Live Set — Rooftop Transmission
The plan was simple enough on paper, which is usually the first sign that the day will not go the way anyone drew it. We arrived with a shot list, three cases of gear and a rough idea of how long the light would hold.
Gallery 12 photos · 1 MB
What follows is the part that is normally cut out of these write-ups: the setups that did not work, the compromises that made the schedule, and the two decisions that ended up carrying the whole piece.
What the gear actually did
Every frame here was captured with equipment that would fit in the back of an estate car. That is not a boast about resourcefulness, it is a constraint that shaped the coverage from the first day onward.
- One key, one bounce, and whatever is already switched on in the room.
- Meter for the highlight you cannot recover, then let the shadows fall where the scene wants them.
- Match colour temperature at the source rather than in the grade.
- Leave one practical slightly hot so the frame has somewhere to breathe.
You do not get a better film by adding equipment. You get a better film by removing the reasons a shot is not working.
Notes from the edit
There is a version of this where we hired a bigger crew and solved most of these problems with money. It would have been faster. It is not obvious that it would have been better, and it certainly would not have been finishable. The full rundown lives on the about page, including the gear we no longer recommend.
- Block the scene with stand-ins while the lights are still cold.
- Set the key, then kill every other source and add back only what is missing.
- Run one take at full speed before adjusting anything else.
- Shoot the wide last, once the performance has settled.
The transcode command, for anyone who wants it verbatim: ffmpeg -i master.mov -c:v dnxhd -b:v 36M proxy.mov. It is not clever, it is just consistent.
card_01/ ingest verify proxy backup card_02/ ingest verify proxy backup card_03/ ingest verify -- --
One last thing. By the third day we had stopped fighting the weather and started building the schedule around it, which is the single most useful thing that happened on the whole production.
None of this is prescriptive. It is what worked in one room, on one shoot, with one set of limitations. Take the parts that map onto your own and ignore the rest with a clear conscience.
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