Today we begin principle photography on Intruder.  We’ve had a few ups and downs since my last entry, having failed to get some things I’d hoped we could, but also having an idea and having the good fortune of getting access to the equipment we need to pull it off.  I also had to deal with the inconvenience of retail store holiday hours as I attempted to make a change to our equipment rental profile.  Fair warning, it’s going to be a bit of a long one.

First thing’s first, let me tell you about what went wrong.  Initially, we planned to have a crew of six and one actor.  One Director, one Director of Photography, one primary Camera Operator, one BTS Director/Cameraman, one Boom Operator, and one Production Assistant.  My cousin Chris was going to be filling the primary Directorial role on the set, with myself behind the monitor as DoP, Kyle as the BTS director, a friend of ours who we’ve been trying to line up schedules with for a while as the primary Camera Operator, a student currently enrolled in the digital multimedia class I attended in high school as our Boom Operator, and a film studies student from that same school as our PA.  Tomorrow, we will be going into the shoot with one Director–Chris, one Director of Photography–Nick(me), one BTS Director–Kyle, and one actor.  We lost our primary Camera Operator first as it turned out that he had a scheduling conflict for our shooting days, and with him we also lost our access the beautiful RED camera he was going to bring with him and even more importantly, his great eye for detail and cinematic intuition.  But that’s old news for us by now, the newest hurdle is going to be not having the boom operator (another scheduling conflict) or the PA’s extra pair of hands on set.  But this is the part where I’m glad I reserved two evenings for shooting a three minute short, at least time is on our side.

Now the good news though.  During a production meeting with Chris one evening, I told him about how one night I’d been thinking about how to increase the visual appeal of the film even more.  The conclusion I had come to–I told him–was that a lot of really atmospheric films have texture all over them.  An “easy” and potentially overused (depending on who you ask) method for accomplishing this look is just to make everything grimy and film in an old concrete bunker or something.  For us though, that wasn’t going to cut it.  We couldn’t get away with scratching up his walls and floors, and even if we could, that wouldn’t match our aesthetic.  No, we needed everything to be clean, not dirty; messy though, not tidy; but textured, not smooth.  It’s a hard balance to strike, but I pitched the idea to Chris that we get some chalk and some blackboard erasers and just go to town bashing those things together and filming our shots as the dust settled.  He did one better and showed me a can of spray-haze, only $12/can.  PERFECT!  Nope, just kidding it’s only available in the United States.  So we shelved the idea, not really expecting much to come of it.  We definitely didn’t have the budget for an actual hazer machine, so there wasn’t much else we could do.  Low and behold, I talk to Kyle not two days later about borrowing some gear from a production house in our city and he says they have a hazer they can lend us.  Boom, just like that we’re set to go.  There is a God and he wants us to have haze!  So now we’ll have that look we’re going for and hopefully we can use this gift of fortune to really strike that balance.  If we can, my confidence in our film’s performance at the RØDE Reel festival will skyrocket.

Oh, and I outright bought a whole Kessler Crane for one shot in the film, and I think the tripod head I have to mount it on is too small.  More on that one in a later post.

So we lost some gear and some people, but we gained a new asset that we didn’t originally plan on having, so things have balanced out in their own way.  Will we learn how to use the haze machine?  Is there actually anything to learn or is it just a switch?  How will we make do without a boom operator or production assistant?  Will I find a tripod head to use that’s big enough for the new crane?  Check back sometime around the beginning of April for another post where I’ll recap both shooting days and let you know how everything went.  PLUS, either Kyle or I will post a link to both the finished product and the behind-the-scenes component in news form once we are able to make those available.

Here goes nothing,