Filming

When filming the shower scene I basically could not get the diffuse lighting i wanted because the bathroom did not steam up enough. The shower door itself did but this simply resulted in the shot becoming blurred. The shot was not useless, but not how I intended it.

Luckily the following night there was a great deal of fog and so at midnight I managed to find a nice alleyway that produced some interesting diffuse lighting which was usable.

While filming the harsh lighted noir shot at night I managed to create an interesting daytime shot giving a profile of the man's face that contrasted with the appearance of beautiful over-exposed light coming through the windows, similar to the exagerated over-exposure mentioned in AB earlier.

The problem is though that the black of the night can be seen through the windows. However with some simple After Effects work this could be altered in post.

Filming the light flickering on the man's face proved more difficult than I had thought. It was hard to make the reflector board reflect onto only a portion of the bed given the small space filming in and so this flicker effect looks slightly unrealistic as it covers most of the shot.

The shot of him being central within the room was filmed well, giving me a chance to experiment with 3-point lighting and create a couple of interesting shots. The throw focus shot was filmed with ease, exactly as planned. Also, following my diagram for the Noir-esque shot I was able tocreate an interesting profile on the man, experimenting using just the one light and also adding the fill light, creating a shot similar to Ricky when confronting his father and another less harsh creating one similar to Lester in the bar alone (which I never actually used).

All of the shots were of course colour corrected and the majoirty had the saturation turned down by at least 50% and the blues turned up slightly in order to make his surrounding seem dull, accentuating his dull lifestyle, whilst make him stand out slightly with his blue shirt. Also adding the blue tone makes the shot seem colder.

The handheld 'frame within a frame' shot looked great. The lighting is also nice as it silouettes the actor nicely.I made the actor pace around in the frame talking on the phone and to 'seem frustrated'. It appeared like we were getting a glimpse on this character at a time of weakness, that nobody was supposed to see. In post noise was increased as well as the contrast and brightness to make the image seem as though it was shot on a handheld camera.

For the shot of images blending seemless between one another at the end I use After Effects to create the dissolve between them, just by simply changing the opacity at different keyframes. I could have done this in Premiere Pro where I was editing but I wanted to be precise. Furthermore I made the image blur out at the end again in AE simply because it was a nice way to end the piece.

http://www.vimeo.com/17454114