thoughtspot

We started the weekend with a pre-midnight call time at a gym that looked like a coal mine office. Lucky for us, the scene was set in a coal mine office. Maybe not so lucky for people who use it as a gym.

3:30 A.M.
All-night shoots tend to go one of two ways. Sometimes they drag on interminably, like a high school dance with a terrible date. You’d rather be at home in bed, but as long as you’re here, you might as well make the most of it. Usually, though, the adrenaline kicks in and you lose all sense of time. Saturday’s shoot fell into the latter category. Not until I emerged from the set and discovered the sun had been up for hours did it occur to me that I should have been sleeping.
Being a mine shaft office, and not one of the happy ones, the lighting called for an “ugly” look. This was easy enough to achieve by mixing our daylight balanced Kinos (a 4′x4 bank and a 2′x4 bank) with the greenish fluorescents already installed in the gymnasium. The still below shows my favorite example of this.

Mixed Light
Our setup times were decidedly short, which gave us time to get in a lot of takes and angles. Best of all, we were able to move the dolly track frequently with a number of lens changes.

From a ligthing perspective, Sunday was fairly straightforward. The first half of the day was a series of TV interviews conducted in a prison. To match that MSNBC location style, we stuck with the two Kinos, each serving as a key for each interview subject.

Prison Interview
Indirect window light served as good fill and a nice backdrop in the medium shots. We had to throw some ND 6 behind the blinds to keep from blowing out.

In the afternoon we moved into a 4 shot hallway attack sequence. This included two dolly moves that covered more distance than our two pieces of track could cover. Fortunately, the ground was short carpet, which combined gave a smooth ride without making any noise. A later dolly move on a wood floor also abstained from creaking.
This sequence was a lot of fun because it presented the most technical challenge so far. Two characters walk toward each other in a hallway.

One attacks the other and chokes him against a wall. With such a narrow space to work in, it was hard to cover all the angles. We decided the best way to achieve this was to jump the line repeatedly.

The attack is extremely disorienting for our main character, so it made stylistic sense to allow it to be so for the viewer. With all the walls serving as landmarks, there still remains a sense of geography. Just like shooting the interior of a car, we could jump around anywhere without people getting too lost.

For the final shot of the sequence, we dollied in from a doorway in the hall.