Tech Talk — Storage That Survives a Shoot
Sound was the part we underestimated. It always is. The camera work forgives a great deal more than the mix does, and audiences notice the difference long before they can name it.
Gallery 12 photos · 2 MB
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.
The part that went wrong
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.
- 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.
The best coverage we shot all week came from the setup we nearly cancelled because of the forecast.
What we would change
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. 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.
One last thing. 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.
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.
The bit about scouting in the same light is the single most useful sentence on this whole site.
Any chance of a follow-up on the audio chain? The gear list is there but not the levels you were riding.