The script called for four different styles: surreal, noire, musical, and dogme.
The dogme bits for the framing story were shot on 16mm black and white before I came on the project. That left us with three different styles to shoot, all at night, on the same location, with the same camera and light kit. The frames at left are all straight out of the camera - a lot is planned for them in post.
Lauren and I decided to go hand-held wide-angle for the surreal section (it never takes much to convince me to go hand-held). I geled or replaced all the practicals with colored lights, threw an impromptu gobo on the ceiling, and hid a popper in the bathroom to get some light on a particular mark for dialog. We then embarked on the most complicated hand-held shot I've done to date: three minutes, shooting 360 degrees, with mirrors and windows in every direction, hiding the lights and shadows, following multiple characters through their entrances and exits, and ending on the second frame you see at left. This was lesson number one: we pulled off the shot perfectly, but no editor in his right mind would use it, the pacing is all wrong. After watching it, we went back and shot a couple of new angles, so that it could be jump and intercut.
For the noire segment, we shot for black and white in post, though the frames here are all raw out of the camera. Lesson number two: night lighting, at least with a small kit, is about defining small areas of brightness to contrast with the rest of the frame, otherwise you get murk. Lauren needed a lot of depth staging, so we had little choice but to pour distant lights on the parking lot - at least as much as the fuse box could handle, which turned out to be a total of about 2k. I badly wanted to do four-light Rembrandts, but it took a lot of cheating between Lauren's long masters and the tighter shots. Take the time, though (which we did, a lot of 4:00am drives home from Durham), and it can look great.
Rather than puzzle out how to get a pastel look in a huge parking lot at night for the musical, I convinced Lauren to rescript it for day. The pen was mightier than our puny light kit. These were my first jib and dolly shots (non-wheelchair, anyway). The jib is fiendishly addictive, as soon as you have it set up, you want to make every shot a huge swoop. A fun, but tiring day. I shot the entire length of the song hand-held lying on the crossbar of a swing set, following the actors back and forth, trying not to drop the camera or myself.
Later I got my first chance to light an interior to properly image the practicals instead of using them as a source and blowing them out.
A great project: challenging, frustrating, and rewarding in equal measures.
Directed by Lauren Wolkstein
