, but his glasses broke...

quite a nice shot as i think... with the burned out whites...

 

 

this is shortly before hes killed...

i slowly went up with the grain in telecine from where he was first beaten down and broke his glasses. and i left away much of the fill light towards the end, where its getting rather dramatic, handcamera shackey and even a bit exitingly.

 

 

 

this is the murder. ..well two littel piesces of it. the whole thing is rather graphic and brutal, i swear.

it was shot on super8 with kodak tri-x rated at 400asa and pushed one stop.

to my suprise it was not grainier as the end of the 16mm sequence, the one with lots of telecine grain.

i wanted the super8 stuff to look even dirtier, but it didnt...

theres hardly a difference. (it was neutrally (i think) telecined in germany, since i couldnt find any lab doing s8 telecine here.. )

 

 

 

well...

 

that was it.

dont be too harsh.

my english is surely not the best and this was my first 'real' moving picture project on celluloid as DoP...

Edited August 12, 2005 by haspel