Being an AD and nude...minus the nude

Today was Walter's F2 set where I was 1st AD. Like most young teens, I was nervous for my first time. I wasn't really sure what to say when he asked me how much footage I have, and of course I was anxious when I realized that all of the time was in the set up, and not so much in getting the shot off. All innuendo's aside, it was a great experience and we all had a great time. For our F2 projects we have 200ft of super16mm film in order to shoot a two page script within four hours, which seems easy enough. We had eight total set ups and were able to get all of them off as well as have enough time and film for a crew dance, which is basically like a school dance except filmed and of a film set's crew.

The next set that I'm working on is Ron's as Art Director, which seems like somewhat of a challenge. It's a futuristic, underworld set where people illegally download the internet into themselves through chords entering their fingers and mouth.
I'm gonna line the walls with wiring and pvc pipe to get a "once sterile, now run-down" feel to it. I would really like to make some of the wires spark to show how old they are, I was thinking about putting a sparkler inside of the pvc and letting it rain out a bit?

Leave a comment below if you have any suggestions for a safe way to have sparks come off of the walls.

I'll Catch You Up

So being that I created this blog long after starting Film School there have already been many notable events that I've missed. I'll go over a little bit of a back story to bring us up to date.

For the FSU Film School, sophomore year is the first year of actual production and strictly film related courses, thus I am a "first year" student. Freshman year was all the necessary classes (general english, math, etc.) in order to graduate with a bachelor's degree.

Our class is a very transitional one for the film school in that we are the first class most effected by the digital change. They scrapped the older Canon xl1's used for F1's (Production 1 projects) to get HD Sony XDCAM's, which are beautiful. Although this was a pretty great change for us, the biggest one will be the new RED cameras (www.red.com) we work on. These digital cameras shoot at 4k resolution (twice the quality of HD) and look like 35mm film. In the past, our school shot F2's, F3's and Thesis on 16mm film, which isn't bad, but with the new RED cameras we can reach the quality of 35mm and start to move with the industry over to digital (Crossing the Line, Jumper, Che, Angels and Demons all shot on RED).

But for now I'm working my way up. My F1, "Typewriter" was shot in HD on the XDCAM. Below is a screenshot.



I recently finished filming my F2, "Speed Dating," which is mainly an exercise with 16mm film. I don't know if film will forever be abolished by the industry, there is something about working on something so delicate to make an image look right that gives you a true sense of pride. There is so much that goes into creating the right look on film that digital does not have to deal with, be that a good thing or not.

I will update later on the documentaries currently in the process.