Richard Vialet

Would love to hear other thoughts about it...

I love this movie it is one of my favorites! I think the way it was shot really mirrors the kind of extremely rigid formality of the situation she was in at the master's house. I think alot of its beauty comes from the combination of the photography, the costumes and ESPECIALLY the art direction. I think it's very confidently directed which I think is one of the most exciting things about it (for example: how you never really get any kind of visual access to the master...or almost any other male for that matter). Love it!

Thanks for the kind words everyone! Satsuki- I was really pleasantly surprised by the magenta flaring too. I think its a product of the lenses. We did some some other flare stuff in the movie as well and whenever the lenses flared it had this magenta look. My color temperature was set a little warmer in that scene as well. it was maybe set at 6500ºK to make that scene warmer. Maybe that affected it too. Ram- Make sure to do extensive prep with all the camera equipment and make sure it has been well-maintained with up-to-date software. It turned out our donated package wasn't and that slowed us down a bit. We could have moved even faster without some of the RED camera software problems like freezing during the record and stuff like that. The RED battery charger we had kept screwing up...I would suggest getting one of those separate simultaneous quad chargers that can charge four batteries at the same time. I would say the biggest tip would be too be very prepared with the director and being on the exact same page as him...to the point where you don't even really have to talk that much on set. On other projects I've done and sets that I've worked, one of the biggest things that slows the production down is the department heads not being on the same page as the director. If everyone is making the same movie on the set, everything should be great. In terms of working with mainly practicals, I suggest really prepping all of that with the designer, because if you'll mainly be lighting with them, you guys should get VERY specific on what they are and where they go. I do think a well-chosen/well-placed practicals can do wonders with lighting. I don't really think we compromised things like camera movement. But I think alot of that was affected by the type of script. If we were make a horror movie or action thriller, i don't think we would have had the time to do all the crazy camera movements we would have wanted to do with a movie like that. But with this movie we planned some simple moving dolly masters and steadicam moves that we were able to get.

Thanks alot David! 12 days was scheduled and thats what we shot for. The script was 112 pages. At first when that schedule was given to me I was very concerned about getting it done. But it turned out that we moved very fast and got through almost everything. We averaged about 11 pages per day with some days doing 16-17 pages and one day we did 18 pages! We only significantly went over 12 hours maybe three days and each time it was about at the most an hour over. We missed a really tiny flashback scene, and we still have "B-unit" type shots to get, which the director is trying to schedule right now. I think we were able to shoot so fast because the two main actors were also the writers and the stars of the play, which had two theatre runs locally I think. Katrina Bowden also did the play with them in New York and so all three of them were already very off-book and were totally comfortable with the characters so there was no waiting on performance. Also the director and I were on the same page with everything and we had blocked out many of the scenes with the actors in prep. Also, even though I had a 4-man G&E crew, they moved very quickly led by my gaffer Kris Carrillo and key grip David Tayar. I also had an operator which made the camera department move very quickly too. I'm sure many people on this forum know this already but it's so great having a separate camera operator. Especially one you work well with. I saw even more evidence of this when I interned for you David.

...continued: We had another day shooting at a coffee shop location in East LA. At this location, we show shot a flashback that our main character Mike describes of him meeting Deanna again after two years. This is the first time we see Katrina in the movie and he vividly describes her in a voice over as being the most beautiful girl ever. To quote the script: “She looks like the kinda girl that pees bunnies...” The director wanted me to go all out with her entrance so I was like, “All out...? OKAY!” So I shot the entrance on an 85mm with the 1/4 Classic Soft and we had her walk into a close-up. We put an 8x8 Ultrabounce up from camera left to key her from the side in her walk and then we added a 1.2K HMI Par through 250 over the lens to fill her in. We then took two shiny boards and used one for hard backlight at the start of her walk and then one on the ground below camera (actually just in frame blasting it into the lens.So the frame starts white and then she turns the corner from camera right and blocks the flare, and it becomes her huge backlight. We shot it at 60 fps. I was really excited for this because I’ve always wanted to do a shot like this. Below is a series of stills showing the shot: We shot most of the night stuff around a t2 and a t2.8 and we shot most of the day stuff around a t4/5.6. I really enjoyed shooting this and alot of that needs to be credited to Malcolm the director, because he knew exactly what he wanted and was willing to go out there with confidence and made the vibe onset fun and relaxed. Here are some more screengrabs from the movie. The first one is part of a Steadicam walk and talk outside a pizza shop, the next one is from a big Steadicam one-er that follows our heroes as they visit a music video shoot for fictional rapper Skinny Pete. Fun day where all of the crew got to have a cameo in the scene...all of my G&E crew is in there and the art director and a PA are playing the camera crew. Yours truly is actually playing the random hype man in the hoodie behind the rapper in the background! The last still is from the credit sequence of the movie which features the cast and all of the crew departments dancing in the actual Skinny Pete video. The still shown is of the production department and the rapper. Now THAT was fun!

I very recently wrapped a new feature entitled A TRUE STORY: BASED ON THINGS THAT NEVER ACTUALLY HAPPENED...AND SOME THAT DID (or A True Story for short) It’s a comedy based on an independent play, Hollywood Dreams, about two screenwriters in Hollywood struggling to sell their new script and about the girl that enters their life and nearly ruins everything. It’s a running joke that it is a love story about two guys... The movie is the feature directorial debut of actor Malcolm Goodwin (American Gangster, Leatherheads). It is produced by Brandy Jones and starring Tyler McGee and Cameron Fife (who are also the writers) with Katrina Bowden (plays Cerie on 30 Rock), Jon Gries (Jackpot, Napolean Dynamite), and Malcolm as the supporting cast. I’m super excited to have another feature shoot under my belt (I co-DP’d a horror feature in Sept/Oct). The shoot was EXTREMELY low budget (at a little over $40,000. We shot with a donated RED One camera package (yea I know...the RED again...) at 4K 2:1, framed for 2.39:1. We used the BNCR mount on the RED with Canon K35 BNCR-mount primes (18, 25, 35, 50, 85mm). I was very pleased with the look of these lenses. They were sharp but still felt organic and held up surprising well wide open (most of the lenses were at a t1.3, although I didn’t use them wide open a lot). I did some research and it seems that they were introduced in the late 70’s as rehoused still lenses and have a similar look to the SuperSpeeds. Mechanically they could be better though. The movie, being based on a play, is EXTREMELY dialogue driven, and I thought it would be a great challenge as a cinematographer with keeping scenes that ran for 10 pages of dialogue visually interesting. I watched alot of movies that were either based on plays (like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, and Glengarry Glen Ross) or very talky comedies, like Woody Allen’s movies and realized that the cinematographers never had any distracting visual flourishes to try to keep the scene moving, but they seemed to trust the actors and the script to keep the momentum and just used the photography simply to support it. Because most of the story contains very fast dialogue between two characters who are very close best friends, and whom the director wanted to keep in the same frame as much as possible, I decided to frame in 2.39:1 in order to have a wide enough frame for them to play in without the necessity of cutting a lot. I used alot of what I learned from David Mullen when I interned for him on STAY COOL last summer, and I implemented alot of what I learned in this shoot. So I must thank him again for that opportunity. We had a 3-ton grip truck with a house power tungsten lighting package (2K’s on down to Inkies), two 1.2K HMI’s, a 575w HMI Par and a 575w HMI Fresnel, and a small 42 amp putt-putt generator. We also had a handful of Chimeras with medium base sockets that we used ALOT, and a homemade batten softbox. 5 days out of our first week was spent shoot both day and night scenes that take place in and around the house of the main characters, on location in East LA. For the day interiors we used the 575w Par alot through diffusion as a key, For the night interiors, we used small chimeras alot as keylights with either 250w Photofloods or these units that my gaffer Kris Carrillo owned that he called SparkPlugs (not sure if these are well known and I just wasn;t in the loop lol). They’re supposedly like clear 500w pin-based bulbs in medium base adapters to fit in the Chimeras to get more of a punch. In the first day interior still above, we used the 575w Par through to layers of 4x4 diffusion (Opal and 250 I think) from camera right as a key with nets cutting the light down on the two fairer skinned actors in the foreground. We also used a 4x4 beadboard for a little fill from camera left. Katrina Bowden was a real trooper and was great to work with. She's also a great actress! She plays a simple, ditsy character on 30 Rock so you don't really get to see much variety in her acting chops but she really has some talent! For the stills on the couch, we had a x-small chimera with a 250w bulb on a dimmer hanging directly above the practical giving Katrina her 3/4 key. We then filled them both in from below camera left with a larger chimera with a smaller blb on a dimmer as well. Outside the window we had this gigantic tree that proved to be an issue. We had a 1.2K Par with 1/2 CTO bounced off of a 6x6 griff hanging high over the window (you can feel the light on the couch), as well as a 1K Parcan with 1/2 CTB blasting onto the leaves outside. But the tree was cutting down so much of the light from the bounce that right before the take we added the 575w Fresnel from window left with 1/2 CTO to backlight them. For this scene we shot the wider two shot and the CU of the the guy, Mike, with an 1/8 Classic Soft on the lens. And for Katrina’s CU we used a 1/4 CS on the 50mm. She is Mike’s ex-girlfriend and he sees her as the greatest girl in the universe. In the 3rd night still, the main character Mike, just rejected Katrina’s character Deanna. We had a practical lamp with a 100w bulb on a dimmer on the banister hitting the papers on camera right, and used that to motivate our key which is coming from a chimera from camera right. We had two 4x4 Kinos with a dayight/tungsten mix coming through some windows from camera left hitting the background, providing a contrast of color temperature that would make the surprise entrance of another character in the background pop more when he exits his room. He is being rimmed by a 4x4 KinoFlo with tungsten bulbs. We also had a very small Mini LED litpanel dimmed down as a rim in her hair. It was shot with the 35mm with no diffusion. The following 6 days we spent jumping from location to location getting the other scenes that take place around LA in the script. One location was for the climactic scene in the office of the legendary producer Richard Simpkins, who our heroes have been anxiously waiting to meet with about their script. He is played by character actor Jon Gries who is well known for his role as Uncle Rico in Napolean Dynamite and his work in many Polish Brothers movies (he had nothing but great stuff to say about David Mullen too!) he was super supportive and helpful (maybe because he just finished directing his own independent feature on the RED. He even came back in another day just to have the back of his head in one shot! The first shot is a two shot showing the two main characters, Mike and Matt, on their way to see Richard Simpkins. A secret has just previously been revealed and their has been an awkward silence between them for a while. We shot this with the 18mm slightly above them in a working elevator that we stopped and propped the door open. Their key is from a Source Four that we put on a board on the floor of the elevator and shot it straight into the metallic ceiling above them. The metal reflected back this sort of hard bounce onto their faces. In the script the office location was just a regular office, but when we scouted this location and saw this conference room, we decided to make this his “office” just so we can stage the action at the far ends of this gigantic table, and show the distance between them and Richard. We used alot of the natural lighting from the windows and taped four 4’ KinoFlo tubes to the ceiling over him, which is also creating the specular highlight on the table. We brought in another KinoFlo to fill in for the closer shots. My favorite thing about this scene are the hilarious, Andy Warhol-type depictions of himself on the back wall that the art department designed and put up. We shot the scene with mostly wide lenses (18mm for the wide and 24mm for the closer stuff). We shot a full night at this house in Brentwood that stood in for Deanna’s house which is seen in all flashbacks. In one of the flashbacks, Mike meets Deanna for the first time at a house party she’s having and they share a romantic tryst in her pool. For this scene, we shot a two shot on the 85mm with an 1/8 Classic Soft and then moved the camera physically closer to get the tighter two shot. Art department put Xmas lights and candles in the background and we gave the two actors a key/rimlight with a 1K Mickey through a frame of 216 from camera right. We then took a 575w Par from camera left slightly behind them and slammed the light into the bottom of the pool to light the white floor of the pool, which we discovers worked well as feeling as if the pool is lit. We also took a Source 4 with 1/2 CTB that was right to the left of the camera and skipped it off the water to fill in and create water ripples on the camera side of their faces.

The Woodsman with Kevin Bacon and the recent I've Loved You So Long with Kristin Scott Thomas.

I've searched the archives alot and found some helpful tips on lighting for the "white void" look on a cyc set. But I've got a new music video project where I'm shooting a 4-man group performing on a platform in the void to a crowd slightly below them. And the director wants the performance to feature alot of grand sweeping shots with a Jimmy Jib/remote head. I'd love some tips on how to key the performers while using this Jib, which might cause shadows. One thing I was thinking was creating a large/soft side key (some units punched through a 12x?) that would wrap around fairly well on them and shouldn't be a problem with creating shadows with the Jib or on the background. Should I add backlight to backlight them and the crowd? I am about to go and scout the stage now to find out more specifics but I think we'll have 4 6K spacelights to light the cyc but the largest other lights would be a few Baby 5K's and some 12-light and 9-light FAY's. *Does this large side key seem like a good idea? The Space lights should definitely be sufficient for filling in everything else right? And what about the background? Would be Spacelights be sufficient for getting a good even white? *Sorry I'm not sure yet how big the space is that we're shooting in. I know that will definitely effect everything.

Very great looking stuff as usual man!!! The story sounds interesting and it seems like you're doing a very good job with it. *Is that Dedolight 400D used in most of these day interior examples? * Are the deep blacks a product of that LUT you created? * Screengrabs #6 and 9 seem like almost the same frame but with different lighting...was there like a stylistic lighting or stop change or were these just two different scenes? I would also like to read some more lighting and camera details on the screengrabs please! :)

As a follow-up on all this, here's a review at dvdbeaver that includes some hi-res screencaps of the blu-ray release if anyone is interested... http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film2/DVDReviews4...ion_blu-ray.htm

Pan's Labyrinth comes to mind.

I saw The Reader and thought it was wonderfully shot. Great textures in the lighting that felt in touch with the arch of all the emotions (i.e.: scene in the church?...and also during the Fiennes modern day scenes?), with deliberate but subtle camerawork. All around very elegant. The Dark Knight Revolutionary Road Slumdog Millionaire The Reader Wall-E The Duchess Rachel Getting Married Let The Right One In The Fall Hunger and maybe Defiance all were some of my favorite work of the year.

Maybe these will help: http://www.bobelfstrom.com/downloads/sieme...ocus%20star.pdf http://www.lvrusa.com/PDF/BackFocusChart.pdf I printed out one of these and I have it attached to the back of my grey card for easy access. If you can get your hands on the great SharpMax or other portable collimator, they work very well and a lot quicker to use and easier to back-focus.

There must be some library that has them wherever you are... I know the American Film Institute Library on Western and Franklin has copies of all the back issues if you're in the LA area. You can easily read it there. Or if not there are a lot of online library resources where you can find articles. But the libraries should definitely have copies of the books Mike mentioned: all three have all the info on Se7en and much more.

Eastwood composed the original music for all his movies since Mystic River. It's probably on IMDB. I think his music is pretty great in these movies as well. I think he also did the music for Grace Is Gone

great work stephen i love it when people go all out with color palette like that. I'm planning on a stylized palette for this feature im prepping. I was on your website an noticed you use a lot of those solid color filters like the blue/grey and the jade where would be the best place to find special solid color filters like these? Does Tiffen or Schneider carry them? and are there any other kinds that you find interesting to use?

OZ seems similar to Deluxe's CCE process where silver is added to the print and cannot be varied (unlike Technicolor's ENR and Deluxe's ACE processes, which can be scaled), producing a harsh silver retention look with darker blacks, more contrast, and desaturated colors. So i guess you can think of OZ as Technicolor's "un-scalable" version of ENR I also liked the print of American Gangster and thought the design was one of the best parts of the film.

Just watched it...its hard to see on youtube, but you can point out other anamorphic qualities in the video that proves that they used anamorphic lenses. That's probably how they got those flares. They MIGHT have enhanced it more in post but they definitely shot anamorphic.

Slow Motion Inc. up in the Valley (i think) has their Elite anamorphics as well don't they? That can be another option

Thanks Freya Glad u liked it. My director will be thrilled to hear you thought of ingmar bergman. He one of favorite directors. And 5222 would have definitely had an interesting look. I'd really lie to use it in the future for another project. Mike, thanks alot for checking out the post. Yea I'm really glad I shot slow stock in anamorphic. I was kinda tired of people proclaiming that it was SOOO hard to shoot with a slower speed. If the guys and gals before us did it why can't we. I mean, of course it is harder, and I don't think that slow stock is right for everything but it's not horribly different and its a great discipline.

Thanks I should've pointed this out in the original post. Those photos aren't from the same scene. The different looks was something i planned before. The film starts in the daytime and is supposed to be bright and beautiful and then when the woman leaves the film switches to nighttime and gets contrast-tier and contrast-tier. Then, when the lady returns, it's a moment of joy for the man that his love is back so i used a soft diffused key on her which opened up the shadows a bit and then the rain stops. Yea Kobi graduated with me. Cool guy, great energy! He shot his MOS project right after I did. I'll tell him you said hi.

Thanks you guys for checking out the post! It's the first time I've made a post like this and it's exciting to see feedback. Jayson- *Yea, it turned out to be more ambitious than i expected but i wanted to do a good job on it and make it turn out well, I was disappointed with my thesis experience and wanted to leave AFI with a something more. * It would have been really interesting to work with the Clairmonts, I like lenses that have little personality traits (lol) like that but I enjoyed the Hawks very much. I crewed for a friend on his thesis when he was using the Clairmonts and they seemed cool. * I was really happy to watch a print of the work on B+W but was disappointed the it was pretty fairly dark * It is shot on the AFI Campus. The set was erected outside on the patio area next to the Sony Digital ARts Center. Funny tidbit: I had to act as my own rigging gaffer the night before and run 450 ft of banded cable myself down the steep hill next to the patio to run power off the stage. I didn't have enough power for a generator! * Thanks for your feedback. I CONSTANTLY referred to your Naked Eye posts while prepping. Great help! Karl- * Long Live B&W! I really wanted to shoot some real black and white for a long time. I wanted to practice lighting monochromatically and I also just miss black and white images on the big screen. And even though there's been some great B+W work with desaturated color. I just prefer the look of the real thing i guess. * I mentioned the filters briefly somewhere in that OPUS that is the original post :) But, in detail I mostly used yellow filters and Tiffen's LLD for the contrast and for smoothing out exaggerating skin tones. I got the idea of the LLD after reading the I'm Not There article n AC magazine where Ed Lachman used it for the B+W sequences. Because of the low EI I was rating the film with, the LLD was great because it's designed for no lightloss. It's usually used as a daylight to tungsten filter when shooting in low daylight so because of its color and acted like a slight yellow filter. I also used an orange filter once for a POV of the sky and trees. * Well, as its been said before the Kodak B&W negatives haven't really been improved upon for a while so the superficial quality of the negative isn't as good as their color stocks. The stocks are definitely grainier and a little less sharp. Also, you don't get a stock faster that the Double-X which is 200T/250D. It was definitely a little harder shooting at EI 125 and staying around a T4 on the lens at night. Those are the major disadvantages over shooting in color. Oh and plus, by shooting in color you won't have people reacting weird when you want to process and print in B+W lol. * During the test I did discover that the pushed Plus-X still had less grain than rating the XX slower. I thought the grain of the XX was pretty cool but was a little too distracting for this story. Oh and by the way, in my test, both stocks looked their best rated normally at kodak speed.

...(cont.) And then they have sex after eating the apple (I know subtle symbolism right?). Here (100mm) they are under the silk for the softest light on their bodies, after we started losing light we helped it out by bouncing the Maxi into the silk over them. Jeez now that I'm finished writing this, I see what people go through to write these...JEEZ! My hands are tired. Please let me know what you think...I wish I did this earlier when the shoot was fresh in my mind. I hope people learn as much from this as I have from other people's posts. I had alot of fun shooting this, and now that I'm graduating and going out into the professional world I hope what I did on this project will help. You can see some of the footage in my reel at www.richardvialet.com

Hello to all on the forum! I?ve been constantly inspired by the production journal that many of you have posted here in the In Production board. I?ve been especially inspired by the recent ones of David Mullen and Jayson Crothers. I usually roam the boards trying to learn as much about the craft as possible and this is my first major post. I?m a graduating fellow at the American Film Institute Conservatory and finished my final project recently. I wanted to write a journal about the experience and I hope others will learn from it as I have and I will learn from any feedback given. The project is for the 35mm MOS requirement at the school, where each cinematographer receives 2400 feet of 35mm negative from Kodak as well as processing and printing from one of three labs in town, and an hour of HD telecine at HTV Inc. in North Hollywood. The purpose of the project is too guarantee shooting experience for all the cinematographers on 35mm and a chance to experiment and do something new without the extra hassle that burdens the other AFI projects. For my project, I wanted to do things that I?ve never done or wanted to learn more about. Teaming up with director Jake Vander Ark, we came up with a VERY SIMPLE, but visually challenging fantasy idea about a couple that live in a half garden/half bedroom paradise (tentatively titled EDEN). The tranquility is then threatened and the woman leaves, leaving the man waiting for her in a dark and depressing, rain-soaked (raining inside) environment. I decided to shoot B+W negative and use anamorphic lenses. Aside from wanting to learn about lighting for rain, I wanted to really learn about working with shadows and tones and use that to tell the story in black and white. I also have a fascination with the anamorphic format and have always wanted to shoot in it. Thinking that I might not get a chance like this for awhile after graduation, I just decided to go for it. After some basic preliminary exposure tests, I decided to shoot the entire thing on the 5231 Plus-X 64T/80D stock. The Double-X looked surprisingly good but the Plus-X just looked so much better. I also decided to rate it at 125 and push it one stop in the processing at Technicolor for deeper blacks, slightly more contrast, and also to help in low light. I knew that shooting by shooting in anamorphic the increased grain from the push wouldn?t be a problem. Plus I like a little texture! Most of the camera and G&E equipment was provided by AFI. I originally ordered the Clairmont anamorphics thinking that they would be the only lenses that I would be able to get at a discout. But at the last minute they called mentioning that they didn?t have an available 75mm, but that they had a set of Hawk C-Series. So, I quickly jumped at the opportunity to use those lenses. I used the lenses on the Arriflex 35III body with a horrible anamorphic extension finder (constantly had to switch to he regular squeezed mode to check focus. We used Tiffen's LLD filter alot as kind of a light-lossless yellow filter, and used a yellow and orange filter throughout the shoot, along with Mitchell diffusion sometimes for the woman. I had mostly tungsten lighting that included a 6-light Maxi-Brute, a 10K, and two 9-light FAY?s, along with other smaller units. The shoot was an almost equal mix of daytime and nighttime at AFI. Our great designer BreAnn Vander Ark erected a great set outside on a patio that we partly covered for most of the daytime stuff with a 20x20 silk. I quickly learned my first lesson and wished I had HMI?s when we constantly struggled to light with the less powerful tungsten lights to compete along with the daylight. Even though it was black and white, having the output of HMI?s would have been useful. Another big lesson was with lighting rain. Even though I?m pleased for the most part, I learned that you really need a very large broad source to light rain the best way. In dailies, the rain feels directional for some reason and I think it?s because you can feel the direction of the light. I usually backlit the rain from over the set with the 6-light or the FAY?s. I also learned a lot about using diopters as well, and of course tons about working in black and white. Working with anamorphic and in the 2.40 ratio was very interesting and with the help of 1st AC Julia Joseph, for whom this was also the first scope experience, we pulled it off. The shoot went fairly well and smoothly, except for a few major L+D things during drop-offs at the end. I'm proud of the work we all did with limited resources, an EXTREMELY tiny crew and me and the director paying for everything. I guess I'll just appreciate larger budgets that much more. Technicolor printed all the footage to 2302 B&W stock. I was fairly worried because the print was darker than I would?ve liked, but then when I supervised the telecine at HTV (with colorist Roger La Prairie), and also looked at the printer lights I saw that the negative was actually pretty good and the it was just printed to dark. The telecine was done simultaneously to HDCam and DVCam. The stills posted here are from the DVCam. Thanks to Jayson Crothers on the forum for his great info on working in B&W from his ?Naked Eye? posts and to Mike Williamson who gave me great tips on it as well. Also, thanks to Max Jacoby for all of his priceless info on anamorphic lenses on the forum. It was a big help. One of my favorites from the movie. The man sits waiting for his love to come back on the swing that hangs from the tree in the house. The first wide shot was on the 40mm. We shot around a T4. There is a 9-light FAY hanging over the set above the tree backlighting the background as well as the rain. Creating the large splash of light on his lap, there is the 10K slightly spotted in from camera right. Lighting the cherry blossom and bookcase on camera right is a Mighty Mole hanging off the set. And finally, the soft halo that is behind his head silhouetting it is a small Midget with a snoot on it on the ground pointed to the wall. In the close up (100mm at 48fps), we moved the 10K to the window and scrimmed it down, kept the Mighty in place to backlight the rain and blasted a 1K onto his head and back from camera left. In the first take we had a complete silhouette, but then for 2nd take (shown here) we pushed in a bounce board until his face levels were at 3 stops under key. In this shot (50mm), we wanted to show a dramatic turn from the daytime utopia to the nighttime sadness where, after sex the angry woman, leaves the man. One of my regrets for this shot was that it was near eye level. It was supposed to be the end of a dollyshot from the nightstand but it was too difficult to get the school's Fisher 10 in the tight space. So we just kept it here. But because there's no motion, I feel like it needed something more dramatic to highlight this important part in the story. I wish I had it more above their eye level. Anyways, I still kinda like it. The woman is keyed with a 650wFresnel wit some 250 diff on the head. There's also a slight blackwrap lamp-left sider to feather it off her face just a bit. There is a 9-light FAY off camera left hitting the man and providing some rim for the woman. There's also a Mickey Mole downlighting the flowers behind her. In this shot (75mm, 30fps) the woman finally returns to the man. She walks in through the door and puts up her umbrella to cover herself from the rain. We used the 6-light maxi over the set to backlight the rain, and the 10K outside the door to rim her before she walks in. Then she enters and walks into a soft 9-light FAY with opal on the head and pushing through a frame of light grid. I like the way her umbrella glows when she walks into the path of the maxi. Accidentally, we got a take where the 10K reflects off of the glass door and flairs the lens but its kind of interesting and we're deciding whether or not to use it. Here, the woman returns and comforts the man by sitting next to him and sheltering him from the rain, in the same shot, the rain stops and the movie ends. We have the same maxi backlighting the rain, A Mighty Mole is downlighting the decor on frame left, which also provides a rim light on the face of the woman when she looks to the man. The 9-light Fay from camera right also rims the face of the man when he looks to the woman as well as lighting her shoulder. This is the end of a push in (on a 75mm) from the outside of the set which was dressed with brick. We wanted to show that it was not raining outside but was raining inside their little environment. We also wanted to show the man still waiting desperately for his love. As the shot pushes in he paces back and forth and then trashes a dresser and finally ending in this shot. He is keyed from camera left by a 1K, and filled in for an eyelight by a 2K bounced from outside the window (which also served to slightly illuminate the brick wall outside to show that it's not raining out there. The FAY above the tree is still there to slightly backlight the interior as well as the rain. Here are some daytime shots before everything gets dark and sad. The silk is up above the set but we didn't cover the set from the tree and beyond them because we wanted the hard splashes of sunlight in the background. Luckily, we shot at the perfect time of day. We just added a beadboard from camera right for some passive bounce. And the book she's reading is filling her in angelically. In the wide shot, the apple in the foreground is plucked by the man entering from camera left and then he kneels in front of her on frame right, then feeds her the apple. Here's the wide (40mm): *I have no idea why this frame grab seems wider, I have to look into that sorry* And here's a close up of the woman (75mm) with just another beadboard added closer:

Great stuff Jayson! Congrats! I especially love the image of the sleeping coach with his losing team's shadows walking across him, would love to see that in motion! I'm constantly inspired by the production diaries of you and David, keep 'em coming! Quick question...in many of your posts, you mention "on the pin" sometimes when describing the set-up of a light...what does that mean exactly...i tried to use context clues and I think it just means spotted in but I wanted to make sure... Anyways, great stuff and thanks for the insight.